Vitro Nasu

(Makanai directed by Hirokazu Koreeda)

Girls building a solar toy car.

Name these girls – Happy Hinamatsuri album

Google Hinamatsuri

The custom of displaying dolls began during the Heian period. Formerly, people believed the dolls possessed the power to contain bad spirits. Hinamatsuri traces its origins to an ancient Japanese custom called hina-nagashi (雛流し, lit. “doll floating”), in which straw hina dolls are set afloat on a boat and sent down a river to the sea, supposedly taking troubles or bad spirits with them.(via wiki)

(Hidetoshi Nishijima in Dolls directed by Takeshi Kitano)

The Dazzling Beauty of Elizabeth Taylor in Iran

Elizabeth Taylor was born on Feb 27, 1932

Elizabeth Taylor Her Place in the Sun”> (Previous Post)

Monty Clift was her best friend

(Taylor with James Dean)

HIV Activism
Taylor was one of the first celebrities to participate in HIV/AIDS activism and helped to raise more than $270 million for the cause.[65] She began her philanthropic work after becoming frustrated with the fact that very little was being done to combat the disease despite the media attention.[66] She later explained for Vanity Fair that she “decided that with my name, I could open certain doors, that I was a commodity in myself – and I’m not talking as an actress. I could take the fame I’d resented and tried to get away from for so many years – but you can never get away from it – and use it to do some good. I wanted to retire, but the tabloids wouldn’t let me. So, I thought: If you’re going to screw me over, I’ll use you

John Malkovich on best friend Julian Sands, a storyteller and so funny. (guardian)

One of the last conversations John Malkovich had with Julian Sands, his best friend of 40 years, concerned how to prepare yourself for death. You can see that conversation in their new film, Seneca – On the Creation of Earthquakes, which premiered at the Berlin film festival this week. Malkovich fears it will be their last together.

See a photo of Julian Sands and John Malcovich when they were in “The Killing Fields

(With N. Kinski and Julian Sands in “Night Sun” directed by Taviani brothers)

Julian Sands
Julian Sands, Harold Pinter the pregnant pause extended

In his one-man show “A Celebration of Harold Pinter,” which he performs tonight at the Whittier College Writers Festival, the 55 year-old Brit reveals Pinter’s lesser known side—his surprising warmth and tenderness, as evidenced in his poetry, prose, letters, and the recollections and anecdotes of friends, including Sands himself. John Malkovich, with whom Sands previously worked in The Killing Fields, directs.

It is the dead of night,

The long dead look out towards
The new dead
Walking towards them

There is a soft heartbeat
As the dead embrace
Those who are long dead
And those of the new dead
Walking towards them

They cry and they kiss
As they meet again
For the first and last time

Harold Pinter, 2002

Yeh Ballet Julian Sands and Netflix India
Fun ballet film, Julian Sands played a wild ballet instructor.

Julian Sands on youtube -5 questions asked.

Shirin Neshat Builds a Land of Dreams

(Shirin Neshat and Shiela Wand)

The process of making Land of Dreams was a surreal one, befitting a tale about an Iranian stealing dreams from New Mexican locals for research. Neshat drove from New York and shot the film in seven weeks with a small crew, right before the second wave of the pandemic reached the Southwest, all while “getting people to believe in a film which was about America but made from the perspective of an Iranian American director.”

Shiela Vand was the girl walks home alone directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

Shirin & Matt Dillon

Matt Dillon
Verified “What a wonderful experience working with the great artist Shirin Neshat on her film Land of Dreams. A joy to work with!”

Isabella Rossellini spoke about “Land of Dreams”

Then, Shoja, your partner, wrote this film Land of Dreams with Jean-Claude Carrière. So, there was a further connection with close friends and collaborators and now, we are family.
SHIRIN NESHAT: I’ve also known of you for many years – from your work as a model, then as an actor in Blue Velvet (1986). I was a huge fan. When we started to socialize, I always wondered if I could have the honor to work with you. I was waiting for the opportunity and then came Land of Dreams. The day we finished filming you, we sent a video message to Jean-Claude,who was on his deathbed. He sent a message back and two days later he passed away.

Script by Jean Claude Carriere (Previous post)

(Photo of Matt Dillon by Masatoshi Nagase)
Happy birthday Matt Dillon! (Feb 18)

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)

Carlos Saura wiki

Carlos Saura Criterion

Directed by Carlos Saura

Reality and fantasy, dreams and memories flow freely into one another in the haunting, layered works of iconoclastic auteur Carlos Saura, arguably the most important Spanish filmmaker to emerge between Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar. Achieving international renown during the repressive years of Francisco Franco’s rule, Saura became a model for how to make dissident political cinema under an authoritarian regime, using potent metaphors and symbolism to dodge censors and examine his nation’s troubled twentieth-century history. In complex and often controversial works like PEPPERMINT FRAPPÉ, COUSIN ANGELICA, and CRÍA CUERVOS . . . —frequently starring his longtime partner Geraldine Chaplin—Saura explored the legacy of fascism and its devastating effects on a generation of Spanish citizens, while in often-overlooked post-Franco films such as DEPRISA, DEPRISA he captured the turbulence of a society experiencing the first shockwaves of liberalization.

Dog Sitter sued Burt Bacharach (His dog was called Alfie- see the photo).

What’s New Pussycat

Billboards obit

Allison Anders posted on FB.

I had the lead sheets to God Give Me Strength, the song Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello wrote for my movie Grace Of My Heart, framed a little while ago, but I couldn’t find the right place for it yet. This morning upon hearing the news of Burt’s passing I immediately tore off the plastic and began to create this altar to process how much this man’s talent has meant to me.
On Monday it will be (I think?) 26 years since Burt recorded this song Feb 13 1996? in NYC with Elvis. It was a warm smallish studio and only a handful of us were there for this quietly historic session with the two of them; music supervisor extraordinaire Karyn Rachtman who brought these giants together for the first time to write this now classic song for me, our amazing lead actress Illeana Douglas, our wonderful producer Dan Hassid and me. Occasionally friends came by to visit; my daughter Tiffany with J Mascis and I recall our pal Joe McGinty got a life altering moment with Burt too that day. In the downtime Illeana and I absorbed all we could with Burt who was so generous so kind and so respectful. I remember asking him about working with one of my idols Dusty Springfield. And he said warmly thinking of her, “Hard.” I asked, “Hard to work with?” He said with such empathy, “She was hard on herself. And she was so brilliant.” It was exactly what I wanted to know.
After Burt and Elvis finished recording God Give Me Strength they both signed the lead sheets, one for me and one for Illeana. Burt wrote “For Allison…thank you for bringing us all together.” This Polaroid photo of them was taken the same day. Burt’s musical genius and warmth and beautiful melodies was part of the fabric of my life from the time I could open my toddler mouth and sing along to Perry Comos “Magic Moments”. There are far too many songs of his I love to begin to list, but I will over the coming days. Thank you Paul Myers for reaching out this morning and helping me process the meaning he’s had to me and to all of us. Rest In Peace Maestro.

Audrey Hepburn in “Two for the Road” 1967 publicity shot wearing dress by Paco Rabanne.

Iconic Fashion Designer Paco Rabanne dead at 88

Fashion designer Paco Rabanne, famous for his Space Age metal mesh looks worn by celebrities including Jane Fonda, Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin, died Friday at the age of 88 at his home in Portsall, France.
His death was confirmed by Spanish group Puig, which owns Rabanne’s fashion and fragrance businesses.
“Paco Rabanne made transgression magnetic. Who else could induce fashionable Parisian women to clamor for dresses made of plastic and metal,” said Jose Manuel Albesa, president of Puig’s beauty and fashion division, in a statement.
“That radical, rebellious spirit set him apart: There is only one Rabanne.”

(Paco Rabanne with Salvador Dali )
Paco Rabanne Fashion Biographies.

During the sixties Rabanne’s oversized earrings, sunglasses made of fur and other accessories became a huge media and commercial success. His material of choice, rhodoid, could create infinite combinations of colours and form which mirrored the effects produced by Op Art.
Desiring to make his fashion more accessible, Rabanne launched a series of paper dresses in 1967. The soft, lightweight fabric was a cheaper alternative which Rabanne used with coloured adhesive tape to bind it together.
In 1969 Rabanne introduced fragrances to his company. This marked the beginning of the label revolutionising the perfume industry and becoming a long lasting success in the market.
Rabanne continued to work with unusual materials for his trimmings and fabrics. 1968 saw a beaten metal aluminium jersey and 1970 saw dresses made out of linked buttons. In 1972 Rabanne used ostrich feathers attached with Velcro. 1982 saw dresses made with glass reflectors and in 1984 Rabanne used chainmail.

Alfred Leslie, a second-generation Abstract Expressionist and filmmaker who turned his back on nonrepresentational art in the early 1960s to lead a revival of figurative painting, died on Friday in Brooklyn. He was 95. His son Anthony said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was complications of a Covid infection. (New York times).

The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God

Alfred Leslie – Artnet

Alfred Leslie wiki

(Delphine Seyrig from Pull My Daisy)

Pull My Daisy Robert Frank, Albert Leslie, USA, 1959, V’08, Tribute to Bob Dylan

Pull My Daisy is a 1959 American short film directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, and adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation. Kerouac also provided improvised narration

Happy birthday Melvil Poupaud

Ozon & Poupaud

By The Grace of God wiki

It premiered at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival and won the Jury Grand Prix

Observer review

François Ozon’s ‘By the Grace of God’ Is One of the Best Films of 2019

Red Visitor Interview Melvil Poupaud

Melville as a child actor made his first film “City of Pirates” directed by Raul Ruiz

Parker Posey and Melvil Poupaud in Broken English (Z. Cassavates directed)

Named after author ‘Herman Melville’ by his mother. (via IMDB)

Laurence Anyways directed by Xavier Dolan.

Great interview on Xavier Dolan Melvil was eloquent. (Youtube)

Time to Leave (starring with Jeanne Moreau) (Melvil was directed twice by Francois Ozon, Time to Leave and Hideaway).

Eric Rohmer – Melvil Poupaud

Melvil Poupaud Reflects on Director Éric Rohmer and His Film, ‘A Summer’s Tale’

(Photo of Rabbit by Fung Lin Hall)

CHOJU GIGA (鳥獣戯画) “, the first manga in Japan. It was written 900 years ago by TOBA-SOJO. Rabits, monkeys, frogs, foxes behave like human.

Sad news from the last year.

(Lee Chang Dong – Yoon Jeong-hee)
Yoon Jeong Hee passed away on Jan 19, 2023. She was directed by Lee Chang Dong in Poetry.

Happy birthday Jim Jarmsuch

(With Gerard Philipe in Fanfan La Tulipe)

Gina Lollobrigida

Dame in the Game: The Unexpected Feminism of Gina Lollobrigida

Throughout her acting career, Lollobrigida never abandoned her dreams of returning to the fine arts, and she used her time on set as a master class in photography. By the late 1960s, she was an accomplished photojournalist and over the course of her career, she photographed as diverse figures as Paul Newman, Salvador Dali, and Henry Kissinger. Most notably, Lollobrigida became so skilled in her photojournalism that she managed to secure an exclusive interview with Fidel Castro in 1972. Speaking of this incredible opportunity, Lollobrigida noted that she was shocked to discover Castro was more nervous to meet her than she him. Inspired by this rare access, Lollobrigida produced, directed, and wrote a documentary short entitled Ritratto di Fidel. Years before Cuba would be reopened to America, she secured a personal and in-depth look at one of the world’s most reclusive political figures.

Lollobridiga retired from acting in 1997, but she continued to pursue an avid career as an accomplished photographer, painter, and sculptor. Her work has been displayed all over the world and has won numerous accolades, including the “Legion of Honor” as “artiste de valeur” from France.