Word: ciphers
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...Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is," the philosopher Walter Kaufmann wrote. In this sense Steiner is a curious but stimulating blend of visionary rationalism who obviously shares the dream he attributes to Borges: "No living thing or sound but contains a cipher...
...featuring teen-age girls who struggle to ally themselves with crude and hopeless romantic lyrics; and an SPFC meeting during which evening-jacketed bourgeois folk turn on for the first time. But there is so little control over the film that even these go wrong: Henry often becomes a cipher; the SPFC scene is both cruel and whimsical in a mix that doesn't mesh; and I even may be mistaken about the purpose of the songs the girls were singing: I am told that one of them, Tom Eyen's "Ode to a Screw," passes for chic these days...
...Yamamura) is Eskimo-like in appearance, stoical in practice, goaded by an affliction no leader can afford: doubt. Lieut. Commander Fuchida (Takahiro Tamura) is an Oriental Smilin' Jack, all jaw and strut. Ambassador Nomura (Shogo Shimada), present in Washington when the bombs fell, is the same shrunken cipher who appeared in all the newsreels. It is he who bears the verbal assault delivered by Cordell Hull, played by George Macready, one of the few performers capable of diplomatic outrage...
Lighter Side. Literary lunacies abound. Under "Shakespeare and the Computers" is a revelation from an Enfield College of Technology scholar who used a computer to crack the cipher of the sonnets. Solution: Shakespeare was really Edward VI, who, contrary to popular belief, died at 125 instead of 16 after writing all of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon and Don Quixote...
...Zabriskie Point structurally (and wisely) resembles Eclipse more than Blow-Up. Probably fearful of juggling both American Youth and radical advances in construction and style, Antonioni returns to a familiar formula: the people are cipher-like, of less consequence to the film than Hemmings in Blow-Up or Monica Vitti in Red Desert. and are often unsecing guidse through elusive situations in abstract environments. Also, we can parallel the student strike footage with the stock market scene in Eclipse: like the earlier film, Zabriskie Point balances personal travelogue with formally spectacular set pieces. The scenes of Daria driving through...