Word: realism
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...social realism that flourished in depression was exhausted by prosperity. In the ensuing decades. Chicago's backwaters were described in livelier manner by Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow. Farrell gradually dropped out of sight, his books published but ignored by critics and readers who had moved on to other themes, higher styles. The old pro stayed on his outworn turf producing characters who still dumbly battled circumstance, like cuttlefish trying to redirect the tide. Olive and Mary Anne is the fixture as before. Its five tales are confined to the standard Farrell inventory: lives with insufficient love, the sorrows...
...casting a competent actress who cannot pirouette her way out of a paper bag (Anne Bancroft) in one of the two lead roles--a middle-aged ballerina clearly in decline--and supporting her with two genuine ballet stars (Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne) in significant if minor roles. Realism and a respect for the irreplaceable skills of a tested movie star blend nicely in Ross' polished parable about the world of ballet and the thoughts about the roads not taken fostered by the onset of middle...
...visitor at the show soon realizes that the Chinese Revolution has also obliterated any notion of socialist realism, as practiced?however fitfully?in Russia. There are no sweating boatmen by the rivers. Not even a dirty shirt in view. Everything is swept, ordered, prosperous. The happy people of Huhsien county are the last Arcadians. Socialism, as it were, equals Ovid plus electricity. Their sacks of grain bulge like the bellies of good-luck gods. Every bulb of garlic in their fields is the size of a baby's head. Each melon and gourd displays, in its massive and purposeful rotundity...
...inquiring lens. The assimilation of the world goes on faster and faster; the camera furnishes us with our prototypes. "Instead of just recording reality," Sontag argues, "photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism." Nevertheless, the photo is a fiction: reality unfolds in time, and photographs do not. "Through photographs," Sontag writes, "the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles ... It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery." Photography isolates...
...false glory," the Vendome Column. Later, the Commune crushed, a vengeful state passed a law to make Courbet bear the cost of restoring the column. Bankrupt, he fled to Switzerland and died in exile in 1877. There is always room for argument over the extent of Courbet's realism. The man who insisted on setting down the bald truth of visual experience, from a drunken priest's red nose to the drool on a stag's jaws, was allegorist and history painter as well as factual witness; and there he could be very puzzling indeed. The debate...