Word: closeup
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Very sympathetic to the government, Sandino lacks a certain credibility (certainly no more, though, than any accounts in the American press of events in the nation). It nonetheless provides a technically skillful and sometimes moving closeup of people adjusting to the idea that they have some control over their own lives. Revolutionary fervor is not lacking; the volunteers, mainly from Nicaragua, fan out across the nation in a truly impressive literacy effort, for example. And there seems a readiness to defend the revolution. When counterrevolutionaries (a particularly simpering, cowardly band of counterrevolutionaries) sneak across the border to murder one literacy...
...Management and Budget, was on the cover. Had the President, asked Stahl, seen Stockman's critique of his economic program in the magazine? The President, taken aback, replied that he would ask Stockman what he had said. He did. And the furor that followed (yeeNATION)provided a closeup look at the symbiotic relationship between those unnamed government officials quoted every day on the front pages of newspapers and the reporters who cover them...
...should have been a silent movie. Facts and faces flicker through E.L. Doctorow's novel with the speed and power of jerky images from a newsreel of the American soul circa 1910. Archetypes are intercut with tintypes; a panorama of mass or class dissolves into a closeup of an agitated bourgeois mind; fable is superimposed on history. And they all run like hell to the D.W. Griffith finish line. Long shot: Harry Houdini performs thrilling escapes, restaging his own birth trauma for a country just then emerging from isolationism into imperialism. Closeup: Emma Goldman, anarchist spellbinder, woos Evelyn Nesbit...
...seems to have understood this. The film's first shot focuses on a pair of black hands striding over piano keys, then pulls back to reveal a nickelodeon screen whose newsreel image is closing in on some machinery. Step back for the long shot; move in for the closeup. Distance and involvement, irony and sympathy. Working with Playwright Michael Weller, his collaborator on the 1979 film version of Hair, Forman concentrates on one main story and one subplot-Coalhouse Walker's rise to notoriety and Evelyn Nesbit's career as America's first sex goddess...
Preoccupation with the flesh and its beauty has been geometrically accelerated by television. The original moment of truth, for millions of viewers, came in the field of politics, when youthful, imperially slim Jack Kennedy apparently clinched the presidency with the first closeup in his televised debate with the blue-jowled Richard Nixon...