Word: foregrounding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...single artistic statement of distinction is not the work of a university undergraduate. Heidi Pape, a Smith graduate and a student of Leonard Baskin's, contributed a large woodblock print and a small abstract graphic print. In the woodblock, a female figure inclined upon a table in the foreground gazes backwards towards a checkerboard avenue overhung with intertwined branches of menacing black trees. Entitled "Playroom," it suggests mystery and romance, foreboding and longing. Especially admirable for its command of intent, the print is reminiscent, in the swift and clawing strokes winding around the woman's body, of certain German expressionists...
Even offscreen, she seems to have been scripted by a nostalgic romanticist. She grew up in New York's Westchester County, amid acres of woods that looked like backdrops for Burne-Jones paintings. Ali lived like one of the foreground figures. "We had rather little money," she recalls. "My parents were artists; for Christmas, my mother used to make me things like a doll's house with chandeliers and wallpaper inside, and dresses for the dolls. In the winter, my brother Dick and I sat in front of the fireplace and talked with my father, surrounded by books. We were...
Like Victorian theater and early film, Antonio das Mortes (1969) is staged exclusively in two flat planes: one straight across the frame, the other straight into it. The figure in the left of the frame is opposed to the figure in the right, and the actors in the foreground fight the crowds toward the back. In this closed form of thesis/antithesis, Rocha's open form occurs when he transforms one opposition into another. Rocha's shots are set, closed, until he brings in a new term of antithesis: he pans roughly till the camera picks up a new character...
...pushed away from the camera instead of into it. A rich landowner's emissary, Dr. Matos, comes up to Antonio and with great difficulty (personal dialectical relationship) induces him to move out of the background and into the line of march (changing Antonio's relation to the foreground parade from one of detachment to one of passive participation...
Through Antonio das Mortes the dialectic keeps balancing and leaving its crux, in center frame, to be the truth of the image and of the film at this instant. Sometimes a symbolic figure occupies the center between the cangaceiro and his opponent; sometimes there is just the space between foreground and background masses. In each case Rocha's dialectical construction tells us the precise nature of their relationship. As elsewhere, dialectic shows itself to be the best way of understanding events, of laying them open to us. The central fact about this film, the root of its success, is that...