Word: pitilessness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...will, with saints ground down by sinners; Diary of a Country Priest and The Trial of Joan of Arc depict a state of grace under pressure. But all his attractive heroes, whether explicitly religious or not, are trudging up their own private Calvary. In Mouchette, the beautifully pitiless story of a teenage outcast so maladroit that she must try three times before she succeeds in drowning herself, the girl's schoolmates sing one refrain as if it were a prayer: "Hope--for more hope." Bresson's films, handmade and precious, gave viewers hope for a more exact, more exalted form...
...corrective to zero-tolerance excesses won't come from courts, it may come from parents. Communities sometimes revolt against pitiless punishments. In Hartford, Wis., outside Milwaukee, 550 people crammed into a high school cafeteria for a shouting match over zero tolerance. Since the beginning of the academic year, 10 students have been expelled from the school for various infractions. Raged one parent: "Expulsion is just another unfeeling word for abandonment...
...love affair--he pushed the idea of commitment, and the idea of possession, and the idea of affection to such an extreme that you can touch on other areas that love stories don't often touch on. [Greene is] a great novelist of character, and he's kind of pitiless-he observes them at their worst and their best...
...burned-out houses. Corpses, left where they fell, putrefy in fields and farmyards amid the buzzing of flies and the howling of stray dogs. As the first of Kosovo's Albanian refugees stream back across the borders or down from hiding in the hills, they are discovering just how pitiless a charnel house Serbian forces made of Kosovo...
...Nuremberg trials, where "war crimes" were supposed to find a fitting punishment. There are no moral equivalents. One might have hanged Himmler, Goebbels, Goring, Hitler himself--hanged them in a row and left their corpses to rot in public view, and still all one would have felt was a pitiless vacancy...