Word: humanism
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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...
...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 for a stronger spiritual connection...
...poems about Byzantium, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats seemed drawn to the city's stylized art because it provided a release from the restraints of his own frailties. Yeats longed to exchange the "fury and mire of human veins" for the "changeless metal" of the city's mechanical golden birds, whose beauty he felt to be permanent. There is historical evidence that the Byzantines, too, revered artifice while denigrating the human flesh: self-castration was a popular means of purification, and mutilation a prevalent form of punishment - one Emperor even wore a gold nose as a result...
Then, of course, there are the warhorses themselves. In the poem that lends the book its title, Komunyakaa speaks of them as mythic beings, created to be ridden into battle. Throughout the book, Komunyakaa suggests that there is some basic human force that drives man to war; the horses are just as old and just as essential to the task of killing. As such, horses are often referred to throughout the poems as a symbol of man’s own warlike drive: “Horses carried men to reed boats. / Horses carried the Lion-hearted / ...Horses carried...
...attributed to the abuse he suffered as a child. "His story describes an unpredictable atmosphere with humiliating and unprovoked attacks from his mother," psychiatrist Adelheid Kastner wrote in her 130-page report. "His childhood made him susceptible to an emotional handicap; [he felt] the need to possess an entire human being." (See photos of Austria's house of horrors...