Word: banally
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...have had it with aristocracies. Corrupt, sleek, lascivious queer or cruel, Italian, French or Spanish, they all amount to the same thing on the screen: vacuity writ large. But the most banal set of all lives in Argentina. Its members are as vapid, unsophisticated and coarse a covey of brightly feathered birds as I have seen in film. Leopoldo Torre Nilsson (director of End of Innocence) records their antics in Summerskin, a cheap and pretentious story in the worst possible taste...
...comes to an end. Suddenly the audience, a group of young and well-dressed young people, spring to life; they greet each other and break into smaller groups to play cards and talk of their previous meetings a year ago in the same place. Their games and dances, their banal talk, constitute the second level...
...because they expected an explicit disentanglement of the sketch's nebulous events--probably they had already become familiar with the promising ambiguities of Pinter, Ionesco, Adamov, Genet--but because the classics of the theatre of the abstract have been long-winded. This one was rapid, lucid; and also banal...
...segment of the advance guard has suddenly pulled a switch. Unknown to one another, a group of painters have come to the common conclusion that the most banal and even vulgar trappings of modern civilization can, when transposed literally to convas, becomes...
...novel's title, as Mauriac explains in the foreword, derives from a remark by Poet Paul Valery. who said he had never written a novel because he could not bear to set down the banal first words, "The Marquise went out at five." The book is to be taken as an answer to Valery's implied charge that plain statement of fact is dull. "A pure exercise in virtuosity, you might say at first glance," says Mauriac. "Yet never gratuitous. But how to exhaust the gifts of reality?" Mauriac, who explains that he prefers literal exactitude to literature...