Word: iconic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first level, Magritte's art produced some of the most disturbing images of alienation and fear in the lexicon of modern art. There is no more chilling icon of the failures of sexual communication than The Lovers, 1928, with two anonymous (but inescapably similar) heads kissing through their gray cloth integuments. Nor are there many paintings that sum up the pathos of fetishism-the substitution of a symbolic part for the desired whole-more acutely than In Memoriam Mack Sennett, 1936, in which a woman's negligee, hanging on its own in a closet, has developed a forlornly...
...classic figure of American success: famous, frightened and mother-fixated. The movie catches Presley's suicidal insulation, the shifts of mood and all his uncertainty, manages to make his success seem ultimately stultifying without ever inviting pity. Just as important, he is not treated either as a cultural icon or as some sort of bloated, junked-up superstar, but simply as he was, a great singer whose life grew beyond him, and out of control...
...director had retained the heavy-handed horse symbolism of the stage version, the critics' court probably would have found Lumet guilty of emulation when his duty called for an imaginative adaptation. Acknowledging his obligation to present a different slant, Lumet has stripped the story of its dependence on icon-like imagery and lent the narrative a stamp of realism that is quite appropriate to the special demands of cinema. With considerable assistance from the shining performances of Richard Burton--his finest in recent memory--and the promising Peter Firth, Lumet has successfully carried out the delicate operation of transforming Shaffer...
...transcended formalism without damaging his aesthetic sense. Any event is an infinitely divisible string of moments, and Hine had an uncanny eye for the right one. An Italian woman, carrying a floppy bundle of sweatshop piecework on her head through the Lower East Side, is transformed into an icon of labor - solid as a young Mother Courage, but turned into a caryatid by the iron lamp post that rises above her head, exactly on the axis of her body...
...mock diverse sectors of American life, their many-colored pallet congeals into a brown blob. Particularly offensive are the overheated but not well done comments on sex change operations, the welfare system, and rugged individualism. In one scene, Jane's father refuses to lend money because he worships an icon of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the promoter of self-reliance. Here, the humor is too forced to be incisive or even amusing...