Word: conquistador
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...oratory: he often salts his speeches with fire-and-brimstone references to the Aztec past. During his state of the union address, for example, in speaking of the oil spill in the Bay of Campeche, he made references to an ancient god and the Aztec mistress of the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes. "In the depths of this flaming well," he intoned, "we Mexicans have seen ourselves reflected in Tezcatlipoca's black mirror. Malinche emerged from those depths howling for human sacrifice to satisfy the god of fire." A physical fitness buff, he keeps in shape with a vigorous regimen that...
...Rome because Hannibal had never set foot in the city. In fact, Freud's ideas about himself were heavily tinged with mythic and military overtones. "I am actually not a man of science," he once told his friend Wilhelm Fliess, "not an experimenter, not a thinker... but a conquistador...
Cuban Premier Fidel Castro may talk like an explorer, but he acts more like, well, a messianic leftist conquistador. Since he began a major airlift of troops to Angola three years ago, the bearded Communist dictator has expanded his country's military presence in Africa to ominous dimensions. Some 43,000 Cuban troops, roughly one-third of his country's regular armed forces, are now stationed on the continent. In addition to the army-size units in Angola (20,000 troops) and Ethiopia (17,000 troops), there are contingents in Mozambique, the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Libya...
...actors were hypnotized, another in which all the actors were dwarfs, and a third in which the leading character, an old woman, was both deaf and blind. His best work, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), might serve as a metaphor for the whole German school. Aguirre, a Spanish conquistador played by Klaus Kinski, revolts against the crown and attempts to build a new empire in the jungles of Peru. The film, a kaleidoscope of the fabulous and the bizarre, would be noteworthy even if it stopped after the first riveting scene: 50 or so Spaniards, in armor and heavy...
Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Many people don't like this Werner Herzog film, which is based on the true story of Aguirre the Madman, a mutinous conquistador who led an expeditionary force down the Amazon River on a disastrous search for gold and glory. Critics complain that Herzog treats his subjects too mechanically, and that the film is visually stunning but thematically vacuous. But such criticism misses the point: Herzog's relentlessly realistic re-enactment of the trip--of the assumption of power by a ruthless brute who rapidly develop into a raving megalomamac and whose subordinates lack either...