Word: poet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...title of the biography indicates, Ehrenburg's life is of so much interest precisely because his loyalties, his principles, are so hard to determine. He was a Jew who prospered during the anti-Semitic Stalin years, while other notable Jewish writers were judicially murdered; he was a poet and novelist who won the Stalin Prize while his personal friends Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel were sent to the gulag. Clearly, Ehrenburg was no beacon of conscience...
Blake is befriended by a Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer), but Nobody is no one-dimensional Tonto. Educated in Eastern schools, Nobody is convinced that Blake is the reincarnation of the poet, engraver and self-dubbed prophet of the same name. The remainder of the film chronicles Blake's wanderings in the wilderness and his encounters with the various outlaws and deviants who live on the fringe of America. As he wanders, the stability of his identity is more and more challenged and he begins to reform his sense of self around his experiences in the woods...
...choice of the poet William Blake as a central reference for the script was serendipitous, according to Jarmusch, yet the cloying axioms of the self-obsessed Blake are not any less cloying when they appear here. Still, the work of a more verbally interesting poet could have potentially overloaded this tautly balanced film...
...grouch with a tendency to be "fierce" and "short" with her interlocutors, a woman who didn't "suffer fools gladly," a regular old crosspatch. They all recounted the rounded, well-traveled life she had led. (Before writing the first Mary Poppins book, she had been variously a dancer, a poet, a journalist, a theater critic and a Shakespearean actress.) Still, the implication that seemed to lurk behind the articles about Travers was that she hadn't really liked life or the world very much. In fact, interviews with Travers suggest little more than that she couldn't abide journalists...
...Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July 1863--a battle that cost the young aristocrat and nearly a hundred of his troops their lives. When the Union army asked for his body, a Confederate officer replied, "We have buried him with his niggers." Shaw's sacrifice--memorialized by the poet James Russell Lowell as a "death for noble ends"--has become an emblem of the lofty idealism that inspired New England's 19th century abolitionists and their 20th century descendants in the civil rights and school-desegregation battles...