Word: avante
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...lots of action (including a splendidly complex shoot-out in a train station), a starry performance by Zhang Ziyi and enough period atmosphere to clog your lungs. But Lou seemed to be in a debate with himself about what kind of film he wanted to make. He ultimately chose avant-garde abstraction over the melodramatic vigor this large subject demanded...
Yoko Ono once thought she had a hit. The song was called Walking on Thin Ice, and it was such an eerie and intense piece of avant-pop that her husband John Lennon was sure it would finally transform the public perception of Yoko from a shrieking fraud who broke up the Beatles to an important musician on the fringe of the mainstream. Ono and Lennon had just finished mixing Walking on Thin Ice and were entering their apartment building on Dec. 8, 1980, when Mark David Chapman pulled a .38 from his pocket...
...controversial movie is far different from a controversial moviemaker who’s more fit for prison than movie lots. It’s baffling that people are willing to overlook atrocities as severe as Polanski’s simply because he makes intense movies or because it seems avant-garde to hail a dubious, unrepentant figure. He didn’t show at the awards—he hasn’t even been to Canada since fleeing indictment from fear of extradition—but the Academy and any actors who cheered his honor should be ashamed. France...
...graduation in 1965, Adoor returned home and took the New Wave message to the masses, forming the state's pioneering film society, organizing its first international film festival and founding the Chitralekha Film Cooperative with other would-be New Wavers. He spent the rest of the 1960s studying avant-garde world cinema (a 1969 visit to the U.S. left him impressed by "all the happenings") and learning the mechanics of filmmaking, from sound recording to accounting ("the most important part"). Then, as now, producers had little interest in backing a high-minded novice who knew more film theory than practice...
That may not have been evident at Betty Parson's Manhattan gallery, where Pollock watched the guests snort in puzzlement. Later came the reviews ("monotonous intensity"). The sales? Two canvases. But within the American avant-garde, a world consumed by disputes that consumed him too, the show was a loudly argued challenge. When the mostly skeptical mass media came around, the Abstract Expressionists, who had been germinating for years, exploded American art onto the world stage for the first time...