Word: poetic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...document that the courts ruled invalid two years ago. Anyone looking for authentic information about that Melvin and that Howard is advised herewith that this movie will not help: the film makes no claims about Melvin's tale one way or the other. But anyone looking for the poetic truth about Dummar, and most especially about the sweetly dreaming life of the American underclass that produces characters like him, is advised to see this movie, which is just about as good as American films get: sly and funny and, in the end, terribly touching...
...poetic consistency of Hopper's vision now seems far more interesting than the unadventurous vanguardism of most "advanced" American painting in the '20s and '30s, that is partly because it was grounded in 19th century France: especially in Manet, whose work Hopper studied and copied. The sober painterliness of Hopper's style, its reliance on the single brush mark to enunciate form, came ultimately from Manet; so did his passion for meticulous truth of tone; and so, especially, did the "emptiness" of his compositions, with their emphatic blocks of shadow, their wide, flat planes of wall...
Hopper never lost his grasp of the poetic possibilities of such utterances. It stayed with him right to the end and produced some miraculously unsparing images, notably the figure of his wife Jo, A Woman in the Sun, 1961, standing like a middle-aged caryatid on a plinth of golden light in the bare Hopperian room, wearing nothing but a cigarette. In it, the distances between wall and wall, window and sky, or the lit edge of the curtain and the worn radiant torso, take on something of the strangeness of the space in a good De Chirico. The body...
...both form and sensibility, as evidenced by their inability to capture the immediacy and disjointed folly of this most foreign of American wars. Now Herr's book was something else, and they called it everything imaginable: rock 'n' roll reporting; a personal journal; a transcript of the "mad-pop-poetic/ bureaucratically camouflaged language in which Viet Nam was lived...
...Belgian insane asylum recalls the charming ballet of war in King of Hearts. Fuller's use of music and symbols is again heavy-handed and the sequence ends with a madman firing a machine gun with berserk glee and shouting, "I am sane, I am sane," but poetic camera movement and a sense of humor, even about death, make the scene more than just another "Who's-really-insane?" routine...