Word: foregrounds
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Cover: Photographic design by Fred Burrell, who utilized a dramatically lit wood-and-polychrome Ibo mask. The figures in the foreground symbolize Biafran refugees...
...playing with the light and shade of the passing trees. When the bandits take her from them, fast tracks of incredible violence following them running along the shore after the women are cut against shots of her being carried off in a boat. In every track characters and setting, foreground and background, seem to be moving in the same direction, but along parallel lines so that they will never meet. One keeps wishing that their direction would be broken, that a character would penetrate into depth and bring everything back together...
...foreground, weary pikemen trudge downhill with their discouraged hounds. One man carries a dead fox, symbolically, perhaps. The rebel emblem was a foxtail. But then again, fox pelts are thickest and glossiest in winter; that is the time to take them, hunters say. In the middle distance, a house burns out. Neighbors come running with buckets and ladders, trying to help. However, the whole earth is cold, like a dead body in its winding sheet of snow. The water mill hangs stiff with icicles. The rivers wait, as if struck by some icy thought. A woman with fagots...
...hope appears to balance, blindfold and invisible, upon a shaky raft. Something of that sort, surely, is implied by the accumulation of incidents in Bruegel's Dark Day. But there is realism in it too. That foreground bank of earth, where the peasants work, somehow seems much earthier than any other in world...
Haymaking, at Prague, continues Bruegel's calendar series into early summer. Here three foreground figures - farm women this time - may be simply three women on the way to the fields (see detail, page 57). But they might also be the Maid, Mother and Crone of mythology. The people carrying baskets of cherries move round and down like planets - or automatons on a town clock. In the distance at right, a sailboat drops downriver toward the gleaming sea (see detail, pages 54-55). "The journey is not ended," a Flemish proverb says, "even after church and tower have been recognized...