Tag Archives: 1925

RIP Michel Piccoli (1925 – 2020)

Michel Piccoli was a French actor of the generation of Philippe Noiret, Jean Rochefort and yes, Yves Montand.

Of note is his work with Marco Ferreri (Dillinger Is Dead, La Grande Bouffe, The Last Woman and Don’t Touch the White Woman!); with Luis Buñuel (Diary of a Chambermaid Belle de jour, The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty); and Jean-Luc Godard (Contempt).

In The Milky Way (1969) he plays Marquis de Sade.

Then there is the iconic La Grande Bouffe (1973), the story of three bourgeois men who decide to eat themselves to death.

Later I saw Themroc (1973), one of the strangest counterculture films where he played opposite the tragic but delightful Patrick Dewaere.

Watching clips on YouTube, you see him with Romy Schneider in The Things of Life (1970), my god what a beautiful woman she was.

RIP Honor Blackman (1925 – 2020)

Honor Blackman was an English actress, known for her sex symbol-ish parts in popular pulp of the sixties (The Avengers, Goldfinger and Jason and the Argonauts).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HH8VuwCoxW4&t=57s
The Cat and the Canary (1978)

Radley Metzger cast her as Susan Sills (“the big game hunter, one of the world’s most efficient killers”) in The Cat and the Canary (1978).

“Men Will Deceive You” (1964), a version of Gainsbourg’s “La javanaise.”

She recorded the surprise hit “Kinky Boots” (1964) and the album Everything I’ve Got (1964) which featured an interpretation of Serge Gainsbourg’s “La Javanaise”.

RIP Ruth White (1925 – 2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h03yTdLG4WM
The Litanies of Satan

This has happened seven years ago but even Wikipedia only noticed it in 2018.

Personally, I only noticed it today.

Ruth White (1925 – 2013) was an American composer noted for her work in early electronic music.

Of interest to me is her 1969 Baudelaire album, on which she reads 10 poems from The Flowers of Evil. This is really bizarre and reading her liner notes makes the experience only weirder. “The Litanies of Satan” is one of the poems that got him in to trouble.

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.