Vitro NasuIconoclastic Incubator
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Gong Li 
and Gaspard Ulliel, at Premier of Hannibal Rising.
Tragically Gaspard Ulliel an Elegant actor, he was only 37 when he passed away last January 2022.
Gong Li was born on New Year’s Eve. (Like Matisse and Paul Bowles)
Eros -Wong Kar Wai (Gong Li and Chen Chang)
Gong Li lives in France with her composer husband.
(Joshua Tree) ‘
Arata Isozaki Himalayas Center Zendai
Vivien Westwood & Greta Thunberg
Vivienne Westwood says Greta Thunberg should run the world
‘If Greta was world controller it would be great’
Joe Strummer 
(Photo of Joe Strummer by Masayoshi Sukita)
Thanks to Actor/Photographer Masatoshi Nagase who posted this on FB (Dec 23, 2022).
(Yoko Ogawa and Haruki Murakami)
Murakami adds voice to his work in reading with Yoko Ogawa
Murakami Library from Asahi Shinbun
AUTHORS ALIVE!: Murakami spins best of Stan Getz while he talks about jazz great
(3 books by Haruki Murakami Photo by Fung Lin Hall)
On the right:
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Left bottom
Haruki Murakami, Illustration by Anzai Mizumaru
Haruki Murakami Usagi Oishi Furansujin 1st Edition Mizumaru Anzai
The Top : The Scrap – 1980 Nostalgia.
Artforum Obit Philip Perlstein
f
Highliths friendship art of Pearlstein, Warhol & Cantor
Philip Pearlstein, whose planar arctic nudes of the 1960s revitalized realistic figure painting for a new generation, died December 17 in New York at the age of ninety-eight. An accomplished illustrator by his teens, Pearlstein flirted with the emotional hues and geometric shapes of Abstract Expressionism before diving fully into figuration with his disaffected, antisexual nudes and paving the way for such twentieth-century notables as Jack Beal, Alex Katz, and Alfred Leslie. “A typical Pearlstein nude, in which the genitals are rarely as obvious as in any of [Larry] Rivers’ earlier nudes, establishes so corporeal a presence that, despite its seeming somnambulant apathy, it bursts through the limits of style,” wrote Sidney Tillim in a 1966 issue of Artforum, attempting to explain the controversy then surrounding the artist’s work. “The nude, in other words, regains its existential dignity.” (Artforum obit)
Graduating from the University of Tokyo, where he studied French literature, Yoshida entered the Shōchiku studio in 1955 and worked as an assistant to Keisuke Kinoshita,[1] before debuting as a director in 1960 with Rokudenashi.[2] He was a central member of what came to be called the “Shōchiku Nouvelle Vague” along with Nagisa Oshima and Masahiro Shinoda,[3] and his works have been studied under the larger rubric of the Japanese New Wave,[4] a linkage which Yoshida himself disliked.[1] Like many of his New Wave cohorts, he felt restricted under the studio system. After Shōchiku’s re-editing of his Escape from Japan (1964), he left the studio to start his own production company,[1] for which he directed such films as Eros + Massacre.[2]
Between 1960 and 2004, Yoshida directed more than 20 films, some of which starred his wife, actress Mariko Okada.[1] After a long absence from the screen following the 1973 Coup d’État, he returned with A Promise, which was shown in the Un Certain Regard section the 1986 Cannes Film Festival.[5] Two years later, his film Wuthering Heights would compete for the Golden Palm at the 1988 Festival.[6] In 2002, Women in the Mirror followed after another hiatus of 14 years.[7] In addition to his theatrical films, Yoshida directed a series of documentaries for Japanese TV.
Yoshida named European cinema as a great influence on his work, most notably the directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, and pre-war French films like the works of Jean Renoir.[1] He also published a number of books on the topic of cinema, including one on his own cinematic work and an analysis of the films of Yasujirō Ozu.
Mariko Okada married to Yoshishige Yoshida is an actress who worked with her husband, Yasujiro Ozu, Juzo Itami and her father was a legendary silent film star Okada Tokihiko. (Both father and daughter were directed by Ozu).
‘We can’t paint a rosy picture’: Robert Downey Sr’s life of drugs, taboo-busting films and parental regrets
Robert Downey Jr. Reveals Making of Sr. was Improvisational
Indewire Interview on Downey Jr and Chris Smith
Making “‘Sr.’” was a transformative experience for both Downey and Smith, with the latter saying it had a “huge profound impact” on the way he shoots and directs future projects. “Robert says early on, ‘My dad’s a lover of process.’ And I felt like that was something that was always with me during the process of making this film. And I do so many other films that are done in a different way, that there was something very exciting and it reminded me of how I started, which is like on this film called ‘American Movie,’ where it was me with a camera on my shoulder, little to no crew, just trying to figure it out as we went along. And to me, that’s the most exciting,” said Smith.
Many of us not so familiar with Robert Downey Sr. learn from watching this documentary that Robert Downey Sr. appeared in “Boogie Nights”, or that Senior and Paul Thomas Anderson were close friends. (Many of their conversations were on youtube).
Watch this,
Paul Thomas Anderson & Robert Downey Sr Talk Putney Swope/
Because of “Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond”, the producer suggested that Chris Smith contact Robert Downey Jr to make his documentary.
(Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond” .)
(The Pool in Goa)
Chris Smith Interview – Filmmaker
Filmmaker: When did you first read Randy Russell’s short story? And when did you decide you want to transpose it to Goa?
Smith: I’m always looking for something that looks interesting and engaging. For me, it was one of those stories that I read and then came back to. It just sort of stuck with me; it was so simple and some of the themes seemed so universal. I thought back to the experience I had when I was in India about four or five years ago helping some friends shoot a movie, where we were living at that hotel and interacting with the roomboys and getting a sense of their lives. The idea of putting those two worlds together seemed really interesting to me, and I thought the two could be combined in a way that could provide a lot of rich material to work from.
2)The kids didn’t know how to read so for me it was more important to get a good performance than to get word-for-word.
Mylene Demongeot was born Marie-Helene Demongeot on September 29, 1935, in Nice, France, into a family of actors. Her parents met in Shanghai, China, and moved to Nice, where she grew up. Her mother, Klaudia Trubnikova, was a Russian-Ukrainian émigré from Kharkiv, who escaped from the horrors of the Russian Civil War.
A “veteran of cinema”[11] who started as one of the blond sex symbols of the 1950s and 1960s,[12][13][14] she managed to avoid typecasting by exploring many film genres including thrillers, westerns, comedies, swashbucklers, period films and even pepla, such as Romulus and the Sabines (1961) and Gold for the Caesars (1963).
Demongeot was also nominated for the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles for her portrayal of Abigail Williams in The Crucible (1957) which also garnered her best actress at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and was twice nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the César Awards for 36 Quai des Orfèvres (2004)[15] and French California (2006).
(Bonjour Tristesse Jean Seberg and Mylene Demongeot directed by Otto Preminger).
(“The Singer Not the Song” Mylene Demongeot with Dirk Bogarde)
Mylene Demongeot was in supporting roles with Catherine Deneuve in “Midwife” and “On My Way”.
