Word: cartoonable
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ripe for Ribbing. In his early period, Lichtenstein was a latter-day abstract expressionist. When he turned to subject matter, he happened on comic strips, he explains, "because of their anti-artistic image and because they are such a modern subject." He took over the whole cartoon vocabulary, including printers' Benday dots (originally suggested to him by the exaggerated dots on a bubble-gum wrapper), primary Magna colors, heavy, black-outlined forms. "I like taking a discredited subject and putting it into a new unity," Lichtenstein says (currently he is working with 1930s pseudo-Bauhaus modern), "I was serious...
...schools that can afford them. From the fairly tame animal films on the kindergarten level, they range to Human Reproduction, featuring body models with all organs clearly labeled; Phoebe, the story of a lovely girl and what happens to her when she becomes pregnant; Fertility and Birth, a cartoon depicting sexual intercourse and subsequent hospital delivery, which is supposed to be used only in "emergencies," meaning when children specifically ask about fertilization...
Chafed Elbows is also an experiment in visual humor. Downey uses still pictures for more than half the movie, treating the frozen action as a cartoon. Dinsmore is on a roof undressing a girl. Stop. Comment. He makes love. Stop. He throws her off the roof into Long Island traffic. Comment, existential chuckle. Dinsmore gets a stop-action hysterectomy which, allowing for differences of taste, is still not the last laugh. But that it is humorous at all is Downey's victory...
Other directors sense the farce in the drama of any still picture. Fellini's White Sheik is a parody of the Italian fumetti, romantic cartoon strips with real pictures instead of drawings. But White Sheik was made as a movie, with due respect paid to continuity of motion and thought. Chafed Elbows, whatever it is, has not paid respect to anything...
...Paul Conrad's cover cartoon of the leading presidential contenders [April 14] does reward "a few moments of savoring contemplation," but the really intriguing figure is the horse. This mean-and unpredictable-looking animal probably symbolizes the electorate upon whose support each "jockey" must ultimately depend. Is there not, however, an outside chance that it represents a "dark horse" candidate? A Mustang for Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy? A symbol of the long-departed past for Barry Goldwater? Or perhaps it is not a horse at all, but a mule standing for George Wallace's stubbornness...