Word: ballooned
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...news staff is youthful (average age: 29) and happily, rarely takes itself very seriously. Once an announcer closed with "This has been KRLA news. For all the news, listen to KNX, KFWB or read a newspaper." Spoofing traffic reporting, KRLA claims to have hired a barrage-balloon pilot who always seems to get lost...
...balloon...
...Mario (Marcello Mastroianni), a Milanese manufacturer who is initially seen standing before one of his machines. In case anyone should miss the point, the machine is shown in furiously moving pictures; Mario is encased in a still photograph. When a salesman presents Mario with a balloon, he inflates it and suddenly becomes obsessed with the mystery of what he has done. "If I stop and there's still room inside," he muses, "then I've failed." Ignoring his friends, his mistress (Catherine Spaak) and ultimately himself, Mario gets absorbed in the nonproblem of how much...
Attempting to give his film some metaphorical importance, Director-Scenarist Marco Ferreri heavy-handedly presents the balloons as sexual, global and H-bomb symbols. To little avail. By the time Mario decides that his problem is insoluble and defenestrates himself in despair, the viewer will have long since discovered that he has been trapped inside a movie very like a balloon: filled with nothing but air and stretched to ultimate thinness...
During a recent reading in the Manhattan studio of Pop Artist Robert Rauschenberg, their poems competed with the sound of a speeding locomotive, hissing helium, the splat of a punctured balloon, random clickety-clacks and the unprogrammed clucks of three caged chickens who presumably work for Rauschenberg. And during a performance of Michael Benedikt's poems from his collection The Body, there was the sound of oscillating necks as the audience tried to keep up with the nudie films that were projected on opposing walls. But to savor Benedikt's laconic wit, the peace and quiet...