Word: purposelessness
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...ridges on it. Another giveaway was a tiny hole on the top of the horse's head. Such holes are common on the life-size marble horses found on the Acropolis: the Greeks fitted spikes in them to keep the birds away. But such a device was purposeless for a Greek statuette, 15 inches high, which would have been shown indoors...
...saga of the scruffy, sleazy desperadoes who cut a staccato swath from Iowa to Texas and were ambushed and shot down near Arcadia La., on May 23, 1934. But Producer Beatty and Director Arthur Penn have elected to tell their tale of bullets and blood in a strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap that teeters uneasily on the brink of burlesque. Like Bonnie and Clyde themselves, the film rides off'in all directions and ends up full of holes...
Blow-Up's editing is weakest when the script allows Antonioni to be self-indulgent, the scenes in which he passes judgment on mod society. The cutting in the first photography session with Verushka, the mini-orgy, the rock and roll sequence seems purposeless and overly self-conscious. Antonioni's best editing is found in the sequences with dramatic purpose and direction: the blow-up sequence and the discovery of the corpse. Both deal with extended action--a lengthy process of printing and examining photo enlargements, and a long walk through a park--and Antonioni must use editing...
...between the Puritan ethic--work as an end rather than a means--and the older idea that a philosophic principle of leisure is essential to true creativity. The failure to appreciate this is the reason we are all too busy around here. Empty space must be filled with often purposeless activity. We do not understand correctly what we are doing or why we are doing it, and this brings about much of the tension often bordering on neurosis that so often afflicts us and affects the quality of our work...
...confronting these cliched, silly estimates of what happened in Cuba, Warren Miller's new novel undertakes an important job. Stylistically, however, the-author dissipates his energy in a sluggish attempt at parable as he describes Jonathan Weller, a wealthy, purposeless North American, adrift in Havana during the winter of '58-'59. Driving relentlessly toward the city is Revolution, a process that will free Havana of a mortification so extensive that Weller fails to sense its reality. And in this kind of blindness, in assuming that a nation can exist as a playground for him and his, Weller stumbles toward...