Word: enigma
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...egocentric approach speaks for the severe self-consciousness of many Indians, who see themselves through Western eyes. But, although Indira Gandhi remains an enigma to Western observers, Moraes's accounts of random conservations with Indians about their leader grasp the essential point of her power--her appeal to the purely Indian spirit...
...without ever quite solving it. From the moment Raging Bull introduces its three main characters, the moviegoer knows all there will be to know about them. Jake is the loner with a special, terrible gift he can't control; Joey is weak, loyal and scheming; Vickie is an enigma wrapped in gilt. The first hour of the film sets up the situation with a naturalistic vigor and cinematic resourcefulness unique to Scorsese. He knows precisely how to move the camera, dress a set, direct his splendid actors, underlay the music, edit to keep the viewer off guard and consistently...
...fact, these people with their sometimes boring, occasionally self-serving ruminations and reminiscences are not characters in the conventional sense. They are instruments through which Ingmar Bergman, employing the device of an "investigator," who is mostly an offscreen voice, contemplates an enigma much larger than the causes of a sordid crime. What he is meditating upon is nothing less than the fundamental unknowability of the human soul...
...deity. But this is not enough for Rush. In its jumbled hyperactive way The Stunt Man is part corny romantic comedy, part whoop-it-up action exploitation flick, and high-brow, somewhat pretentious anti-war statement (circa Vietnam) and quickie-metaphysical study of Paranoia, Art, and the old Illusion/Reality enigma. The Stunt Man's got it all, even those big, capitalized questions of Significance, which flutter like damp fortune-cookie slogans blowing around in the whirl wind of the movie's frenetic action. There is too much...
...understand. Intensely private and somewhat reclusive from his earliest years, Hawthorne concealed his own personality as successfully as many of the veiled characters in his stories. He is a difficult subject for any biographer, and Mellow deserves credit for his prodigious research; but after all that labor, the enigma of Hawthorne remains just as impenetrable...