Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sculpture. Thus the silver tracery left by Smith's disc grinder on the stainless steel only comes alive in sunlight; spotlights kill it. Smith's constructions of forged and welded iron, like Wagon II, 1964, also force themselves on the out-of-doors by their density as metaphor...
...routines tapped the ghetto idiom and jazz slang of the fifties black jazz musicians with whom he gigged, scored junk and shot up. He mined the radio shows and grade B movies of the thirties and forties to forge his early mordant satires. Finally, Bruce found his most comprehensive metaphor for human experience in the hustling world of show business itself. As Goldman reconstructs and distills the creative process, Bruce's greatest work would invariably pose the question...
...under the direction of an apparently ageless Chinese named Dr. Lao, arrives one day in the town of Abalone, Ariz., and delivers delights that even Barnum would have hedged at promising. "The world is my idea," says Dr. Lao. "As such I present it to you." The circus, a metaphor for his world, is half dream, half nightmare. In its sideshow tents a puritanical schoolteacher is seduced by a syrinx-playing satyr, a gorgon turns an unbelieving harridan into "carnelian chalcedony," one of the harder varieties of building stone, and an absent-minded magician performs a couple of genuine miracles...
Hodges apparently realized this, because he takes great pains to bury the thematic superficiality beneath a superstructure of desperate metaphor and elaborate production. The movie is rendered largely in frosty, antiseptic hues, giving every scene the air of the laboratory. The hospital where the operation is performed on Benson (George Segal) is called Babel. The doctors (Joan Hackett, Richard A. Dysart, Donald Moffat, Michael C. Gwynne) dress in white uniforms that make them look almost military, like shock troops of the future. After Benson has had the operation, which misfires, he runs all over Los Angeles killing at random, until...
...familial trauma in the plot solution. But it is to Chandler that the movie is very deeply indebted. No film has ever succeeded quite so well as Chinatown in conveying the ambience of Los Angeles before the war-sun-kissed, seedy and easy. The city was a central metaphor for Chandler, and it is brought alive here by Polanski and his collaborators, Production Designer Richard Sylbert and Costume Designer Anthea Sylbert. The film was photographed by John Alonzo in subdued, warm hues that give the effect of time and distance without pickling everything in soft-focus nostalgia. Chinatown suggests...