Word: tableau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...searing scenes from Eugenia Ginzburg's memoirs of the Gulag, Journey into the Whirlwind. An innocent victim of the Stalinist purges, the heroine endures humiliating interrogations, strip searches and endless nights during which she covers her ears to block out the cries of the tortured. In a final, chilling tableau, she even welcomes assignment to the labor camps as a liberation. Viewers leave speaking in hushed tones, bludgeoned by the past...
...Pittsburgh dispute invites the high bench to revisit one of its most controversial and opaque rulings. In a 1984 case from Pawtucket, R.I., the Justices upheld the constitutionality of a town-supported creche in a display that included reindeer, Santa's house and candy-striped poles, saying the overall tableau had a "secular purpose" and "effect." Ever since, lower courts have struggled to apply what has come to be ridiculed as the "reindeer rule." At issue: how much secular camouflage is required to sneak a publicly sponsored Nativity scene past the First Amendment bar on an "establishment of religion...
...scene at Olympic stadium was like a pointillist tableau. Huge white parasols rested on the green infield, ready to shield athletes from the autumn sun. White doves left over from the opening ceremony strutted on the grass while athletes stretched languidly. Then a Korean in white blazer and gloves climbed up a ladder and fired a pistol. The points began to blur: legs pumped, iron heaved skyward, bodies shot forward...
Carl Lewis, alone, taking his mark in an empty stadium, strikes a gentle tableau. This is his chance to make amends for 1984, when he only won four gold medals. In the long-limbed company of swimmers, the little tadpole Janet Evans seems to represent all the early mornings and late suppers of all the tiny racers in all the neighborhood pools. The great Olympian John Naber laughed wonderfully when someone suggested that age-group swimming is just another kind of phenobarbital prescribed by parents to drain their children of excess energy and make sure they go to Yale...
...such charge can be leveled against Kupfer. In a striking final tableau, after the old order has been destroyed, he populates the stage with a crowd dressed in formal clothes -- like the Bayreuth audience -- mindlessly watching television as the conflagration subsides. The drowned Hagen lies unnoticed, a beached whale in black leather. Despite the music's glowing promise of redemption by love, no one seems to have learned a thing: only two innocent children make their way, hand in hand, out of the carnage. A forgetful human race ensures that, in Kupfer's moral universe, history repeats itself exclusively...