Word: crucially
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...performance is about small, believable, human gestures which sometimes fail, sometimes succeed, but eventually restore Juliette to something like life. A modest victory that is not presented triumphantly. I have heard this criticism advanced about the movie: that Claudel holds back from the audience the crucial information that Juliette's crime was morally defensible, which implies that calumny she suffers for it is indefensible, or at least too crudely judged. I think otherwise. This is not a movie about setting an injustice to rights. It is more profoundly about Juliette coming to grips with herself, freeing herself from...
...Byzantine Empire's air of inscrutability was used not to keep people out but to draw them in - crucial for a realm whose authority required awe and loyalty from its disparate subjects. The altars of Byzantine churches, for example, were hidden by huge screens decorated with icons of saints and martyrs that, while huge and impressive, are also as inexpressive as a child's doll. Without realistic human features or vivid detail through which to tell their stories, these icons demand that viewers use imagination to grasp the lives of the dead. The icons' elusiveness, in other words, allows...
...Byzantine art can sometimes seem rudimentary, it's not because the empire was uncultivated or primitive. For many years considered by Western intellectuals to be pompous and decadent - Voltaire called it a "worthless repertory of declamations and miracles" - the Byzantine Empire is now seen by historians as a crucial bridge connecting antiquity to the Renaissance, as the keeper of the sacred flame of classical learning through the so-called Dark Ages. It was also a melting pot of influences. Byzantines, who were devout Christians, considered themselves the inheritors of the Roman Empire, despite the fact that they spoke Greek. Their...
...Robin Cormack, one of the exhibition's curators, sees the wooden sculpture as crucial to understanding the Byzantines' obsession with ceremony and mystery, which he believes were efforts to offset a low-rumbling sense of insecurity. Byzantine figures and icons seem crudely rendered to us now because the artists carefully chose to make them generic and timeless. "If you give a figure a [personalized] resemblance," Cormack explains, "it becomes ephemeral, like its model...
...Austrian newspaper so far has openly declared Haider gay. But the revelations of the past two weeks are far more specific than in the past. "The Austrian press has already gone well beyond where they'd been up to now," says Hofer. "It's a crucial period for the media here...