Word: focusing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That kind of tense action is always in the foreground. But the background is continually in use as well. Polanski often has the shot divided in half down the middle, and while a character talks in one half the other is left for out-of-focus entrances, clues, touches of atmosphere. Faye Dunaway comes in that way, behind Nicholson telling a dirty joke. And in the background, literally and figuratively, is where the thirties settings stay, unpretentious, accessory: a blurry old Coke sign reminded me how much more obtrusive the nostalgia bit is in some other recent films, say Robert...
...itself is also in the background--and curiously far. Only one scene takes place there, but it figures importantly in Gittis's background. He was a detective there and got involved with a woman and learned its lack of respect for life, but the outlines are blurry--out of focus. Maybe too far out of focus for some people--I'm guessing the worst thing that could be wrong with this film is that about two thirds of the way through you might worry about why the title seems irrelevant. But by that point in the story I doubt...
...truckers. In an interview last month, he said, "Truckers don't want somebody up there saying, 'Hey you're gonna do this or you're gonna do that,' so we've been very careful, in stating the facts, that we act as a funnel for all their problems and focus them as best we can. I suppose that there are some truckers that look upon us as being a leader or their leader. I don't. I just look on it as knowing more what's happening, or what should happen, than anybody else...
Such exceptional figures remain one of the enigmas of civilization. Leaders, wrote Peyre, "are indeed mystery men born in paradise or some devil's pit." In his brilliant study of Gandhi, Erik Erikson detected a "shrewdness [that] seemed to join his capacity to focus on the infinite meaning in finite things?a trait which is often associated with the attribution of sainthood." The rule that great leaders are summoned forth by great issues can be persuasively argued from, say, the Churchillian example?a brilliant, irascible aristocrat who was settling into a relatively unsuccessful old age when the war called...
From an object of curiosity, and even scorn, she has suddenly become the focus of her countrymen's attention. It was she who appeared on television to reveal the seriousness of her husband's illness. It was she who, choking back tears, announced that he had died. And it was again she?dressed in black unadorned with jewelry?who symbolized Argentina's sorrow. The icy smile, the tightly pulled-back hair dyed dark blonde and the slightly strident voice of Maria Estela ("Isabelita") Martinez de Perón, 43, last week dominated the thoughts of Argentines nearly as much...