Word: details
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...round-gave them a great depth of pictorial suggestion. One seemed to be looking not at an explicit sculptural fact but at a dark reef of nuances: form laid beside and over form, shadow vanishing into deeper shadow, leading the eye inward to a profusion of veiled detail that demanded the most strenuous attention. In an environment she showed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959, Dawn's Wedding Feast (reassembled in her 1980 show at the Whitney), Nevelson turned this effect inside out by painting the whole array white, not black. The chalky surface now produced...
...public scale in America, the chief beneficiary of an overflowing pork barrel. Yet a great deal is lost when her work is transferred from the room to the lobby or the plaza. The sense of intimate contact goes. So does the feeling of envelopment, the mysterious orchestration of additive detail in a limited, and hence obsessive-seeming, space. Nevelson's open-form, welded sculptures, such as the set of Shadows and Flags recently installed on a handkerchief-size plot near Wall Street (which New York City benevolently renamed Louise Nevelson Plaza), are big, imposing and mannered. They leave...
Most of Stephens' detail is more to the point, though. His compilation is essentially a fuckup-by-fuckup account of what went wrong, and each goof is more chilling than the next. Consider the moments after a valve first failed and the "incident" began--operators feverishly leaf through Emergency Procedure (EP) notebooks, searching for a way to bring the reactor back to stability. The operators don't need a college degree, nor any training in engineering. They need to pass 14 hours of exams designed to test their knowledge of the EPs. Needless to say, no one had thought...
...more than the close attention to visual detail, what distinguishes Raging Bull is the way Scorsese has captured the flatness and banal perversity of these lives. Much of the credit for this belongs to Paul Schrader, who scripted Taxi Driver and was called in to assist Mardik Martin with Raging. Schrader writes highly stylized dialogue, the way short story writers write it. Often there's a total lack of communication...
...RAGING BULL is, as the advertisements would indicate, Robert DeNiro's movie. DeNiro combines all the wit and spontaneity and genuineness of a Method actor like Brando with all the craft and attention to detail of an Olivier. You become oblivious to the devices he's using: the way he takes the windmill motion of bodypunching, for example, and turns it into LaMotta's leitmotif. Things that DeNiro did to prepare for the movie--learning boxing well enough to become a good club fighter, for example, or gaining 60 pounds or whatever to play LaMotta in later life--have almost...