Yearly Archives: 2009

Milan Kundera @80

Iconic mirror scene from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera (born April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia) is a Czech and French writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke.

Kundera has written in both Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; these therefore are not considered translations but original works. Due to censorship by the Communist government of Czechoslovakia, his books were banned from his native country, and that remained the case until the downfall of this government in the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

Volker Schlöndorff @70

Young Törless

Volker Schlöndorff (born in Wiesbaden, Germany on March 31 1939) is a German filmmaker generally categorized in the New German Cinema movement.

New German cinema is a period in German cinema which lasted from the late 1960s into the 1980s. It saw the emergence of a new generation of directors. Working with low budgets, and influenced by the French New Wave, such directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and Wim Wenders made names for themselves and produced a number of “small” motion pictures that caught the attention of the art house audiences.

Schlöndorff is best-known for The Tin Drum (1979), the film version of the novel by Günter Grass. Of his filmography, I am most eager to see Young Törless (1966).

Young Törless (German: Der junge Törless) is a 1966 German film directed by Volker Schlöndorff, adapted from the autobiographical novel The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil. The film examens the origins of fascism by focusing on the sadistic and homo-erotic bullying in a boys military academy at the beginning of the 20th century. As an added bonus, the film stars British scream queen Barbara Steele.

The Eiffel Tower @120

The Eiffel Tower was inaugurated April 1, 1889 in Paris.

The Eiffel Tower is an iron tower in Paris, France. It is one of the tallest structures in Paris and one of the most recognized and visited monuments in the world. Named after its designer, engineer Gustave Eiffel, it stands as a symbol to the modernity of Nineteenth century Paris.

The tower was met with criticism from the public when it was built, with many calling it an eyesore. (Novelist Guy de Maupassant — who claimed to hate the tower — supposedly ate lunch at the Tower’s restaurant every day. When asked why, he answered that it was the one place in Paris where you couldn’t see the Tower.)

One of the great Hollywood movie clichés is that the view from a Parisian window always includes the tower. In reality, since zoning restrictions limit the height of most buildings in Paris to 7 stories, only a very few of the taller buildings have a clear view of the tower. The relationship Eiffel Tower/Paris is metonymical.

The Eiffel Tower was the second instance of modern architecture after the Crystal Palace, modern architecture understood to be driven by technological developments, a celebration of the aesthetics of iron, steel, concrete and glass.

Iron, steel, concrete and glass

I see modern architecture as primarily driven by technological and engineering developments, rather than artistic and social developments) and that the availability of new building materials such as iron, steel, concrete and glass drove the invention of new building techniques as part of the Industrial Revolution. The first example in this category is the Crystal Palace which used iron, steel, concrete and glass to house the Great Exhibition of 1851.

About 40 years later in France, the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated. It broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be—and at the same time offered a radically different environment in urban life.

The style was first verbally celebrated by futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia in 1914 in his Manifesto of Futurist Architecture.

“The house of concrete, glass and steel, stripped of paintings and sculpture, rich only in the innate beauty of its lines and relief, extraordinarily “ugly” in its mechanical simplicity, higher and wider according to need rather than the specifications of municipal laws. It must soar up on the brink of a tumultuous abyss: the street will no longer lie like a doormat at ground level, but will plunge many stories down into the earth, embracing the metropolitan traffic, and will be linked up for necessary interconnections by metal gangways and swift-moving pavements. ”

RIP Helen Levitt (1913 – 2009)

poster in the city of Amsterdam: Helen Levitt In The Street by Jarr Geerligs

Helen Levitt exhibition poster photo by Jarr Geerligs

Helen Levitt (August 31, 1913 – March 29, 2009) was an American photographer. She was particularly noted for street photography around New York City. Street photography is connected to candid photography, both practices are becoming cumbersome in the internet era with regards to privacy.

RIP Maurice Jarre (1924 – 2009)

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuarP-wUHCw&]

Eyes Without a Face

Maurice Jarre (born in Lyon, France, September 13, 1924 – March 29, 2009) was a French composer and conductor, father of Jean-Michel Jarre. To the mainstream, he is best known for his film scores, particularly those of David Lean: Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and A Passage to India (1984). In my canon he is best-known for his scores for the films of Georges Franju: the splendid horrorish flicks Eyes Without a Face[1] (1960) and Judex[2] (1963).

Lene Lovich @60

Nina Hagen and Lene Lovich in their prime, click for credits.

Lene Lovich (born 30 March 1949) is an American singer based in England, who first gained attention as part of the New Wave music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her most popular hit single was “Lucky Number,” first released in 1979. She is the co-author of Cerrone‘s “Supernature.” Other notable recordings include “African Reggae“.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnIJOO__jVo&]

“Lucky Number“

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM6QRjzE5gw]

“African Reggae“

Ernst Gombrich @100

Cornelis Bos, Female herm (1546). Engraving, 243 x 179. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

I first stumbled upon Ernst Gombrich via the enigmatic Ian McCormick who mentioned Norm and Form, volume one in Studies in the Art of the Renaissance in the bibliography of his excellent site[1] on the visual grotesque. By the way, if anyone has the lowdown on Ian McCormick, please let me know, he is one of the internet’s little mysteries.

But first some background info on Gombrich:

Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE (30 March 1909 – 3 November 2001) was an Austrian-born art historian, who spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom. Gombrich was close to a number of Austrian émigrés who fled to the West prior to the Anschluss, among them Karl Popper (to whom he was especially close) and Friedrich Hayek. He is best-known for his books Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, A Little History of the World, The Story of Art and Art and Illusion, which ushered in reader-response criticism in visual culture theory.

Back to the grotesque.

Gombrich collaborated with Ernst Kris (the art historian/ psychoanalyst who brought the grimacing sculptures[2] of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt) on a history of caricature. The Principles of Caricature was the fruit of this collaboration and it was first published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology in 1938, reprinted in full here[3]. The piece was later reprinted in Kris’s Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (1952).

RIP Ronald Tavel (1936 – 2009)

RIP Ronald Tavel

Poster by Alan Aldridge for Chelsea Girls (1966), for which Tavel wrote the script.

Ronald Tavel (May 17, 1936 – March 23, 2009) was an American writer, director and actor, and was known for his work with Andy Warhol and The Factory. He was involved in the Playhouse of the Ridiculous and wrote the scripts for Chelsea Girls, Poor Little Rich Girl and Vinyl.

Nelson Algren @100

The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) by Nelson Algren

The classic modern novel about drug addiction.

Nelson Algren (1909 – 1981) was an American writer best-known for The Man with the Golden Arm (see drugs in literature and heroin in literature).

Allow me to digress.

Algren had a torrid affair with Simone de Beauvoir and they travelled to Latin America together in 1949. In her novel The Mandarins (1957), she wrote of Algren (who is “Lewis Brogan” in the book):

“At first I found it amusing meeting in the flesh that classic American species: self-made leftist writer. Now, I began taking an interest in Brogan. Through his stories, you got the feeling that he claimed no rights to life and that nevertheless he had always had a passionate desire to live. I liked that mixture of modesty and eagerness.”

On January 3, 2008, French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur publishes a nude photo of Simone de Beauvoir by Art Shay with the title “Simone de Beauvoir la scandaleuse“.

Simone de Beauvoir photo by Art Shay

End of digression.

Edward Steichen @130

The Pond-Moonlight

Edward Steichen (1879–1973) was a pictorialist American photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator, born in Luxembourg, Europe. He is known for such photos as The Pond-Moonlight.

Pictorialism was a photographic movement in vogue from around 1885 following the widespread introduction of the dry-plate process. It reached its height in the early years of the 20th century, and declined rapidly after 1914 after the widespread emergence of Modernism.

Jahsonic

Burgemeester van Dodenstad