Word: motif
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...conducting; RCA, $5.98). In the days when almost everyone loved Hollywood for its epic swashbucklers, almost everyone in Hollywood loved Erich Wolfgang Korngold for his epic, swashbuckling film scores. Starting in 1935 with Captain Blood, Korngold pretty much set the pattern-virtuoso tone poems that reinforced character with melodic motif, heightened situation with orchestral effect and commented relentlessly on just about everything taking place on screen. Such gems as The Constant Nymph, Kings Row, Juarez, Anthony Adverse and The Sea Hawk followed...
...spinal injury sustained when his Air Force fighter crashed. The hospital was on the coast of California, and Francis spent weeks watching the shift and bloom of light on the Pacific, and its reflections on the ceiling-projected, as it were, on a blank canvas. Here Francis discovered a motif to which he would constantly return: the specific qualities and the substantiality of light. It permeates his earliest grand-scale painting, Opposites. 1950: the radiance flickers through successive depths and opacities, and even an eye tired by the scale of recent American art can still experience some of the surprise...
Provided gullibility to the flash of the city is another traditional literary motif, and Gegal exploits it to the hill. The townspeople strain to believe that the vain, petulant, but eminently purchaseable (and therefore not so terrifying after all) dandy is a real inspector general. At the same time Khlestakov screams with fear that these locals are going to incarcerate him in their jail. But Khlestakov and his manservant Osip, are the ones who group the situation and take advantage of the confusion. Eventually, all of the feuding factions are victimized by the liar from the city...
...this is only the first round of confessions. A trial-like motif continues in the second act, with the addition of a third defendant: Rosin, a bright Jewish girl from the Bronx, who has lost her way coming from an illegal abortionist, and just happens to be writing a thesis on the survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Rosie catalyzes a series of cross-examinations which reveal that Glas's story is just a guilty cover for his real complicity. A mock trial, where Randall acts as judge and executioner, aids Glas in the symbolic expiation of his guilt, and leads...
...carved toggles that fastened the inros to one's sash; and tsubas, or sword guards. The amount of craft lavished on these small things almost surpasses belief. So, often, does their sculptural quality: witness Issan's tiny, writhing red dragon netsuke. To complete his inro bearing the motif of a Chinese ship, Ritsuo (1663-1747) had to apply some 80 coats of lacquer-the dangerously toxic sap from a Japanese relative of poison ivy. Lacquer is slow drying; it had to be left for days or even weeks between coats, and laboriously burnished with charcoal and powdered deer...