Word: sentimentality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...decision to show these films in this order is one reason the slogans sound natural and meaningful. Lilienthal's Uprising recreates the final bloody months of the 1979 revolution, and Sandino, a documentary, looks at the year that follows the victory. Despite crude acting and a liberal dash of sentiment, Lilienthal succeeds brilliantly in showing how this revolution--and more important how the brutal piggishness of American ally Anastasio Somoza--touched the life of the people. Little wonder that Nicaraguans who watched their neighbors, their sons, shot in the back for no good reason, who ran off the streets...
...much talk of the masses, of "groundswells of popular sentiment," can hide an important idea about revolutions, one that Lilienthal makes the center of his movie. Far from being some sort of tidal occurrence, a revolution is made up of first hundreds, then thousands, finally millions of individual decisions. Usually the decisions are horribly hard; the young Guard member in The Uprising who eventually joins the Sandinistas knows it will likely be the death of his parents. Those who have a hard time imagining how bad conditions were under Somoza (or are under El Salvador's "14 families") might...
...began quietly in 1979, almost as an echo from a bygone generation. Pastors delivered sermons on the virtues of peace. Antiwar groups, some with their roots in the '50s, passed out petitions and organized small demonstrations. Communist parties drummed up predictable anti-NATO sentiment. But gradually, as anger and fear began to take hold, the movement reached beyond its traditional constituencies, taking on a dimension that surprised even its organizers. Finally, this autumn it reached a crescendo. More than 2 million Western Europeans have demonstrated so far in the streets of the Continent's major cities?and weekend after weekend...
...positively Rubenesque wallop and energy, and his feeling for "sublime" landscape-the misty crags and glens of the Highlands-connects him to northern European romanticism, in particular to Caspar David Friedrich. When he let his sense of nature as a ground of elemental conflict speak directly, uninflected by sentiment, he produced one of the great images of his century, The Challenge, 1844: a stag bellowing defiance at its swimming enemy in the glacial boneyard of a mountain landscape. Such a painting makes all the dewy-eyed spaniels bearable, if not worthwhile...
Antiunion sentiment seems to be everywhere, and not just among white-collar suburbanites. A symptom of this was the public support President Reagan got when he fired 11,500 air-traffic controllers who struck illegally in August. Says Victor Gotbaum, head of New York City's largest (109,000 members) public employee union and one of organized labor's most powerful voices: "Not even Eisenhower or Richard Nixon did that...