Word: banality
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...school worse than 'irrelevant'?meaningless. No wonder Jesus is making a great comeback." The death of authority brought the curse of uncertainty. As Thomas Farber writes in Tales for the Son of My Unborn Child: "The freedom from work, from restraint, from accountability, wondrous in its inception, became banal and counterfeit. Without rules there...
...cutting between various means of exploitation-black and white, color, video, red darkroom light, silhouette effects-all of which deliberately modify objective surfaces for various ends. The obvious effect of these conflicting images is to encourage a careful scrutiny of the ends for which films are manipulated. A hysterically banal aesthetic argument from Vincente Minelli's 1956 B-movie, Lust For Life (shot off TV via video tape and transferred to film), represents the Nixon-Paramount form of exploitation within Available Light. Speaking to the point of images questioned, Anthony Quian (Gauguin!) answers Kirk Douglas (Van Gogh), "I paint...
Disappearing Act. Warhol's historical importance is beyond question, if such things are measured by a man's effect on other artists. The use of multiple and serial images, of mechanical reproduction, of systematic banality seen as an absolute-most of this either originates in Warhol's paintings or passes through them en route from Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg. But to a wider public, which still measures art in terms of sensuous enjoyability and a man's claim to be an artist by the vim with which he "expresses himself," Warhol is a baffling creature...
...point too energetically at the irony of each incident; he also has a predilection for Time-ese ("Zelda was teaching Scott lessons about tragedy which Aristotle had left out.") For someone unfamiliar with Fitzgerald's novels, the analysis here may be too sketchy; in any case, it is occasionally banal (The rape of Nicole by her father in Tender is seen as a symbol of capitalism...
Perhaps the most damning analysis of A New Leaf comes from none other than Elaine May herself-by way of her lawyer: "a cliché-ridden, banal story ... It will be a disaster if the film is released." The trouble, claims the Star-Director-Writer, is not the performances, direction or scenario. It is the studio. Paramount, she claims in a fat 14-point complaint, took her black comedy away from her and "advised me ... that the film released would be that as cut and edited by Fritz Steinkamp, a Hollywood editor, and Robert Evans, a vice president of Paramount...