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Ulysses movie4/17/2023 But the real star of the film is Dublin itself the black-and-white cinematography ensures the city's aesthetic dimension becomes a prominent character with O'Connell Street, the Ha'penny Bridge and Glasnevin Cemetery serving as iconic visual adornments without falsifying the city's burgeoning modernity. Milo O'Shea excels as Leopold Bloom, the clever and libidinous protagonist, his external dialogue wonderfully evoking his surreal and spiralling fantasties, anchored with a vigorous undercurrent of shocking-for-its-time sexuality. If anything, this juxtaposition of past and present affords the film a unique timelessness. The decision by Strick to base his adaptation in 1960s Dublin rather than the novel's original setting of 1904 ensures that the mise-en-scene does not take away from the film text and in fact serves to highlight the contemporaneity of Joyce. Ulysses is a novel so rooted in a sense of place that, as its author once memorably put it, if Dublin was to "suddenly disappear from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book". Joyce was clearly a fan of the cinema as well, having opened the Volta, one of Ireland's first dedicated cinemas in Mary Street, Dublin in 1909. It is ironic that the film version suffered so many obstacles, considering the fact that Joyce, in depicting the flaneur-like ramblings of Leopold Bloom in the novel, deployed a whole range of techniques such as montage and rapid scene dissolves which are more commonly associated with the cinema. It wasn't until 2000, a year after the Irish censor belatedly passed Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange for release, that Ulysses was finally given the go-ahead for public consumption. In Ireland, the film censor unilaterally banned the film, denouncing it as being "subversive to public morality". The British Board of Film Censors forced 29 cuts, but eventually passed the film – it became the first in Britain to include the word 'fuck' – after Strick re-submitted it with the 'offending' sequences replaced by a blank screen and a shrieking soundtrack. A significant number of subtitles were cut during its screening at the Cannes Film Festival, which Strick later dismissed as "corrupt and fake, and just a mechanism for keeping the hotels open". Indeed, the film caused great controversy at the time of its release. Strick died last year without ever seeing requisite acclaim afforded on his achievement. After years of frustration, Strick managed to film the first and definitive version of Joyce on screen with his 1967 adaptation of Ulysses. In fact, it took Joseph Strick, an idealistic American, to fully realise its cinematic potential. While the book itself may simply be too much for the everyday reader, this did not render the novel entirely unfilmable. But the question is: how many people have actually read this famously difficult text? The answer is probably not very many this book which strove to celebrate the everyday life of the common man and woman has endured the unkind fate of never being read by most of them. Over the last thirty years or so on this day, celebrants of the book act out various scenes in cities and towns all over the world, displaying their willingness to be at one with the novel. On this day, 107 years ago in 1904, two residents of Dublin, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, embarked on their epic converging journeys through the city, as depicted by James Joyce in Ulysses. For millions of people, June 16th is an important day.
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