Word: foreground
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most famous example of Manet's contrariness is, of course, the Déjeuner: two women-one completely naked, the other virtually so-and two clothed men, occupying the foreground of a sketchily painted Arcadian landscape. We have been taught to see its allusions stick out like elbows (here a homage to Giorgione, there a quotation from Marcantonio Raimondi), but what infuriated the audience at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, and has caused so many gallons of ink to be spilled on it since, is its insolubility as narrative. An "uncouth riddle," one critic called...
...least as interesting as her plot. Hackett 's affair with the wife of a philandering husband is sexy and poignant, a tough embrace shared by two adults with equally damaged illusions. Similarly, the Depression, its grinding poverty and hero-worshiping tabloids, keeps threatening to push from background to foreground. In side the competent puzzle posed by Tender Prey, there is clearly a bigger novel and a promising novelist...
...view of the castle (which overlooks the Thames estuary) a pressure of melancholy: he was painting this desolate shore from memory, and his beloved wife Maria had just died of consumption. The paint is crusted, layer over layer, like mortar; even the grass and mallows in the foreground seem fossilized, and the broken tower-taller in art than in life-has an Ossianic misery to it. Then one's eye escapes to the horizon, glittering with scumbled white light, like a promise of resurrection. The whole image is as intense as anything in Turner: "melancholy grandeur," as Constable...
...with bloodcurdling threats. Poor Domenichino, the Bolognese master who had been invited to decorate the chapel of St. Gennaro in Naples' cathedral, rushed back to Rome in a state of collapse after hearing from this cabal. Grand Guignol abounded, especially in details like the amputated hand in the foreground of Massimo Stanzione's Massacre of the Innocents, which seems ready to scuttle away, like a pink crab...
...perfect finish to a masterly film, at once superbly intelligent and strangely poignant. He employed the same ironic device in A Special Day (1977), in which Mussolini held a giant rally for Hitler in the background, while Mastroianni and Sophia Loren coped with the quotidian in the foreground. But La Nuit de Varennes is a much richer film. In Day the protagonists virtually ignored the great events moving around them. In Varennes they are relentlessly articulate in expressing views about them, ranging from right to left with a splendid detour for Casanova's apolitical self-absorption and his mourning...