Word: motif
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Paris haute couture house, the decor is outright iconoclastic. Instead of the usual hushed beige backdrops, little gilt chairs and artfully placed mirrors, rich oranges and reds glow on every side. The black border motif on the rugs and walls summons up visions of black flames. Bright pink branches thrust upward from behind small neo-Martian chairs, and the sconces are big burnished theater masks, enough to scare a timid millionairess right out of her chiffon...
Margarete, the blond personification of ideal German womanhood, and Shulamite, the cremated Jewess who is also the archetypal Beloved of the Song of Solomon, interweave in Kiefer's work in a haunting and oblique way. Margarete's presence is signaled, like a motif in music, by long wisps of golden straw, while Shulamite's emblem is charred substance and black shadow. Hence Kiefer's tragic image of Shulamite, 1983: a Piranesian perspective of a squat, fire-blackened crypt, the paint laid thick in an effort to convey the ruggedness of the masonry, whose architectural source (as Mark Rosenthal points...
...Isis, 1985-87. The former takes as its point of departure one of the canonical images of German Romanticism, Friedrich's Monk by the Sea, 1808 -- a tiny figure contemplating infinity, culture lost before the magnitude of nature. In Kiefer's painting this is almost reversed; the main motif is a lead book without writing, its silvery pages full of light and as big as a medieval hymnal, an object as imposing as the seascape behind it. Is this the Book of Creation? Of Revelation? The unnamable form...
...lizardly Gekko is a potential father figure for sly Fox; the other is Bud's dad, a working-class hero who is a mechanic at the small airline that Gekko may soon devour. The elder Fox is played by Charlie Sheen's own dad Martin; and to complete the motif, Stone has dedicated Wall Street (as he did Salvador) to his stockbroker father, who died two years ago. The entire film is in fact a ferocious meditation on the dilemma of a son choosing his father. Which one will Bud emulate: the noble failure or the triumphant sleaze...
...Sondheim and a longtime friend, Actor Anthony Perkins, to turn out their own Hollywood chiller, The Last of Sheila. Equally methodical for the stage, Sondheim does not simply write songs; he writes scores so intricately interconnected that he began Into the Woods by jotting down a musical motif for each character, as if planning a narrative symphony. He couples that architectural approach to music with a detached, almost anthropological look at his fellow man. He derives many of his lyrics from probing conversations with actors or friends. Yet even people who have been close to him for decades...