RIP Giuseppe Rotunno (1923 – 2021)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro8BF51_tnI&ab_channel=HGC
The Stendhal Syndrome 

Giuseppe Rotunno was an Italian cinematographer with a long career, working with many great directors, check your regular sources.

One of these films is The Stendhal Syndrome , the last feature film he worked on.

There is a full version of The Stendhal Syndrome on YouTube, a film I had not seen before which turned out to be very enjoyable.

I especially liked the opening scene at the Uffizi in Florence with The Birth of Venus by Botticelli, Caravaggio’s Medusa, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Paolo Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano and The Duke and Duchess of Urbino by Piero della Francesca.

When Asia is walking towards the Uffizi, you can already see the distinctive style of Rotunno’s cinematography, already invoking the fainting of Asia once she stands before the Bruegel painting.

After that, when she falls into the Icarus painting, she kisses a grouper fish. Beautiful!

The film is full of these little details, in her hotel room hangs a copy of The Night Watch by Rembrandt. She walks into this and finds herself on the streets, blurring the lines between fact and fiction.

RIP Christopher Plummer (1929 – 2021)

Christopher Plummer was a Canadian actor best-known for his part in The Sound of Music.

Harrison Bergeron (1995). Christopher Plummer can be seen from 30:04 onwards.

In my universe, Plummer played parts in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The Man Who Would Be King and Harrison Bergeron, an admirable adaptation of the wonderful short story by Vonnegut.

In Harrison Bergeron, Plummer is John Klaxon. Klaxon is the benevolent tyrant of the intelligent elite that gives the masses the illusion that they rule.

There seem to be quite a lot of differences with the short story, but I have not had time to check them out.

Update: I re-read the short story, which is only 6 to 7 pages long so there is barely opportunity to compare. In the short story the parents of Harrison are watching television, their son having been arrested some time before. The parents are watching television. All of a sudden the son is seen on television interrupting a ballet performance. The son speaks to the people, imploring them to free themselves from their handicaps. He ‘marries’ a ballerina and is subsequently and tragically shot.

The 2009 short film 2081 follows the short story faithfully.

The film version, with Harrison becoming part of the elite, is reminiscent of V for Vendetta, one of the best films of the 21st century.

RIP Cloris Leachman (1926 – 2021)

Cloris Leachman was an American actress with a long an fruitful career.

I give you a fragment from The Last Picture Show (1971) in which she is a wife angry at her husband.

And one set of fragments from the Young Frankenstein (1974), where she famously is Frau Blücher, and everytime her name is pronounced the horses start to whinny, neigh and rear.

The Last Picture Show (1971)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv1Oi3K1vN0&ab_channel=MOVClips%20
 Young Frankenstein (1974)

RIP Arik Brauer (1929 – 2021)

Arik Brauer was an Austrian artist, co-founder of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism.

“Allaweil Die Arbeit” from the album Sieben Auf Einen Streich (1978)

The work of Brauer strikes me as uninteresting.

Maybe I’m too harsh on this whole school of Vienna, but the only artist of that school who really impresses me is Johfra Bosschart.

RIP Alberto Grimaldi (1925 – 2021)

Alberto Grimaldi was an Italian film producer known for producing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Last Tango in Paris, but more importantly for us, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom by Pasolini.

That Sodom film you don’t need to see to form an opinion about. It’s better just to read about it and let it lead you to the manuscript by Sade on which it was based.

That book has the lines:

“How many times, damn it, have I not desired that one could attack the sun, deprive the universe of it, or use it to set fire to the world”.

But I digress.

RIP Guem (1947 – 2021)

Guem was an Algerian musician, composer and dancer.

Guem is best known for his cult dancefloor recording “Le Serpent” (1978).

“Le Serpent” (1978)

“Le Serpent” is a sibling to “Jingo” (1959) by Candido Camero, “New Bell” (1972) by Manu Dibango and “Road Close” (1984) by Tony Allen, who all died last year.

RIP Larry King (1933-2021)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvQSC64WMFg&ab_channel=BraveHeart
Spin (1995)

Larry King was an American talk show host iconic in the 1990s. He was called the father of talk show democracy and was instrumental in the development of infotainment.

His whole era is captured by the superb documentary Spin.

In that documentary, he can be seen talking to G. W. Bush on the merits of the drug Halcion at 5:40.