Word: vision
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Prentiss's book never gets written, not because he lacks vision ("If . . . one could take a moment of history, a week, a month, and know it fully, perfectly, turn it in one's fingers until all the lights had played upon its surfaces . . .) but because the facts and mysteries he encounters exceed his intentions. Or so he claims. When a friend suggests that history is a form of narrative fiction, Prentiss replies a little too glibly that "a taste for fiction has always seemed to me the unfailing mark of an imaginative deficiency...
Huston has precisely duplicated onscreen both the simple two-part structure of Joyce's story and much of its dialogue. The old Hollywood adventurer's mood and motives do not compromise Joyce's vision; they tactfully illuminate it. Indeed, Huston's handling of this material is so direct, artless and unassertive that one's first enthusiasm for it is tempered by doubt. Perhaps our desire that his last movie represent the best of his several selves is coloring our reaction. Mistrust, however, must yield to Huston's trust of his medium, his material and himself...
...clarity and his color is monotonous, though the former seems to reinforce the grinding earnestness of his style and the latter contributes to its lugubrious intensity. What counts, is that he is one of the few visual artists in the past decade to have shown an unmistakable greatness of vision...
...Librarian of Congress, James Billington, a historian of Russian culture who speaks the language, probed for a glimpse of the underlying vision that Gorbachev might hold. How would the Soviet government, he asked, officially commemorate the millennium of Christianity in Russia next year? Gorbachev deftly avoided the question by indicating that his nation's ecclesiastical authorities were making the preparations. How "Russian" was the man? wondered Billington; then he queried him about Soviet writers. Gorbachev's reading was current, and included the so-called village writers, who have deplored the loss of rural values in Russia...
Reagan's desire not to stray too far from his conservative base also probably accounted for some of his caution in dealing with arms control at the summit. As he has pursued his visions of disarmament through strength, many Republican strategists -- notably Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger -- warned that the headlong rush to cut missiles was not being guided by any strategic vision of how the U.S. and its allies could best defend their vital interests. Yet another surprise "breakthrough" that discarded the carefully wrought strategies of deterrence could have been disconcerting...