Word: mask
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Michael K, the hero of this fearful fable, is a South African of unspecified color. A gardener in a Cape Town public park, he has a harelip and a reputation for feeblemindedness that mask his true nature: he is a man as meek and lowly in heart as a latter-day Messiah. Coetzee calls him "the obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy." As his life and times unfold, it becomes clear that his prodigiousness lies in his ability to continue to celebrate life in the midst of the most malignant chaos...
...corduroy trousers, dark shirt, size-twelve boots), rolled his cigarettes from a pouch of acrid shag and poured his tea into a saucer before drinking it (there he goes, that Socialist who says such terrible things about Mr. Stalin). Eric Blair had totally metamorphosed into George Orwell; the mask had become the man. Money was still scarce; his books had made him well known but not solvent. He turned out columns for Tribune, a weekly organ of the non-Communist British left, and did wartime broadcasts for the BBC's Eastern Service to India and Southeast Asia. He also...
This is followed by a mystical and erotic scene that reaches to explain the mysteries of fecundity that evade and torment Yerma. Reach it does, but not quite far enough; while the symbolism and open sexuality of the Male and Female Mask is striking and effective, the closing of the semi-circle of cast members into a circle, which now excludes the audience, isolates and distances spectators who before had been drawn into the circle of Yerma's pain...
...coming-of-age clichés. These teen-agers are good-looking kids with big dreams and a bright line of patter. The coach carries on like a sensitive drill sergeant, psyching his team into a football frenzy by using curses, inspirational locker-room speeches and the odd face-mask violation. Michael Chapman, who graduated to the director's chair with this film after making his name as the cinematographer of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Personal Best, brings a virginal intensity to each hoary plot device. He hardly gives his audience time to realize that the football team...
SOME HARVARD PRIMA DONNAS used to grouse that Sellars treated them like his hobby, puppets. Sellars' novel device in Pericles actually does just that--turns actors into puppets, using plastic masks on the evil characters. The technique produces an eerie, sinister effect; the masks, sometimes grotesque, sometimes animal, sometimes human, look frighteningly real. Though without masks, Pericles, Thaisa and Marina are equally un rounded as characters; when Lysimachus removes his mask repenting of his past ways, the easy gimmick becomes a tour de force...