Word: prophets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...their exchange of philosophies and dreams forms much of the film's movement, and film is probably not the best medium for philosophical debates. But you have to hear them out in spite of that--writer-director Alain Tanner presents each of the characters as a kind of minor prophet, and you have to respect their ideas. Like his characters, Tanner seems to have rejected the bourgeois world--the eight of them are brought together as they fight against a bank's corrupt land-speculations. Like the characters, the audience must decide which of their dreams will best protect...
...Part Prophet. Secluded at the rear of the chamber, O'Neill tried to show no emotion, but his expression was morose. Though he stood aloof from the struggle and made a point of saying, "I can work with anyone," he is known to loathe Burton. Suddenly, an emissary burst from the Speaker's lobby, where the secret paper ballots were being counted, held up one finger and passed the word to members: Wright 148, Burton 147. Tip O'Neill was grinning, ear to ear. The early speculation was proved wrong: 53 Boiling voters swung to Wright...
...yank Beale off the air, but Diana Christenson (Faye Dunaway), the network's head of programming, senses enough viewer interest in a nutty anchorman to boost the ailing network into Nielsen heaven. The news department becomes part of Christenson's entertainment empire, and, as the "mad prophet" of the air waves, Beale gains 60% of the audience and puts the double-whammy on such stolid, sane types as Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor. "Howard Beale is processed instant God," Christenson gushes, "and right now it looks like he may just go over bigger than Mary Tyler Moore...
...when he crosses them up and announces that his trouble is that he has "run out of bullshit," they would not instantly cut him off the air; that the resulting publicity would cause the network to reverse its decision and put the man on as a regularly scheduled Mad Prophet of the airways; that emboldened by this success, the executives would grant a weekly slice of prime time to a revolutionary group something like the Symbionese Liberation Army so they can stage their heists before a slack-jawed mass audience; that meantime the Mad Prophet would be taken over...
Spender abandoned an older conception of the poet as "a kind of shadowy prophet behind the throne of power" in favor of a new idea of the poet as translator of a world which men have created around themselves through actions of the will. "I believed now," writes Spender in his autobiography World Within World, "that everything which men make and invent is to some degree a symbol of an inner state of consciousness within them...Poetry was a use of language which revealed external actuality as symbolic inner consciousness." Intrigued by the kind of hard, clear imagery that...