Vitro Nasu

Ray Johnson

See more – Ray Johnson – Mystery Artist/Mail Art, Motics & Nothing

Bridet Riley’s Comb

Please send me your mailing address.

Subrata Mitra

Remembering the great cinematographer Subrata Mitra, best known for his collaboration with Satyajit Ray, on his 88th birth anniversary. He was the man who revolutionized the art of cinematography by introducing the technique of bounce lighting for the very first time. Many celebrated cinematographers, including Vittorio Storaro, Nestor Almendros and Takao Saito, got influenced by his extraordinary works.

Thanks to Debayan Roy for posting

MUBI Subrata Mitra

Charulata (youtube)

Rare ketches Satyajit Ray
(The Pather Panchali Sketchbook’ has been edited by the master filmmaker’s son, Sandip Ray.)

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop – Tragic Muses

Elizabeth Bishop
February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979

Biography 0f Bishop 2017 (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
by Megan Marshall)

One Art – see her painting + many great links (previous post)

Reaching for the Moon – Brazilian film on Elizabeth Bishop (trailer)

Aznavour
via aznavour

Charles Aznavour wiki

In a career spanning over 70 years, he recorded more than 1,200 songs interpreted in eight languages.[6] He wrote or co-wrote more than 1,000 songs for himself and others.

Shoot the Piano Player
(Truffaut archive here)

A tribute from Fuse Akira who translated Aznavour’s song here ..(youtube)

Ararat by Atom Egoyan
Who is telling the truth? about the Armenians.

Helena Almeida (1934 – 25 September 2018) was a Portuguese artist known for her work in photography, performance art, body art, painting and drawing.

wiki

artnet

Helena Almeida
We Find Wildness (blog)

Art Seen Chicago

Frieze

How Philosopher Paul Virilio (1932–2018) Spoke to an Age of Acceleration and Total War

Claude Parent and Paul Virilio

via

Paul Virilio (wiki) (French: [viʁiljo]; 4 January 1932 – 10 September 2018)[3] was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.
According to two geographers, Virilio was a “historian of warfare, technology and photography, a philosopher of architecture, military strategy and cinema, and a politically engaged provocative commentator on history, terrorism, mass media and human-machine relations

Bunker Archeology

Magdalene Jetelova
– in which she laser-projected select quotations from, what else, Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology onto the half-submerged fortifications found scattered along Normandy’s beaches.

Magdalene Jetalova (Czech artist)

(Photo via)

Arthur Mitchell passed away at 84.

Dancer broke barriers for African Americans in the 1950s in leading roles with the New York City Ballet

George Balanchine with Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell working on ‘Slaughter on Tenth Avenue’ in 1968.
Photo by Martha Swope from the collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
via

Balanchine archive

George Balanchine and Arhtur Mitchell

Mitchell shares interesting stories about Balanchine. (youtube) or why Pad de deux was so controversial (youtube)

Arthur Mitchell is an African-American dancer and choreographer who created a training school and the first African-American classical ballet company, Dance Theatre of Harlem.
In 1955 Mitchell made his debut as the first African American with the New York City Ballet
Mitchell was the only African-American dancer with the NY City Ballet until 1970. Choreographer and director of the NYCB George Balanchine created the pas de deux in Agon especially for Mitchell and the white ballerina Diana Adams. Although Mitchell danced this role with white partners throughout the world, he could not perform it on commercial television in the United States before 1965, because states in the South refused to carry it.

Arthur Mitchell

Slim dragon-fly
too rapid for the eye
to cage,

contagious gem of virtuosity
make visible, mentality.
Your jewels of mobility

reveal
and veil
a peacock-tail.

— by Marianne Moore

Arthur Michell Quote

A Life in Pictures.

Annette Michelson (photo via)

Art News – Annette Michelsonk Pioneering Film Critic, Co-founder October dies at 96.

Photo by Fung Lin Hall

Kiki Kirin

Josh Parmer posted on FB a sad and shocking news that Kiki Kirin (樹木 希林) passed away. (See a great photo of Kiki there)

May your body rest and your soul soar Kiki Kirin. You have been one of my favorite actresses since I first saw you back in Still Walking.

Japan times Obit

Interview with Kiki
Kiki Kirin’s response here.

Regarding the afterlife, there is the Buddhist idea of rebirth. Right now, my soul is in this body and this body is Kirin Kiki. After this body is used up and death comes around, that soul and spirit moves on and reappears. I don’t see death as an end.

Kiki with Nagase (Previous post)

Koreeda and Kiki (Shoplifters won Palme’dor at Cannes – 2018)

Still Walking

Previous Cannes festival.

Kiki, for whom After the Storm is her fifth Koreeda film, described the director as among one of the most observant she has seen in her 55-year career.

Sea-Saw

Morton’s work is as unusual as her biography. Born in upstate New York, in 1936, Morton, who was a trained nurse, only started making art in her thirties and received her MFA at the age of 34, already a mother of three.
Her entire body of work was created between 1968 and 1977, when she died prematurely in a car accident at the age of 41. But her vision seems to have erupted almost fully formed and, in just a few years, she managed to deliver more than many artists cobble together in a lifetime.

Ree Morton

Google Ree Morton

NYtimes Ree Morton -Artist/Mother

Present in the selection of pieces are many of Morton’s sentimental, décor-oriented, performatively feminine motifs — bows; ruffles; wallpaper; flowers; fairy-tale-looking flags; loopy, girlish cursive lettering — which collectively one critic would later refer to as “Emily Dickinson in love with Raymond Roussel.” When she prepared the application, Morton had been making artwork for less than a decade, and a few months later, she would be dead.

In the 41 years since, Morton — who once described her own artistic ambitions as “light and ironic on serious subjects without frivolity” — has become something of an obsession within the art world.

(photo from pages of Individuals:Post-Movement Art in America Edited by Alan Sondheim)

RECITATIONS

Mean Business

mean
mean ing
mean ing ful

mean
mean er
de mean ing

me an you, babe.

Text by Ree Morgan

(“First Reformed” directed by Paul Schrader)

On casting Ethan Hawk (Spoiler alert!)

“There’s a certain physiognomy in playing a man of the cloth, be it Montgomery Clift in ‘I Confess,’ Belmondo in ‘Leon Morin’ or Claude Laydu in ‘Diary of a Country Priest.’ So, you’re thinking about actors who have that physiognomy, maybe Jake Gyllenhaal, Oscar Isaac, but Ethan was 10 years older than them and his face was getting some very interesting wrinkles. I started thinking he’s just right for this. I sent him the script and he responded right away.”

Shooting fast, took only 22 days of filming.
Budget $3.5 million. (Investers got their money back)

Richard Brody on first reformed – (The reckless passions of Paul Schrader)

On naming the Pastor “Ernst Toller” –

Yup. I did. I came across the name years ago in a poem by W.H. Auden, but there were two things about the name I liked. One was the “tolling” of the bells. The other was the playwright who escaped Nazi Germany to come to America and then committed suicide

Willem Dafoe
(The Light Sleeper)

Dafoe and Schrader have collaborated many times, The Light Sleeper, The Affliction and Auto-Focus etc.

Light Sleeper, American Gigolo etc. (Mishima, Patty Hearst and Auto Focus were incredible biopics, and Schrader directed late Natasha Richardson twice – she played Patty Hearst and was also in the Comfort of Strangers, scripted by Harold Pinter based on a short novel by Ian McEwan.)

Polygon Interview – (First Reformed, Taxi Driver filmmaker Paul Schrader will change how you think about movies)

Which modern, American filmmakers have mastered leaning in?
Paul Schrader: In America, [Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff director] Kelly Reichardt works that way. Gus van Sant did that three film trilogy [Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days].

Paul Schrader directing Mishima, A Life in 4 Chapters, his sister in law acted as his interpreter with Japanese crew and actors.
(Philip Glass composed the soundtrack, Eiko Ishioka designed the set, Mishima was Schrader’s most theatrically stylised film.)
His brother Leonard knew Mishima.

On Mishima.. ( His Final Performance, the Suicide of Yukio Mishima )

Read his letter to his brother Leonard Schrader (His visit to Jean Renoir in Beverly Hills )

I spent the afternoon at Jean Renoir’s home in Beverly Hills, and was very entertained. Jean (as we friends call him) is shooting four short stories for French TV. During some continental business haggles he decided to come back to L.A. for two weeks. He told Max Laemmle, manager of the Los Feliz Theater, that my article on Boudu was the best he had ever read. He then sent me a letter to thank me, enclosing an autographed photo, asking for a tear sheet for Michel Simon, and inviting me to his home.
So Joel and I (Joel is an old friend of the Renoirs) were there this afternoon. This is an exceedingly kind, gracious, and fragile person. Just like his films: you can’t help but love him. We had a very interesting conversation about Bresson, Simon, Moreau, Magnani, Chabrol, Truffaut, but I remember the afternoon primarily as an experience, like a warm bath. His home is covered with original paintings by his father, Picasso, Cezanne, Braque, etc. In his living room hangs a larger-than-life-size portrait of Jean at 17 painted by his father: he is young and handsome, has a shotgun and hunting dog. Jean, now past 70, bald and pink-faced, was sitting in a chair in front of that painting. I think I’ll always remember that view. He is, as he describes Picasso, “a force of nature.” I think he is a greater artist than his father, for he invented the vocabulary before he embellished it. You think my head’s swelling. Peut-être.

(Robert Mitchum and Keiko Kishi in Yakuza)
Sydney Pollack directed Yakuza, scripted by Leonard Schrader, Paul Schrader and Robert Towne.

RIP Paul Taylo, Nytimes tweeted.

Paul Taylor brought a lyrical musicality, capacity for joy and wide poetic imagination to modern dance over six decades as one its greatest choreographers

The Paul Taylor Dance Company Performing Tracer, in 1962. Robert Rauschenberg’s Bicycle Wheel was the only scenery on stage.

Paul Taylor died (Guardian obit)

Taylor, a dancer who later became one of the world’s greatest choreographers, was seen as the last of the 20th century’s titans of modern dance

NPR obit (A Giant of Modern Dance)

Kiki Smith and Paul Taylor
(via)

Kindred Spirits (youtube)

(Dogs designed by Alex Kats)
Yerba buena SF 2015

“I had seen Paul dance for the first time shortly before we met with Edwin [Denby] and thought his choreography was one of the most surprising things I had seen as an artist. Paul’s dancing seemed to be a real break with that of the previous generation: no expression, no content, no form, as he said, and with great technique and intelligence.”

Alex Kats

Paul Taylor

Paul Taylor proves staying power of ’70s and ’80s dance