"It's not by chance that television, with its mass audience, hasn't touched this subject, because it is a forbidden theme there, even though a mini-series would draw high ratings," said Marcelo Pineyro, the director of "Kamchatka," a recently released movie that tells the story of a family forced into hiding in the early days of the dictatorship.
Chinese customs officials often confiscate publications about forbidden themes.
The forbidden love theme is hardly fresh, but here fractious inter-tribal relations give it real kick.
But as the images danced on the screen of that darkened theater in the Midwest, Mr. Frankel saw his grandmother, then in her late 80s, become swept up in the emotional tide of the story — with its incendiary passions, forbidden desires and themes of bigotry and social repression.
His final film, the 19th-century samurai drama "Taboo" (1999), which he directed after suffering his first stroke, continued his late-career theme of forbidden love, bringing to the surface the homoerotic currents of "Mr. Lawrence".
It's a potentially intriguing recasting of the narrative, since it intensifies the theme of forbidden love (Nikiya, as a temple dancer, is a holy virgin of sorts) and — at least in theory — infuses the drama with issues of race and social class.
But whereas Verdi relies on the great 19th century Italian opera themes of forbidden love and the like to make the exotic realm of Pharaohs and gods knowable, Glass operates on the late 20th century perspective of history as unknowable.
The theme itself should not be forbidden, and the book's treatment of its theme was unexceptionable.
VIDEO: Upcoming summer films The quote, from the French philosopher Voltaire, neatly encapsulates the film's theme: "It is forbidden to kill and therefore all murderers are punished.
But over the next decades, the politicization of faith, relying in part on the surge of youth into the country's churches, turned religious themes into a forbidden zone for secular musicians.
But lyrics like "Just like a child/I'm driven wild/By what's forbidden/By what's forbidden" and the paper-thin themes they represent aren't enough to justify full-fledged numbers.
