Word: modern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...choreography of Merce Cunningham is to dancing what nonobjectivity is to painting or atonality to music. His work is total abstraction, es chewing the cliches and conventions of gesture, costume and music by which both ballet and modern dance seek to evoke moods, emotions and dramatic climaxes. Whatever emotions Cunningham's audiences feel are entirely in dividual. The same movement or interplay of bodies might engender fear in one person and laughter in another-and that is the way it is meant...
Yukio Mishima, 43, is clearly out to become Japan's answer to Papa-san Hemingway. He lifts weights. He excels at kendo, a Japanese swordfighting sport. He makes headlines by producing, directing, and acting in films. And, of course, he writes. How he writes! Poetry, modern No plays, short stories by the score, and novels (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea) at the rate of nearly one a year...
...fact, the best scenes are those set in the suffocating, sealed-off community of the homosexual-scenes as diabolic and profaning as a witches' sabbath. Here, in the gay parks and bars frequented by people in "the van of decadence," is modern hell for sure. And Yuichi-make no mistake-is Mishima's modern damned man: he who kills everybody and everything he touches by a kind of pathological indifference. He is a soul capable of being neither corrupted nor redeemed because he really wants nothing, nothing...
ANTHONY MANN, a director commonly associated with several good westerns, turned to modern melodrama in his last films, and made some mistakes. For careful balancing of expansive exterior composition, he substituted that betenoir of camera technique, the zoom lens, with its infinite capacity for making an audience think suspense is present when none actually exists. In The Heroes of Telemark, some corny zoom technique was at least in part redeemed by controlled visual construction and a sensible linear narrative. Perhaps A Dandy In Aspic could have similarly transcended its endless zooms to close-ups of anguished eyeballs and urban details...
STEPHEN DEYOUNG explains "the sterility of modern English letters and society" by examining G. B. Shaw's Heartbreak House as symptomatic of a strain of "social ignorance and aloofness" in English literature since World War I. With an incisive and lively style, DeYoung's fast-moving argument is more speculative than conclusive, but convincing just the same. In contrast, Jacob Egan '68 does a longer, deeper, more confined analysis in a Dickens study, "Reification and the Rhetoric of Nature in Bleak House"--the longest piece in Bogus. The texture is as academic as the title, and requires thesis-grading frame...