Vitro Nasu

(Saint-Lô )

Vire will wind in other shadows
unborn through the bright ways tremble
and the old mind ghost-forsaken
sink into its havoc.

-Samuel Beckett, “Saint-Lô” (1946)

Where is Saint-Lô?

In Love with Hiding

Beckett might have sat out World War II in his native Ireland, but as he later quipped in an interview with Israel Shenker, “I preferred France in war to Ireland at peace.” By 1941 he had joined the Resistance in Paris, largely as a response to the arrest of such Jewish literary friends as his old Trinity College classmate Alfred Péron. As a neutral Irishman who spoke fluent French, Beckett was in great demand; he and his companion (later wife) Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil joined Gloria, a reseau de renseignement or information network, whose main—and dangerous—job was to translate documents about Axis troop movements and relay them to Allied headquarters in London.

Waiting for Beckett: A Portrait of Samuel Beckett is a must for anyone interested in his work. It traces Beckett’s early years in Ireland and Paris, before discussing the impact of his novels, plays and late work with the help of friends, scholars and publishers.

A Piece of Mononlogue Waiting for Samuel Beckett (all six parts of the documenatry film are linked here)

Looking at the film

Georges Bataille (1951):

What ‘Molloy’ reveals is not simply reality but reality in its pure state: the most meager and inevitable of realities, that fundamental reality continually soliciting us, but from which a certain terror always pulls us back. . . . There is in this reality the essence or residue of being. . .

Lena Olin as Miss Julie.

Ingmar and Lena Olin

Various reviewers noted Bergman’s faithfulness to Strindberg and the naturalistic elements on the one hand, yet also pointed out that the production worked its way down from the naturalistic surface to culminate on an almost expressionist level. A number of critics also noted the intensive psychological interplay that characterised the performance, yet opinions were divided as to how well this worked, and who was the real centre of attention.

August Strindberg was born on Jan 22 1849.

(Direct link)

Happy birthday Robert Wilson!

Robert Wilson (born 4 October 1941) is an American avant-garde stage director and playwright who has been called “[America]’s — or even the world’s — foremost vanguard ‘theater artist'”. Over the course of his wide-ranging career, he has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video artist, and sound and lighting designer. He is best known for his collaborations with Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach, and with numerous other artists, including Heiner Müller, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, and David Byrne. (wiki)

October 4 birthday
The Dark Brain of Piranesi

Jean-François Millet (October 4, 1814 – January 20, 1875)
The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda) starts with a painting by Millet.

J.P. Rameau

Les Paladins

Jean-Philippe Rameau (September 25, 1683 – September 12, 1764) was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the Baroque era.

Les Boréades, Eros

Director Robert Carsen and his creative team flood the stage with summer blossoms, drifts of autumn leaves, winter snows and thunderous spring storms. The cast of 140 are attired in elegant costumes inspired by late 1940s Dior. This mythical tale of a young queen, Alphise, determined to abdicate rather than contemplate an enforced marriage to a descendant of Boreas, is nothing less than highly-charged.
Ground-breaking modern dance ensemble La La La Human Steps, choreographed by Édouard Lock, perform dance ‘divertissements’ in this strikingly beautiful staging.

Sylvie Guillem selected la Poule for you.

Goodbye Harold Pinter. He was 78 years old

Obits from Greencinedaily and NYtimes.

Apart From That

I talked to Harold himself at great length, to his friends and colleagues. And what I discovered was that his plays, so often dubbed enigmatic and mysterious, were nearly all spun out of memories of his own experience. If they connected with audiences the world over, it was because he understood the insecurity of human life and the sense that it was often based on psychological and territorial battles. (Michael Billington)

Previous posts;
Harold Pinter – A Master and a Caretaker

More links on Harold and a clip from his play “The Lovers” on youtube

Update:

True story: a young theatre student became obsessed with “The Birthday Party.” He wrote a forty page essay about its “meaning” and thought he’d come up with a brilliant interpretation. He decided to mail his tome to Harold Pinter, and after doing so, he was puzzled as to why he didn’t get an immediate, enthusiastic reply. Eventually, he resigned himself to the fact that he’d never hear back. But then, almost a year later, he got a manila envelope in the mail. He opened it and found his essay inside. Scrawled on the front page, written in think magic marker, were the words “Fuck off. — H.P.” (Harold Pinter, Curtain Call at metafilter)

R.I.P Paul Scofield

A Matter of Conscience: Henry VIII and Thomas More (Youtube)

Richard Eyre, who directed Mr. Scofield in the play, maintained that he was “not just the best there is, but the best there has ever been.”

On stage, the actor Paul Scofield, who has died aged 86, was braver than a lion. Off stage this genial man kept his private life quiet as a mouse. (GreenCine daily)

I’ve always used the running gag that “All British actors are whores” though I always qualified that with one exception: Paul Scofield. (Edward Copeland – read more here.)

Mr. Scofield and Vanessa Redgrave in the 1996 production of Ibsen’s “John Gabriel Borkman” at the Royal National Theater in London.
Director Richard Eyre and actresses Vanessa Redgrave and Eileen Atkins discuss working with actor Paul Scofield on his last ever stage performance of Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at the National Theatre in 1996. (see video here)

Scofield reportedly had been offered a knighthood but declined. In 2001, however, he was named a Companion of Honor, one of Britain’s top honors and limited to 65 living people.(Herald Tribune)

A Delicate Balance

This is my favorite Albee play because I am still thinking about it. It presents us with the question of how good a friend we really are. Albee challenges those of us who think we are capable of being good friends. Scofield runs away with this film. (Janet Paparelli via email)

We received two tickets to see Italian Bel Canto Opera last Saturday, at the Orpheum, a last minute surprise.

Retouched digital image of the restored Orpheum Theater Phoenix Arizona

Stanley Theater by Hiroshi Sugimoto

I received this email from Janet Paparelli when I described my experience at the Orpheum Theater in Phoenix.

When I was a child, my parents used to take me to a movie theater that looked just like your Orpheum. I remember at the age of 7 or 8, just running around the balcony lobby and pretending. There were benches covered with red velvet cushions and small ponds everywhere with small fish and gurgling water. The balcony railing was this gold baroque design. I used to play that I was a royal princess, it was so much fun. The sky inside the theater itself was blue and when the lights were dimmed for the movie to start there were crowds of stars. There were small boxes where nobody really sat, you know, the kind you would find in a Degas or Renoir painting. They hung off the side walls just waiting for royalty to arrive, and nobody royal ever came, I guess, because they were always empty. That was the Stanley Theater in Jersey City. Much more royal than the Gusman here in Miami which has been restored. I am not sure that that theater is even there any more. It was the most elegant. It became a temple for one of those groups that knocks at your door to tell you that Jesus loves you

Janet then found on youtube about the theater. 2007 Follow the Christ Convention Photos

Art Deco Neon (Image source)

I grew up in Orinda—and hated it, try being one of the lone Jews among the WASPS in the 70s, but at the theater, staring at the walls painted with long-haired women, soaring upwards against blue and stars… I could forget for awhile.
a comment from here

The Only Cool Thing in Orinda (A stunning photo from flickr)

Orinda was shaken by a tragedy when a cheerleader was murdered in revenge for bullying by another student 0n June 24, 1984 when this blogger and her family lived there. (Fifteen minutes from Berkeley, conservative Orinda hides its troubled residents in leafy beautiful redwood exteriors.)

Orinda Theater by Hiroshi Sugimoto

See more and read Hiroshi Sugimoto’s statement

If you missed Harold Pinter on Charlie Rose, go here.
If anybody, it is Pinter who can handle Charlie’s obnoxious questions and turn them into gold. (See my previous post on Pinter – Master and the Caretaker)

The Lovers – Clip from 1963 TV Play by Pinter

Harold Pinter without dialogues? Vivien Merchant, Pinter’s first wife
plays the character. (She was great in Alfie. Got nominated for the Oscar but did not win – not winning is almost an honor).

Yesterday was a day of connecting the dots in today’s film/theater pop culture world, I found out from Hal that the playwright he introduced me as his neighbor in the early 90’s is Paul Weitz who later directed “About a Boy”, “In Good Company” and others.
I have seen two of his films and did not know that he was the director.

Here is a bad picture at Paul’s apartment of Hal, Masayo, and Paul with one of Hal’s paintings in the background. I have another picture somewhere in the pile of my old photos of them in exactly the same position and pose with dark glasses off.

The only thing I remember from the meeting was that Paul Weitz did not like Gus Van Sant’s sudden foray into Shakespeare in the middle of “My Own Private Idaho”. Paul Weitz is a sweet guy, and his films shows the same goodness.

Speaking of Shakespeare, I came across this article.
Playwright of the Globe

From all around the globe—from Frankfurt to Tokyo, from Prague to Moscow—we have testimony to Shakespeare’s power, his ability to move people of all nations, to inspire them, to shake them out of ingrained modes of thought and feeling, to give them the strength to question and challenge authority. Above all, we see how Shakespeare remains politically relevant to a wide variety of situations around the world; he seems to be taken most seriously by people who find themselves in the middle of a crisis and, in particular, who feel their liberties threatened.

I have seen Maximilian Schell playing Hamlet in German with Japanese subtitles. I was introduced to the greatness of Shostakovich’s film scores through the Russian Hamlet film.

La regina , mio signore , è morta (The Queen, my lord is dead).
Here is Macbeth in Italian from dlsan, the web artist who was a
part-time Shakespearean actor.

(Maximilian Schell is the prominent collector of Josef Albers squares. How revealing!)

Samuel Beckett by Henri Cartier Bresson

An Inner Silence: The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson

Play by Samuel Beckett

Alan Rickman, Kristin Scott Thomas and Juliet Stevenson playing (tongue twisting Beckett play directed by Anthony Minghella) now on Youtube.

Part I here

Part II here

Three urns stand on the stage. From each, a head protrudes – a man and two women. The play tells the story of a love triangle, and each character narrates a bitter history and their role in it. On the stage, each head is provoked into speech by an spotlight. In the film, the camera takes the role of the spotlight. (Synopsis)

You only discover Beckett’s genius once you start immersing yourself in the material. Beckett completely altered our vision of what theatre can do. In a sense they are not really plays but theatrical events. He is more a poet or installation artist, or performance artist, or some strange combination of all of those things, than a playwright. He pays as much attention to what sound and light are doing as he does to text. Stevenson on Play.

In 1965 Philip Glass composed music for a production of Play. The piece was scored for two soprano saxophones, and is his first work in a minimalist idiom – an idiom which was substantially influenced by the work of Beckett. From here.

Sam I Am (from the New Yorker by Benjamin Kunkel)

Beckett’s work can lay a strong claim to universality: not everyone has a God, but who doesn’t have a Godot?

Just a few days after his birthday Harold Pinter received a Nobel Prize, unlike last year’s controversial win by Elfriede Jelinek (the Piano Teacher), Harold Pinter has been well established in the world of both theater and cinema.
Born on October 10, 1930, Pinter is a libra/horse – the measured commander, his Sun in Libra/Moon in Taurus – (same as Steve Reich, F. Scott Fitzgerald and M. Antonioni, charming, cultured, determined, good judgment, and patient.)

Left – Harold Pinter with Frances O’Conner in Mansfield Park
Right – an image from a play “The Caretaker” – about the painful power struggles between two brothers and the tramp who comes to stay with them.

“And you thought his plays were great…
In his screenplays Pinter constantly returns to fascism’s pyschological and historical origins . It is that that makes his movies as significant as his plays and elevates him from the ranks of a master-stylist into an auteur. (More here)

The Servant was Pinter’s first collaboration with Joseph Losey. The film changed the course of Dirk Bogarde‘s career, established him as a magnetic and serious actor. (Salon in this link to Bogarde describes him as a gentlman pervert).
Pinter – Losey teamed up for more memorable films with “The Accident” and “The Go Between”.

“He uses language to convey miscommunication and lack of understanding rather than shared comprehension. ” (from NYTimes)

What is pinteresque?
* The plot must portray the disruption of normal domestic life
* There must be the feeling that we, the audience, are missing something vital to the complete understanding of the text
* Dialogue should be written as people often speak it – it doesn’t need to directly further the plot, make sense or be witty all the time, it can instead contribute to the atmosphere
* There must be seemingly random acts of verbal and physical violence
Outside of literary circles the word can be used to describe anything tame or ordinary that’s said in a particularly violent or threatening way.

Here is one of his poems.

After Lunch

And after noon the well-dressed creatures come
To sniff among the dead
And have their lunch

And all the many well-dressed creatures pluck
The swollen avocados from the dust
And stir the minestrone with stray bones

And after lunch
They loll and lounge about
Decanting claret in convenient skulls

(Harold Pinter September 2002)

On Pinter’s Poem About War in Iraq from Talkleft.

Speaking of poetry, today (Oct 14)was Cummings’s birthday.
Read his great anti-war poems here, he was a pacifist.
e. e. cummings
10/14/1894 – 9/3/1962
American poet

Photo albums from his plays are here.

“I asked him what he had read there, expecting to hear a familiar litany of African American writers. To my astonishment—the 92nd Street Y’s archive videotape must show me nearly falling off mychair—he answered, “Ruth Benedict,” and after I had caught my breath, we found ourselves discussing the whole panoply of his plays in the context of cultural anthropology. The scientific and systematic aspects of August’s approach became abruptly visible to me: Look at the use of social-science parameters in the opening scene of Fences, or the constant playing on superstition and stereotype in The Piano Lesson. There are many such surprises still to be discovered in August’s plays.” (From August Wilson 1945-2005, an article from villagevoice by M. Feingold.)

Ruth Benedict made a great impression on Yukio Mishima as well.
Like Mishima August Wilson was erudite and a warrior.

At fifteen August Wilson quit school when he was unjustly treated by a teacher.
“Over the next four years, by his own estimation, he read three hundred books, spending as many as five hours a day in the library. He read everything—sociology, anthropology, theology, fiction. “The world opened up,” he says. “I could wander through the stacks. I didn’t need anyone to teach me. All you had to do was have an interest and a willingness to extract the information from the book.” It was about this time that Wilson began to see himself as a kind of warrior, surviving unapologetically on his own terms.”
Being Here and Gone, from New Yorker on Wilson by John Lahr.

“He made me the writer I am today”, Kwame Kwei-Armah pays a tribute to August Wilson.

Last saw him on Charlie Rose show, he stood firm and corrected Charlie’s lack of grasp on the current situation. (the interview here)