Word: symbols
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...process," not a "circumstance" as the others do. What Calisher does not seem to realize is that she is guilty of the same thing. She creates a nicely literary shallow set of circumstances out of what should be a fully human process. She plays word games and symbol strategies with her middle-aged prilgrims, but forgets their supposedly real children entirely; they are but mythical objects of a quest...
Marshall Petain, the aging hero of Verdun, plays a special role in this version of French history. Though he led his country into the Armistice, he became a symbol of a new honor that France hoped would come to her in the new Europe. More pitiful and disturbing than the film's review of the Nazi's lightning defeat of France is its exposure of the French trying to rebuild, their self-esteem by embracing Nazi doctrines of race purity and ultra-nationalism...
Petain becomes a somewhat benign version of Hitler, showing up in newsreels, on innumerable posters, and in the rhetoric of nationalist speakers. In retrospect, Petain is recognized to have been a symbol of safety and accomodation. So many wanted a way out, and Petain was acceptable as an old man who couldn't harm anyone. The film's critique of him is personal--he was very much a defeatist--but it holds him as symbol, not scapegoat. The Sorrow's shame is collective...
There is the Hopperesque alienation of George Segal's white plaster woman who sits behind the railing of her porch facing a world that does not even exist. And Luis Jiminez has remade the Statue of Liberty into a new symbol of American fertility...
...comment with intelligence on most financial issues, but I can comment on issues of social responsibility" -including the bank's services to the poor and the elderly. Mrs. Cooney has addressed meetings of the bank's women employees and sees herself "as a symbol of good faith on the part of management to them...