Word: gaze
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Picture, if you will, a homely and none too bombastic statue of Marx and Lenin, looming over one of the city's grayest public spaces. The men gaze deeply into each other's eyes, their image pathetic yet darkly erotic. Despite its quaint chumminess, the statue symbolizes state oppression and popular fear...
...balance. In front of three slide projectors projecting white light with no pictures, Finley strides onstage wearing only black mules, her posture, tone and demeanor daring us to make her into a sex object. We can't because she won't allow us to, her voice stronger than our gaze, conquering and shaming her would-be voyeurs. She puts on a hat, gloves, stockings, a slip, one at a time against different projections of women's art, each time assuming a new persona with a new story but each time equally angry. Segments that begin on the political large-scale...
Among the first modern Westerners to be captivated by the Maya were the American Stephens and English artist Frederick Catherwood, who started in 1839 to bushwhack their way into the Central American rain forest to gaze at the monumental ruins of Copan, Palenque, Uxmal and other Maya sites. The book Stephens wrote about his trek was an enormous popular success and sparked others to follow him and Catherwood into the jungle and into musty Spanish colonial archives. Over the next half-century, researchers uncovered, among other things, the Popol Vuh (the sacred book of the Quiche Maya tribe...
...BOTTOM LINE: Astronomers gaze at mysterious structures that challenge current theories...
...voyeuristically. It is, of course, possible to see this as artful irony, given the film's theme, but it feels more like carelessness. Or exploitation. Or simple imitation. For like Eszterhas' somewhat hotter, somewhat smarter Basic Instinct, or the more recent Indecent Proposal, what this movie really wants to gaze upon is high- toned decor, and like its predecessors it treats its female star mainly as part of the furnishings, something that might get scratched or worn down -- rendered, shall we say, unusable. This is bad sexual politics. It is also bad, unsuspenseful moviemaking...