Word: madman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...another scene, Gortchakov and Eugenia visit a man who had been mad ever since losing his wife. The madman, who lives in a dilapidated house full of pails and bottles to collect the rain falling through the roof--there is not a single sunny scene in the film--urges Gortchakov to perform a ritual, carrying a lit candle across one of the fountains outside his house--a wish that is later carried out. We know neither the reason for Gortchakov's visit nor the significance of the ritual...
...final scene, Gortchakov is crossing the fountain carrying a candle, just as the madman is preparing for a self-immolation ceremony atop a Roman sculpture, surrounded by a myriad of oglers and Biblical symbols. Such constant merging of the subconscious and conscious landscapes give the movie a pervasive sense of weirdness, as the scenes are organized around their symbolic and subconscious meanings, rather than a logical scheme. The result is cinematically dazzling, if, at times, difficult to watch because of disjointedness and the fact that very little actually happens...
When he was spinning platters at a poky rock-'n'-roll station in Gainesville, Fla., during the late '60s, 'Madman Mark," as he was then known, chafed at the public service programs he was required to air. So he buried them in the doldrums of the early morning hours. Fifteen years later, balding, bespectacled Mark Fowler still does not much care for public service programming. But now, as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, he can do something about it. Indeed, Fowler's goal is to free broadcasters from nearly all of the thousands...
...then, after a few weeks, disappears with Junie, the younger of Mary's two daughters. The surviving daughter, Alice, 13, grasps instinctively what Detective Jim Hackett of the department of missing persons grimly suspects: the little girl is dead, a month shy of her tenth birthday, and a madman is at large...
Through them all, Brown notes, runs the Dostoyevskian theme of "moral madness." Characters dance around their own souls, burbling luminous insights that no one regards; others believe that nothing good can come of sanity: "If man be the messenger of man, why should a madman not be the messenger of God?" In one play, God himself is put on trial in the 17th century for crimes committed against the Jews. His defense attorney is a mysterious stranger who turns out to be Satan...