How did Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn come to make the classic firm Bonnie and Clyde
The Big Idea – Bonnie & Clyde
After finishing the script, the writers sent it to Truffaut, their first choice to direct. He was interested, but eventually passed on the film, suggesting they offer it to Godard, who also turned them down.
Beatty learned about Bonnie and Clyde when he and then-girlfriend Leslie Caron had dinner with French director Fran¿s Truffaut in an effort to convince him to direct a film biography of Edith Piaf for Caron. Truffaut passed on that project, then suggested that a script he had just received had a great part for Beatty. The role was Clyde Barrow.
Beatty had worked with director Arthur Penn on Mickey One, a small, surrealistic film that had failed at the box office in 1965. But Benton and Newman thought the film had a distinct European-American flavor and suggested they offer Bonnie and Clyde to him. Penn’s career was at a standstill after the failure of Mickey One. He had just been fired from The Train (1964) by that film’s star, Burt Lancaster, and shortly after that, producer Sam Spiegel seized control of The Chase, (1966) another film Penn was directing. Naturally, he was depressed and turned down Bonnie and Clyde at first, complaining that he didn’t like the script. Beatty almost had to browbeat Penn into taking the job.
On being brothers
There was an inherent competition and inherent admiration—both, you know. It was fragile … except that we knew our lives sort of depended on each other. His wife, Lisa, was an absolute marvel. We all four were very close.
And the secret to their success …
I do think it was something we learned from each other. [A beat.] I just don’t know what.
Update Arthur Penn died a day after his birthday Sept 28, 2010.. Obit from Vanity Fair
I’m interested in demonstrating the folly of duality; I’m deliberately toying with that thing about figure/ground, which is which. The ground being the way we set up what we think reality is, the warp and woof of how we see our situation. The paintings are not constricted or rigidly mathematical; it’s like the fiction of our perception is ready to fall apart, the whole grid is ready to collapse, or change.
Fassbender, who also stars in this fall’s sexually themed psychoanalysis drama “A Dangerous Method” as Carl Jung, won an acting prize at the Venice Film Festival this weekend for “Shame.”
Despite the overt sexuality, Fassbender said the movie is in many ways a critique of our hyper-sexed era. ” (via)
Fassbender talks about John Cazales and his love of American films of the 70’s (youtube).
Fassbender was amazing in “Hunger’ also directed by Steve McQueen… appeared in “Angel” by Fracois Ozon and “Jane Eyre”
The film is the final part in a series of films where Alexander Sokurov explores the corrupting effects of power. The previous installments are three biographical dramas: about Adolf Hitler in Moloch from 1999, Vladimir Lenin in Taurus from 2001, and the Japanese emperor Hirohito in The Sun from 2005. (Faust wiki)
In One Breathe – the making of the Russian Ark is on youtube. (A breathtaking achievement..more fun to see this than the actual film).
In in 1952, Richard Hamilton was introduced to the Green Box notes of Marcel Duchamp through Roland Penrose. (Roland Penrose later became a husband of Lee Miller)
Shock and Awe 2007 The British Visionary
Richard Hamilton has a new show at the Serpentine, but the Pop Art pioneer’s fame has never matched his extraordinary influence.
In his “Satyricon,” Fellini contented himself by playing God, the artist, off screen. Pasolini is not quite so modest. About halfway through “The Decameron” he himself shows up as Giotto, one of the founding fathers of the Renaissance. Thereafter we see him periodically, surrounded by his students, at work on a giant fresco, the holy faces of which are those of the thieves, whores, merchants, nuns, friars, rubes, deceived husband and not-so-virginal lovers, whose stories we’ve been watching.
When his work is finally completed, Giotto is spent, drained, empty of feeling. “Why produce a work of art,” he says to himself, “when it’s so nice to dream about it?”
Pasolini’s dream is composed of the tales he tells us, takes as its theme a frenzied Giotto nightmare, in which the artist’s religious visions are overwhelmed by the more attractive visions of a pagan orgy.
Giotto’s Dream an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Jeni Spota. Using Pasolini’s interpretation of Boccaccio’s medieval allegory The Decameron, specifically Giotto’s dream sequence, Spota’s paintings blend traditional religious painting with a hallucinatory vibrancy.
Death will come with your eyes—
this death that accompanies us
from morning till night, sleepless,
deaf, like an old regret
or a stupid vice. Your eyes
will be a useless word,
a muted cry, a silence.
As you see them each morning
when alone you lean over
the mirror. O cherished hope,
that day we too shall know
that you are life and nothing.
For everyone death has a look.
Death will come with your eyes.
It will be like terminating a vice,
as seen in the mirror
a dead face re-emerging,
like listening to closed lips.
We’ll go down the abyss in silence.
Cesare Pavese is widely regarded as one of the foremost men of letters in twentieth-century Italian cultural history, and in particular as an emblematic figure: an earnest writer maimed by fascism and struggling with the modern existentialist dilemma of alienated meaning. Little known in the United States, Pavese was profoundly influenced by American literature, and, when official censorship closed his mouth, he would use his position as a translator and editor indirectly to bring into Italy messages of freedom and new ideas from English-language authors. Most Italians first encountered Herman Melville, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and Daniel Defoe in Pavese’s translations, and also encountered their influence, and echoes of their meditations, in Pavese’s own highly accomplished body of novels, short stories, and poems.
(August 31, 1942 – September 6, 2011) was an American film director, known for his “low-fi” aesthetic, playful use of no-talent actors, plotless plots, and themeless themes. Trained as a commercial artist in a vocational high school, the School of Industrial Art, he drew weather maps for a local news show.
George Kuchar, RIP. Kuchar and his twin brother Michael practically invented the “camp” genre. He prided himself on making films with non-actors, script, or theme, for almost no money. The 8mm movies he made in the 60s were as important a part of the underground film scene as those made by by Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage.
See for yourself, here’s his “masterpiece”, Hold Me While I’m Naked, a semi-autobiographical short about a pornographer. In the Village Voice’s Critics’ Poll of the 100 best films of the 20th century, it ranked 52nd.
“One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”
“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”
“There is no logical reason for the existence of a snowflake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains—if anything contains—the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves.”
Loren Eiseley September 3, 1907
(anthropologist, philosopher, and natural science writer)
The Starfish and the Spider The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations is a 2006 book by Ori Brafman (Is this a good book? )
(Bored surf-board) – Fung Lin Hall)
R.I P Samuel Menashe
“We think not in words but in shadows of words,”
There is never an end to loss, or hope
I give up the ghost for which I grope
Over and over again saying Amen
To all that does or does not happen—
The eternal event is now, not when –
Samuel Menashe