Jean-Pierre Mocky was a French film director, actor, screenwriter and producer who made over 40 films.
Trailer of Solo (1969) with a soundtrack by Georges Moustaki.
RIP Henri Belolo (1936 – 2019)
Henri Belolo was a French music producer and songwriter active during the disco era.
He co-created The Ritchie Family, the Village People.
In the course of my research following his death, I found that Belolo was co-responsible for a horrifying version of “Aquarela do Brasil” by the Ritchie Family, and for the kitsch classics “Y.M.C.A.”, “In the Navy”, and “Go West” by the Village People.
However, it is Break Machine’s record “Street Dance” (1983) which I want to bring your attention here. A personal favorite, of however questionable taste it may appear to be.
RIP Toni Morrison (1931 – 2019)
Toni Morrison was a American writer perhaps best-known for her novel Beloved (1987).
Beloved has been banned from five U.S. schools since 2007. Common reasons for censorship include bestiality, infanticide, sex, and violence.
Perhaps an offending passage is this one, in which Sethe pays the tombstone engraver with sex:
“You got ten minutes I’ll do it for free.
Ten minutes for seven letters. With another ten could she have gotten “Dearly” too? She had not thought to ask him and it bothered her still that it might have been possible–that for twenty minutes, a half hour, say, she could have had the whole thing, every word she heard the preacher say at the funeral (and all there was to say, surely) engraved on her baby’s headstone: Dearly Beloved.”
Margaret Atwood in Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose: 1983-2005 (2009) remarks:”Sethe wanted “Dearly Beloved [on the tombstone],” from the funeral service, but had only enough strength to pay for one word. Payment was ten minutes of sex with the tombstone engraver.”
RIP D. A. “direct cinema” Pennebaker (1925 – 2019)
D. A. Pennebaker was an American documentary filmmaker and one of the pioneers of direct cinema. Documentaries about performing artists and politics were his primary subjects. He was known for his hand-held camera aesthetic.
Pennebaker was an important chronicler of sixties counterculture.
To the general audience, he is probably best-known for the film clip to “Subterranean Homesick Blues“, in which Dylan displays and discards a series of cue cards bearing selected words and phrases from the lyrics of the song.
RIP Bryan Magee (1930–2019)
Bryan Magee was a British philosopher noted for bringing philosophy to television in the programs Men of Ideas (1978) and The Great Philosophers (1987).
A quick check found some really boring television (I love boring television if it’s extremely boring, regular television is just plain boring).
In the beginning of this bit two men in suits are sitting on a sofa facing each other as well as the camera. They are John Passmore and Bryan Magee and they discuss David Hume in 1987:
And then there is this bit of 1977 when Magee interviews Herbert Marcuse:
RIP Rutger Hauer (1944 – 2019)
Rutger Hauer was a Dutch actor best known for his role as Roy Batty, the renegade replicant in the cult film Blade Runner (1982).
Especially famous is Hauer’s death soliloquy:
In 1986, The Hitcher came out in which Hauer plays a homicidal and suicidal psychopath who ends up killing the beautiful Nash (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh who was 26 at the time) in the most cruel fashion.
Luck has it that the full film of The Hitcher is on YouTube:
The film encyclopedia Cult Movie Stars mentions Hauer’s “semipornographic lovemaking scenes with Monique van de Ven in Turkish Delight, Theresa Russell in Eureka, Sylvia Kristel in Mysteries and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Flesh + Blood.”
RIP Paul “The Realist” Krassner (1932 – 2019)
Paul Krassner was an American author, satirist and political activist, founder of the freethought magazine The Realist (1958-2001) and a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s.
He is famous for writing “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book” (1967), “My Acid Trip with Groucho” (1981) and for designing/and/or/distributing the FUCK COMMUNISM! (1963) and Disneyland Memorial Orgy (1967) poster.
He was severely criticized by Robin Morgan in 1970 in “Goodbye to All That“:
“Goodbye to lovely “pro-Women’s Liberationist” Paul Krassner, with all his astonished anger that women have lost their sense of humor”on this issue” and don’t laugh any more at little funnies that degrade and hurt them: farewell to the memory of his “Instant Pussy” aerosol-can poster[1], to his column for the woman-hating men’s magazine Cavalier, to his dream of a Rape-In against legislators’ wives, to his Scapegoats and Realist Nuns and cute anecdotes about the little daughter he sees as often as any properly divorced Scarsdale middle-aged father; goodbye forever to the notion that a man is my brother who, like Paul, buys a prostitute for the night as a birthday gift for a male friend, or who, like Paul, reels off the names in alphabetical order of people in the women’s movement he has fucked, reels off names in the best locker-room tradition—as proof that he’s no sexist oppressor.”– “Goodbye to All That” (1970) by Robin Morgan
The entire issue where he is depicted with a spray can of “instant pussy” referred to, can be read here[2].
RIP Rip Torn (1931 – 2019)
Rip Torn was an American actor. To an international audience he is remembered for his roles in Coming Apart (1969), Maidstone (1970), Tropic of Cancer (1970) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1974).
The book Cult Movie Stars describes his integrity and says that he “took parts only in films that he considered artistic and/or politically correct.”
He was also known for his on-set conflicts. While filming Maidstone for example, Torn struck director and star Norman Mailer in the head with a hammer. With the camera rolling, Mailer bit Torn’s ear and they wrestled to the ground. The fight continued until it was broken up by cast and crew members. The fight is featured in the film.
RIP João “bossa nova” Gilberto (1931 − 2019)
João Gilberto was a Brazilian musician known for pioneering the musical genre of bossa nova in the late 1950s.
The history of bossa nova starts with this recording:
Canção do Amor Demais (1958) by Elizete Cardoso features the compositions “Chega de Saudade” and “Outra Vez”, both featuring João Gilberto’s guitar beat, which would go on to become a staple of bossa nova.
Then there is bossa nova’s defining moment, the release of “Bim-Bom” (1958), most often claimed to the first bossa recording.
While researching Gilberto’s death it came to my attention that bossa nova is considered a nobrow phenomenon, i.e. the mixing of high and low culture .
Perhaps Caetano Veloso was the first to make this point in 2013 in The Guardian:
“It [bossa nova] was possibly the first popular music where the themes were existential […] It’s part of what makes it high art. Third-world countries usually produce raw materials that are then transformed into capital by first world nations. This happens in industry, but it also happens in the arts. What was revolutionary about bossa nova is that a third-world country was creating high art on its own terms, and selling that art around the world.” —Caetano Veloso in “Why bossa nova is ‘the highest flowering of Brazilian culture”.
When I further investigated, I came upon this quote by José Miguel Wisnik in Robert Stam’s World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media (2019) which makes the nobrow point explicitly:
The result within MPB (Popular Brazilian Music) was a perhaps unprecedented synthesis of “high” and “low” culture. Wisnik notes the “permeability established, beginning with Bossa Nova, between so-called culture and popular cultural production, forming a field of encounters that cannot be understood within the binary between music of entertainment and creative and informative music.
RIP Artur Brauner (1918 − 2019)
After the death of Ben Barenholtz, another film producer expires.
Artur Brauner was a German film producer and entrepreneur of Polish origin.
I came upon him by way of Jess Franco (Brauner produced Vampyros Lesbos) and also via the film adaptations of Edgar Wallace (The Devil Came from Akasava, also directed by Franco).
Hollywood Reporter summarizes my sympathy for this man in this soundbite: “while his dramas won awards, it was sex and sensationalism that often paid the bills”[1]. This also explains why Brauner too is a bit of a cinematic Losfeld who typically financed high art with exploitation.
The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960, full film)
The Good Soldier Schweik (1960, excerpt)
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970, full film)
Vampyros Lesbos (1971, Soledad Miranda dance)