Word: melancholia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seem (as they seemed to the young Berenson a century ago) peculiarly congenial to modern eyes. His work is sown with recondite allegories, complicated quirks, unexpected twists of meaning. Despite its often ravishing formal beauty, it is full of unease. Apart from Durer's famous etching Melancholia, Renaissance art can show no more poignant portrayal of the way depression freezes both action and curiosity in its sufferers than Lotto's Portrait of a Young Man, circa 1530. It depicts its subject with sallow face, deep dark eyes and Hamlet-black clothes, idly toying with the pages of an unread book...
...spring Universal chief Tom Pollock declared, "Waterworld will not cost any more than $65 million." That number may have a sacred resonance at Universal, since it was the production cost for the studio's top hit of the '90s, Jurassic Park. And here Sheinberg and Pollock may slip into melancholia: virtually all Universal's megamovies of the past 20 years-including Jaws and Hollywood's all-time champ, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial-were directed or produced by Steven Spielberg, who last fall decided to form an independent multimedia company with fellow Poo-Bahs Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen...
Tony Kushner's Pulitzre prize-winning play, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches tells the modern story of death as result of AIDS. Kushner shows his character in their turmoils, their laughs and their delusions. Unlike Kushner's well-paced play, which balance the melancholia, depression and heartache surrounding this deadly disease, French film maker Cyril Collard's "Savage Nights" (or "Les Nuits Fauves") approaches the subject of AIDS in a much more dramatic, passionate, insane way, one which, ultimately, is unable to remain comprehensible...
...intention, even the central focus of the Dream of the Red Spider, but the critical flatness and distance that can lift a farce above its banal and stereotypical underpinnings never surface. The author's despair and alienation are evident, but we are never given any reason for his whiny melancholia. It is a shame that the truly complex and harrowing aspects of life under a dictatorship are not examined in depth, for instance as in Ariel Dorfman's recent Death of the Maiden, instead of being subjected to this shallow evaluation and empty philosophizing. Instead of entering his world...
Relatively little of Freud's voluminous work is devoted to the empirical study of clinical depression. His writings discuss only four patients who were known for certain to have suffered from major depression, and he published only one paper on the subject -- "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) -- which contrasted ordinary grief and acute depression. He wrote somewhat more extensively about schizophrenia, which he called "paraphrenia." But he was always doubtful that psychoanalysis would be of much help in treating it. The schizophrenic's lack of interest in the external world, Freud wrote, made him inaccessible to transference. That...