Word: primal
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...like George Lucas' film, The Bear works not because it is technically expert but because of the connections it makes with primal emotions. We form an instant attachment to a near helpless creature whose mother is killed by falling rocks. Nor can we entirely avoid anthropomorphizing the cub's attempts to survive on his own or to attach himself to a full-grown male as a protector-mentor. He is such a vulnerable little guy, infinitely curious and dangerously, comically distractible -- whether by a passing butterfly or the moon's reflection in a pond...
...arms-outstretched terror up a road away from American napalm, outmanned the force of three U.S. Presidents and the most powerful Army in the world. The photographs were considered, quite ridiculously, to be a portrait of America's moral disgrace. Freudians spend years trying to call up the primal image-memories, turned to trauma, that distort a neurotic patient's psyche. Photographs sometimes have a way of installing the image and legitimizing the trauma: the very vividness of the image, the greatness of the photograph as journalism or even as art, forestalls examination...
...grasses and boulders are untamed, as the riverbank might have been when Indians apprehensively watched approaching sails. Says Sally-Jane Heit, an actress-writer who was a 1982 "pioneer" in the first apartment tower: "It's a fantasy world, a sculpted cutout. You sit there and listen to the primal sound of the water whooshing...
Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) is possessed by a primal memory: a rabbi instructing the boy Judah that the eye of God is all seeing; no crime ever escapes it. Now successful and middle aged, Judah self-deprecatingly suggests to the audience at a testimonial dinner on his behalf that perhaps he became an ophthalmologist because he is haunted by that recollection...
...glued onto their surfaces. Constructivist sculpture descends from Braque's paper constructions and Picasso's tin guitar. Abstract Expressionism gets its originality from its struggle to "escape the Cubist grid" -- which was never a grid anyway. Cubism, from this simplified and patristic standpoint, becomes the tree in the primal garden of modernism, and Picasso and Braque its Adam...