Vitro Nasu

Happy birthday Li Young Lee August 19, 1957

Li-Young Lee was born in Djakarta, Indonesia in 1957 to Chinese political exiles. Both of Lee’s parents came from powerful Chinese families: Lee’s great grandfather was the first president of the Republic of China, and Lee’s father had been the personal physician to Mao Tse-tsung. In Indonesia, Dr. Lee helped found Gamaliel University. Anti-Chinese sentiment began to foment in Indonesia, however, and Lee’s father was arrested and held as a political prisoner for a year. After his release, the Lee family fled through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, arriving in the United States in 1964. Lee and his parents moved from Seattle to Pennsylvania, where Dr. Lee attended seminary and eventually became a Presbyterian minister in the small community of Vandergrift. Though his father read to him frequently as a child, Lee did not begin to seriously write poems until a student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied with Gerald Stern.

(repost)
Happy birthday Gustavo Santaolalla 19 August 1951 is an Argentine musician, film composer and producer. He has won two Academy Awards for Best Original Score in two consecutive years, for Brokeback Mountain in 2005 and Babel in 2006. (He composed the soundtracks for North Country, Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Motorcycle Diaries)

Picking Berries from “Into the Wild” – directed by Sean Penn.

The Wings from Brokeback Mountain

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(Photo by Fung Lin Hall)

August 19 birthday
Arthur Waley

Frank McCourt

Pina 2 <> <> Pina 3 <> <>

Wim and Pina

Happy birthday Wim Wenders!

What I saw there, moved me deeply.
I troubled me, amazed me, but most of all: it concerned me.
What I had thought impossible – in the context of dance -
had happened!
This spoke to me in a very powerful way.

When the piece was over,
- it only lasted 40 minutes,
but it felt like I had visited a whole universe -
I realized that this (unknown) woman Pina Bausch
had shown me more about men and women
then the entire history of cinema had.
And all that without a word,
with nothing but movement, body language and dancing.
I might be exaggerating a bit,
and the history of cinema has a lot to offer
about the relations between men and women,
but that’s how it felt: mind-blowing.

Wim Wenders speaks about her death (Youtube)

A film documentary and tribute about Cazale, titled I Knew It Was You, was an entry at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and featured interviews with Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Gene Hackman, Richard Dreyfuss, Francis Ford Coppola, and Sidney Lumet.

John Cazele Aug 12, 1935

In his final film, The Deer Hunter, he chose to continue acting despite being diagnosed with terminal bone cancer, and died in New York City on March 12, 1978, shortly after completing his role. He was 42.
Cazale was characterized as “an amazing intellect, an extraordinary person and a fine, dedicated artist” by Joseph Papp.

During his six-year film career he appeared in five films, each of which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon and The Deer Hunter.

John Meryl Streep

Claude Laydu French actor Known for the Bresson role dies at 84.

Mr. Laydu fasted to achieve the thinness required for the role. “Claude Laydu as the tortured young priest gives such a sense of general suffering that he is literally painful to watch,” Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times.

Mr. Laydu, unlike many of the untrained actors whom Bresson used, continued acting after appearing in “Diary of a Country Priest.”

Update: Nicole Ladmiral who was great in the Diaray of a Country Priest, died at 28 by throwing herself deliberately beneath a subway train in the Paris Metro. (1958)

Heroine Wake a ‘role model for courage’

“They could not catch her,” he said.
“Whenever somebody dobbed her in, they would go there and she would be gone. Nancy would get away from them.
“The world offered a reward for anyone who could catch The White Mouse. They grabbed her husband, Henri, and the Gestapo tortured him to death.”

Nancy Wake

Farewell to Nancy Wake, the mouse who ran rings around the Nazis
The WW2 resistance heroine, who has died aged 98, was ‘a force of nature’ who topped the Gestapo’s most-wanted list

Charlotte Gray

The story is thought to be based on the exploits of Nancy Wake, codenamed the white mouse, a member of the resistance in war time France and Pearl Cornioley, a British secret service agent.

Lee Miller (repost) by Man Ray

Documentary of Lee Miller – narrated by her son.

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Lee Miller taking a bath in Hitler’s bathroom.

Portrait of Max Ernst by Lee Miller

“Tous les matins du monde” swept the 1992 Cesar Awards, winning best film, director, cinematography (Yves Angelo), supporting actress (Anne Brochet), music (Jordi Savall), costume design (Corinne Jorry) and sound.

Alain Corneau, film director: born Meung-sur-Loire, France 7 August 1943; died Paris 30 August 2010.

The French director Alain Corneau made 16 films in a variety of genres, from Série Noire, the bleak, sordid 1979 drama that featured a compelling performance by Patrick Dewaere as a door to door salesman looking for redemption in the wrong places, to Crime D’Amour [Love Crime], the psychological thriller starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier, which opened in French cinemas to critical acclaim a fortnight before his death from lung cancer. “He was a cinema great,” Scott Thomas said, “an absolutely adorable, funny and sharp-witted man.” (Independent UK)

Alain Corneau Previous Post

See his filmography at MUBI

“I was lucky to be able to bring to fruition unlikely projects that were close to my heart like ‘Nocturne Indien’ or ‘Tous Les Matins Du Monde’, which fulfilled my wish to make a film about Baroque music, some of my other films could have been better, but I avoid watching them.” Alan Corneau (Mubi)

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Guardian obit
Corneau is survived by Nadine and the two children of Marie Trintignant whom the couple had adopted.

Robert Mitchum in another clip talks about David Lean, that he suffered, that he was shy, and that it was very refreshing to work with him. Mitchum considers Ryan’s Daughter to be Lean’s finest film.
See Ryan’s Daughter here (very underrated film where Robert Mitchum played against his type)

Jim Jarmusch on working with Robert Mitchum (Dead Man)

(via)

Robert Mitchum August 6 1917

Hunter Thompson loved the Thunder Road (Rober Mitchum was a great singer)

Robert Mitchum admired Charles Laughton who directed the Night of the Hunter. (See an iconic clip from Night of the Hunter here)
Night of the Hunter was scripted by James Agee

Farewell My lovely

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James Baldwin August 2, 1924

Baldwin and Marlon (Dangerous Minds – civil rights 1963)

Go Tell It on the Mountain, which Baldwin had worked on for years under various titles, was finally finished during a trip to Switzerland. When New York publisher Alfred Knopf expressed interest in publishing the work, Baldwin returned to America on a ticked bought with a loan from Marlon Brando. His novel was published a year later in 1953 and received rave reviews. (via)

James Baldwin published “A Talk to Teachers” in The Saturday Review of Dec. 21, 1961. The essay was originally delivered as an address in New York City on Oct. 16, 1963, titled “The Negro Child: His Self-Image.”

See a photo of James Baldwin with Marlon Brando and Charles Heston (Strange to see Charles Heston there with them).

Two related links:

Hidden in the Open (Flickr: A Photographic Essay of Afro American Male Couples )

James Zwerg’s physical wounds healed after he was attacked by an Alabama mob, but the emotional wounds festered

In Memoriam Jerome Liebling

Jerome Liebling, acclaimed founder of Hampshire College’s photography and video school, dies at 87

A Brooklyn native whose father was a waiter, Liebling was a child of the Depression who served in the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II before going on to study at Brooklyn College on the GI Bill.

His students included Ken Burns

Butterfly Boy

Interview (with photos)

What were some of the things that you went out looking for when you first started?

Well—mostly just the street, and what it gave back. There were a few wonderful documentary photographers, especially Helen Levitt, who was present and whose work I saw. All of the good people were trying to bring back pieces of the world as honestly as possible.

I studied with Jerome Liebling 20 years ago (it was the semester when I realized that I should stop trying to be a photographer). He was a remarkable teacher – warm and encouraging, but he didn’t get in the way of his students, and he told the truth without telling us what to do. The same with his work. Some of the photographs he once exhibited in the college gallery have burned themselves into my brain. They were arresting and complex – visually complete, beautiful, but full of questions he didn’t try to answer for the viewer.
Artists and teachers like Liebling are rare these days. He will be missed. via

Michael Cacoyannis

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.

Iphighenia Accepts Fate

See Woman in Black (previous post0

Cousteau and Cacoyannis (previous post)

The Berlin Affair directed by Liliana Cavani is based on Quick Sand or Manji (see below left book cover)

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.

Makioka Sisiters

Makioka sister was translated by Edward Sidensticker

Junichiro Tanizaki was born on 24 July 1886

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)

Henry Miller loved the Key directed by Kon Ichikawa (nominated for the best film at Cannes – read Miller at Cannes)

John Fowles and Tanizaki at Midnight Eye

Liliana Cavani directed The Night Porter and Repley’s Game.

Lucian Freud and two childrean
Lucian Freud dies at 88

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)

BBC obit (image + a video clip)

Painter’s room

Esther Freud
and her sisiter.. (see two clips of Hiideous Kinky starring Kate Winslet)

See more photos and paintings here, great collection

See Caroline (his second wife) and other images

The timing was everything

Norman Jewison: 50 years in film (NPR) a true superstar

Hurricane trailer

Happy birthday Norman Jewison!
July 21, 1926
In the Heat of the nIght
Jesus Christ Superstar
Moon Struck
A Sodier’s Story
And Justice for All