Word: sensuality
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Subtly sophisticating the transmission of sensual information over the past two decades, Stan Brakhage has projected an inner vision (what you do see when you turn out the lights, when you close your eyes, when you change sight-thought relationships) through, and worn his heart on, his films. Consequently, any audience wishing to enter the kingdom of Brakhage must become as little children, must not wrongly expect "entertainment" but meet each image, sequence, film on its own terms. It must concentrate on learning to see how one sees -- how one comes to understand the worlds of fantasy and observation...
...contrast. Rivette's psychology has its limits as well -- tendencies toward surrealism narrow its view, violence becomes stylized and unbelievable towards its end -- but the basic insights are sound. Sex is merely sketched in Rivette's work, but his actors have a greater sensitivity which produces a far more sensual result than Brando's mechanical and purposeless simulations...
Pauline Kael, at one time arguably the best film critic in operation, has turned into the Hubert Humphrey of film criticism. She comes on chatty and playful when talking about film techniques, valuing good stars above acting and sensual excess over rigor, all the time letting us know that under that tigress bite of hers beats a heart which overflows with sympathy. She makes sufficient noises in the vague directions of liberalism to insure our recognition that she cares in the correct way about moral and political issues which the films she sees might raise. She is overwhelmingly ebullient...
...models of what a good abstract painting should be. The problem of uniting form and content, honesty and illusion is made almost symbolically explicit by the use of the inner color field and its surrounding borders. Each of those elements, in turn, has both a formal and a sensual function. The formal solution of drawing at the edge of the canvas satisfies a felt need to reflect the frame in the structure of the painting, but also allows old style, "painterly" handling to survive. (The styles of some of Olitski's edges can be read as homages to the paint...
...difference between Matisse's contemplation of his own works and the arid feedback one gets in so much art today is enormous. It is a matter of sensual wholeness. The blue of the Dance invades the painted room, drenching its space in an oceanic full ness of hue. In it, the hot pink of the chair back and table legs and vase glows with preternatural intensity. Color for Matisse was not a property of objects. It was the stuff of which they were made. And space itself was less a describable structure-which it was for Picasso or Braque...