Word: contentions
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...number of things about the Nixon campaign that struck me as especially preposterous. Nixon basically supported the war, and so there didn't seem to be any reason for him to run--we already had a President who supported the war. More generally there wasn't any readily identifiable content to the campaign, no important issue out of which it had grown. The Nixon campaign was exactly like a corporation, from the area sales representatives in the Milwaukee headquarters to the top management people from New York. Nothing is required of a corporation other than that it produce its product...
...irony of the Post's final nine months under Ackerman is that many of the desperate new departures it had made by that time were improvements. It had oriented itself to more cutting issues, achieved a more youthful flair, and introduced more thoughtful content. But all this came too late. The Post's frenzy of rejuvenation was really a dance of death, and those close to the magazine knew it. The end, said Editor-at-Large Harold Martin, was "like being told that a relative had died after a long incurable illness. There is a certain feeling...
Chabrol's camera creates and defines characters, theme, and content, able to articulate everything his characters cannot. His ability to do exactly what he wants is shown in the brutal climax of The Champagne Murders, a one-and-one-half minute montage of all the camera movements and color schemes that have previously dominated the film, which arrives at a shocking (Marnie-like) shot of unearthly colors and images foreign to it. In Les Biches, the soft lighting of the night scenes is as magnificant as any in film history, as are the time-compression montages of Frederique...
...frame elements, showing nothing as an independent whole). More simply, Preminger films the wide-angle claustrophobia of a Hippie bus to contradict their professed freedom, just as the immaculately confident space of the California courthouse is violated by the encroaching teen-agers. If we know how to read the content of Preminger's images, Skidoo is often scary, often moving (an LSD sequence is surprisingly effective, given Preminger's initially labored treatment of psychedelic special effects). Fortunately it's a comedy; the director comes out for sex, Hippies, drugs, all that's good. This youthful tolerance, plus the fact that...
...political content is lightweight (contrary to American popular opinion, Godard is anything but the idol of the French student revolutionaries) but it contrasts well with the other-facets of the film. For example, having established a motif of red paint on white walls, the multi-shaded greens of the train and apartment-house assassination sequences make the real world a complex support of Francis Jeanson's assertion that the students are drasticalliy oversimplifying. But the ending replaces conclusive directorial statement with irony, and signifies that Godard didn't know what kind of statement he wanted to make...