Word: potemkinism
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...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...
...Americans were mostly gone. They left after the Potemkin peace set up by the Paris accords of two years earlier, for which Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. The conflict had been "Vietnamized." And with the Americans out, the war of the lethal vanishings, the surreptitious strikes, was past...
...supposed to be an exhibition of capitalism at work, a marketplace near the ancient city of Xian where farmers and other vendors conduct business free of state control. It was in fact a contrivance, a Potemkin-like set where the customers were programmed not to begin buying until after the President and Mrs. Reagan arrived, and to cease as soon as their motorcade departed...