Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio's El Jarama (1956; "The Jarama"; Eng. trans. The One Day of the Week), masterfully utilizing pseudoscientific impassivity and cinematographic techniques, depicts the monotonous existence of urban youth via their aimless conversations and exposes postwar apathy.
The impassivity of the card players makes them as timeless as the mountains around Aix, and as monumental.
The gallery opened in January , 1996 with a live performance piece by Vanessa Beecroft, an Italian artist whose materials, if that is the word, are groups of nude or seminude young women standing or sitting on the floor, shielded by their attitudes of aloof impassivity.
Compact and shining: the London aesthete's ostentatious impassivity becomes the contented quiet of a younger brother peeking at a menagerie hidden behind a fence in a little mansion on Fourteenth Street.
After a while, the shallowness of his characterization and the movie's glib impassivity become a little unnerving, and viewers may ask why it's supposed to be better that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in Harlem were destroyed by black gangsters rather than by Italians.
The shows document one of the West's most ingrained cultural obsessions, inherited from the Enlightenment: the itch for lucidity and exposure, and the recoil from obscurity and concealment embodied in, for example, the veiled costume of Islamic women or the impassivity of ancient Egyptian masks.
She's infuriating, but the movie, for all its morose impassivity, is beautiful and haunting.
Though François Mitterrand was President of France for fourteen years, longer than any other, his government lived with an opposition parliament for much of that time, and its acts, after two years of failed leftism, were mostly marked by a stolid actionless impassivity, accented by corruption.
He shares his uninflected manner with the rest of the cast (particularly the hawk-faced Edwards, born in 1868, whose expressions compete with Keaton's for repressed impassivity) and he brings the scenography to the fore, as in a sequence set in a bare dressing room, in which the view through a peephole surprises Alfred with the jolting sight of an arena filled with excited spectators.
Woodward is maddened by Bush's impassivity ("Sure would be nice if this got better," the President tells Condoleezza Rice), and his lack of honesty with the public.
