Word: heroicize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Right after World War II, the private eye replaced the cowboy as hero, in the eyes of the average white middle class man on the street. The heroic image had changed with the environment--increasing urbanization, progress, etc. But this didn't stop certain filmmakers from making Westerns. Ford and Peckinpah continued making good Westerns, but did it by altering their concepts; Ford by turning inward, studying "the American's struggle between self-destruction and life affirmation," to quote John Landau in the latest Rolling Stone; Peckinpah reacted similarly, by examining the end of the Old West...
...which no traveler returned. Nude Descending a Staircase was at once the scandal and centerpiece of exhibitions from Paris to New York. The work was no mere rendering of cubist theory. It was mechanistic, sensual and impudent. It held nothing sacred−not even iconoclasts. Thus Nude performed the heroic task of simultaneously galling public, critics and the avantgarde. At the New York Armory show a reviewer spoke for his fellows when he described it as an "explosion in a shingle factory." Crowds had to be restrained from damaging the painting. Back home, Futurists and Cubists considered the naked body...
...with such popularity, the story was denounced as escapist fantasy, its success owlishly attributed to "irrational adulation" and "nonliterary cultural and social phenomena." Attempts to straitjacket Tolkien's story as contemporary allegory were updated too. In the '50s, critics averred, Sauron was really Joseph Stalin and fumbling, heroic Frodo was the West...
...Heroic and useful efforts have clearly been made to put all these pictures into cohesive categories. The Table of Contents lists such topics as The Black Cause, The Soldiers, The Animals, The People, The Faddists, The Leaders, etc. Happily, in by far the largest grouping, the editors simply threw up their hands and called it The Moment Preserved. That, really, is what this collection of 700 great pictures from LIFE is all about. Readers, leafers-through, photography fans born and unborn, future historians, unabashed lovers of LIFE, nearly everybody's children, in fact nearly everybody, can sample one vast...
...this book sometimes demonstrates. Not enough has been written about the cumulative effect of images, arranged for artful purposes, as in the great innovative LIFE picture essays like W. Eugene Smith's "Country Doctor" and "Spanish Village," Leonard McCombe's "Cowboy," and Mark Kauffman's mock-heroic epic of a Marine drill instructor going about his martial business...