Gillo Dorfles was an Italian art critic, painter, and philosopher best known for his 1968 book on kitsch, Kitsch: The world of Bad Taste.
He was 107.
The photo: When I just started buying books, somewhere in the late 1990s, I saw this at Vulcanus, a book store in the Volkstraat 3 run by a lady named Yvette. I didn’t buy the book. I see they have it at my university. Maybe I’ll lend it one day.
Dance of the Peacock by Chechen actor/dancer Makhmud Esambayev is a clip[1] which is currently doing the rounds on Facebook.
It intrigued me because of its kitschiness and I decided to investigate.
It did not take long to figure out that the soundtrack to which Esambayev is dancing, is a cover of the theme of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by Sergio Leone. It has a drum break which is not in the original.
It took me more than an hour to find the original film the clip was taken from.
First I found a version with a little bit more footage at the beginning (below).
For a while I thought it came from a children’s movie and I scrubbed through two. These were actually quite nice.
Then, by machine translating the Russian Wikipedia page of Esambayev I found out that the clip comes from a film called Dances of the Peoples of the World (above) in which the Chechen dancer performs a huge number of various dances: “Chaban” (Chechen-Ingush, Uzbek), “Warrior” (Bashkir), “Golden God” (Indian), ritual “Dance of Fire” to the music of de Falla, “La Corrida” (Spanish ) and “Dance with knives” (Tajik)”.