Word: epics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...modest projects of Japan's Akira Kurosawa are conceived and executed on a grand scale. Whether his subject is history (Seven Samurai), social commentary (The Bad Sleep Well), classic drama (The Lower Depths) or thriller (High and Low), Kurosawa invests each film with the breadth of an epic vision. Taken together, his films are like a single, vivid morality play, often heroic and sometimes cynical, celebrating the triumph of man over circumstance...
...SPACE ODYSSEY. Stanley Kubrick's epic of the space age brilliantly describes the history and future of man with some of the most mind-blowing special effects ever seen on a movie screen...
National Verities. Like Norman Thomas and Upton Sinclair, Steinbeck rebelled against injustices precisely because of a profound faith in man's perfectibility. The epic journey of the loads was a warning against the evils existing within the American system, but the migrants were presented as the actual guardians of all of the national verities: family loyalty, trust of neighbor, devotion to the land. Steinbeck's dogma was uncommonly wholesome for a radical of the '30s. Avoiding customary Communist cliches, he affirmed children, home, mother and young love. "Nothin' but us," says Ma Joad, "nothin...
...Worldly Eye. What kept this epic Greek from sailing off into the outer reaches of egomania was his sense of the concrete. His admiration for grand designs of the spirit was tempered, as the letters show, by a fine sensuous eye. "Imagine slender, tall Chinese women like snakes erected upright," he reported during his first visit to Singapore. "Never did the human body look so like a sword. And through the dresses slit open at the sides, at each step, the yellow blade of the leg glistens-slender, strong, irresistible-right up to the pelvis...
...perorations, Kazantzakis' widow points out that her husband has been compared with Victor Hugo, adding with feminine fondness, "He is closer to Homer." The remark is not quite as outrageous as it sounds. Kazantzakis' 33,333-line poem, also called The Odyssey, is a 20th century epic in which a contemporary Ulysses savors the world's sunny delights while heading inexorably for a polar night of the spirit. In the letters, however, Kazantzakis settles for a shrewder, certainly earthier judgment of himself. "I am not a Romantic in revolt," he wrote, "nor a mystic scorning life...