Word: focusing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...AMERICAN film world centered in New York has seized upon a new focus: Italian director Lina Wertmuller. No other recent director has achieved such monumental stature so immediately and so unanimously, with the possible exception of Robert Altman. Critics compare Wertmuller without hesitation to Bergman, Fellini, and Antonioni; she is besieged by interviewers; her films are mobbed...
...allows Pasqualino to desert the troop train and plunges him into the Nazi inferno. The social conditions constraining the characters' action stand outside the narrative itself, temporally distant, colored differently, and represented impersonally. Only when the situation is fully formed and unchangeable can Wertmuller abandon this abstract style to focus on her characters, who naturally must either accept or reject the dictates of circumstances...
...nursed a tremendous loathing for the place. Ah, California--land of Norman Vincent Peale-inspired small businessmen, San Clemente, sterile beauty and freeways. Smile was released about a year ago, and because of some kind of distribution problems, hasn't made it to a lot of theatres. The focus of the movie is a state beauty pageant managed by Barbara Feldon (of Get Smart fame) and judged by Bruce Dern, but that's just a jumping off point for an examination of the so-called community of Santa Rosa. The comic sensibility of director Michael Ritchie, who did Downhill Racer...
...dominant strains in American society, but they certainly didn't predominate. The cliches about college students have been relatively constant in my time here--less protest, economic pressure, preprofessionalism. Having a feeling that something deep in the roots of America was dreadfully wrong but lacking anything approaching a focus for that feeling, I spent a lot of time thinking about a struggle that, sadly, was obviously over...
...failures of the student movement has been its too-specific focus on situations and villains, at the expense of examining the processes that create them and make them recur. Similarly, the despair in students' lives now is not the product of specific circumstances or individuals. It is a story without any villains, the story of what is left in the wake of a period of idealism and vision that failed. Its central characteristic is not an embracing of the status quo or a blindness to its failings, but a sense of its irrevocability. The vast majority of students here...