Word: moralizer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...especially pleasing to find that the one exception in recent years to the Department's de facto refusal to tenure from within is a stellar teacher whose course, Moral Reasoning 22: "Justice", is a staple of many undergraduate academic diets. Sandel not only earns top CUE guide ratings year after year, but is also a professor whose presence at lectures would not be redundant if his notes were typed, xeroxed and passed out at the start of the semester. He makes teaching a process, carefully engaging his students in questions of political theory. Learning is therefore not something done passively...
...strategy is sound. For Barbie is that familiar archetype, the sadist whose dark impulses might have remained impotent had they not been licensed by a police bureaucracy demanding results, and no questions asked. This pathology is beyond comprehension by conventional reportage, beyond control by conventional moral opprobrium. Confronting him, the decent individual can only defend his own integrity. The painful cost of that integrity is shown by the survivors of Barbie's interrogations, the witnesses to his depredations, in the interviews that form the film's redemptive center...
When a film aims to awaken moral awareness, it may seem ungrateful to inquire how it discharges its obligations to art. But there are long passages in Hotel Terminus (the title refers to the hostelry where Barbie had his headquarters) in which the picture's failure to select and shape its materials seriously vitiates its power to grip and instruct our consciences. Worse, there are deeply disquieting moments when Ophuls abandons the documentarian's traditionally modest on-screen role as a reporter in search of a story and presents himself instead as an egotist in search of a platform...
These are indulgences and impositions. And they subtly debase the courage in truly dire circumstances of the men and women at the film's moral core. They also divert us from Ophuls' central frustration. He clearly wanted to show that Barbie was protected by Americans and other friends in high places, but he cannot prove it. Barbie owed his long freedom to his own international underclass of thugs, ideologues and opportunists. It is as a reminder of that group's influence -- and not as an inflated moral statement -- that Hotel Terminus has its considerable, unintended value...
...they did survive. There are more than 225,000 Aborigines living today, about 1.5% of Australia's population, and instead of dying out (as most whites around 1900 assumed they would), they are increasing their numbers. The fate of these people is now one of the prime moral dilemmas Australia faces. It has also made whites more aware of the realities of Aboriginal culture. For here is the oldest continuous tradition of visual art on earth (30,000 years at least, more than twice the age of the Lascaux Cave paintings), tenaciously maintained in the face of pressures from...