Michael Cacoyannis, who died on July 25 aged 89, was the first Greek film-maker to achieve international renown, later becoming a respected theatrical and operatic producer in Paris, Frankfurt and New York.
Trained as an actor, he was an outstanding director of other players, especially actresses. He gave Melina Mercouri her first screen role, in Stella, as a femme fatale; he put the dark, tragic Elli Lambetti on the international map in A Girl in Black; he made a star of Irene Papas in Electra (1961), and drew impressive ensemble playing from Papas, Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave and Geneviève Bujold in his film of Euripides’s The Trojan Women (1971). In Zorba the Greek, he coaxed an excellent performance from Lila Kedrova in a part originally intended for Simone Signoret.
The original title of the film, Interno Berlinese, can be translated as Inside Berlin or Interior berlines. The story is based upon Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.’s novel Quicksand, Manji, better known as The Buddist Cross 1928 -1930.
Japanese novelist, poet, and essayist, who dealt with the influence of the West on the old cultural heritage of his native country. After publishing novels written in a fairly orthodox style, Tanizaki fused traditional Japanese storytelling and experimental narrative. He emphasized the fabrication as the basis for fiction, stating that in both his reading and his writing he was “uninterested in anything but lies.”
“I read somewhere the other day that men who are too fond of the ladies when they’re young generally turn into antique-collectors when they get old. Tea sets and paintings take the place of sex.” (from Some Prefer Nettles, 1928)
For an artist who has in recent years been selling for $30m for his best portraits, it’s easy to forget how far he fell out of fashion in the 60s and 70s. His highly skilled, original, instantly recognisable, figurative work was eclipsed by the ephemeral stardust of abstract, often unskilled artists…
A Freud was always distinctively a Freud, with idiosyncratic features. For all my admiration for his work, his noses, for example, tended towards the over-droopy, I would say.
His work changed, too, over his very long career – a sign of an original, curious artistic mind. (Harry Mount)
A Berlin-based photographer has captured the beauty of forgotten buildings from the communist era. Ex-Soviet hospitals and dried-up German breweries are among the dilapidated settings for the stunning series of photos.
The Orpheum Theatre opened on April 15, 1912 – the same day the Titanic sank. Located on Water Street in New Bedford, Massachusetts, it was part of a Beaux-Arts building that was built in 1910 by a French-Canadian group known as Le Club des Francs-Tireurs (The French Sharpshooters Club).
(via)
Painting by Max Jacob, “Orpheus Attacked by the Brigands,” 1928, Philadelphia Museum of Art
For Jacob, an openly gay apostate Jew, the myth also carried personal significance. When Orpheus loses his wife Eurydice in the Underworld, he renounces women for the love of men, thus providing Jacob with an affirming image of homosexuality from classical antiquity.
Picasso said: ‘There’s only one man in Paris who knows how to dress and that is Modigliani.’ He didn’t say that as a joke. Modigliani, poor as he was, even to the extent of having to borrow three sous for the underground to go to the literary evenings at the Closerie des Lilas, was not only refined, but had an eclectic elegance. He was the first man in Paris to wear a shirt made of cretonne.
1876-1944. Met Picasso in 1901 and for some time shared a studio with him. Afterward, and for many years to follow, he lived three doors away from the artist on the Rue Ravignan. One of the key members of the group that formed around Apollinaire. A painter as well as poet, Jacob lived in extreme poverty, working at all manner of jobs throughout his life. Although born a Jew, he converted to Catholicism in 1915, six years after having a vision of Christ. In 1921 he moved from Paris to the small village of Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, close to a Benedictine church, where he remained until his arrest by the Nazis in February 1944. He died the following month in the concentration camp at Drancy. (via)
Update: Max and Picasso were both so poor they shared the same overcoat, hat and gloves in winter. There was one bed. One went out and used the coat, the other stayed in and used the bed. What resolve! (via email thanks to Janet Paparelli.)
Love Is Such an Old-Fashioned Word – by Blaire Broussa (Via the Walrus)
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world” — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Read this delightful story here
When Felix Bronislav met Helen Ferapont in 1937, she was already an expert in Panini’s sutras on Sanskrit grammar. She was working on her dissertation under Nikolai Trubetzkoy in Prague, and her Ph.D. thesis was to be a discussion of the deification of speech found in Hindu Scripture. (continue here)
Helen went to revolutionary China to study both Mandarin and the praying-mantis school of Tai-Chi in Shandong province, writing verbose and melancholy letters back to Felix, ending each epistle with luxurious postscripts in a calligraphy that dripped libidinously off the page:
Edwin Parker “Cy” Twombly Jr was born in Lexington, Virginia. Both his parents came from Maine. His father was a sports instructor and former baseball player whom Twombly admiringly described as still doing back flips at the age of 40: he was known as “Cy” after the legendary pitcher “Cyclone” Young. Twombly inherited his father’s nickname but not his athleticism.
Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.”
Herman Hesse Statue at Calw
On Monday 2nd July 1877 at 18:30 Hermann Hesse was born in a flat on the second floor of Marktplatz 6, Calw, opposite the town hall, and lived there for the greater part of his youth.
“Gluck” means… luck, fortune, happiness. ‘The very sound of it’, Hesse says, ‘brings forth that feeling of lightness, life and joy.’
To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one. HERMANN HESSE, The Glass Bead Game
The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught – HERMANN HESSE, The Glass Bead Game
Ninon Hesse – an art historian who married Hesse and became very important in his life (photos here)
Peter Falk, who died Friday at age 83, was an actor of great and invisible skill who played many parts over a five-decade career. He was a late bloomer but quickly embraced on the stage and screens big and little — by 1962, he had been Oscar-nominated twice, for gangsters respectively chilling and comical in “Murder, Inc.” and “A Pocketful of Miracles,” and won an Obie playing Eugene O’Neill opposite Jason Robards. Later, he acted troublesome characters for director John Cassevetes in “Husbands” and “A Woman Under the Influence,” was brilliantly funny as a reckless CIA agent in “The In-Laws,” and narrated, grandfather-to-grandson, “The Princess Bride.”
The In-Laws, The Husband, The Detective, The Scriptwriter, Friend of angels, Just One More Thing (Previous post)
In 1918, his art was to change dramatically as a direct consequence of Germany’s economic, political and military collapse at the end of the First World War.
“In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready…. Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been.