Word: thompson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dance. (Movement, one might say, is to tribal art what print is to Western art.) The mask one admires in the museum once had a dancer's head inside it; the carved figure embodies meanings that are entirely based on gesture and posture. Art Historian Robert Thompson, in showing these works drawn from the superb African collection owned by Katherine White in Los Angeles, demonstrates the canons of African motion across the diversity of regional cultures: Dan and Dogon, Yoruba and Ogoni, Luba and Ashanti, Benin and Ejagham...
...seek the meaning of a work like the modern Ashanti wood carving of a mother and child from Ghana in its harmony of shapes: the massive, fluid bulges of hair, the delicate formal rhyme between the points of nose, chin and conical breasts, and so forth. But when Thompson showed it to an African, his response to what seemed "universal" in the sculpture was quite different. "She is purely there. She gives milk to the child. She secures his body with the other hand. She is sitting well, like a person of character." And this quality of presence, of being...
...White collection includes a superb variety of masks, from cumbrous affairs that need an athlete to lift them to a wooden Ogoni mask from Nigeria, with its curving protrusion of lips like a bird's beak, too small to fit a human head. Thompson has included films showing how these personifications of spirit and moral forces are used in communal dances: Gaa Wree-Wre, for instance, the Dan personification of "ideal justice," with its white-rimmed eyes, worn in a dance characterized by ponderous walking and sitting...
Directed by J. LEE THOMPSON...
Along with the script, the Sherman brothers (Mary Poppins, Tom Sawyer) have supplied a typically cankerous score. Director J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone) performs his task with the requisite banality, although there is considerable strength in Paul Winfield's performance as Jim and some smoothly flowing, elegant camera work by Laszlo Kovacs. This current adaptation (turned out under the auspices of the Reader's Digest) represents at least the fourth effort to bring Huckleberry Finn to the screen, and once again Huck has been smothered by the pasty good taste from which he always tried...