Word: surrealness
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Never exactly famed for munificence, Salvador Dali has offered to give six of his paintings to the French National Railroads for poster art. It seems that Dali has always been a real (or surreal) railroad buff and regards his home station in the small city of Perpignan as something of a shrine...
...Powers of Ten, one such idea film that Eames presented in 1968 to ameeting of America's top physicists, sketches a linear zoom to the farthest known point in the galaxies down to the nucleus of a carbon atom. What makes the film almost surreal at times is the starting point- the wrist of a man lying on Miami Beach- and the narrator, a serious female voice. Yet, whether physicist or child, one gets a feeling for the dimensions of time and space...
...reason why the marathon works so well as a context for American sickness is the ferocity with which director Pollack has depicted it. Some shots-the faces of the tortured contestants as they run two "derby" races during the marathon, a juxtaposition of Sarrazin and a trashcan with a surreal beachscape, the reflection of Susannah York's delirious face in a shower head-knock you over with sheer force. The depression-era detail (posters for Grand Hotel and band music like "The Best Things in Life are Free") and the editing (often utilizing sound cues such as sirens and gunshots...
...greatest strength of surreal "anti-theater" is, in point of fact, intensely theatrical: visual images that slice faster than pain can follow to the deepest resources of the imagination. No one else's emblems of the irrational at the core of man-not Jean Genet's black white Negroes, not Samuel Beckett's ashcans, not even Jerzy Grotowski's Holy Auschwitz-are quicker or more deadly than Eugene lonesco's best: when he bothers to aim, he can knock the cigarette from one's lips at 40 paces. As Death and the nun came...
...terms of real power, we of draft age are no more impotent than we were before. But somehow the new medium that they have chosen, this Surreal Raffle, is absurdly funny even as it is degrading. It is a parody that the Proposition might offer of government's evaluation of human life...