Mughal-e-Azam again and forever, but this time on the big screen at Walter Reade, in the original version, not 2004 full colorization. As heady a myriad of beauty and sensation as ever. The full ten scintillating seconds of pearls sent scattering, pattering onto a polished patterned floor. The billet-doux secreted into the lotus flower, the […]
Thursday, December 3, 2009
[the trash collectors] Leoš Janáček, From the House of the Dead [Z mrtvého domu] Wednesday, December 2, 2009, 8PM Production: Patrice Chéreau Associate Director: Thierry Thieu Niang Conductor: Esa-Pekka Salonen Main Cast: Willard White (Alexandr Gorjančikov), Eric Stoklossa (Aljeja) Stefan Margita (Filka Morozov) How to make a narrative of so relentless yet monotonous, time-ravaging and […]
Also filed in Literature, Love, Music, New York, Opera, Politics
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Tagged aljeja, dostoevsky, eric stoklossa, Esa-Pekka Salonen, from the house of the dead, Gorjančikov, janacek, Leoš Janáček, met opera, metropolitan opera, notes from the house of the dead, opera review, Patrice Chéreau, prison operas, prisons in opera, review, reviews, willard white, Z mrtvého domu
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Sunday, September 13, 2009
A long-form poet of political cinema, Robert Kramer (1939-1999) may be the greatest American filmmaker we hardly knew. His unique alloys of fiction and documentary chronicle the doings and undoings of the revolutionary Left from the Sixties through the Eighties. Yet the perspectives offered in his films are prismatically personal: the hesitations of a militant […]
Also filed in Cambridge, Film, Politics
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Tagged American Left, americana, anthology film archives, bridgeport CT, cinema, Documentary, films, Grace Paley, harvard film archive, ice, jesse jackson, leftism, milestones, movies, Newsreel, radicalism, Robert Kramer, route one / usa
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Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Ingmar Bergman, in his introduction to Four Screenplays: There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its […]
[A still from Земля] Chinese National Symphony Orchestra at Boston’s Symphony Hall. Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry and Dovzhenko’s Земля [Earth] at the Harvard Film Archive. Labor and land preoccupy both; and in each, a visual symphony of tractors. One is reminded of Russian cinema’s obsession with the sun-baked, dirt-caked, beard-bristling face — eyes always […]
Also filed in Asiana, Film, Music
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Tagged dovzhenko, earth, faces, harvard film archive, kiarostami, land, orchestras, russia, symphonies, taste of cherry
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Saturday, October 22, 2005
I’ve long been haunted by toilet scenes in two particular films — Coppola’s The Conversation and (less famously) Andrzej Zulawski‘s The Possessed. It was nice to discover, then, that artist Margaret Morgan has compiled some other cinematic toilet scenes in her video Toilet Training — which, she writes, ‘began as a response to my research […]
Also filed in Film, Philosophy
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Tagged coppola, duchamp, Film, hitchcock, movies, possession, psycho, rheingold, the conversation, toilets, zizek, zulawski
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Carmen was the first opera I knew and loved, before its tunes became too familiar and the eager young self dismissed it as unsophisticated. Last night, in the Zeffirelli production first staged at the Met in 1996, I began to rediscover its musical as well as dramatic intelligence. My memory of Don Jose, formed upon […]
Also filed in Film, Love, Music, New York, Opera
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Tagged bizet, carmen, cigarettes, don jose, french, ildar abdrazakov, independence, irina mishura, Love, metropolitan opera, monogamy
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A famous British chemist, Dr. Charles Henry Maye, tried to determine exactly what man is made of and what is man’s chemical worth. Here are the results of his scholarly research. The amount of fat found in the body of an average human being would be enough to make seven pieces of soap. There is […]
Saturday, January 31, 2004
Weight is a value for me… the balancing of weight, the diminishing of weight, the addition and subtraction of weight, the concentration of weight, the rigging of weight, the propping of weight, the placement of weight, the locking of weight, the psychological effects of weight, the disorientation of weight, the disequilibrium of weight, the rotation […]
Also filed in Art/Architecture, Philosophy
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Tagged difficulty, fire, forge, heft, iron, Labor, richard serra, sculpture, serra, sisyphus, stell, strenuousness, vulcan, weight
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