Word: thrustingly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WHILE SEVEN BEAUTIES does not say directly that survival through collaboration and murder is preferable to death in defense of human values, the whole emotional thrust of the film implies that conclusion. Certainly, Wertmuller presents the opposing case, but whenever characters speak against Pasqualino's point of view, they do so in abstract rhetorical terms without a context that could lend any human meaning to their arguments. When Pasqualino and Francesco argues that the two of them are as guilty as the Germans since they are doing nothing to prevent it. But this is simply an inauthentic rendition of stock...
Wertmuller's inability to represent political choices in a meaningful way reflects the violently anti-political thrust of her work. In each of her films, political principles are beliefs that characters adhere to abstractly, and which bear no relation to their lives. In fact, as her films unfold it becomes apparent that the characters' political principles are in conflict with their lifestyles; when they discover this contradiction, they abandon politics for the things that really make Wertmuller's universe revole; sex, emotions, and material ambition...
SINCE WERTMULLER sees politics purely as principles cut off from life, she can envision no way for people to chance the social conditions that structure their lives. Those conditions are thrust upon people by external forces entirely beyond their control, and for Wertmuller they can only choose how to submit to the situations that confront them pre-formed. Seven Beauties opens with black and white montage of World War II newsreels, clips of Hitler and bombings, which eventually leads into the wreck that allows Pasqualino to desert the troop train and plunges him into the Nazi inferno. The social conditions...
Singular Talent. Still has written about his preference for "the vertical rather than the horizontal; the single projection, instead of polarities; the thrust of the flame instead of the oscillation of the wave." This was partly meant to separate his work from the tradition of the School of Paris, which was all balance and harmonious composition. But in such remarks, as in the work, one catches the note of true terribilità that lies beneath the grumpy face Still turns to the public...
...tried to get them to stay with the possibility that black working people raising families have hopes and fears like their own. And when Baldwin spoke at Quincy House later that month I challenged them to confront two of their demons--blacks and Harvard--face to face. The undertaking thrust me instantly into a social "no-man's land" and taught me something about what it is like to be raised comfortably "above the battle" in an America where working whites and blacks are fighting...