Word: tableau
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...father's wake, Daniel muses: "For me, they brought with them a crude air as of a settlement in the woods of people of strange blood, a settlement which was not really a success." Reconstructing a gathering his family had held some 20 years earlier, he recalls a tableau: his father depressed, his mother on the verge of hysteria. Even the Francoeurs' idea of Catholicism cannot comfort: "It was a religion, not of recourse, but stark truth: death is what we live for, and as terrible as it is, to die is better than to live...
This moody and romantic tableau, which is instantly recognizable as the opening scene of John Fowles' novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, is a cinematographer's delight. The breakwater exists, just as Fowles described it, at Lyme Regis, the small English sea-coast town of which he wrote. A film company needs only to go there, dress its actors in the costumes of 1867 (the story is a 19th century period piece, seen with irony through the filter of 20th century conceptions and misconceptions) and wait for dirty weather. All true, with only one complication: the look that Sarah Woodruff...
...players toot before the big game; those who use drugs might seek the longer-lasting boost of amphetamines, or "speed." Instead, coke fuels the victory parties, fills the void when the applause is over, coaxes away inhibitions. The man in the moon sniffing coke from a spoon: under that tableau at New York City's Studio 54, trend-setters used to disco all night...
...used throughout the festival, a vaulting of 3,600 translucent tubes, designed by Philip Johnson. (It took 50 men 75 hours to install the 200,000-lb. set.) In Mozartiana, as elsewhere, the play of light on the clear columns gives a spacious harmony to the scene. The tableau is more enigmatic than the one in the Garland Dance, but it shows the continuity of the company: Balanchine, Farrell, the generation that will replace them...
...instant before it happened, one camera's eye caught a tableau that might serve as the late 20th century's most succinct text on the metaphysics of terrorism. There, on a mellow May afternoon at St. Peter's Square, beneath the encircling Bernini columns, the most vigorously gregarious of Popes rides slowly through a sea of tourists and pilgrims. It is a rite of sweet human communion. The Pope reaches out for babies in the crowd. He gently blesses the faces that give back a radiant daze of whatever it is that they...