Word: ritually
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...room environment, Confrontation, 1978. Here the viewer is excluded from the central table, which is strewn with breasts, remnants of latex-covered food and other morsels, by a ring of white wooden boxes. These taper toward the top and, like versions of the dolmens in archaic ritual sites, press to be read as abstracted effigies of the human figure: a ring of watchers, backs shutting out the audience, absorbed in an obscure ritual...
...seem grim and violent, the movie's tone is actually quite gentle, because Schepisi and his writer, William D. Witliff, concentrate on the legend itself. The basic human passions of hatred, bloodlust and revenge are really only minor catalysts in the world of Barbarosa, there to fuel the ritual. The legend of Barbarosa is far greater, far more important than Barbarosa's actions, than even Barbarosa himself, as he has chosen his successor in Karl...
...states, a net gain of seven for sure, with a remote possibility of picking up an eighth in Illinois (see following story). Of the five incumbents who lost, only one was a Democrat: New Hampshire's Hugh Gallen, beaten because he refused to take the state's ritual pledge for gubernatorial candidates to veto any income or sales...
...sarcasm stops when the insurance man learns of a mysterious cult (the "Names" of the title). The ritual murders committed by these ragged, nomadic zealots are as easy as ABC. Their formula, revealed by Owen Brademas, an aged American anthropologist, is based on polyglot alphabets twisted into a system of worship. The killers simply match the initials of elderly or crippled villagers with those of towns. When the sacrificial names collide, their hammers fall. For Brademas, these deaths reveal a new layer of violence: "We thought we knew this setting. The mass killer in his furnished room, in his century...
...Jellicles are assembled for a clan ritual. Annually, the revered elder, Old Deuteronomy, played like a benign biblical patriarch by Ken Page, chooses a deserving Jellicle to ascend "up up up past the Russell Hotel, up up up to the Heaviside Layer," and be born again. While this serves as a passing and somewhat pretentious reminder of Eliot's New England transcendentalism, it does not provide the binding plot line that Nunn obviously hoped it would. As it is, the various Eliot cats come on doing star turns as if they were gifted gypsies eager to escape the anonymity...