In 2004, the head of a bearded man, startling in its scrupulous rendition of naturalistic detail, was excavated at Shipka in central Bulgaria.
In a way, the whole film is a startling twist on the black art of rendition: ordinary citizens, often unaware of their own guilt, are spirited off to a secure environment in Eastern Europe, there to be forced into a humiliating and often painful confession of sins past.
Meow Meow begins in the warm, welcoming light with a fiery rendition of Cole Porter's Too Darn Hot that takes a startling turn when it plunges us into complete darkness.
Certainly, that was the case in Lee Hall's invigorating adaptation, in which director Vicky Featherstone captured the novel's adolescent girl-power rush and then topped it off with close-harmony renditions of the music of ELO, as unexpected as they were startling.
This was clear, extroverted playing, so it wasn't as startling as it might have been when the program shifted to Leslie Uggams's big-boned renditions of four songs that were hits for the great Lena Horne, a Bedford-Stuyvesant native.
Here's a recent rendition.
"My next rendition," he said.
Then came startling evidence, discovered in the ransacked Tripoli offices of Moussa Koussa, former head of Gaddafi's intelligence service, of direct MI6 involvement in the rendition of two prominent Libyan dissidents.
That was extraordinary rendition, Greatest Generation style.
In Brendel's rendition, it did.
