Vitro Nasu

Caravaggio
(Dexter Fletcher played young Caravaggio, directed by Derek Jarman)
Dexter Fletcher how he ended up replacing Bryan Singer here

Fletcher replaced Singer in the Freddie Mercury biopic last December, after Singer became ‘unavailable’ following reports of major clashes with Rami.

The Rocketman by Dexter Fletcher (Hollywood reporter, see a trailer)

The Usual S.

The Usual Suspects , (Me Too are after both Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer. )

Bryan Singer described the film The Usual Suspects as Double Indemnity meets Rashomon, and said that it was made “so you can go back and see all sorts of things you didn’t realize were there the first time. You can get it a second time in a way you never could have the first time around.”[16] He also compared the film’s structure to Citizen Kane (which also contained an interrogator and a subject who is telling a story) and the criminal caper The Anderson Tapes.[12]

Gabriel Byrne Homepage (Who just had a birthday celebration on May 12.. also a link to his saying goodbye to Albert Finney who starred with him in Miller’s Crossing.)

Mr. Kobayshi or Peter Postlethwaite here .

Untitled – 2010

photo via (See more paintings here)

Thomas Nozkowski passed away (Art News)

Pace

Thomas Nozkowski (b. 1944, Teaneck, New Jersey, d. 2019) is recognized for his richly colored and intimately scaled abstract paintings and drawings that push the limits of visual language. An awareness of perception and the desire to explore the possibilities of seeing, is at once grounded in reality for the artist and released from specific legibility. His concurrent practices of painting and drawing reflect on specific places and experiences—from the deeply symbolic to the notational—translating sensations and memories into abstract compositions

In conversation (Brookynrail.org) with Nozkowski

Gary Snyder (Photo by Allen Ginsberg )

Happy birthday Gary Snyder (May 8 1930)

“I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.
And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.”‘ Gary Snyder

“Range after range of mountains.
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.”
― Gary Snyder

“Clouds sink down the hills
Coffee is hot again. The dog
Turns and turns about, stops and sleeps.”
― Gary Snyder, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems

Reality Insight (poem on youtube)

Paris Review Interview here.

Poetry foundation

”Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics”
“Once Only almost at the equator almost at the
equinox
exactly at midnight from a ship the full moon in the center of the sky.”

Iain Sinclair meets Gary Snyder (The Man In the Clearing)

Snyder on Kerouac

The dialectic that I observed in Jack, which was kind of charming, really, and you see it at work in his novels, was that be could play the fool and he could play the student very well. “But see, I really don’t know anything about this. Teach me!” “Wow! You really know how to do that?” and lead you on. ‘I’hat was balanced by sometimes great authoritativeness and great arrogance, and he would suddenly say, “I am the authority.” But then he would get out of that again. It was partly maybe like a really skillful novelist’s con, to get people to speak. And be uses that as a literary device in his novels, where he presents himself often as the straight guy and he lets the other guys be smart.

I much appreciated what he had to say about spontaneous prose, although I never wrote prose. I think it influenced my journal writing a lot, some of which would, say, be registered in the book Earth House Hold. I think that I owe a lot to Jack in my prose style, actually. And my sense of poetics has been touched by Jack for sure.

Our interchanges on Buddhism were on the playful and delightful level of exchanging the lore, exchanging what we knew about it, what he thought of Mahayana. He made up names. He would follow on the Mahayana Sutra invention of lists, and he would invent more lists, like the names of all the past Buddhas, the names of all the future Buddhas, the names of all the other universes. He was great at that. But it was not like a pair of young French intellectuals sitting down comparing their structural comprehension of something. We exchanged lore. And I would tell him, “Now look. Here are these Chinese Buddhists,” and that’s how we ended up talking about the Han-shan texts together, and I introduced him to the texts that give the anecdotes of the dialogues and confrontations between T’ang Dynasty masters and disciples, and of course he was delighted by that. Anybody is. ‘I’hat’s what we did.

Orson Welles

Orson Welles sought justice for Isaac Wood a African-American World War II veteran.

Max Ophuls and Orson Welles share a birthday on May 6. Max was born 12 years earlier, in 1902, Orson in 1915.

La Ronde
Gerard Philipe

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Actor James Mason, who worked with Ophüls on two films, wrote a short poem about the director’s love for tracking shots and elaborate camera movements:

A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor old Max,
Who, separated from his dolly,
Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.
Once, when they took away his crane,
I thought he’d never smile again.

photos via (A Sharper focus with a review)

Wiki for The Earrings of Madame de

G.C. Spivak

Interview Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Because of the unusualness of my parents…my mother was very active. When the refugees from the newly created state of East Pakistan came in the millions into Calcutta at Independence at 5:00am in the morning she was in the railway station helping with rehabilitation. She helped establish a nunnery particularly for educated middle-class women who really wanted to get out of their lives, etc. She ran the first working women’s hostel in Calcutta so well that even the state asked her, “Mrs. Chakravorty, how do you do it? We failed!”

Photo via

Spivak – Interview

Has your understanding of Derrida’s book changed over the four decades since you first translated it?

So I found. When I began, I didn’t notice how critical the book was of “Eurocentrism” because the word in 1967 was not so common. Derrida was an Algerian Jew, born before World War II, who was actually encountering Western philosophy from the inside. A brilliant man, he was looking at its Eurocentrism.

He also said a very powerful thing about African orality: they could remember seven generations back; we’ve lost that capacity. There, “writing” takes place on the psychic material called “memory.” Derrida connects this to Freud. So he was saying, look at reality carefully. It’s coded so that other people, even if they’re not present, can understand what we are saying. He looked at how this was suppressed in philosophical traditions.

Ornette Coleman and Derrida

Derrida was from Algeria – Previous post, Far from Men Viggo’s film about Algeria

ALL THE MORNINGS OF THE WORLD, (AKA TOUS LES MATINS DU MONDE), Jean-Pierre Marielle, Caroline Sihol, 1991, (c)October Films

Jean Pierre Marielle passed away
via wiki

Jean-Pierre Marielle (April 12, 1932 – April 24, 2019)[2] was a French actor. He played in more than a hundred films in which he brought life to a very large diversity of roles, from the banal citizen (Les Galettes de Pont-Aven), to the serial killer (Sans mobile apparent), to the World War II hero (Les Milles), to the compromised spy (La Valise [fr]), to the has-been actor (Les Grands Ducs), to his portrayal of Jacques Saunière in (The Da Vinci Code (film) , acting always with the same excellence whatever the quality of the movie in itself. He was well known for his outspokenness and especially for his warm and cavernous voice which is often imitated by French humorists considering him as the archetype of the French gentleman.

with Philippe Noiret in Coup de Torchon.

See his many striking photos here

Ivan Regina posted on April 13, that he was feeling sick. He fell into a comma as Notre Dame de Paris was burning.
He loved life and art, will miss him greatly.. he taught me a French expression, “Très maitrisé”
It means “under control”, and more.. he explained.

Crottes de chameaux – (camel dung, Ivan referred to the rock formation)

Ivan Regina (above) – to Heros Fragiles
(Time Lapse – previous blog presentation)

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Nod le Fou, Ivan Régina, juillet 2009

Fais Vite (previous post)

Bibi Andersson

Sad news.. goodbye Bibi Andersson! RIP
Obit here -Guardian

she starred in more than 10 films Bergman-directed pictures, including The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Brink of Life, The Magician, The Passion of Anna, The Touch and Persona. She also appeared with Ingmar Bergman on the Dick Cavett Show for interviews.

Persona – Bibi Andersson

Persona

Gunnel Lindblom, Jeanne Moreau, Ingmar Bergman and Bibi Andersson.

Far from Men

Viggo Mortensen Interview

When I took French in college I re-read The Stranger in French [and] The Plague and his play Caligula. By the time this movie came around, I had read most of his stuff, but I hadn’t read a lot of his early writing, which I ended up doing in the time before we started shooting. His chronicles, his journals, his correspondences, his journalism. His collected writings before World War II when he was still living in Algeria and he was talking about the Berber population—about the Arabs—and about a lot of the problems with racism and injustice in his native country. That I found very instructive.

I don’t know if Camus would have approved –

Viggo’s Polaroids (Previous post)

Camus and Maria Casarès

Albert Camus –

Jane Goodall with one of her research subjects in the Gombe National Park in northern Tanzania.

Happy birthday Jane Goodall

Young Jane Goodall loved animals, books, and books about animals. (Courtesy of Jane Goodall Institute )

Adieu Agnes Varda, she died at 90. (BBC obit)

I fought for radical cinema all my life – Agnes Varda (Her last interview at Guardian)

(Agnes Varda and Jr while filming Faces and Places)

Interview: This is Part of the Work- Agnes Varda

She studied art history at the Louvre, but at night took classes on photography.

Peter Bradshaw (Guardian)

Greatest of the great’ – Agnès Varda: the eternally youthful soul of world cinema

Agnes Varda with blooms –

Criterion – Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand – partners in song
(Repost)

Agnes Varda archive here.

Agnes Varda (wiki)
‘

(Fassbinder directed Dirk Bogarde in “Despair”, scripted by Tom Stoppard,
based on the novel by Vladamir Nabokov)

Dirk Bogarde (homepage)

Dirk Bogarde. .. actor/writer.. gardener – most admirable for courage and honesty.. J. Losey said his career was revived by teaming up with Bogarde.. The Servant & The Accident (Harold Pinter script)..Dirk B won Bafta with Darling (he was superb).. Providence (Alain Resnais) He persuaded Charlotte Rampling to do the Night Porter (Liliana Cavani).. he liked danger & taboo subjects..Despair (Fassbinder).. Death in Venice (Visconti).. his last film was Daddy Nostalgia (w..Jane Birkin directed by Bertrand Tavernier..

( Dirk Bogarde and Marisa Berenson- film still from Death in Venice)

Daddy Nostalgia.

(Dirk Bogarde, Tavernier and Jane Birkin in Daddy Nostalgia.)

Bogarde had only praise for the director: ‘He knows more about the cinema than practically any director I have worked with, Visconti coming a close second.’ I have said, when asked, that Visconti is the Emperor of film, Losey is the King, Tavernier is the Genius. And, for me, so he is a genius in the minutiae of life which he gets on to a cinema screen as no one else has ever done quite so brilliantly before. Nothing very much happens in a Tavernier film. Just all of life.

In his second career as a best-selling writer, Dirk wrote 8 volumes of memoirs, six novels, a volume of collected journalism and writings, and a selection of the hundreds of letters he wrote, in “Ever, Dirk.” (via Dirk Bogarde FB)

Discreet Reformer – Victim

Dirk seized with relish on the role of Melville Farr, the successful barrister with the beautiful wife, because Victim (1961) had something important to say about a society in which the blackmailing of homosexuals was commonplace. When the film was made, Lord Wolfenden’s Committee had reported on the merits of qualified reform, but the legislature was slow to respond.

Six years later, the Sexual Offenses Act was passed, partially decriminalizing homosexual acts in private between consenting males aged 21 or over. In 1968 the Earl of Arran, who had introduced the legislation in the House of Lords, wrote to Dirk, acknowledging the part the latter had played in helping to change the climate for the better. The brief but gratifying letter is reproduced on these pages by kind permission of the writer’s son, the 9th Earl.