Jean-Louis Trintignant was a French actor who worked with all European art house directors between the 1950s and the 2000s. He is known for his economic acting.
Here he is in My Night at Maud’s (1969):
BDSM-wise (let’s, shall we?) two films come to mind.
Continue readingJacques Calonne was a Belgian artist, actor and musician.
Elza Soares was a Brazilian singer known for her work in samba. Early in her career she covered samba classics such as “Mas que Nada” (1963) and “Chove Chuva” (1963).
Towards the end of her life she came with edgier work such as A mulher do fim do mundo (2015), Deus É Mulher (2018) and Planeta Fome (2019).
Stephen Sondheim (1930 – 2021) was an American composer and lyricist known for such compositions as “Send In the Clowns” (1973).
On a personal level, his connection to the farce A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) is also of note: a funny farce my father drew my attention to.
Richard Donner was an American film director of blockbuster movies.
His film The Goonies (1985) featured a Rube Goldberg machine to open a gate. The cage of the chicken in that sequence bore the text: “RUBE G. 83”.
This happened in 2015, but I only found out today.
Pierre Jansen was a French composer working in film. He was in particular the permanent collaborator of Claude Chabrol for whom he composed the music for many films.
He also scored the above documentary Acera, or the Witches’ Dance (1972) by Jean Painlevé.
Dani Karavan (1930 – 2021) was an Israeli sculptor best known for Passages; Homage to Walter Benjamin (1994).
Marshall Sahlins was an American anthropologist.
What currently interests me in anthropology are a) accusations of eurocentrism; b) discussions on the nature of human nature (innate good or bad); and c) sexual anthropology. By sexual anthropology I mean a particular variant of it, which I call anthropologica, namely the prurient interest in sex which masquerades as anthropology.
There is no anthropologica in Sahlins, anthropologica is more the province of the 17th and 18th centuries.
I know not of discussion by Sahlins on the innate goodness or badness of man.
There are accusations of eurocentrism in Sahlins: see the Sahlins–Obeyesekere debate.
Sahlins co-authored the book On Kings (2017) with David Graeber, who died recently and of whom I’ve read the book on debt and the book on bullshit jobs.
David Graeber also wrote a foreword to a later edition of Stone Age Economics (1972).
Chris Barber was an English jazz bandleader and trombonist best-known for his cover of “Petite Fleur”, a 1952 instrumental by Sidney Bechet.
That song, especially the version of Barber, reminds me of the music of Jacques Tati in his Oncle films. I mean songs such as “Quel temps fait-il à Paris” by Alain Romans and Henri Contet.
In France, the actor Michel Robin died. He turned 90. He played in more than 120 films. Always bit parts. You can recognize him by his bald head and the banal characters he usually had to portray.
Favorites are Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal (1971), a film about two beautiful adolescent girls who start indulging in a satanic love for evil. Robin plays the simple gardener whose parakeet is killed by the diabolic duo.
There is L’Invitation (1973) in which Robin plays a simple and clumsy office worker who, after inheriting a fortune, invites his colleagues to his new estate. There, those good bourgeois men and women are intoxicated by a spiked drink at the hands of a rogue bartender. The situation escalates. Cult movie.
And then there is the genius animal head puppet film Marquis (1989) in which Robin voices a certain Ambert, a rat prison guard who is eager to be sodomized by the Marquis de Sade, something Colin, the living and talking phallus of the Marquis does not wish to indulge in.