Word: somber
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...begins with the somber, subdued tones of the classic Dutch artists. But his study of Rubens' paintings in Antwerp and his overwhelming need to escape the disaster of his personal life in the joy of his art together served to brighten his palette. By the end of his life, when his thoughts were concentrated almost exclusively on eluding madness by pouring himself forth in paint with all the joy he could evoke, his color reaches its peak of vibrant warmth and his canvas achieves its greatest vitality--almost more living than life itself...
...once during the four months of shooting. Yet that sort of spartanism paid off in a performance-under the brilliant direction of Sir Carol Reed-which delivered astonishing proof that her talents were more than physical. She had little to do, but she did it to perfection, as the somber mistress of a series of doomed World War II tugboat skippers, managing to suggest the awesome fears just beneath the surface of the dearly bought frivolities...
Milk with an Awl. In a somber, six-hour speech at the Central Committee's annual conference on farm policy, the Soviet Premier castigated "irresponsibility" and "backwardness" in almost every segment of agriculture, even to the high price of harrows in Novosibirsk and the lagging fight against weeds in Kazakhstan. Unless the party makes "tremendous efforts," he warned, "our country will face great difficulties, and serious harm will be inflicted on the cause of building Communism." To get Red farms in the black, he demanded sweeping, immediate reforms that include doubling the output of farm machines, a tenfold boost...
...admirable. Williams is full of similar moral ambivalence. His oppressive, superheated tropics are Poe's "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir," and his characters some times seem like Poe's spectral phantoms of a locked-in ego, walking somnambulically to their dooms. Williams shares Melville's somber cosmic dread. It was of the Encantadas, the desolate islands of the Galapagos, that Melville wrote: "In no world but a fallen one could such lands exist." And it is "on the beach of the Encantadas" that Sebastian, the poet of Suddenly Last Summer, who later would himself be eaten...
...silently, from the summit of a glittering skyscraper, from the zenith of man's pride and material achievement, the camera descends relentlessly into the convenient hell of a meaningless marriage, into a dark and joyless night of the contemporary soul imagined with monstrous art by Michelangelo Antonioni, the somber master of cinema who made L'Avventura (TIME, April...