Jean Vigo + Satyajit Ray+ Mixed Alphabet Soup

Love on the Water
“It’s a modest, everyday story without any big themes or grand spectacle. So what makes Jean Vigo’s film L’Atalante unforgettable?
“To this day, there is a Prix Jean Vigo in France for exceptional talent and resolve in the very young, and it derives from an urge in Vigo to make his films quickly, before he might be dead. ”

Jean Vigo shared a birthday with Shakespeare and Wittgenstein.
Happy 100 years from a blogger on Vigo
A clip from L’atalante animated.

Bark
Digital photo – Bark & Bark Form W.

Satyajit Ray‘s birthday today. The Apu Trilogy beautiful, moving masterpieces and must see if you have not.
“Like Renoir and DeSica, Ray sees that life itself is good no matter how bad it is. It is difficult to discuss art which is an affirmation of life, without fear of becoming maudlin. But is there any other kind of art, on screen or elsewhere? “In cinema,” Ray says, “we must select everything for the camera according to the richness of its power to reveal. (Pauline Kael).

Located a poem by Howard Nemerov that I was looking for.
(see Diane Arbus)

To D–––, Dead by Her own Hand

My dear, I wonder if before the end
You ever though about a children’s game –
I’m sure you must have played it too – in which
You run along a narrow garden wall
Pretending it to be a mountain ledge
So steep a snowy darkness fell away
On either side to deeps invisible;
And when you felt your balance being lost
You jumped because you feared to fall, and thought
For only an instant: That was when I died.

That was a life ago. And now you’ve gone,
Who would no longer play the grown-ups’ game
Where, balanced on the ledge above the dark,
You go on running and you don’t look down,
Nor ever jump because you fear to fall.

–Howard Nemerov-
(from Modern Kicks)