Word: humanistic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Arcadia was the humanist's Club Med. In it, nothing happens. Shepherds and nymphs, young soldiers and scholars, madonnas, saints and animals loll about in a state of pure being, with no future tense. Arcadia has ruins, sometimes quite grand ones -- as in Claude Lorrain's classical revisions of the pastoral landscape, here represented by the Landscape with Nymph and Satyr Dancing, 1641 -- but Roman architecture does not include a stern call to Roman virtue and gravity. Arcadia's weather is always equable, and its views intimate and mellow. Above all, its location is not too far out of town...
Filmed in handsome chiaroscuro and with an austere camera zest, this Russian film makes for a poignant humanist fable. So does the story of its making and suppression. Writer-Director Alexander Askoldov finished his film in 1967. But the Soviet authorities, accusing Askoldov of "promoting Zionism and . . . imperialist chauvinism," shelved Commissar, and Askoldov has never made another picture. Only last year, as glasnost was opening the door of artistic freedom, was the director able to free his kidnaped film. Commissar won a Silver Bear at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival, though the Soviet press neglected to mention it. A true...
Milagro marks a brave attempt at a humanist western. It is a genre in which faith and good works reinforce each other, Anglo pragmatism rubs shoulders with Latino magic, and John Wayne might peacefully coexist with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The spirits may stir up a gust of wind, a kind of Milagro airlift, to bring the good word to town. And a cowboy (James Gammon) with a forbidding face -- you figure him to be the Jack Palance villain from Shane -- may up and save your life. Nobody will get hurt, except in the pride. Finally, the village will erupt into...
...unenthralled viewer; he wants to head for Vegas. Milagro is kind to its characters; it works as hard to discover subtleties in their stereotypes as it does to unearth gorgeous new colors in the Southwest palette. But the film remains genially above them, like an Olympian social worker. This humanist western is just too darn nice. It needs to be more butch and less Sundance...
Robert Redford directs The Milagro Beanfield War, a humanist parable with all the right motives and a few of the wrong moves...