Word: backdrop
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Perfect Pretext. Against the backdrop of military preparedness, the Soviets began an ominous propaganda campaign that seemed aimed at crippling West Berlin's economy. The Soviet government announced that it had requested the East Germans to use whatever measures were necessary to halt what it claimed was the flow of military products from West Berlin to West Germany. That announcement was followed up by a Pravda article that listed a large number of Berlin-made products, chiefly optical and electrical equipment, that the Soviets claimed were used by the West German armed forces...
...second movement--earth--is probably the most exciting. It opens with movies of Cambridge projected on the white backdrop. First is a film of Hilles Library, speeded up many, many times so that the people in it tear up and down the stairs with greater energy and bustle than the Keystone cops at their peak. This sequence gives way to one filmed outside Memorial Hall, also speeded up many times. The dancers than come on stage, their movements exaggerated and fast. The music continues loud and rapid, and the audience is suddenly caught up in this frenzied, hell-bent, crash...
Meanwhile, the Communists have stepped up the war of nerves, peppering West Berliners with public warnings of harsher measures to come and delivering chilling private threats to political leaders in West Berlin. Against that backdrop of anxiety, Soviet Marshal Ivan Yakubovsky, the commander of the Warsaw Pact, arrived in East Berlin for a conference-held, according to the East German news agency, in a "brotherly fighting spirit"-with military leaders from the other six Warsaw Pact countries. Yakubovsky has a Btfsplkian habit of turning up just before something big happens; he visited Berlin shortly before the Wall went...
...Marrakesh, the 900-year-old "Red City," Winston Churchill spent long hours painting the vast expanse of date palms against the haunting backdrop of the Atlas Mountains. Now pleasant French nouvelles riches wear mink or sable coats as they trip down to the Mamounia Hotel's heated pool.* A few blocks away, in the teeming public square known as Djemaa el Fna, or Assembly of the Dead, robed Berber men and veiled women chew on fried locusts while they watch snake charmers toy with defanged black cobras, or listen to interminable tales of storytellers perpetuating the tradition...
...temperament, and so I prefer to have the public imagine the river." There is no river to imagine in Ustinov's Magic Flute, but there is much else. Sarastro's temple of wisdom is suggested by four golden columns and a clear egg-yolk backdrop rather than the usual bombastic temple architecture. The other sets consist primarily of a variety of shrublike trees positioned differently for each scene...