Word: cosmos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ford's label in the great film cosmos is wonderfully ambiguous. The term "classical" is tossed around a lot ("classical" is what you say when you know someone is a great film-maker but can't explain why except in literary terms--Hawks being the prime example of a victim of creeping "classicism"). Strictly speaking there are two classical directors, Griffith and Eisenstein, both of whom continue to exert a major influence over all narrative film-making. In one sense all narrative is "classical" in that cutting dependent on continuity of movement is basic montage (two shots put together...
...role or identity which society thrusts upon him. For when a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique. He is universal by virtue of the inseparability of his organism from the cosmos...
...earth below. In the most perverse-and most Kafkaesque-analysis, the fable is turned. The villagers have only his word that the land-surveyor is what he is: he produces no credentials. Thus discredited, he is under the Ptolemaic delusion that he is the center of the cosmos. It is not the Castle that is empty but man himself, beyond grace, beyond help, beyond hope...
...created man, so Shakespeare created Hamlet. He is an infinite mar vel. He is more than a part: he is an element, a realm, a cosmos. He is man in extremis, fencing desperately and gal lantly on the rim of an abyss called fate. To watch him is to be chilled and electrified by the destiny...
Certainly one of the biggest spiritual problems posed by man's conquest of space is the new perspective that he will have from which to contemplate himself and God. Although the question is not a new one, man's journey in the cosmos raises again the issue of whether he and his planet enjoy the special favor of God, as set forth in Scripture. Space exploration, suggests Dr. Bernard Loomer of Berkeley Baptist Divinity School, "may reinforce the idea that man may not be the most important thing in creation. Say that out there we find persons superior...