Word: motif
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...First he tries matching up sounds with tones, words with musical phrases, and so on. "I believe it's no accident that the German word satz means both sentence and symphonic movement." This seems a bit simplistic, though, so he tries again with parts of speech, equating nouns with motifs and adjectives with their harmonic underpinnings--Wagner's Fate motif played over a diminished chord could mean something like "cruel fate." Verbs naturally correspond to rhythm, so Bernstein adds some triple meter at the piano and comes up with a complete sentence, "cruel fate waltzes...
Crafted Skin. The show consists of Liberman's abstract paintings on the motif of a circle, done between 1950 and 1961. It is old work and put there to make an argument. Liberman, by and large, was left out of the accounts of New York art in the '50s; the very look of his paintings tells why. Rather than the complicated, relational colors of much abstract expressionism, Liberman used plain primaries. Instead of free drawing, he used ruler and compasses. Rather than drips and splashy brushwork, he went in for the most even and perfectly crafted skin...
Silence ought to be the motif of such a room, or so one might think. Instead, it is raucous with gallows humor. There is probably not an outright comedy on Broadway at which one could clock more smiles, snorts, giggles and guffaws. Quite apart from the patients' sometimes grisly jests, the response of the audience obviously has complex, uneasy, psychological roots. Laughter is a wonder drug by which man anesthetizes his consciousness of mortality...
...hourglass motif is visible in the Johan-Marianne relationship. The sands of power, all his at the film's beginning, are all hers at the end. Women's libbers will probably applaud, but Bergman is less concerned with the inequality of the sexes than with the inequity of the cosmos. He seems to see the love of men and women as a metaphysical surrogate for the absence of God and God's love. It is clearly an incommensurable task. But who could better symbolize the desperate gallantry of the venture than Liv Ullmann, the orchid...
...everything the two fighters say and do, even in the things they own and the way they train. Ali's training camp in Deer Lake, Pa., overlooking Amish country, could be described as rich rustic. The $200,000 compound consists of five buildings in a log-cabin motif, including a fully equipped gym. Foreman trains in the drab mineral and gem exhibition hall at the Alameda County fairgrounds in Pleasanton, Calif., near Oakland. For dressing quarters he uses the ladies' room...