Word: kracauer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...high end, Mikhail Baryshnikov hailed him as the dancer of the century, and Jerome Robbins created a ballet in tribute to Astaire's "I'm Old Fashioned" dance with Rita Hayworth. Starchy Teutonic theorist Siegfried Kracauer praised him for injecting realism in Hollywood films by "dancing over table tops and down garden paths into the real world." Kracauer was totally wrong - Astaire didn't bring realism but rather a nonchalant nobility to movies - but it's touching that the nutty professor bent his theory to accommodate a tap dancer he loved...
...pick the best Astaire-Rogers number? Robbins and Brooks had their favorites; Kracauer's reference is to "The Yam" from "Carefree," which is also the choice of Entertainment Weekly's Ty Burr. I love "Pick Yourself Up," another you-hate-me-now-but-when-we-dance-you'll-like me number, from "Swing Time." And I can't imagine a more beautiful expression of reluctant rapture than Ginger's in the "Cheek to Cheek" dance from "Top Hat." And not just the song (Berlin's finest) or the dance (one of Astaire's most brilliant). I'm thinking...
...pantheon of great directors, Fritz Lang is a bit of an anomaly. Unlike his contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, who was canonized early on and remains a universally acknowledged god of cinema, Lang’s road to directorial fame was an oblique one. Although denounced by Siegfried Kracauer as a fascist in the forties, and then heralded by the French Cahiers du Cinema as an amateur in the sixties, his work has received a surprising dearth of critical attention. It has only been in the last few years that critics have begun to exhume many of his films and give...