Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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While a series of scattered images flash onto the screen in the opening minutes of the film--including old T.V. news footage of the Vietnam War and the French strikes and riots in May, 1968--the narrator debates this question in the background...
Shahak advocates equal rights for all residents of Israel--whether they be Jewish, Christian or Muslim, Middle Eastern or European in background, Israeli citizens or residents of the occupied territories...
...pallid in The Godfather, Part II. She played Al Pacino's wife, and her role amounted to telling Pacino every now and then to stop killing people so often and spend some time with the kids. Says Keaton: "Pacino was great. Robert De Niro was great. I was background music...
That expresses well enough an oddity of the past two decades of moviemaking. Women, with a few notable exceptions, have been background music. The reason is not simply that Paul Newman and Robert Redford make a lovely pair, cuddly though they are. It is a matter of social realities and society's perceptions. A male actor can fly a plane, fight a war, shoot a badman, pull off a sting, impersonate a big cheese in business or politics. Men are presumed to be interesting. A female can play a wife, play a whore, get pregnant, lose her baby...
Such natural dignity befitted Lowell's New England background. His ancestors included Great-Granduncle James Russell Lowell, Cousin Amy Lowell and relatives on his mother's side who date back to the Mayflower. More combative than his genteel forebears, Lowell was fascinated by power. He often chose for his theme the doomed great in history: Racine's Phaedra, Mary Stuart and Cleopatra, and Alexander, "double-marching to gain the limits of the globe." Classmates at his prep school, St. Marks, called him Cal, after the despotic Roman emperor Caligula, because he was so imperious. The name stuck...