Word: recoiling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Once Biko dies, barely an hour into the film, Woods carries the narration; he plots his escape to any land that will publish his Biko biography. The police threaten his cute family with errant gunfire and toxic T shirts, and the viewer is meant to recoil from these domestic atrocities. Of course they are horrid, yet their intended impact reinforces, in dramatic terms, the Afrikaners' credo: white lives mean more. Piling on bogus suspense devices as Woods snakes his way toward freedom, Attenborough lets the venality of South African imperialism degenerate into a staid chase film: The Brady Bunch Flees...
...headedness that marked its immediate predecessor. This is a tighter, more conservative Biennial, attentive to the internal rhymes of current art and to the cross relations between artists. What we have is an Alexandrian fallback -- a sense of the basically academic nature of most "advanced" American art, its recoil from making big parodies of invention, its desire to navigate honorably in a cultural trough whose sides are lined with art fans...
...Reagan is gone. Few Americans want to return to the Great Society style of welfare. The nation can no longer afford that kind of grand buffet, if it ever could. So the instinct for a new compassion, a word that is often heard these days as a signal of recoil against the meannesses of Reaganism, comes abruptly up against hard realities...
...through the star's outer layers and into space. Under these circumstances, there is a limit to how much the neutrons can be compressed. As gravity tightens its grip further, the neutrons, in what Hans Bethe, Cornell University's Nobel laureate physicist, has called the "moment of maximum scrunch," recoil ferociously...
...affections that even indisputable 20th century masterworks have been neglected in favor of the millionth performance of the Beethoven, Brahms or Tchaikovsky concertos. It has not helped that some compositions of the '50s and '60s amounted to teeth-grinding assaults on the instrument that made both soloists and audiences recoil...