Vitro Nasu

Guillaume D. relished working with Jacques Rivette in “Ne Touchez Pas La Hache” based on Balzac’s novel.

Happy Valentine’s day!

Sigmar Polke (13 February 1941 – 10 June 2010)

artnet

Sigmar Polke, Country Mouse and City Mouse (lies and wonders of the painting), 1997, Plastic seal on polyester fabrics, 280 x 350 cm

(via

Ich mach das schon Jess [I’ll Take Care of That, Jess] 1972 Oil on felt 315 x 285 cm 124 x 112″

Via

Happy Valentine’s day!

Yves Klein & Rotrout

In 1962, Rotraut and Klein married in Paris. Klein died six months later, while Rotraut was pregnant with their son’

Rotrout divides her time between Phoenix, Arizona, Paris and Sydney Australia.
Brother of Rotrout Uecker is Gunter Uecker

My Paintings are only the ashes of my art – Yves Klein

Jutta and R. D.Laing.

Mad to be Normal – reviewed by Psychology Today

Gabriel Byrne played a mad patient in Mad to be Normal.

Happy Valentine’s day!

Love is such an old fashioned word
The lovers

A pair of abstract lovers by Fung Ching Kelling

And happy birthday Janet Paparelli (previous Valentine’s post with Klaus Nomi – see her paintings)
(Digital image of Janet Paparelli by Fung Ching Kelling)

The Man (and others we all miss)

Treat yourself a Klaus Nomi flash animation

Klaus Nomi sings The Cold Song by Henry Purcell (six months before his death, he performed in Munich – now on youtube).

He came from outer space, to save the human race. (The Nomi Song) You can order this film at netflix for instant viewing.

After the fall <> <> Simple Man(youtube) and Wiki Klaus Nomi <> <> more links at Zabakdaz

All about his unfinished opera Valentine’s Day here.
Update:The Boom Is Over. Long Live the Art!

The best art was subversive, but in very un-’60s, nonideological ways. When, at midnight, you heard Klaus Nomi, with his bee-stung black lips and robot hair, channeling Maria Callas at the Mudd Club, you knew you were in the presence of a genius deviant whose very life was a political act. (NYtimes – Holland Cutter)

And Happy Birthday Janet!
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Two paintings by Janet Paparelli

Crimes of the Future

(On David Cronenberg)[He] has helped me do really good work, better than other directors. Maybe because he understands my process and because we have some things in common in terms of our sensibility – the kinds of books we like to read, our sense of humor is similar.
It’s comforting to be working with someone you know will make a good movie. Some people will say, ‘Ahhh, he’s over the top, it’s gratuitous,’ [but] I disagree completely. He’s one of the most responsible filmmakers today as far as showing violence – which there’s very little of compared to other movies. It just stays with you because he shows very little of it. It just stays with you and he’s very direct about it. He shows you what happens, and what the consequences are physically and emotionally, in some cases; certainly he does in A History of Violence (2005), and also here [in Eastern Promises (2007)], that makes him very honest.

Viggo Mortensen with Cronenberg, another with Lisandro Alonso

Lea Seydoux was first offered to play the role Kristen Stewart played, Lea told Cronenberg that she prefers to play Caprice, the performance partner of Viggo Mortensen.

Amy Taubin interviews David Cronenberg about Crimes of the Future

GROSS CLINIC
Amy Taubin talks with David Cronenberg about Crimes of the Future

(artforum)

DAVID CRONENBERG’S Crimes of the Future is a stunning film: visually, emotionally, viscerally, and narratively. It is both hallucinatory and intensely real—an echo chamber of Cronenbergiana colliding with a city whose three-thousand-year history can be mined but never contained. It sounds ridiculously simple, but it is Athens, as location and inspiration, that makes Crimes a new direction for Cronenberg, even as it is possibly his magnum opus. The movie, which takes its title and thankfully little else from one of the director’s early experimental films, is set in an indeterminate future that often resembles Renaissance paintings. The only people left on Earth are a small group of performance body-modification artists, their followers, and a few functionaries of the surveillance state—still dedicated to law and order while promoting chaos by playing everyone against one another.

AT: The lighting is very different from the lighting I’ve seen before in your films.

DC: It’s shooting in Athens, and in Mediterranean light, which I’ve never done before. I really embraced Athens and Greece for everything, including the streets, the graffiti, the color of the Mediterranean, and that had a lot to do with the way the film looked. When I wrote the script more than twenty years ago, I was thinking of Toronto, of course. But once we decided on Athens, I embraced it completely. And part of it is the color.

Thanks to Kanopy streaming, I finally was able to see this film and read this interview of Cronenberg by Amy Taubin who concluded that many of Cronenberg films were great love stories.

Happy Valentine’s Day – here more on David Cronenberg below..

The Actor: When you record the moment, you record the death of the moment. Children and death are a bad combination.

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Cronenberg Beyond Cinema: his photos were exhibited

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DAVID CRONENBERG (born 1943) has been lauded for his blurring of boundaries between technology and the individual, but this praise has consistently missed the point, for his films have singularly denied the existence of any such boundaries. (Read more here)

(Madison Chock and Evan Bates)

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Happy birthday Harriet Andersson (90 years old today)

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(Peter Weller and Diane Keaton in Shoot the Moon)
Also a birthday of Alan Parker who directed Midnight Express, Shoot the Moon, Angel Heart etc. (See an obit for Alan Parker who passed away July 2020)

Letters

‘Write me and tell me your heart’ — Leonard Cohen’s letters to Marianne Ihlen

Happy Valentine’s Day!