They also began recording in notes and photographs the chaotic, random and banal elements of the man-made landscape.
Later on, Löwenthal wrote, the profile "reduces itself to the private lives of the heroes," and, in particular, the most banal elements of those lives: a German field marshal likes "big black Brazilian cigars"; a journalist's pet peeves include "clumsily buttered tea bread"; and Mahatma Gandhi dines in the evening on "a few dates, a little rice, goat's milk".
With his paintbrush, Marshall sought to normalize the banal elements of black life that are nearly always overlooked by art, film, and cultural representation.
We also struggled with distinguishing banal contextual elements from the significant ones.
We argue that one way in which such an agenda can be furthered is through a promotion of the idea of everyday nationalism, which combines banal and hot elements in more complex and contingent ways.
The very fact of being able to pinch your skin and lift it, then let it go and see it return to its initial shape and texture in just a few seconds may seem banal enough until you begin to think of all the elements involved.
But the already shaky play by Burns takes a thuddingly banal turn at the end and all the other tech elements follow suit.
As a fan of such classic films noir as "Double Indemnity," Mr. Nolan played with film noir elements for his own film -- from the deliberately banal locations to the characters who circle Leonard in the story.
Yet the notion of the riverfront as a cohesive element in a fractured city is powerful, especially because it avoids the banal historicism threatening to engulf what's left of the authentic city.
Its narrator, Henry Park, works as a spy for a private-detective agency, Glimmer & Company, in New York; Lee cleverly renovates elements of the traditional detective thriller, by making spying at once banal (one of Henry's jobs is to track a rising Korean-American politician) and emblematic of a wary immigrant caution, a sleeplessness poised between assimilation and alienation.
