Word: truisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ALMOST a truism: in the rest of the world, including other universities, the arts are practiced. At Harvard, they are analyzed. Traditionally, the imbalance for undergraduates has been righted in extracurricular activities: Harvard has fostered two orchestras, three choral groups, innumerable dramatic organizations and, most recently, a dance company. But as the Harvard-Radcliffe Dance Company's annual performance (last Thursday through Saturday, at the Loeb) distressingly suggested, it is possible for the pursuit of theory to confuse the integrity of practice, even outside the classroom...
...landmark film comes in the form of Clarke's slightly defensive explanation of how astronaut David Bowman managed to survive in a vacuum for several seconds while re-entering his space ship. Clarke cites experiments on animals in vacuum chambers in an effort to disprove the old sci-fi truism that an astronaut would explode instantly in the vacuum of space. The book scintillates with such occasional tidbits, but otherwise the pickings are slim. Clarke reveals that he has decided to abandon non-fiction to concentrate on writing novels, and the overall mediocrity of the book inclines one to approve...
...foreign films are dubbed these days, and with good reason; the awkward insertion of another person's voice speaking a different tongue into the lips of the original actors, besides being aesthetically offensive, robs the viewer of the genuine performance. But Chabrol unaccountably elected to ignore this long-accepted truism, perhaps as part of a misguided effort to accommodate the English-speaking Steiger. Combine this blunder with the normally sluggish quality of a Chabrol screenplay, and you come up with a film virtually stripped of a crucial dimension--the dialogue and how it is delivered...
...first play David Berry, who served in Viet Nam, deliberately chooses not to forget. Berry surmounts the tiresome truism that war is hell. He seems to say that a nation that sent off its young men to the killing ground of Southeast Asia with complacent arrogance is itself hellish, not least in shirking its collective moral responsibility...
...Foreign Correspondent; the assassin's gun poised in mid-air amidst the concluding strains of a London orchestra in The Man Who Knew Too Much; or the ultimate vision of the master, the boydless hand ripping away the shower curtain in the nightmare-provoker of all time, Psycho. This truism does not apply to The Lady Vanishes for some reason I can't quite fathom. Perhaps the simple georgraphic limitations of the plot account for this anomaly; Hitchcock always works best with a script that offers a wide variety of settings and locations that allow his prodigious imagination its rein...