Word: backgrounding
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher (Joan of Arc at the Stake) was highly effective as theater, if not always exciting as music (sometimes the score sounded like background for a Norman Corwin radio thriller...
...Saint Anthony (see cut) as a topical sermon. The rotting fish atop the head in the center of the picture, says Editor Barnouw, represented the Church of Rome, which Bruegel considered viciously corrupt. The half-submerged head itself was the Christian world, its mouth on fire, and in the background floated a menacing turretful of Turks. Hermit Saint Anthony turns his back on the nightmare. Ignoring the crossbowman above him, he takes comfort in the psalm: "In the Lord put I my trust . . . for lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string...
...audience, he said, will be a good thing for you. It was a very good maneuver. The movie? I didn't like it." Of Spellbound: "I was lousy." Of The Yearling: "I would have liked the picture better with its Walt Disney aspects pushed into the background. It was much too lushly done, and we have to take part...
...Wife." The angel's name is Dudley. Just Dudley. No other name. That makes it easy to identify him as an angel, for the audience at least, if not for the worldly characters in the picture, most of whom never suspect that Dudley's mononomenclature suggests a nether background. Here is one example of this strange mental dullness in otherwise apparently intelligent characters. The bishop, it has been established, knows what Dudley is, although he finds the concept a difficult one to accept, despite overwhelming evidence of its truth. He introduces the angel to his wife. "This is Dudley," says...
...begins with a Manhattan street at night and an old couple on their darkening porch in Virginia, sweeps across London's Petticoat Lane, where people eat and try on clothes with the same grubby boredom, to Berliners dancing by a stagnant pool and a Viennese carnival in the background. Says Koerner: "Who is guilty, the man who kills or those who turn their backs? It's a sort of question...