Word: darkly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wait. What is that ominous sound in the background, that heavy breathing that strikes terror in the hearts of all those who love peace and freedom? It could only be the scourge of the universe, the nastiest man from here to infinity, Archvillain Darth Vader, the Dark Lord of Sith and leader of the Imperial Forces. It is time, in other words, to hurry up, buy the popcorn, M&M's, or whatever else you like to munch in front of the silver screen, and grab a seat for The Empire Strikes Back...
Luke learns enough, however, to give Darth Vader a spirited battle with his lightsword at the end of the film. But Vader proves a difficult foe to vanquish. That is just as well for the story because the Dark Lord is far more menacing in The Empire than he was in Star Wars, infused with hitherto unknown ambitions and desires, possessed of a mysterious past. There is a hint of a complex personality, and Vader, like all good villains, commands the screen whenever he appears, his black robes floating behind him like the shrouds of death. But once...
...unexpected? perhaps they were the same thing to him ? could suddenly crowd in upon one, where everyone knew he was guilty of something, if not necessarily what he was being punished for. It is a measure of his achievement that he lit erally made light of these dark feelings, miraculously transforming them into deft and graceful popular art that permitted the world to laugh, however nervously, at the demons that pursue every feeling man and woman...
Such scenes open a little trap door at the base of the brain. From that ancient root cellar they summon up dark, flapping fantasies of revenge. During the six-month imprisonment of their hostages, Americans have on the whole reacted with a surprising forbearance toward the Iranians. But beneath the surface they have marinated in an odd, atavistic cross-cultural rage. Their anger has been ripened by the long spectacle of their nation's ineffectuality and the humiliation of the failed rescue raid, by the nightly TV pageant of Iranian mobs pumping their fists in the air and screaming...
Other pictures are more emphatically striking: a large color photograph by Paul Souza, shot through a tilting windshield, containing a snaking road, dark cliffs and, above the foreshortened yellow strip of the car's hood, an exultant view of sunstruck clouds--a kind of visual trumpet blast. Essentially the same compositional strategy, and the same dramatic clarity, are on view in a black-and-white photograph of an industrial wasteland by Roswell Angier: in the foreground, framed by a windshield and side-window, we see the blurred silhouette of a rearview mirror, a woman's blanketed back, a squinting Indian...