Word: cage
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...however, the camera a few feet above his head seems to lock him into his chair, between the curved table-top before him and the gleaming surface of a globe behind. While cracking an egg he whistles to his canary; hearing no answer, he rises and goes to the cage. His head fills half the frame; the cage, the other half. His landlady comes in, takes the dead bird, and saying "no more singing" throws it into a Franklin stove whose open door reveals a brilliant light within. Jannings returns to his breakfast, but between the camera (now further from...
...SCENE'S symbolic content is perfectly accessible. Such devices as the cage and the lamp, together with Sternberg's handling of depth and sets, set up a pleasant and very restricted environment out of which Jannings' character develops. But the same symbols have a deeper meaning which, through their integration into Sternberg's dramatic and visual scheme, establishes the pattern of the entire film. In this system the attraction of light is a crucial motivation of personal behavior, and Jannings' blindness to the globe behind him appears simultaneously with a restriction of depth that expresses the limitations of his moral...
...Among composers of the past, Hector Berlioz was perhaps the first to pay much attention to the symphonic battery of drums. Later on, Stravinsky and Bartok proved that percussionists could do more interesting things than simply thump out a basic rhythm. Nowadays such avant-gardists as Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Luciano Berio and Karl-heinz Stockhausen treat the percussionist as a performer with rights (and responsibilities) equal to any other soloist...
...return to the circus takes Lola backstage to her dressing room, a cage behind which pass actors staging her childhood. The camera follows them back and forth, passing in the middle of each are the sick, static Lola, and provoking a second flashback. In it Lola, a child still mourning her father's death, accompanies her mother aboard ship only to discover her affair with an officer. The sweeping camera movements which follow this child through the ship and express her curiosity and longing, ironically stress the objects and walls that confine her movement through the cramped lower deck...
Nevertheless, the return to the circus finds her in her ultimate imprisonment, at the top of the circus in a cage. Her dive into a tiny net is the last necessary step in the circus act (which is also the act of re-creating her life)' the audience demands it as part of the romantic spectacle. Since it might cause her death, Lola's dive is also a potential act of suicide and escape, the most desperate of all romantic acts. At the same time the ringmaster is forcing her to jump. As he counts to three, the frame tilts...