Word: realisms
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Juliet of the Spirits/Nights of Cabiria. Early Fellini. Attenuated mysticism, and an eerie, compassion-soaked realism...
...chess. During the opening ceremonies at the 80,000-seat Workers' Stadium, the Chinese practiced their flash-card magic; more than 8,000 people were pressed into service to flash poster-size cards. The result of this collective enterprise: "Ode to the Red Flag," a kaleidoscope of socialist realism scenes, beginning with the message...
...gray neuralgic minimality of a character in Beckett, and the paintings-schematic outline figures scrawled on a white ground-look negligible. Quite different is the work of a Frenchman, Jean-Olivier Hucleux, who has developed a technique of such extreme verisimilitude as to make nearly all U.S. photo-realism seem clumsy and generalized. His favorite subject is, lit erally, nature morte: French graveyards, with their raked gravel, their cakes of black granite brought to a patent-leather gloss, their iconography of morose kitsch. Hucleux paints them down to the last molecule and the result is a form of trompe...
...America. Hence the extraordinary flavor of the nudes and portraits by Lucien Freud, the 52-year-old grandson of Sigmund: more psychic territory is crossed in Freud's scrutiny of a few square inches of worn flesh than one might find in a whole roomful of recent American realism. A similar process happens in Avigdor Arikha's tenacious and diffident still lifes. They are small monuments to the difficulty of naming any object. And like many of the other works in this show, they testify that painting as a form of expression is still wide open, still able...
...film is shot in the bank's cramped interior, the visual monotony is relieved only by occasional shots of the street and a few crosscuts to Sonny's apartment. He dwells on ethnicity as though it were the last word since Bridget and Bernie, giving us social realism with a fond look at hysterical Italians, hot-blooded Latins, and stupid, good-natured blacks. Presumably in the name of verisimilitude, he refuses to edit out repetitive or slow-moving sequences. A real drama under Lumet's direction might keep us in the theater for days...