Word: formlessly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...struggle, as Clark wryly makes clear, that can be neatly schematized. The same movement, after all, encompasses Ingres, "imprisoned within his obsession with the outline," and Turner, experimenting with pure, nearly formless color. Indeed, Clark finds romanticism's unconscious beginnings in the work of the last great classicist, David, and in Goya, deaf, hating and isolated beyond the Pyrenees. As before, Clark is wonderfully deft at demonstrating the cross-pollination of ideas and more than ever willing to express his own impatience with the second-rate. Even his beloved Turner is charged with doing some "corny" paintings...
...work has admittedly had its detractors. Pepys attended three productions and termed it "a silly play" and "one of the weakest plays that ever I saw." And one of Britain's finest reviewers, Max Beerbohm, branded it "hackwork" and found it "perfunctory and formless," "tedious and frigid." For my money, it's the supreme work of its kind. And Shakespeare, having at last approached perfection, never returned to the genre again, but proceeded to deeper and darker matters...
Jerry Ford has a shadow presidency already. It is formless as yet, nothing much more than a feeling. But its presence pervades Capitol Hill and the big departments and the White House...
Nevertheless, this conservation faces opposition, the opposition of the university itself. A faceless bureaucracy presides over the university and acts to legitimize what students most fear, the corporate society. A formless and contentless University administration acting on principles of efficiency rather than excellence, reinforce student disillusionment with politics and social action. The Faculty, for the most part, is a model of detached, valueless celebrities subscribing tenaciously to the criteria of reputation. Economic calculations and salary substitute for institutional loyalty and indicate achievement. There is little significant discussion of personal philosophy giving meaning to life, or informing judgment. Instead only...
Director Hal Ashby further jags the film with fade-out-overlap transitions, the idea being that everything is in transit, with close-ups of buses and trains, dolly shots galore. This is a self-conscious technique, particularly when the general look of the film is dull and formless. Even when you're trying to put across existential banality there's no reason to sacrifice style, but Ashby does. The prison-to-prison closedness of the action seemed to make the moviemakers shove messy details into the inbetween rather than shape new levels of meaning or regulate the rhythm. "Significant" background...