Word: realist
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Over the course of his 14 year film-making career, Pasolini created 22 major films and wrote numerous screenplays for other directors. His films range in style from the gritty, black-and-white, neo-realist-influenced "Accatone" (1961), to the mystical, comical "Hawks and Sparrows" (1966), to his mythical, often erotic version of "The Decameron" (1971), right up to the brutal, disturbing "Salo...
...work and one of the few constants throughout his career. Disillusioned with the Communist Party and the Catholic Church, he criticized both. Yet even in criticizing them, he clung to them, commenting on them incessantly in his films. This central conflict generates much of the beauty of his neo-realist-inspired "Mamma Roma...
Were this just a story of disillusionment, of a woman's dreams shattered by the harsh realities of post-WWII Italy, "Mamma Roma" would be just another neo-realist film. Part of Pasolini's genius lies in his inability to rest in any one school or style. He has too much to say to remain only in the neo-realist genre, the genre most suited to his Marxist leanings. The film often seems torn between its clear Marxist stance and its religious overtones, as its many artistic influences and ideas blend together to create an omnipresent tension. Pasolini creates...
...theater isn't realist, like Caravaggio's, but it is based on a codification of reality, a formal, elevated representation of passion and thought. In this he was absolutely French -- the contemporary of Pierre Corneille, whose tragedies revolved around ideas of free will, exemplary virtue and conflicts between desire and duty, enacted by characters from a classical past who spoke ardently and directly to a 17th century audience. Rome made Poussin; but after him, Rome could no longer condescend to Paris. By the time of his death, he had helped create an irreversible shift in the cultural balance of Europe...
Kissinger casts Nixon as a realist, the first in the White House since Theodore Roosevelt. To support this contention, he quotes from Nixon's annual foreign policy reports, which Kissinger himself wrote. But as Kissinger admits, Nixon placed a picture of the unabashed idealist Woodrow Wilson in the Cabinet Room and repeatedly proclaimed the altruism of American policy. It amounted to a combination that Kissinger rather disparagingly calls "novel" but which seems to me quintessentially American...