Word: saturnalia
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...Dolce Vita (in Italian). Federico Fellini's vast (three hours) dramatization of the Apocalypse as a modern saturnalia wallows in boredom, but also develops episodes of transcendent moral horror...
...attempted apocalypse, a vast (3 hrs.) evocation of the Second Coming of Christ. But for those who do not care to be edified by spiritual symbolism, Director Federico (La Strada) Fellini has supplied plenty of earthy realism by clothing his allegory in the robes of a modern Roman saturnalia, stained by spiritual depravity and sexual excess...
...opening-night audience stared pop-eyed at some choice Saturnalia and orgies, at an Egyptian belly dance and a Greek striptease, at gladiatorial combat in the arena. In his experimental dance technology, Moiseyev brilliantly scrapped most of the cliché-laden movements and figures of Russian classical ballet, while retaining classical techniques of body control. Moreover, Moiseyev did away with the traditional counterpoint between soloist and corps de ballet, made mass dancing the ballet's main feature ("My hero," says Moiseyev, "is the masses...
What keeps The Red Room from becoming a sexual saturnalia is that it traces the contours of the heart as well as the flesh. Colette-like in its rhythms, Author Mallet-Joris' prose moves in sensuous counterpoint between "beauty, cruelty, voluptuousness and suffering, all equally delicious." What is not delicious about Hélène and what finally destroys her relationship with Jean is her feral determination to belong only to herself. Outwardly unmarred but inwardly depraved, she is a female Dorian Gray. But even with an unbeautiful soul, the game of love is scarcely over...
They have always been a problem. Back around 1730 the Corporation tried keeping the date of Commencement secret until a week or two before, and transferring the day to Friday, "so that the rest of the week would not be consumed in Saturnalia." However, as Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison continues, "this was held an intolerable grievance, not only by the public, but by the country clergy, for whom a Friday Commencement gave insufficient time to sober up and get home for the Sabbath...