Word: benedict
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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BETRAYAL is a chess match masquerading as a play: Harold Pinter's latest occasion for us to play mind games with his characters. These characters are Emma (Jenny Agutter), her husband Robert (Paul Benedict), and his best friend Jerry (Richard Jordan '60), and the situation is a seven-year affair between Jerry and Emma. In Robert, Emma and Jerry we have intellectuals creating worlds in their heads to avoid the consequences of their behavior. They think they can limit the moral dimensions of their actions by controlling the flow of information...
BECAUSE IT IS the audience's and not the actors' job to analyze characters, actors as competent as Agutter, Benedict and Jordan face a frustrating task. Pinter withholds from them even conversation as an outlet for creative interpretation. The dialogue is slow and choppy, meant to give the audience information without letting word choice and phrasing reveal additional insight into the speakers. Characters rarely utter more than four words at a time, and there are precious few monologues. Benedict, Jordan and Agutter too often let the unexpected eye contact, the strained embrace, the angry removal of a tablecloth...
Today's sheer quantity of disinformation suggests that the people best equipped to cope with contemporary life might be the Dobu Islanders of Melanesia: they habitually practice deceit on everybody and exult in the craft of treachery. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who chronicled the ways of the Dobu tribe in Patterns of Culture, noted that, in their eyes, a "good" and "successful" man was one "who has cheated another of his place." The U.S. is far from living by any such absurd, upside-down ethic. Yet, in the light of today's trends, it can do no harm...
...Wise Blood, adapted from Flannery O'Connor's first novel, proves that a spirited story, a lighthearted screenplay and subtle direction can bring a major piece of fiction--Southern fiction--to the screen. Rarely have great pieces of literature been successfully translated into cinematic terms, but Huston and screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald '71 have captured the difficult, often oblique essence of O'Connor's work on film...
...same discussion Ruth Benedict, director of energy at Yale University, said enlisting students in conservation efforts had cut dormitory energy use at Yale by 17 per cent...