Word: frontality
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...filming works particularly well. Frequent images of a Fisher Price record player serve as a continual reminder that Joey and Sissel are themselves merely children, prematurely throwing themselves into an adult world. And the reflections on the their window which just barely mask some rather gratuitous full-frontal nudity reinforce the suggestion that even in their purest states, something about these characters will continue to remain concealed. All in all, pains were clearly taken to ensure that the visual component of the movie would be well suited to some of its most important themes...
...right through you. They were as anticosmetic as mug shots (some disconcertingly so: young Richard Serra looks like a dockland thug; his wife, artist Nancy Graves, like a snaggle-toothed nut). And it's interesting that Close's heads, then and later, work best when they are either strictly frontal or in profile; any turn or tilt of the head, suggesting that the sitter has noticed you, weakens the image...
...small movement, Photo-Realism, was one of the spin-offs from Pop Art--but nobody took it as far as Close, or with such riveting effects. These are lost in reproduction--the image shrinks back to being just another photo, and its command on your attention (huge, august, frontal, like the head of a Pantocrator from a Byzantine apse) vanishes. Only from the originals can one grasp what Close means when he says, in a catalog interview with curator Storr, that "I wanted to make something that was impersonal and personal, arm's-length and intimate, minimal and maximal, using...
...poetic. A team of six translators (including Holub himself) collaborated on Shedding Life, and they succeed admirably in capturing the terse, aphoristic quality of his prose. For instance, Holub likens the Vietnamese minipig, the Eastern bloc's lab animal of choice, to "a semibald porcupine caught in a frontal collision between two armored cars...
...brain tumor had shown up 10 years ago, Melinda Schuler would not have had much of a chance. Few doctors would even have tried to remove the malignant growth, located in her right frontal lobe, that had already taken over one-sixth of her cranium, pushing her brain down and to the left. Leave it alone, and the cancer would keep compressing useful tissue inexorably, robbing the patient of speech, movement, consciousness, life itself--all within months. Try to cut it out, and there would be the risk of taking too little, leaving cancerous tissue to grow again, or taking...