Word: hansen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What is insufferably painful for this Hedda is that she is totally aware of her predicament. She has aimed at the stars and settled for a cinder. Tesman, with his dusty burrowing in book after book, is not a spouse but a sedative. It is to Actor Peter Hansen's credit that he humanizes a library mole so that the audience can accord him the pity that Hedda withholds...
...sequence Gish. as Hester Prynne, pursues Lars Hansen (Arthur Dimmesdale) to and fro in an attempt to make him talk to her. Griffith would have depicted his decision by cutting to their two faces: Seastrom cuts to their feet walking along the country road. The physical aspect of the decision, the characters' actions in their real setting, takes over from Griffith's spiritual. abstract tendency. Yet Seastrom's acting style remains melodramatic. If anything Lars Hansen is cruder than Griffith's heroes: his gestures are slower and broader. Where Griffith would concentrate on the face. Seastrom gives us the whole...
Other cases are less clear. The Rev. George Burroughs, says Hansen, enjoyed pretending to be a witch, puffed his reputation by such tricks as overhearing conversations and then repeating them, letting his listeners assume that black magic gave him the knowledge. When the witchcraft frenzy struck Salem, this vain foolishness was remembered, and Burroughs was executed...
...other hand, Hansen says, old Bridget Bishop, whose revelations of witchcraft panicked Salem, "in all probability" was a practicing witch. That was her reputation, and apparently she had not denied it before the trials. Dolls with pins stuck in them had been found in the cellar wall of a house she had lived in. A local dyer testified that she had asked him to dye pieces of lace too small for human use-bits intended for use in image magic, Hansen thinks...
...Hansen might profitably have tried to examine the network of small-town malice, envy and ambition at work in the trials, which the modern rational and liberal mind likes to blame for the whole Salem tragedy-most dramatically exhibited in Arthur Miller's grinding parable, The Crucible. A chapter sketching the life and death of Puritanism would have been useful; as Hansen has indicated, much of what is popularly supposed about the Puritans is incorrect. But Hansen has done two things admirably well: he has suggested how nearly impossible it is to see another era clearly through the accretion...