Vitro Nasu

Happy Birthday to Agnes Varda! She is 80 years old.

Birthday links at Greencinedaily on Agnes

Vagabond

Sandrine Bonnaire international breakthrough came in 1986 when she played the title role in Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond), directed by Agnès Varda, for which part she won her second César Award.

Last year, Sandrine Bonnaire has directed a documentary about her autistic sister.

It is surely a first — an international movie star (Sandrine Bonnaire) making a patient, respectful, thoroughly unnarcissistic documentary about her own handicapped sister, and stumping for policy change as she considers painful mysteries about family and the passage of time in the process. “Her Name Is Sabine” (2007) is a simple, unpretentious piece of work — Bonnaire spends an enormous amount of time simply observing the managed-care home where Sabine, nearing 40, lives now with a handful of other adults with varying modes and manifestations of autism. Slowly, Sabine’s history is dripped in — as a child, teen and young adult, she was different, “off,” but lucid, literate, energetic and capable of playing Chopin. She went without diagnosis for decades. As her siblings — ten of them — grew up one by one and left home, Sabine, robbed of stimulus, began to deteriorate; a series of hospital stays and hired nurses followed, and then a five-year long institutional stay in which Sabine grew violent and was tamped down by straitjackets and antipsychotic drugs. The filmmaker glosses over it, but Sabine, perhaps now permanently debilitated, was eventually rescued to a new facility that her famous sister had to raise money for herself, using her fame as an actress and celebrity. (Michael Atkins– read more here.)

Previous post on Agnes Varda

Le monde du silence: Opening shot – Jacques-Yves Cousteau & Louis Malle, 1957

Tao Lin underwater hamster (Reader of Depressing Books Blog)
Gas-powered oceansunfish -alligator hybrid
Network card’s raft ride to freedom realizing it’s fucked

Literature is inside of life

Tao Lin has developed his own unmistakable and unique style by utilizing a contagiously honest way of writing. Marcelo Ballvé discusses Bed and Eeeee eee eeee with the author.

Exactly What I Want –

I want three friends within a 40 mile radius; one 5 miles, one 10 miles, one 30 miles, two females and one male. The male should talk very slowly and laugh at almost everything I say. I want to send one of the females mixed CDs very often and her send me mixed CDs very often but rarely see her in real life. The other female I want to see in the daytime sometimes for lunch. -more here)

Previous post Diver here.

Laurent Cantet’s classroom film wins Palm d’Or

The film is based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Francois Begaudeau about his experience of teaching in an inner city Paris school. Begaudeau himself plays the teacher while real schoolchildren were used in the cast.

“The film we wanted to make had to be a reflection of French society – multiple, many-faceted, complex,” Cantet said in his acceptance speech.
“It’s an amazing, amazing film,” said jury president Sean Penn, adding that the judges decision had been “unanimous”. (Guardian)

Laurent Cantet

Cantet was raised in an activist home. “I remember I was always alone with my grandmother,” he says of his schoolteacher parents. “They were always away demonstrating.” (Via)

It will be a while for the US audience to see his prize winning film, fortunately all his other films including “Human Resources” and “Heading South” are all available at the video stores, Netflix and libraries.

If you are not familiar with Cantet films, start with this film.
Time-Out

A haunting psychological drama, Time Out takes a penetrating look at the angst of the modern worker. (“Time Out “)

This is a must see film, a real masterpiece, great acting and so true. Cantet has a unique ability to take us into the complex and perplexing realities of modern life.

Via James Wagner

Offload

An-My-Lê‘s latest series of photographs shot in coastal waters and regions from Iraq to Antarctica. Evoking 19th century romantic painting to contemporary socio-political landscapes, Lê’s powerful images “examine intersecting themes of scientific exploration, military power, environmental crises, fantasies of empire and the vast ungovernable oceans that connect nations and continents.” (via)

An-My Lê was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1960. Lê fled Vietnam with her family as a teenager in 1975, the final year of the war, eventually settling in the United States as a political refugee. Lê received BAS and MS degrees in biology from Stanford University (1981, 1985) and an MFA from Yale University (1993). (Art21-PBS)

Rescue from Small Wars

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Found photo of a diver<

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Trader Joe‘s bathroom corridor has a new design to go with previously shown interior.

Diver by Hal Lum

A door design for women and men
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(1958)

Robert Rauschenberg,
Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82

He is a totally secular, un-fundamentalist good ol’ boy from an oil port in Texas – Port Arthur, also the home of the late Janis Joplin, with whose randy generosity, narrative howl and sense of pathos Rauschenberg has more than a little in common. But if there is any other American artist Rauschenberg’s combines of 50 years ago remind you strongly of, it’s Walt Whitman: the poet who was not afraid to contradict himself, who said he contained multitudes, who spoke for Americans in general but to no class of them in particular. (Spirit of the Age by Robert Hughes)

“I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun.” (See a great photo of R.R. by Dennis Hopper, via Placebokatz)

See Big and Little Bullys (Ruminations),Visitation and more here. Rauschenberg has continually set new standards and broken the barriers of modern printmaking.

On erasing De Kooning

Erased de Kooning was the first major work of Rauschenberg’s career, and it showed many of the qualities for which he would eventually become known: a paradoxical originality (or perhaps an original paradoxicalness), energy, iconoclasm, unerring instinct. There have been a lot of artists who have used art to assault art’s own verities, but few of them did so as gracefully and cheerfully as Rauschenberg.

He thought of art not as a monument but as the record of a passing moment. I suspect he knew, too, how melancholy an idea that can be. That’s the thing about moments: They pass. And now Rauschenberg has as well, and there’s that much more to miss. (Greatness and golden slippers by Jim Lewis)

A skeleton in front of his astrological birth chart.
See “Autobiography” here – James Wagner
Rauschenberg talked briefly about the above piece in A Conversation with Robert Rauschenberg – Charlie Rose (1998)

Lotus Bed (via)

Bob and Jasper Johns early years

From the start, Rauschenberg embraced Johns in unabashedly romantic terms, “I have photos of him then that would break your heart. Jasper was soft, beautiful, lean and poetic. (Jasper Johns’ Alley Oop – Jonathan Katz) via James Wagner (a great photo of young Bob and Jasper included)

And more here from Tyler Green.

Robert Rauschenberg and dance, partners for life

Something inherently theatrical about Robert Rauschenberg’s talent — always evident in his radical feeling for color, light, composition and new ingredients and juxtapositions —prompted him to his boldest and freshest conceptions when he worked onstage. From the early 1950s until 2007 he designed for dance. And in the late ’50s and early ’60s, when he first came to fame, he was recurrently (at times constantly) occupied in dance theater.

Nam June Paik
Happy Mother’s day is over, now we are back to unhappy earthday.
And here.

Another day, another world (Something wonderful, I can’t remember how I found this site)

Beirut links
Love and War
Beirut and Rawi Hage

Happy Mother’s Day!

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and Stanley Ann Dunham (Obama’s Mom was a free spirit.)

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Spike and Daisy are taking a moment off from their job of patrolling the border or going around garage sales in their bike-limo.

Myanmar Burma Cyclone and Aung San Suu Kyii’s Biographer

Chantal Akerman:Moving Through Time and Space at MIT List Visual Art Center –
May 2 – July 6, 2008

Chantal Akerman retraces a journey from the end of summer to deepest winter, from East Germany, across Poland and the Baltics, to Moscow. (via)

D’est on youtube

From the Other Side is an unsentimental look at the plight of illegal Mexican immigrants as they attempt the dangerous crossing from Agua Prieta in Sonora, Mexico, to Douglas, Ariz. (Via)

Last month Marian Goodman gallery (New York) exhibited Chantal Akerman’s photographs. (Chantal’s main audience is from museums, galleries and film societies.)

The first time I was introduced to Chantal Akerman’a work was her documenatary film on Pina Bausch.
(An Italian version of this film is cut awkwardly in 6 parts, now provided on youtube).

Other samples of film clips from youtube:
“Jeanne Dielmain”

Hotel Monterey (1972) Akerman – passage (Glenn Gould Bach aria is added to the silent film footage on Youtube)

A Couch in New York – trailer (Chantal’s most accessible film starring Juliet Binoche and William Hurt)

A week ago I decided to see “La Captive” starring my favorite actress Sylvie Testud.
Here was a review by Hoberman (scroll down)

Chantal Akerman’s La Captive is another sort of psycho-epistemological inquiry that asks: How can we know another?

Visual as La Captive is in its rigorously formal compositions, the filmmaker is straightforwardly concerned with language. She filters her Proust through the old nouveau roman of Duras or Robbe-Grillet to fixate on recurring phrases: “au contraire,” “if you like,” “you think so?” Similarly, Akerman takes situations from Proust and elaborately defamiliarizes them.

More films by Chantal Akerman by Acquarello

Perpetuum Mobile is an international exhibition curated by Paul Malone, Nicola Rae and Mickey Dell.

Georgio Tentolini Italy

Paul Malone <> UK

Andy Parsons Ireland

You can view videos, “Father’s Tongue” by Chia-En Jao and Paul Malone’s “Footfall Railroad” here.

Simon Betts – UK <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> Chia-En Jao- Taiwan

More previous int’l exhibits organized by Paul Malone, here and here, and view Paul Malone sculptures 2005.

Location : Art in Perpetuity Gallery, 6 Creekside, London SE8 4SA
Dates and times : Thursday 8th to 25th May 2008. Thursday to Sunday 12 noon to 5 pm
Private View : *Friday 9th May. 6 – 9 pm. Finissage : Saturday 24th May 6 – 7 pm