Word: tabula
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...When the news first flashed that a wispy-haired man in a windbreaker had shot four teenagers who threatened him on the subway, that 98-lb. weakling became overnight a quixotic urban American hero. Because nothing much was known about him, the 37-year-old electrical engineer became a tabula rasa on which Americans etched their uneasiness and projected their fantasies of retaliation. Goetz was also a media-made man, composed of scraps of headlines and bits of film topped off with a pundit's knowing gloss. He seemed to symbolize the spirited underdog, the man who bellows...
...traditional view of infancy was that of Shakespeare, who described the helpless newborn as "mewling and puking in the nurse's arms." Nearly a century later, John Locke proclaimed it as self-evident that the infant's mind was a tabula rasa, or blank tablet, waiting to be written upon. William James prided himself on more scientific observations but wrote in The Principles of Psychology (1891) that the infant is so "assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin and entrails at once" that he views the surrounding world as "one great blooming, buzzing confusion." As recently...
Critic Roger Shattuck suggests that while Cubism and Futurism affirmed aspects of the modern world, Dada was founded on doubt. The Dadaists sought to return to a tabula rasa: to clear the slate and begin again, Hausmann felt that it was necessary "to see things as they are." Dadaists searched for authenticity amid the seemingly irrational and arbitrary forces that shape human history...
...stuff. But Depardieu and Huppert, who at least on paper would seem to make a pretty erotic combination, refuse to strike sparks. Depardieu has played this part before, and now looks to have played it out. Huppert, with the freckled, enigmatic face of a sullen schoolgirl, is a tabula rosé on which other directors have written personality. But Pialat is too reticent to give her dramatic motivation, and Huppert is too self-enclosed to convey the orgasmic release that would give her character, and the film, a little life. Alas, Loulou is a corpse, and here Pialat has only...
...Tabula Rasa...