Word: pygmalion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...pattern of Rubek's earlier life is a sort of Pygmalion theme in reverse: the sculptor has found a perfect woman and taken from her the soul he needs for his marble masterpiece. Irene, the model for the statue, has loved him desperately but without the slightest response. When the work is complete she leaves him, her soul shattered and his ground away by the forces of creation. Art has died as well, for Rubek, in his bitterness at the loss of Irene, can sculpt only the faces of animals behind the masks of wealthy men who come...
...doll-house like representation of a Metal Exhibit (Joost Schmidt 1934) complete with boat propellers and model airplanes, shows the creative richness of the Bauhaus that encouraged a tradition in education as well as art. The Bauhaus brought art off its pedestal and seduced even the common Pygmalion; the Busch should bring such attractive nuisances up from the basement more often...
...Metamorphoses, Avery Shreiber is a comic treasure. Rather resembling a stocky, mustachioed Sicilian just off the grape treadmill, he is a muscle-brained Vulcan. Enraged to find his bride Venus cuckolding him with Mars, he exposes the pair in a hilariously crafty bungle. He is equally diverting as a Pygmalion who cannot get over how "real" his diaphanously clad Galatea is, a true lovely of a girl played by Mary Frann. Another splendid addition to the company is a lissome black dancer and actress, Paula Kelly, whose Circean seductiveness is apparent far past the footlights...
...exactly a Noble Savage, but it is impossible for Itard not to have had Rousseau in mind; the doctor many not be a poet, but he is inexorably caught up in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the birth of Romanticism. The film (like Pygmalion, or Frankenstein ) is deeply moving: in its story, one man turns an idea about humanity into flesh. And if the jump from idea to flesh, from symbol to image, constitutes the process of education, it also constitutes the process of cinema...
...invest in the buildings, and the part they pull out for sheer companionship, begin to stare back at them through every window. If you hate what you create, then you hate yourself, but trying to love the skyscrapers of New York must be like kissing a rock. So unlike Pygmalion, the construction workers cannot even fall in love with their work- which is, in part, themselves- and therefore they must either hate themselves of try to become ever more like their creations- hard, faceless, and unfeeling...