Word: motif
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SUPPOSE IT had to happen eventually. Someone had to combine the making-of-a-champion motif of Downhill Racer with the sentimental mawkishness of Love Story, and set the whole thing inside Maple Leaf Gardens. The result is what you might expect...
Kadar's exploration in Adrift of awakened sexuality and guilt is much more complicated (and demanding of his audience) than the painfully unswerving motif of complicity with evil he probes in The Shop on Main Street. Kadar has moved beyond a smoothly delineated story to create a disturbing aura of the off-balance and indefinite. The moral wrong against the Jews depicted in the older film may be more immediately dramatic, but the morally taboo of Adrift is ultimately more interesting. Kadar resolves none of the dilemmas that his movie raises; he merely suggests the universality and complexity...
There is another motif running through the Ellsberg affair, the motif of the Harvard Man, of intelligence delivered in the service of power. Ellsberg stepped forward and removed himself from the past; while not absolving himself of guilt, he at least has attempted repentence. It is better that he should self-consciously but actively atone than atrophy amidst his own regrets...
...traditionally been a showcase for Texas chauvinism, the character of the fair has changed somewhat in the past two decades. Says General Manager Joseph B. Rucker Jr.: "We wanted the fair to have an educational and cultural justification to place it beyond the ordinary festival." This year the motif is "Expo-Trans-Port," and the fair features an impressive mock-up of the new four-terminal airport presently under construction between Dallas and Fort Worth. There is also a new emphasis on Texas ethnic groups (German Day, Czech Day) and a growing spirit of Pan-Americanism. Cattlemen from Argentina, Nicaragua...
When he was not quite 19, before he first left Spain for Paris, Picasso wrote on a self-portrait "Yo el Rey"-the King. This motif runs through his art and life. To think that Picasso has ever been embarrassed by the homages paid him would be naive. Though prone to fits of self-doubt, he is the most naturally egotistic artist since Benvenuto Cellini, a standing refutation of the cozy untruth that geniuses are rather humble at heart. Significantly, he read Nietzsche when he was young, and there is an exhortation in Zarathustra that could well serve...