hce_nthu
115年
英文
第 33 題
📖 題組：
Though The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) was the first film he ever made, Pare Lorentz came to it with a strong belief in the persuasive power of cinema and its ability to make people face up to reality. As a film critic and co-author of Censored: The Private Life of the Movies (1930), he had frequently indicted Hollywood for “censoring” the public’s access to information about “tough contemporary facts”. Thus, when the Resettlement Administration (RA) asked him to make Americans aware of the necessity of its programmes, he leapt at the chance and convinced Rex Tugwell of the need, not for short public information films but for a new kind of “dramatic/informational/persuasive movie” that would be “worthy of commercial distribution”. By 1934, the Dust Bowl extended from Texas to North Dakota, with reports that over 180 million acres had already been ruined for agricultural cultivation and that a further 775 million were at risk. Lorentz had already proposed a film about the appalling cost of this situation to Hollywood. Having been rebuffed, he only became more determined to use the RA’s support to command the public’s attention. As many film historians have noted, he succeeded in producing a **seminal** film, both “politically committed and aesthetically ambitious”, that shaped the American documentary tradition. Presenting The Plow as “a record of the land” and “a picturization of what we did with it”, the prologue immediately conveys a sense of collective national guilt. Each section is carefully orchestrated, with poetic narration delivered by operatic singer Thomas Chalmers and visuals edited to Virgil Thomson’s musical score to unite the film as a lyrical whole. Idyllic shots of tall waving grass show “the richness of the western plain lands before their abuse”, and serve as the measure of the ensuing disaster. Homesteaders, farmers and the frenzy of mechanized harvesting prompted by the agricultural profits available during the First World War, contribute in turn to an ever-expanding exploitation of the land. A dramatic montage juxtaposing tractors on the home front with tanks on the Western Front foreshadow the destruction which Lorentz soon marks with images of dead animals and bleached bones on parched, depleted soil. His most powerful footage, however, is of the violent dust storms themselves, blocking out the sun, bringing the terror of the “black blizzards” to “millions who had only read about what was happening far away on the Great Plains.”
Though The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) was the first film he ever made, Pare Lorentz came to it with a strong belief in the persuasive power of cinema and its ability to make people face up to reality. As a film critic and co-author of Censored: The Private Life of the Movies (1930), he had frequently indicted Hollywood for “censoring” the public’s access to information about “tough contemporary facts”. Thus, when the Resettlement Administration (RA) asked him to make Americans aware of the necessity of its programmes, he leapt at the chance and convinced Rex Tugwell of the need, not for short public information films but for a new kind of “dramatic/informational/persuasive movie” that would be “worthy of commercial distribution”. By 1934, the Dust Bowl extended from Texas to North Dakota, with reports that over 180 million acres had already been ruined for agricultural cultivation and that a further 775 million were at risk. Lorentz had already proposed a film about the appalling cost of this situation to Hollywood. Having been rebuffed, he only became more determined to use the RA’s support to command the public’s attention. As many film historians have noted, he succeeded in producing a **seminal** film, both “politically committed and aesthetically ambitious”, that shaped the American documentary tradition. Presenting The Plow as “a record of the land” and “a picturization of what we did with it”, the prologue immediately conveys a sense of collective national guilt. Each section is carefully orchestrated, with poetic narration delivered by operatic singer Thomas Chalmers and visuals edited to Virgil Thomson’s musical score to unite the film as a lyrical whole. Idyllic shots of tall waving grass show “the richness of the western plain lands before their abuse”, and serve as the measure of the ensuing disaster. Homesteaders, farmers and the frenzy of mechanized harvesting prompted by the agricultural profits available during the First World War, contribute in turn to an ever-expanding exploitation of the land. A dramatic montage juxtaposing tractors on the home front with tanks on the Western Front foreshadow the destruction which Lorentz soon marks with images of dead animals and bleached bones on parched, depleted soil. His most powerful footage, however, is of the violent dust storms themselves, blocking out the sun, bringing the terror of the “black blizzards” to “millions who had only read about what was happening far away on the Great Plains.”
33. In the sentence in the second paragraph, “he succeeded in producing a seminal film,” what does the word “seminal” most nearly mean?
- A consisting of semen
- B looking almost, but not exactly, the same
- C containing important new ideas and having a great influence on later work
- D connected with studying or representing things from the past
- E consisting of documents
思路引導 VIP
請觀察文章中提到這部電影之後的那句話：「這部片形塑了（shaped）美國紀錄片的傳統」。如果一個作品能夠「形塑」一個領域未來數十年的發展，你覺得這個作品在該領域的歷史定位中，具備什麼樣的特質？它對後來的創作者會產生什麼樣的作用？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
語境推論與詞彙定位
太棒了！看到你精準選出 (C) 選項，代表你對文章上下文的連貫性以及詞彙在專業語境下的運用，有著非常敏銳的觀察力。這道題目測試的不只是字彙量，更是「從脈絡推敲含義」的閱讀核心能力。 在第二段中，作者提到 Lorentz 成功製作了一部 seminal 的電影，緊接著後文便補充這部片「形塑了美國紀錄片的傳統」（shaped the American documentary tradition）。這句話正是解題的關鍵。當一個作品被形容為 seminal 時，其核心概念來自「種子」（seed），在文學或藝術評論中，意指該作品具有開創性與深遠影響力，能為後續的發展提供養分。因此，選項 (C) 提到的「包含重要新思想並對後續作品產生巨大影響」完美契合了這部電影在影史上的標竿地位。
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