Word: ritualized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Schrader is the kind of director who leaves no bra unhooked, no limb untorn from its socket in his pursuit of what he believes to be the true and terrible image. Cat People is clearly the work of a solemn literalist (and a man with a taste for perverse ritual), not that of a cynic or a sensationalist. But motive makes small difference in the end result. The film best serves the values of the dimmest lurker in the deepest shadows of the grind house: it has lots of nudity, plenty of gross-out guts and gore, two or three...
...that the letter can kill. They are denied the ignorance of "ordinary people who because of their simplicity are spared bad luck and go through life without any real problems." Hence, a softhearted young man fails to become his village's rabbi, and is chosen instead as its ritual slaughterer; sickened by his work, he must wrestle with the question of whether or not a mortal can be more compassionate than God. In Joy, an aging rabbi mourns the death of his daughter and loses his faith. He concludes that "the atheists are right. There is no justice...
...belongs, more or less, in both categories; she was born into the Manhattan neo-Stalinist school of the '30s and '40s (though she was never a supporter) and in the '60s revived her interest in Matters political to take an active part in the antiwar movement. She made the ritual pilgrimage to Hanoi in 1968, and, in a long, moving essay upon her return wrote the following: "When love enters into the substance of social relations, the connection of people to a single party need not be dehumanizing. Though it's second nature for me to suspect the government...
...angels of the Lord command Lot, his wife and two daughters to flee the sinful city of Sodom without ever looking back. When Lot's wife cast a fleeting glance backward (her faith was uncertain), she was immediately transformed into a pillar of salt. A Roman religious ritual, however, in which grains of salt were placed on an eight-day-old babe's lips, prefigures the Roman Catholic baptismal ceremony in which a morsel of salt is placed in the mouth of the child to ensure its allegorical purification. In the Christian catechism, salt is still a metaphor...
...house his sons dream bad dreams, argue politics and fail to escape their preoccupations. Aside from ritual condolences they have no exchanges with the patriarch. They are, at worst, unconscious rebels against his values, but they are entirely lost to the appeal of those values...