(The Jane collective, in Chicago, which provided abortion when it was illegal, is an exemplary portrait in courage).
Particularly cogent is her discussion of the adjacent careers of the painters Gros and Delacroix, and her exemplary portrait of Zola, the art critic turned novelist, who ended his days as a defender of Dreyfus.
Whatever else "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" (which opens this Friday and which Anthony Lane reviews in the magazine this week) does, it offers an exemplary portrait, in symbols and suggestions, of the way teens — which is to say, middle-class, technologically connected teens — think about themselves and their relationships.
"Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands," directed by Christian Braad Thomsen, is an exemplary portrait-film, a model of personal documentary filmmaking that implicates its maker, intellectually and ethically, in the film's very existence.
First, we are able to appeal to "constitutive goods that lie behind the life goods" our sense of which is "fleshed out, and passed on, in a whole range of media: stories, legends, portraits of exemplary figures and their actions and passions, as well as in artistic works, music, dance, ritual, modes of worship, and so on" (1997, 179).
Boucher never hesitated to put novels by the likes of Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Celia Fremlin all included in this anthology on his best-of-the-year lists, praising their skillful plots, exemplary characterization, and incisive portraits of human behavior.
This "exemplary" novel provides "a rich composite portrait of a group of people ruled by (and often misled by) their passions -- both for the mountains and for one another," Gary Krist wrote in these pages in 2003.
We get Bowker's suggestion of "a strangely vampiric presence... at the heart of a family" rather than a portrait of a great creator, an exemplary imaginative spirit.
I saw Noah Baumbach's "Greenberg" again on Saturday and this time, despite the title, saw it less as a portrait of the remarkable character — unusual but exemplary — played by Ben Stiller than as a romantic comedy.
I took heart from "Country Girl," both as the self-portrait of a great prose stylist, and an exemplary female survivor.
"The Clark Brothers Collect" is a fascinating portrait of two brothers whose relationship might not have been exemplary but whose practices offer plenty of lessons for contemporary collectors.
