Word: viewer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nation where audiences assiduously hunt for modern meaning in productions of Shakespeare, the parallels with Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev and the impending struggle to succeed him are obvious. Says one Moscow viewer: "Not everything today is the way Lenin is saying it should be." Indeed, during a recent performance there was a brief tremor of applause in the balcony when Kalyagin suggested that the post of general secretary should be subject to greater party control...
...certainly, they came out of the cubist sculpture De Chirico saw all over the Paris studios after 1912. De Chirico is often said to have used Renaissance space in his pictures, but, as Rubin points out, this is a myth. Chirican perspective was not meant to set the viewer in a secure, measurable space. It was a means of distorting the view and disquieting the eye. Instead of one vanishing-point in his architectonic masterpiece, The Melancholy of Departure, 1914, there are six, none "correct." This cloning of viewpoints acts in a way analogous to cubism. It jams the sense...
EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE a movie succeeds in interweaving the psychological and the political into a dense web that forces the viewer to get involved. The Deer Hunter did; it made Vietnam an integral element, never just a backdrop. Circle of Deceit, on the other hand, turns the rubble and bodies of present-day Beirut into mere mental furniture for its protagonist. It could just as well have been Angola, Iran or El Salvador. And as an Everymodernman, the protagonist could have been French or American as well as German...
UNFORTUNATELY, IN DEPICTING the dulling of Laschen's senses, the film itself becomes dull. After the initial horror wears off, unrelenting violence is boring. Hardened to atrocity along with the protagonist, the viewer is forced to become amoral in order to empathize. Nothing is less satisfying. The film attaches no guilt to apathy, creating a loss of sensation without sentiment for the loss. In providing the emotional exercise for the audience, Schlondorff's fatalistic approach to indifference falls flat...
...triumph of Hill Street Blues has been to make the passive viewer pay attention-to the interwoven plots, the overlapping dialogue, the busy background of bodies and emotion. Police Squad!, a deftly dippy sitcom now midway through a six-week run, demands the same attention. Blink and you will miss the Tower of Pisa looming outside a window in "a neighborhood called Little Italy." Glance at the evening paper and you will not see a young couple walk through a "Japanese garden" filled with blank-faced nisei standing in planters. Raid the fridge and you will miss the visit Sergeant...