Word: modernist
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WHEN COMPLETED IN 1949, THE HOUSE THAT Philip Johnson designed for himself in New Canaan, Conn., was the most resolute statement of Modernist principles ever set down in a leafy glade. An homage to the ideas of High Modernism developed in Europe between the wars, it consisted of floor-to-ceiling glass on all four sides, which was supported by eight steel piers on a brick platform. Not so much a house as the Platonic ideal of a house, it was also an affront to ordinary notions of domesticity and creaturely comfort, and this at a time when not many...
...recently finished a book that will be out in a few weeks on the geographical survey photographs of legendary Civil War photographer Timothy H. O’Sullivan, arguing that the experimental nature of these surveys influenced O’Sullivan’s surprising modernist aesthetic. Currently, he is focusing on a book about the role that chance has historically played in photography...
...what Horace Walpole had in mind with Strawberry Hill, his 18th century faux-medieval villa on the outskirts of London that defied the Neoclassical consensus of his time and triggered the Gothic Revival. It was what Le Corbusier set out to do with the Villa Savoie, the landmark Modernist house. Libeskind, 61, who spent much of his early career as an architectural theoretician and teacher, routinely operates at the same level of ambition. With his most important projects - and Toronto is one of them - he makes what you might call polemical buildings. They're manifestos in metal and glass, intended...
...fact, you wish they'd given Depp more to do. He enters the film quite late and, as usual, his performance is a canny blend of the minimal and the maximal. What laughs the films offer derive from his work, which consists of putting a kind of ironic, post-modernist spin on the antique conventions of the Yo-Ho-Ho genre. At one point in the proceedings someone asks of Sparrow, "Do you think he plans it all out, or just makes it up as he goes along?" Good question and one that's easily answered. He's a very...
...Which is what serious filmmakers do, especially in works shown at festival like this one. As a Cannes critic, I accept their right to undercut expectations; I hereby validate their modernist parking ticket. But there's enough of a movie kid left in me that I'd like to see this almost-great effort not go bust at the end, but climax in a great big bloody BOOM...