Word: passione
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is old-maidishness and there is the new celibacy. And everyone knows the cure for both of these unfortunate conditions: a man. Any man. The good news about these two small movies -- The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and High Tide -- is that they permit their heroines ambiguous triumphs over this conventional wisdom. The bad news is that neither movie dares triumph over the conventionally compassionate view of the women. Or, for that matter, over the limits of conventionally mannered filmmaking...
...impact on the minds and emotions of Western man, it is an event that can be compared only to the Passion and death of Jesus. After a lifetime devoted to the pursuit of truth and virtue, Socrates, at age 70, is put on trial, charged with dishonoring the gods and corrupting the youth of Athens. The sage makes an eloquent plea in self-defense but is nonetheless found guilty and condemned to die. His disciples urge him to escape into exile, but Socrates refuses and carries out the court's decree by drinking a cup of poison hemlock...
...Japanese in Paris were conservative in their taste, preferring as models Renoir and Monet to Picasso. Some of the high points of this show are conservative in the best sense, such as Kishida Ryusei's superrefined Still Life (Three Red Apples, Cup, Can, Spoon), 1920, in which the Japanese passion for wabi -- unfussed, natural simplicity -- finds its way into a still-life scheme inherited from Andre Derain. When Umehara Ryuzaburo went to extremes in 1938 with Nude with Fans, the limbs drawn in thick dissonant red and green lines, his prototype was Matisse's work of 30 years before. Occasionally...
...Shaw's heroes are men of moral passion." (English...
This tumult of passion, literature and coincidence belongs in the Dickensian tradition, and so does Ackroyd. The protagonist of his crowded and exuberant novel is another cursed poet, Charles Wychwood. One afternoon he comes across an old painting showing the marvellous boy as a middle-aged man. Curious, he begins to pore over some obscure manuscripts. They suggest that Chatterton faked his early death, then continued to write more verse under more assumed names, among them William Blake and Thomas Gray. "The greatest plagiarist in history?" inquires a colleague. "No!" Wychwood argues. "He was the greatest poet in history...