Greek vases and Peruvian bottles, Chinese bronzes and African masks, Tel Brak idols and Egyptian tomb paintings -- artifacts ancient and modern reveal man's universal fascination with the eye and his awe before its mysterious powers. In this wide-ranging and richly illustrated essay Albert M. Potts considers the special properties the human mind has ascribed to the eye over the millenia and seeks out its peculiar significance as symbol. Amulets against the Evil Eye persist today in nearly every part of the world. Almost as pervasive is the conception of the Good Eye, itself used as a protective amulet. The Eye of Horus, for example, was one of the holiest symbols of the ancient Egyptian religion, and its descendants can still be found in the Mediterranean basin. Using artifacts and texts, the folklore of our own times, and aspects of the unconscious revealed by Jungian psychology, Potts reveals the diverse forms and meanings of this powerful symbol.

An important book of essays on "dance and ideas about dance"

Blowup, says Armando Prats, is one of the necessary movies. It is a "living expression of the transition into the new narrative domains" in terms of man's "new vision of himself as a narrative creature in a world whose very essense is cinematic narration." Prats' work on the new humanism inherent in postwar filmmaking is a rewarding work with implications for the fields of esthetics and axiology as well as film criticism. In his analyses of four films by three directors -- Fellini's Director's Notebook and The Clowns, Wertmiller's Seven Beauties, Antonioni's Blowup -- Prats shows the contrasts between the conventional, word-bound narrative methods of the past and the new narrative in which images are free to display their energies fully, to lead the eye beyond rational concepts of reality and illusion, truth and falsity, good an evil, beauty and ugliness. The autonomous visual event, Prats finds, offers one of the most direct ways of entering into adventures of ideas, particularly in the realm of human values. Movies have revolutionized art as well as thought about art, and inasmuch as art and life converge, they have revolutionized life itself.

CONTRIBUTORS: Jose Limon, Anna Sokolow, Erick Hawkins, Donald McKayle, Alwin Nikolas, Pauline Koner, Paul Taylor.