Jack Cardiff
Still image from “A Matter of Life and Death”, a film directed by Michael Powell.
Each of the Powell films presented their own special challenges. The action of A Matter of Life and Death is divided between Heaven and Earth and required both black and white and colour scenes. Cardiff assumed Heaven would be in colour, but to confound audience assumptions Powell opted for a black and white Heaven and a colour Earth. (Jack Cardiff :Source of Light – Senses of Cinema)
Start with Black Narcissus from 1947, it’s an absolutely gorgeous gem with lighting and color design inspired by Vermeer. (Horsese Think Obit)
Tower of Pisa
You can read J. G. Ballad’s last story ‘The Dying Fall” (Guardian)
Three years have passed since the collapse of the Tower of Pisa, but only now can I accept the crucial role that I played in the destruction of this unique landmark. Over twenty tourists died as the thousands of tons of marble lost their grasp on the air and collapsed to the ground. Among them was my wife Elaine, who had climbed to the topmost tier and was looking down at me when the first visible crack appeared in the tower’s base. Never were tragedy and triumph so intimately joined, as if Elaine’s pride in braving the worn and slippery stairs had been punished by the unseen forces that had sustained this unbalanced mass of masonry for so many centuries……
In the 1960s Cardiff made a prolonged foray into directing. He favoured fantastic or poetic subject matter, with mixed results. For a long time he treasured hopes of filming James Joyce’s Ulysses, but they were never realized. His other attempt to film internal monologue – Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) – was one of the most unintentionally hilarious films of the decade.
Sons and Lovers directed by Jack Cardiff
Sons and Lovers adapted from DH Lawrence’s autobiographical novel is a beautiful film with great acting. Young Dean Stockwell plays Paul Morel (DH Lawrence) with Wendy Hiller as his mother and Trevor Howard as his coal miner father.
J.G. Ballard (November 15, 1930 to April 19, 2009) rewired the brains of generations of readers and writers.Giant of literature passes away
Ballard
I believe in the right to confuse middle England by being autobiographical,
Thus disconcerting Mail readers who might like Empire of the Sun but would take to the streets to prevent Crash being screened in cinemas, even though both films were shot in the wrong places.
I believe in not making my characters merely bourgeois.
I believe in the end of the world
But I also believe in boredom.
I believe in the fictional importance of scientific journals.
I believe in the cultural revolution of the middle classes, even if they’ll never have the guts to blow up the NFT.
I believe in never getting out of the car.
I believe in your obsessions. I believe that the inexistence of the universe means that JG Ballard is not, nor ever will be, dead. (Infinite Thought)
As Martin Amis once said of him: “Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different – a disused – part of the reader’s brain.”
Sounddex from jtwine
Jurgen has new sound works – just follow the sound and sight of one screen flickering.
The second image on his post looks like the I Ching, alas one line too many (7 instead of 6) – that is jtwine’s psychic and spiritual line drawing.
I have created bird singing (the real deal) in my garden videos for the silent twitterer whose only sound they make is by their 10 fingers. (Follow Milawaukee, follow Osaka) The twitter sounds authoritarian, a few goes to extreme of refusing to follow. The diamond heist artist follows only 10 institutions.
He twittered,
Sorry my mind has been spinning for a few months and I’m getting butterflies thinking about the auction.
Sui indicates that you should lead by example rather than just telling everyone what to do.
Get off your office chair and take a deep breath. Follow and listen to Master Birds, turn up the sound.
Masterbird on Octillo
Birds sing for Moon –
Blind following is evil – the independent minded and enlightened people hate following and followers. However, it is good to follow certain instructions – like follow the signs to the bathroom, otherwise you might get arrested for being a pervert.
Drinkers
Yakitori sign on the noren.
This image seems to be straight out of an Ozu film (see his posters and signs on youtube). Ozu films are more family and tradition than film noir, but Ozu’s sense of isolation and melancholy feelings are there in Hibi’s photographs as well.
For him, the city was bleak, grimy and alienating, the New York of “Taxi Driver” and “Midnight Cowboy,” gritty films he had watched as a teenager in Japan. (NYtimes)
Photographer Yuichi Hibi’s new monograph Neco published by Nazraeli Press, offers a look into the life of cats, exploring the meaning of existence.(via – with 3 Neco photographs)
From Monograph Neco
Born in Nagoya, Japan in 1964, Yuichi Hibi trained as an actor and filmmaker, achieving success in a broad range of film and theater productions before moving to New York in 1988.(via)
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Yuichi Hibi includes his own calligraphy in his books and photographs.
His name in Japanese on the right and charcters Konseki means traces.
Encompassing two-hundred and fifty works by one-hundred artists and literary figures from James McNeil Whistler to Tehching Hsieh and poets Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg, there are special commissions by Ann Hamilton and live performances by Alison Knowles, Gary Snyder, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, and Robert Wilson.
It’s all too easy to classify Max as a Bergman actor and not much else. But his work for Jan Troell has been enormously fruitful. They have made seven films together, at least three of which are classics—The Emigrants, The New Land, and The Flight of the Eagle—and the latest of which, Hamsun, features a subtle and perceptive portrait of Norway’s most notorious writer.
Forever tarnished by his shocking support of the Nazi occupation during World War II, Norwegian Nobel Laureate Knut Hamsun was once his country’s most illustrious and revered author. Spanning the final 17 years of his life, this searing biopic — featuring a flawlessly nuanced performance by Max von Sydow as Hamsun — recounts the writer’s fall from grace. Ghita Nørby portrays Hamsun’s embittered, manipulative wife. (Netflix)
One film I would recommend is Wim Wenders’ “Until the End of the World,” lambasted by critics at its release in the early 90s, but it’s an epic, beautiful film. Von Sydow’s scenes with the equally fabulous Jeanne Moreau are the highlight of the film. Find the five-hour director’s cut if you can. (Collin Kelly from a comment booth of Criterion article)
Max talks about the film “Diving Bell and Butterfly” here, (tip from here)
Another interview on youtube one, and two – (about working with Ingmar Bergman)
Click to see large
They made 13 films together.
Max in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf
Max Von Sydow did many theater works with Ingmar Bergman, besides his signature films with Bergman that many of us come to know, the Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Shame, Through the Glass Darkly etc.
He appeared in “Pelle the Conqueror” and “the Best Intentions” by Bille August. Ingmar Bergman scripted ‘The Best Intentions”, based on his parents’ marriage and Max got to play Ingmar’s grandfather character.
Here is Pelle the Conqueror the ending clip on youtube.
is a Japanese composer who has autism. He is the son of Japanese author Kenzaburo Ōe.
It has been said that Ōe was walking with his parents near his house and heard a bird calling. He imitated the call with great precision. His parents were fascinated. They bought him tracks of bird calls, which he learned. This was how they got the idea to recruit a music teacher for Ōe.
Birdsong2
He doesn’t know the world at all
Who stays in his nest and doesn’t go out.
He doesn’t know what birds know best
Nor what I want to sing about,
That the world is full of loveliness.
When dewdrops sparkle in the grass
And earth’s aflood with morning light,
A blackbird sings upon a bush
To greet the dawning after night.
Then I know how fine it is to live.
Hey, try to open up your heart
To beauty; go to the woods someday
And weave a wreath of memory there.
Then if tears obscure your way
You’ll know how wonderful it is
To be alive.
The melody of Vltava composed by Smetana followed the Obamas in Prague (Praha).
No speech, no politics, just beautiful city and the music, click below.
Prague: The Moldau (Vltava) and the Charles Bridge
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