i thought this was an accurate portrayal of 19th century life in the working class. we watched the movie in my modern european history class; it tied right to what we were studying and i found it extremely interesting. it was long, but i think the length was necessary. you saw the struggles of the working class, struggles between people, and one certain family trying to survive under their harsh conditions. i liked how Etienne Lantier began and ended the movie: It started with him entering, and ended with him leaving. He was the driving force. many scenes were harsh and brutal, leaving some viewers shocked, but they were there for a reason and added to the reality of the film. Gerard Depardieu was the right choice to play Maheu. This movie ends in despair, with many dead, but still there lies a hope for the future.

Marble Lady painting by Jaisini In his art, Jaisini insists on overcoming of the dehumanization, the suppression of sensuality. In every historical period there are ideas and problems which are expressed and will not come to pass. Jaisini seeks to identify this idea in the present, excavate it from the past, and invent it in a new way for the future. In the murky, anxious world of ours, in the midst of the soul's confusions and the multiplying moral losses, the artist seeks and always finds some big and small islands of "eternal truths," and asserts the indestructible age- long parables that reveal these truths in the new light, in his own system of sign-images. I realized that the more you look at "Gleitzeit" works and think, the more you see, feel, and understand, but never completely, as given work always has too many aspects. There is always some kind of "space" in the painting, on which the observer feels free, without a persistent prompting of the artist, to use his own system of perception. To me, "Marble Lady" seems as a late modern modification of the Greek myth of the sculptor Pygmalion, who used his illusionist skill to satisfy a private fantasy of the ideal woman. Disappointed by the imperfections of the opposite sex, he created Galatea out of marble and during a festival in honor of venus, Pygmalion prayed for a woman as perfect as his statue. Venus answered his prayer by bringing his statue to life and eliminated the boundary between reality and illusion. In Jaisini's "Marble Lady," the object of the intense desire remains alluring, yet perpetually distant. Desire of the others is often imagined in terms of a fetish. The so-called civilized man can be considered in his delight of female form. In "Marble Lady," we find the two types of spectatorship: the masculine and the non-masculine. Therefore, an image of the woman is defined through the desire of both spectators, the unmanly poet and the savage who may well be a subscriber to "Penis Power Quarterly." The statue of Galatea was and still is the symbol of fictional perfection, a result of the search for ideal woman that parallels the artist's own creative urge. A post-feminist culture has found out a way to reinvent the woman as she once was: eager to appear The "Marble Lady" enables male domination by being unreachable and desirable. The construction of such a female identity fiction can inspire both high and low natures. In all of his works, Jaisini unites the high and low principles, integrating art into the material life, breaking out of art's ivory tower. "Marble Lady" is a compact, pyramidal composition of the "trio." As in all of his works, Jaisini subdues the figures to the articulation of line and its rhythmic connection between forms in space, a sort of analytical process, based on the line swinging which starts up ideas, shapes, and colors. The line arabesques are these highly individual textures of Jaisini's art. A decorative role of the painting's color is to create the temperature contrast of the heated environment with the marble-cold statue. In modern and postmodern times, there are increasingly fewer outlets for sensual urges and desires which lay at the origin of human society that imposes restrictions. Sexuality remained beyond the scope of most art history. Interaction between male and female is still responsible for the continued functioning of the universe. by Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb Thank you for reading Marble Lady (Oil painting) by Paul Jaisini, New York 2000 Text Copyright: Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb ALL RIGHTS RESERVED