Word: martyrizing
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...destructive impulse became much more systematic and serious after 1536, with Henry VIII's mass pillage of Catholic monasteries and churches. (In one raid on the shrine of the martyr Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, eight men were needed to carry all the gold out to the King's wagons.) Henry VIII - mainly wanted to raise money, but with Oliver Cromwell the vandalism turned ideological. The Roundheads were determined to erase every last trace of the image in English religious life, leaving only the abstract purity of the Word, the uncompromised Logos. Ordinary plunder, which spares wood and stone, became...
...rights, Cry Freedom ought to be Bantu Stephen Biko's story. The man was as close to being an authentic martyr as any revolution can claim: charismatic preacher of nonviolent resistance, champion of racial equality, steely victim of state sadism. He died in the arms of his torturers ten years ago. There is surely a film here, but Attenborough and Screenwriter John Briley can't find it. The men who made Gandhi turn their Steve Biko (Denzel Washington, from TV's St. Elsewhere) into a saintly apparition; he is first seen swathed in blinding sunlight and last seen shimmering...
...small irony he became a favorite of French anticlericals two centuries and more after his death. Even the surrealists, who hated the church on principle, liked him. Indeed there are Zurbarans whose pure literalness might strike a modern eye as surrealistic; for example, his figure of the Sicilian martyr St. Agatha daintily bearing on a platter her breasts (which had been cut off by order of a wicked Roman prefect) looking like two pale pink, heavenly scoops of gelato...
Honasan was linked to the murdered leftist in at least one respect: Aquino has appointed special task forces both to pursue the elusive colonel and investigate the Alejandro assassination. Meanwhile, leftist groups were planning mass protests to accompany this week's memorial service for their latest martyr. That event is expected to be the country's largest public funeral since 1983, when 2 million Filipinos mourned Benigno Aquino, the President's murdered husband...
Unfortunately the filmmakers will not leave it at that. The movie is preachy and laden with speeches that hobble the narrative. Intricate political positions are drawn with a numbing oversimplification. All South African policemen are sadistic slobs with warty faces. Nelson is an immaculate martyr, always stoic. Winnie is a saint. But for all its flaws, Mandela does dramatize a country's deadly turmoil. "South Africa has been locked off for so long," says Woodard. "I'm hoping for other movies. Mandela is just one star in a huge black...