Word: peasant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ideas are contradicted by their emotional and sexual behavior: in Love and Anarchy Giancarlo Giannini fails to shoot Mussolini because he falls in love; in the Seduction of Mimi his machismo belies his communism and ultimately forces him to collaborate with the Mafia; in Swept Away he forsakes his peasant wife and children for the socialite Raffaella. Though Wertmuller sees herself as a political filmmaker, the emotional message of her films is that political ideas and action are irrelevant to people's lives. She offers as an alternative only a romantic pessimism embodied in passionate, irrational love of the most...
...shorts flow so lyrically that even the opening one, a surrealist nightmare with boulders dropping from water faucets and beds disintegrating into feathers and splinters and sawdust, seems whimsical in retrospect. Another disconcerting take, of endless peasant faces and worn bodies soaking in Yugoslavian mud baths, ends with its own soft fade: the camera moves away as the people move away, and mist from the warm mud interposes. A film by a Boston filmmaker (they try to have one in every group of shorts) based on Anne Sexton's poem "Old," has the same quality: two schoolgirls scamper down...
...government officials and strengthen the power of the upper castes over the lower, and at this the government is remarkably adroit, efficient, and swift. There are very few construction projects, for example, from which officials fail to achieve their target of bribes, very few internal disturbances from which the peasants gain anything but lip sympathy from the government, very few land reform programs which leave large landowners or bureaucrats (often they are one and the same) poorer than before. Officials of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have a hard time understanding why the poor won't come...
...Chairman's wife, Chiang Ching, 61, who surfaced last week in Shansi province to make her first public speech since the chaotic days of the Cultural Revolution more than five years ago. After addressing a conference on Chinese agriculture, Mme. Mao then showed her proletarian stuff by donning peasant clothing and setting to work shoveling the good earth from a nearby irrigation ditch...
...John's work was Paul Gauguin, whose flat, hieratic patterning was echoed in decorative figure compositions. John's favorite subjects remained the two main women in his life, Ida the wife and Dorelia the patient mistress, posing among their hordes of children in long columnar skirts and peasant shawls beside Romany caravans. But the 20th century was for John merely the unfortunate bracket of time in which he happened to live. He shared neither its energies nor its Angst. He saw modernity as a threat, an encroachment of "terrible simplifiers" on the sturdy, randy freedom of the gypsy...