Word: au
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...minute intervals, a cannon fired a booming salute in Port-au-Prince last week. Thousands of mourners filed through a spacious salon in the white Presidential Palace. There, dressed in a black frock coat and resting in a glass-topped, silk-lined coffin, lay the remains of one of history's most malevolent dictators. He was Francois Duvalier, who liked to be called Papa Doc. For 14 years he had held the wretchedly poor black republic of Haiti in a spell of fear. Now the spell was broken. At 64, weakened by heart attacks and chronic diabetes. Papa...
...which in effect is Haiti's national religion. Duvalier affected the staring gaze, whispered speech and hyperslow movements recognized by Haitians as signs that a person is close to the voodoo spirits. He solicited the allegiance of voo doo priests in the countryside, often bringing them to Port-au-Prince for a presidential audience, and he encouraged rumors that he possessed supernatural powers. "My enemies cannot get me!" he used to exult to his followers. "I am already an immaterial being...
Reign of Terror. The son of an impoverished Port-au-Prince schoolteacher, Duvalier studied at the University of Haiti medical school. A member of a U.S.-sponsored medical team in the Haitian interior during the 1940s, he became aware of the grip that voodoo holds on the rural masses. After turning to politics, he was elected President of Haiti in 1957, with the army's backing. He had promised that he would do something for the country's poor black majority, who for years have been exploited by a small clique of mulattoes. Instead, Duvalier, who was very...
...AU HASARD Balthazar (writer-director Robert Bresson) is an attack on sentimentality that manages to avoid all the depressing, self-affirming, grimy little pessimism that flaunts itself in the name of honest cinema. The conception here is far more complex: something of benign hopelessness with a comic sense. Bresson has something unpleasant to say, but he says it pleasantly. He sets his film in the countryside and makes of the story an inverted pastoral...
...long the voodoo drummers in front of the National Palace in Port-au-Prince beat out the same incessant message: "Papa Doc lives! Papa Doc lives...