Word: masking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mask of anguish in Marsden Hartley's The Lost Felice hides a different sort of grief. It is a symbol of womanhood mourning her drowned sons. The 20th century's passion for abstraction makes any representational figure seem accessibly human, but the grieving mother in Hartley's picture resembles a woman only in the way that an eerie echo resembles a voice. The intentional distortions of the 1939 picture ironically complete the cycle begun with the unintentional distortions of the 1670 picture. Perhaps fittingly, the decline of portraiture ends without a portrait...
They should, for Czechoslovakia itself seems today to be smothering in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Prague was once known as the "Golden City." Nowadays it is best seen after dark, for night alone can mask the soot and uncollected refuse that mar its crooked old streets. The only Central European capital that was spared the ravages of World War II, physically and psychologically it seems now to be dying of ennui and neglect...
...foot thick. In another, he connects with an uppercut and rockets his opponent 30 ft. into the air. In the last reel that nasty old Kobrak turns himself into Goliath's double, and at the climax Gordon beats Gordon to a bloody pulp, rips off his smiling mask, displays the inside of his head. It looks like the inside of a pumpkin...
...film casts Barry Sullivan as a philanderer who becomes a firebug when cast-off Playmate Martha Hyer sends his house up in flame. His wife and daughter dead, Barry survives, a hideously deformed monster with a "carbonized" brain. Crazed, hunted, vowing fiery vengeance, he hides behind a mask that inexplicably looks just like his old self. To keep the movie's audience from straying out for a smoke, there are some stunning pyrotechnics, views of the rugged Spanish landscape and -at last-the ghastly terrain of Sullivan's singed face, done to a turn by a mad makeup...
...very presence as a performer, and the natoriety of his unorthodox tone, had steeled many in the audience for an onslaught. As the first few notes burst from the bell of his oboe the remaining faces, already beginning to harden into that controlled boredom of the concert-goer's mask, registered something between discomfort and shock...