Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...seems at first far too facile and fragile an idea for a full-length movie: the roller derby as a metaphor for America's competition, violence, degradation. Scenes of derby competition worked well in films like Petulia and Medium Cool because they were used as secondary symbols, episodes that were part of a more complex whole. But an entire feature devoted to the derby, its stars and its lifestyles? Director-Cameraman Robert Kaylor confounds all expectations in Derby. He does it by treating the competition not as a symbol but as a sorry fact of life...
Free-Fire Zones. The nature of the guerrilla war precipitated the dislocation. Viet Cong tactics derived with bloody logic from the Maoist metaphor that compared the guerrilla to a fish in the sea of humanity. Viet Cong terrorists viewed village officials as legitimate targets and the murder of innocent peasants as ideologically justified. "It is better to kill ten innocent persons," according to a Radio Hanoi slogan, "than to let one guilty person escape." Countless peasants fled their homes to escape terrorism. U.S. military power accelcrated the process. In adapting traditional weaponry to guerrilla warfare, military strategists placed heavy reliance...
...American Bergman, her realm is purely psychological, obsessed with blockage in relationships. Like Bergman, too, externalities are sucked into the personal in such a way as to become a metaphor for the personal. Her book opens with the electrocution of the Rosenbergs; the newspapers are hungry for their execution. Esther imagines how it would be to be burnt up all along her nerves. In the asylum she is given shock treatments as cure for her insanity. "I'm stupid about executions." she says. In the way that the Vietnam war figures in Bergman's Persona, the Extermination figures in "Daddy...
...Kinetic Metaphor. Control is the dandy's key, and Liberman's control is of a peculiar and highly tuned kind: it consists of letting two creative systems play with each other. On one hand, designed accident; on the other, a strictly organized language of geometrical form -circle, cylinder, triangle. "I like the steel to lie around in my yard, fallow," says Liberman. "Eventually some combination imprints itself on me: this sheet belongs to this rod; it attracts that tank end. It's very much a gamble." (His interest in chance as a provoker of form has existed...
...bird's spread wings. With its vertical masts and calm progression of red, sail-like forms, Odyssey, one of the monumental sculptures at Hammarskjold Plaza, suggests an archaic flotilla dipping through the Aegean. Sometimes a sculpture will work not as an object but as a kinetic metaphor of force. Ascent includes a blade of red steel that surges from the ground and appears to crush a cylinder until it is halted and returned to balance by the serene oblong that blocks its path. Even in the most abstract of Liberman's new works like Above, 1970, there...