Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...does not say directly that survival through collaboration and murder is preferable to death in defense of human values, the whole emotional thrust of the film implies that conclusion. Certainly, Wertmuller presents the opposing case, but whenever characters speak against Pasqualino's point of view, they do so in abstract rhetorical terms without a context that could lend any human meaning to their arguments. When Pasqualino and Francesco argues that the two of them are as guilty as the Germans since they are doing nothing to prevent it. But this is simply an inauthentic rendition of stock anti-collaborationist arguments...
...anarchist (Fernando Rey), who continues to affirm his ideal of "man' in disorder" despite a set of crushed testicles, is a touching vignette. Nevertheless, the deaths of Francesco and the anarchist in defiance of the Nazis represent a purely negative gesture. Their renunciation of life based on abstract principles have little to do with the way men lead their lives; collective suicide is simply not a viable moral option. If Wertmuller had wanted to consider serious moral alternatives to collaboration she should have presented a more organized resistance movement such as existed in some of the concentration camps...
...wreck that allows Pasqualino to desert the troop train and plunges him into the Nazi inferno. The social conditions constraining the characters' action stand outside the narrative itself, temporally distant, colored differently, and represented impersonally. Only when the situation is fully formed and unchangeable can Wertmuller abandon this abstract style to focus on her characters, who naturally must either accept or reject the dictates of circumstances...
From this perspective, it is easy to see why Pasqualino appeals to Wertmuller. If men cannot change the world, though it is a terrible place, then they must do what is necessary to survive, since there is no alternative other than death in the name of abstract principles. Given this tragic condition, the only attribute Wertmuller as an observer can take is that of ironic contemplation, exercising a comic acceptance of all the absurdities of human life. It is this fundamental pessimism in Wertmuller's world view which accounts for the coexistent strains of tragedy and comedy i her films...
Elementalism is the recurrent mood of Still's paintings. Many abstract-expressionist canvases allude, directly or not, to landscape. No American artist, however, has so consistently dealt with epic landscape as North Dakota Emigré Still. He is not, of course, a literal landscapist (sky at top, earth below). Yet there is every reason to see in his work a splendid addition to the romantic tradition of landscape, as practiced in Europe from Turner to Van Gogh and in 19th century America by the Hudson River School: a sense of vast, brooding presences, a pantheistic immanence, flickering with energy...