Word: themes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...work great. Miro himself, who should know, does not consider his art abstract, as the critics think. "As a matter of fact," he insists, "I am attaching more and more importance to the subject matter of my work. To me it seems vital that a rich and robust theme should be present to give the spectator an immediate blow between the eyes...
...necessary part of the U.S. economic system. A majority thought ads interesting, although too emotional and not factual enough. Only 17% thought advertising prose "silly." But more than half thought advertising was often in bad taste. They objected to detailed references to bodily functions, ads with the gossip theme (the "careless" beauty who becomes a social outcast) and sexy illustrations (44% would completely ban the nude or semi-nude...
...favorite parlor puzzle a decade or two ago. The late Alexander Woollcott published a breathless version in which the missing person is an elderly woman; in Mrs. Belloc Lowndes' The End of Her Honeymoon (1914) it is a young husband. All are variations on the same theme: a victim vanishes, leaving no sign of his existence; in feverish haste his hotel room is refurnished, repapered or walled off. The hotelkeeper (sometimes it is the police) has reason to dispose of the victim without alarming the city...
Caligari was followed by many imitations. The picture's "basic theme-the soul faced with the seemingly unavoidable alternative of tyranny or chaos-exerted extraordinary fascination." A long procession of tyrants crossed the screen; Dr. Kracauer wonders whether their cruelties and excesses were expressions of a premonitory fear of what lay in the depths of the German soul...
Some pre-Hitler films sought out some tenable pattern for existence. Some escaped into serenely playful romantic comedies. Others advised submission and Christlike love (Dostoevsky was very popular in middle-class Germany). Still others-which were to furnish the Nazis with a theme-"combined passions and precipices," and celebrated the heroic but adolescent cult of mountain climbing...