Word: realist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Over the course of his 14 year film-making career, Pasolini created 22 major films and wrote numerous screenplays for other directors. His films range in style from the gritty, black-and-white, neo-realist-influenced "Accatone" (1961), to the mystical, comical "Hawks and Sparrows" (1966), to his mythical, often erotic version of "The Decameron" (1971), right up to the brutal, disturbing "Salo...
...work and one of the few constants throughout his career. Disillusioned with the Communist Party and the Catholic Church, he criticized both. Yet even in criticizing them, he clung to them, commenting on them incessantly in his films. This central conflict generates much of the beauty of his neo-realist-inspired "Mamma Roma...
...theater isn't realist, like Caravaggio's, but it is based on a codification of reality, a formal, elevated representation of passion and thought. In this he was absolutely French -- the contemporary of Pierre Corneille, whose tragedies revolved around ideas of free will, exemplary virtue and conflicts between desire and duty, enacted by characters from a classical past who spoke ardently and directly to a 17th century audience. Rome made Poussin; but after him, Rome could no longer condescend to Paris. By the time of his death, he had helped create an irreversible shift in the cultural balance of Europe...
Kissinger, a European refugee who read Metternich more avidly than Jefferson, is unabashedly in the realist camp. "No other nation," he writes, "has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism." Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a rather unsettling tribal ritual. The practice of basing policy on ideals rather than interests, he points out, can make a nation seem dangerously unpredictable...
Kissinger casts Nixon as a realist, the first in the White House since Theodore Roosevelt. To support this contention, he quotes from Nixon's annual foreign policy reports, which Kissinger himself wrote. But as Kissinger admits, Nixon placed a picture of the unabashed idealist Woodrow Wilson in the Cabinet Room and repeatedly proclaimed the altruism of American policy. It amounted to a combination that Kissinger rather disparagingly calls "novel" but which seems to me quintessentially American...