Word: potemkin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...scope of Gorbachev's reforms and the vigor with which they are being pursued indicate that they are not merely a Potemkin village of minor improvements designed for foreign consumption. Standing before the Central Committee last month, Gorbachev irrevocably put his political future on the line in favor of principles that sound like those the West has always championed: economic freedom, individual rights and private initiative...
There are the familiar De Palma touches: lots of photogenic blood, a gorgeous tracking shot that leads our heroes from euphoria to horror, an endlessly elaborate set piece reminiscent of the Odessa Steps sequence in Potemkin. But the director's chief contribution is to the film's handsome physical design. "I wanted corruption to look very sleek," he says. "Some people in positions of power with ill-gotten money insulate themselves with over-the-top magnificence. They buy paintings and expensive clothes. And deep inside they know they're cheats and killers...
...lawman and Ness the family man, as he tries to protect the infant and simultaneously conduct a shoot-out. What wild comedy in this conflict between duty and humanity. And De Palma ices the cake by shooting the scene as a parody of Eisenstein's Odessa Steps sequence from Potemkin...
...evasive answer to Sam Donaldson, must seem to the Reagans not quite satisfactory enough of a 7 p.m. presence, and this inane scene certainly galls the press. White House stage managers have accordingly become adept at finding appropriate soapboxes and visual backdrops for the President, a series of Potemkin villages not to deceive a ruler but to catch the restless eye of his subjects. When Reagan worries about Republican defections in the farm belt, the presidential podium and the press corps are flown out to a state fair in Illinois, where he can speak against a backdrop of hay. Should...
...authoritative: photographs of anonymous, hermetic white bodies in Eadweard Muybridge's The Human Figure in Motion, a snap of a baboon or a footballer in blurred motion, a wicketkeeper whipping the ball across the stumps, the bloodied face of the nursemaid of the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, her spectacles awry. These and other images begin as clues, holes in the social fabric, and are then worked up, gradually, into emblems. The elliptical lenses of the nursemaid's spectacles, for example, turn into bigger ellipses, without a face behind them; like punctuation marks commanding one to focus...