Word: backdrop
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...when he paints. His aim is to recapture an era and a place: rural Ontario, where he grew up. The people are "a memory-they've floated back into this situation one more time." Their slightly stylized figures produce a kind of stage-front scrim against a photographic backdrop. The results have a peculiar authority, as hard to account for as it is easy to recognize...
...alienation, absurdity, metaphysical paradox, and an almost eerie psychological portraiture. Since The Rules of the Game is an early Pirandello play, dating from 1919, these themes appear in relatively embryonic form. In some ways, Rules most nearly resembles the young Pirandello's naturalistic short stories, set against the backdrop of his birthplace, Sicily. Like them, it evolves along what might be called Mafia lines of pride, loyalty, honor and revenge...
Against this gloomy backdrop, about 1,000 delegates from some 100 nations and a dozen international organizations are gathering in Rome this week for the World Food Conference, sponsored by the United Nations. It will be the first concerted global effort in history to confront the problem of hunger. For twelve days, the delegates will discuss both a program to provide food for the starving and a drive to mobilize technological and financial aid from the wealthy industrial and oil-exporting states to help the 100 poorest nations increase their own food output. Also certain to be discussed...
Competing Manias. This elemental tale is played out against a backdrop of the here and now. Heroin brings the Viet Nam War home to a sunny California filled with burnt-out cases from the '60s: deracinated hippies, faded gurus, old people driven mad by the gap between promise and truth. This Western strip of civilization has become a collection of competing manias, and its traces-rooming houses, motels, highways-are perched on the edge of primitive wilderness. Driving out of Los Angeles, Hicks comments on the quick change of scenery: "Go out for a Sunday spin...
Clearly a lot of TLC went into the staging of Pulcinella, but to uncertain effect. Rouben Ter-Arutunian has tastefully re-created Picasso's costumes and his imposing backdrop-a blue-gray cubist evocation of a moonlit street in 18th century Naples. The vital young Jeffrey dancers, moreover, prance through the one-act ballet as if caught up in a marathon tarantella. But breathing life into this Pulcinella is rather like trying to revive a dead tree by gluing fallen leaves back onto its limbs...