Word: themes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Every politician has a trick or two up his sleeve, but West Germany's Chancellor Helmut Schmidt has worked wonders. During the annual summer festival (this year's theme: Philosophers' Reverie) on the chancery grounds in Bonn, Schmidt got a little help from a professional conjurer and presto! levitated a woman. Then the Chancellor jubilantly passed a hoop over her body to show that it was not supported by wires. Why mix politics and magic? Like the levitated body, explained Schmidt, "problems are suspended and have to be solved...
...Last Hurrah comes across as O'Connor's dirge at the death of traditional Irish-American society, and Frank Skeffington, the larger-than-life caricature, served quite neatly as a symbol of a vanishing way of life. The Wanting of Levine, by contrast, takes on no such broad sociological theme. A.L. Levine's odyssey is an intensely personal one, the maturing of a fascinating character who happens to be Jewish and happens to be a politician and happens to be enormously successful. Less ambitious in scope than O'Connor's book, it is no less fascinating...
...Allen's Love and Death ("You are choked by boredom"). Mikhalkov could also use some of Renoir's toughness of mind and poetic genius. The Rules of the Game dared to dissect contemporary France; A Slave of Love is essentially a safe nostalgia piece. Where Renoir merged theme, style and narrative into a seamless whole, Mikhalkov must shift gears as his film moves among its various concerns. A Slave of Love is further afflicted by a dippy sound-track score, but such flaws are a real part of this picture's appeal. Somehow it is reassuring...
...variety was symbolic of the message the Yugoslavs were trying to deliver to the Chinese: socialism is enriched, not weakened, by the diversity within it. The same theme was elaborated on by Tito, who said that both countries had produced socialist revolutions of an authentic character. Their original paths, he added, taken under different conditions, have provided a lasting bond between them...
Scientists are not the only ones smitten by black-hole fever. The parcels of nothingness are a favorite topic on the lecture circuit. They bring out record crowds for planetarium shows, and they have lately been the theme of a spate of books. In the popular lexicon, the term black hole once suggested only the legendary hellish cell in Calcutta in which British prisoners were held by an 18th century Indian nawab. Now it has become an immediately recognizable catchword for a different kind of darkness. Says one young astrophysicist...