Word: visual
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...year-old Californian named James Turrell. A spare-time pilot and full-time sculptor, Turrell has filled an entire floor of the Whitney with almost nothing: some walls, some tungsten and fluorescent lamps, and the reactions between them. To say that he has posed some ingenious visual conundrums on an ambitious scale is true, but insufficient. Turrell has also contrived an exquisite poetry out of near emptiness...
...more than the close attention to visual detail, what distinguishes Raging Bull is the way Scorsese has captured the flatness and banal perversity of these lives. Much of the credit for this belongs to Paul Schrader, who scripted Taxi Driver and was called in to assist Mardik Martin with Raging. Schrader writes highly stylized dialogue, the way short story writers write it. Often there's a total lack of communication...
...back panel woven of nearly 40,000 beads. The labor and time entailed in all this are meant to remind us of the vast anonymous efforts expended by women through the centuries on supposedly minor, "decorative" arts, and to help rehabilitate all fiberwork as a serious medium of visual discourse. So they do-at times movingly; and it is well to keep in mind how many of the vestments, arrases and other trappings whose function was to affirm male power, from the Bayeux Tapestry to the sacerdotal wardrobes of the church, were actually made by women...
...idea is not simply to mike the actors and jack up their volume; Breuer says that in wedding the aural techniques of radio and film to the visual images of a stage, he is using conventions the audience already understands but has never seen yoked together. The ancestor of this idea is the film director's voice-over: "It's theater about the way you think. When you think, there's about the way you think. When you think, there's a voice in your head, like someone speaking in your ear, and then there are abstract images...
Samuels has not turned to visual minimalism for this production; a bare stage and black costumes suggest themselves to such austere lines, but they would only denigrate Mamet's subtler minimalism. While set and costumes are uncluttered, they afford details that allow the lines their bareness, filling in little gaps that the dialogue leaves ambiguous...