Word: abstractedly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Intolerance was based on a very abstract view of human experience. A triumph of sentimentalist humanism, it made dramatic sense and power out of all history, which it saw as human circumstance. Its basic notion, that a few universal sentiments motivate human actions, were more common in Griffith's Christian times than now. The films of the period, though, don't reflect it. Even Birth of a Nation, which was changing everyone's ideas of what films could be even while Intolerance was in production, dealt with members of two families in a historical context, tracing individuals' emotions through...
...Griffith, in using an abstract scheme of moral sentiments to design a drama, had nothing to follow except his instincts. They led him to direct engagement with his material. He buried himself on the one hand in his subjects' history, on the other in the dramatic means he'd developed in eight years and four hundred films. His means did not give him formal dramatic control of his project; Intolerance's moral conclusions were not designed into the film from its beginning. Griffith rather intended his range of historical settings to reveal the struggles of "hate and intolerance against love...
...easily co-opted and side-tracked. For such a movement, a withdrawal of half our troops would be half as good as withdrawing all of them. Every minor concession becomes a victory, and every such "victory" lessens the strength and cohesion of the movement. This is not an abstract theoretical observation, but something we have all learned from very bitter experience. We must not go down that road again...
...happenings too, and got married to a pretty artists' model, Pat Muschinski. The world of objects-food, toys, bric-a-brac-blazed all around him ia neighborhood stores. Claes started to reproduce them in burlap or muslin dipped in plaster and painted with all the romantic energy of Abstract Expressionism. "I wanted to extend color to three-dimensioned form," he says, "to make paint tangible and edible...
...physically contaminated by it, since it represents one of our pathetically few sources of "information." We are corrupted by television even if we have never gazed upon it, for we must live among those who have gazed upon little else. I admit that it is difficult to abstract from those tiny colored images, largely static, to the minds of those who watch TV eight hours a day. Watch Hugh Downs or Ed McMahon punch those Concentration buttons, as they organize the soothing pairs to yield prizes and bathe pasteurized viewers in the emulsified applause of the studio audience...