Word: lilith
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lilith, in ancient Babylonian mythology, was a female embodiment of evil. In J. R. Salamanca's gaudy, gothic 1961 novel she was a wildly desirable schizophrenic whose corruptive beauty disrupted the routine of a private sanitarium. In Director Robert Rossen's movie version of the book, she is Jean Seberg, who enjoys an unholy liaison with a young therapist-in-training, lures an inmate toward destruction, steals away with a lesbian patient, and occasionally whispers improprieties into the ears of small boys...
Director Rossen renders all this with just enough art-film panache to have won Lilith a place among far worthier movies in the recent New York Film Festival. Certainly, the techniques of modern moviemaking are much in evidence. Sound and images overlap. During long silent passages, the characters narrow their eyes at one another, conveying reams of censorable prose in each perfervid glance. The photography is often eerily beautiful-a subaqueous twilight world where everyone's torment finally condenses into eddying streams, stagnant pools and rushing rapids, an unsettling suggestion that the machinery of despair is water-driven...
...wall of her room, Lilith scrawls hiara pirlu resh kavawn, a phrase from a secret language she has devised. It is never translated. By contrast, the lush spoken dialogue works little strain on the imagination. Lilith wants "to leave the mark of her desire on every living creature in the world." Warren Beatty, studiously guttural as the overzealous therapist who notes that his patient looks just like his mother, has difficulty explaining his dilemma to the chief psychiatrist. "Do you think she's trying to seduce you?" asks the doctor. "Um . . . you can't put it like that...
...Moviemakers of eleven nations sent films. At least two of the five Japanese entries introduced gifted young directors whose achievements may well challenge the supremacy of Japan's great Akira Kurosawa. Four U.S. films flail at the nerve ends with everything from nuclear war (Fail Safe) to nymphomania (Lilith). Passionate cinemanes may also scrutinize works by established masters (Satyajit Ray, Kenji Mizoguchi, Joseph Losey), and some flashy Wunderkinder from Argentina, Sweden, Italy, France and Canada. Among the better entries...
...beginning, Soprano Leontyne Price sounds outsized, more like Lilith than a simple gypsy, but the opera soon rises to her voltage. Tenor Franco Corelli manages a convincing disintegration as Don Jose, and Baritone Robert Merrill's Escamillo exudes male vanity. Mirella Freni makes a sweet-voiced Micaela. Conductor Herbert von Karajan colors the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra sensuously, generally keeping the tempos down and the temperature up; the smugglers' quintet reaches a high pitch of excitement...