Word: obscura
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...furious (Meg Ryan?s Maggie). They meet (about as uncute as any couple in the history of screwball farce) because Linda (Kelly Preston), his former fiancee, has moved into a Lower Manhattan loft with Anton (Tcheky Karyo), her former lover. Sam, an astronomer, has rigged up a camera obscura in a tumbledown tenement across from their love nest, which he uses to snark on them. Professorially, he charts the many ups and very rare downs of their affair, hoping to predict a big bang in their happy little universe. It?s never easy being a spy in the house...
...Holland was an age of the eye: optics was a ruling scientific interest, and the telescope and microscope were opening tracts of nature that up till then had been below or beyond normal sight. As an aid to painting his View of Delft, Vermeer probably used the camera obscura--a box with a lens that captures the image of a scene on ground glass. It may be that the circles of confusion--the luminous spots caused by imperfections of the lens--gave him the idea for his poignant highlights, the liquid white dots that sparkle off eyeball, lip or chair...
...Didion, El Salvador is "less a 'story' than a true noche obscura. " The assessment is a bit melodramatic, yet her dark night is full of the sort of detail that Didion knows how to use so well: the beach towels at the San Salvador super market that are printed with maps of Manhattan that pinpoint Bloomingdale's; the local woman who gets out of a taxi in a provincial town and leaves behind the scent of Arpege; the dubbed television version of The Winning Team, starring Doris Day and Ronald Reagan, in which the now U.S. President...
Land's idea is not new. The camera obscura (the word camera means room or chamber in Latin) was described by the Islamic scientist Alhazen, who died in A.D. 1039. It consisted of a darkened room with a small opening through which light passed to form an image on the wall opposite the aperture. Nor is using photography to make precise copies of paintings or other objets d'art a recent invention. Art reproductions have long been made by photographing paintings and then enlarging the pictures...
...still more exercises of arcane wit. Nabokov aficionados will take pleasure in matching up these variant titles with the originals, or comparing, say, Vadim's precocious daughter with Nabokov's Lolita, but no real light is shed by the kind of wordplay that turns the real-life Camera Obscura into the fictional Camera Lucida, or by a stereotyped sketch of another Lolita...