Word: mask
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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MacLean's Bolingbroke never smiles, and he never looks worried--even when he talks of his "unthrifty son." There must be some reason for Bolingbroke's solemnity, but MacLean never lets the audience know why he plays from behind a mask...
Lynn Milgrim (Clytemnestra), on the other hand, did not perfect nearly so interesting a pose and had to settle for a mask of hauteur. The chorus was innocuous, which is something, and the play is short...
...mask of anguish in Marsden Hartley's The Lost Felice hides a different sort of grief. It is a symbol of womanhood mourning her drowned sons. The 20th century's passion for abstraction makes any representational figure seem accessibly human, but the grieving mother in Hartley's picture resembles a woman only in the way that an eerie echo resembles a voice. The intentional distortions of the 1939 picture ironically complete the cycle begun with the unintentional distortions of the 1670 picture. Perhaps fittingly, the decline of portraiture ends without a portrait...
...film casts Barry Sullivan as a philanderer who becomes a firebug when cast-off Playmate Martha Hyer sends his house up in flame. His wife and daughter dead, Barry survives, a hideously deformed monster with a "carbonized" brain. Crazed, hunted, vowing fiery vengeance, he hides behind a mask that inexplicably looks just like his old self. To keep the movie's audience from straying out for a smoke, there are some stunning pyrotechnics, views of the rugged Spanish landscape and -at last-the ghastly terrain of Sullivan's singed face, done to a turn by a mad makeup...
...very presence as a performer, and the natoriety of his unorthodox tone, had steeled many in the audience for an onslaught. As the first few notes burst from the bell of his oboe the remaining faces, already beginning to harden into that controlled boredom of the concert-goer's mask, registered something between discomfort and shock...