Word: sorting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...like understanding has its roots in the animism of the earliest primitive artists: French cave-mural painters, mask-fashioners of Africa and Eskimo sculptors. The belief that a spirit exists in every living thing implies that in order to fashion an image one must first understand exactly what sort of spirit moves the subject. By the same token, art initially served a practical function: it was believed that by symbolically capturing prey (one captured a portion of its spirit by painting or sculpting it) the chances of success in the field were much greater. What may appear pure ignorance...
SETTING ASIDE an evening to endure this sort of film sounds bad enough in theory; the reality is even worse. Herzog does not film scenes, he leers at them, trying to extract every droplet of meaning and mood his flabby creative muscles can muster. And the sluggish screenplay gives little relief. You never get the feeling that much has been lost in the translation because there isn't much to be lost in the first place. That Herzog can summon the raw nerve to inflict this unredeeming and unredeemable trash on an audience speaks volumes about what obligations he feels...
Television, however, in its new fondness for "docu-dramas," is subject to special danger of another sort. People who go to a moviehouse expect to see fiction and accept the conventions of historical drama: no one is much worse off if everyone's image of Disraeli is George Arliss or if Gregory Peck romanticizes the legend of Douglas MacArthur. But, as a number of psychologists have pointed out, the television screen provides most people with their visual knowledge of real events, such as President Kennedy's assassination, so that truth and show-biz demands are bound...
...blues, those fuchsias and oranges, those velvety blacks and soprano yellows, without producing an effect akin to colored gumballs? In Matisse's world, color was equated with feeling. It belonged to the realm of Dionysus. But Matisse's goal was, in his own words, to establish "a sort of hierarchy of all my sensations," to possess and minutely articulate the nuances of feeling. There was nothing more decisive than the actual process of cutting, the shears slicing through the painted paper, dividing the final form from its surplus without ambiguity...
...constructive approach, the suggested solutions seem simplistic. All too often, the power of federal mandate seems to be invoked by the council as a magic cureall; wave the wand of legislation, they imply, and problems will vanish. Rather than looking ahead, the council appears to be advocating the same sort of reform that, in general, failed to solve the problems of society in the 1960s. They seem unlikely to do much better now for the beleaguered U.S. family...