Word: distortion
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Touching Image. In some ways, Strauss the man mirrored the strengths and weaknesses of his music. Even to the late admiring critic, Lawrence Gilman, he was a composer who could "mold a beautiful or touching or heroic tonal image, and then distort it by scrawling a bad joke somewhere on its surface." He was a man who composed a great symphonic poem about his own sometimes mean and usually money-grabbing life and called it Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life...
...wear trunks without tops at the beach. Theoretically, they must cover their chests while walking to the beach, but MDC will not enforce this rule unless bathers are so robust that ungainly folds o flab distort the midriff
...second-rate or worse. "We have lived," said British Critic Raymond Mortimer, "[in an art age] dominated by a few men of extraordinary imaginative power, like Matisse, Picasso and Braque. Greatly as I admire them, I think their effect on their contemporaries and juniors has been catastrophic. To distort before you can represent is like trying to dance before you can walk." But, argued Mortimer, "modern painting is no more difficult to understand than modern poetry, modern music, or, for that matter, modern science...
...argued that four years of such influence virtually unalloyed by any contact with the outside world can only distort the Cadet's outlook to the point of uselessness, as far as dealing with ordinary mortals is concerned. Many men who served in the last war came away with the feeling that West Pointer's were little more than a modern-day version of the Prussian military caste, unadaptable to circumstances and unable to deal with personnel...
There is little novel interpretation of character: even that might distract from the great language, or distort it. There is no clear placement in time, no outside world except blind sky, faint landscapes, ruminant surf, a lyrical brook. The camera, prowling and peering about the cavernous castle, creates a kind of continuum of time and space. Such castles were almost as naked of furniture as the Elizabethan stage; Olivier uses both facts to the film's advantage. Not even the costumes are distracting; they are close to the simplest mind's-eye image: a King & Queen like playing...