Word: contention
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...variety of personal concerns-the shading elm tree in the front yard that had to come down, a son who seldom came to visit, all the small but vital concerns of an old woman in a house and a life that for many years had been too empty. In content, it was very little different from the 150 calls a month received by 323-1819, which is the number of a service known as Dial-a-Listener. At the receiving end is a rotating staff of ten volunteers-including the schoolteacher, a nurse, an author, a civil engineer-who keep...
...SCENE'S symbolic content is perfectly accessible. Such devices as the cage and the lamp, together with Sternberg's handling of depth and sets, set up a pleasant and very restricted environment out of which Jannings' character develops. But the same symbols have a deeper meaning which, through their integration into Sternberg's dramatic and visual scheme, establishes the pattern of the entire film. In this system the attraction of light is a crucial motivation of personal behavior, and Jannings' blindness to the globe behind him appears simultaneously with a restriction of depth that expresses the limitations of his moral...
Such is the slight story of Tropici, a film about modern-day Brazil made by an Italian, Gianni Amico, for Italian television. But the content of Tropici is primarily political: the effects of foreign exploitation on a Third World nation. Amico has correctly realized that traditional narrative, no matter how portentous, is inadequate for describing a social reality that lies beneath surface story lines. Therefore he has interweaved his narrative with a conventional documentary which attempts to set Miguel's story in context, to explain in party why Miguel is unskilled, why a country so rich in resources...
...capturing on hands in Leacock's Mothers day, for instance). Salsman, despite almost mythic possibilities (an existence trapped in motels with their cleaning women; ion rented cars, with their clean ashtrays, in strange locals; living rooms never to be visited again; a thousand children played with and forgotten), is content to dwell solely on isolated portraits of individuals, invariably assuming neutral backgrounds tension; Brennan looks pathetic no real narrative defeated after his first missed sale-he looks just as pathetic and defeated in the final frames...
...about a ruling class' interest in the institutionalization of ecstasy through church structure. But the direct cinema aesthetic, in this case dedicated to just being there while a Bible salesman goes under, doesn't permit them. In its exposure of contradictions Salesman is a one-joke film; in intellectual content in never rises above Ferlinghetti's insipid " Christ Climbed Down" ("from his bare tree/this year/and ran away to where /no intrepid Bible salesman/covered the territory/in two-tone cadillacs...