Word: foregrounded
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...view of the castle (which overlooks the Thames estuary) a pressure of melancholy: he was painting this desolate shore from memory, and his beloved wife Maria had just died of consumption. The paint is crusted, layer over layer, like mortar; even the grass and mallows in the foreground seem fossilized, and the broken tower-taller in art than in life-has an Ossianic misery to it. Then one's eye escapes to the horizon, glittering with scumbled white light, like a promise of resurrection. The whole image is as intense as anything in Turner: "melancholy grandeur," as Constable...
...with bloodcurdling threats. Poor Domenichino, the Bolognese master who had been invited to decorate the chapel of St. Gennaro in Naples' cathedral, rushed back to Rome in a state of collapse after hearing from this cabal. Grand Guignol abounded, especially in details like the amputated hand in the foreground of Massimo Stanzione's Massacre of the Innocents, which seems ready to scuttle away, like a pink crab...
...perfect finish to a masterly film, at once superbly intelligent and strangely poignant. He employed the same ironic device in A Special Day (1977), in which Mussolini held a giant rally for Hitler in the background, while Mastroianni and Sophia Loren coped with the quotidian in the foreground. But La Nuit de Varennes is a much richer film. In Day the protagonists virtually ignored the great events moving around them. In Varennes they are relentlessly articulate in expressing views about them, ranging from right to left with a splendid detour for Casanova's apolitical self-absorption and his mourning...
More appealing symbolism surfaces in the series of visual images which are a Serban trademark and which are enhanced in this production by Montresor's ghostly, haunting light design. Andrei (Thomas Derrah), the three sisters' only brother, and his fiancee, the inhospitable Natasha, kiss in the foreground while everyone else in the cast trots offstage in a long line, their faces illuminated and their bodies dark against the back wall...
...John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, young British dramatists of envenomed wit and mocking disillusionment have spewed unpent rage across the English stage. In some ways, they sing an elegy in a graveyard-a threnody of lost nerve, lost confidence and a lost imperial destiny. In the foreground are eroded ideals, ill-spent passions and the taste of ashes that flavors lives without a guiding purpose...