The documentary was made to celebrate Tagore’s birth centenary in May 1961. Ray was conscious that he was making an official portrait of India’s celebrated poet and hence the film does not include any controversial aspects of Tagore’s life. However, it is far from being a propaganda film.
“I find I am inimical to the idea of making two similar films in succession,” wrote the great Indian director Satyajit Ray in 1966, and in this, as in everything he wrote or filmed, he spoke the truth.
Bruce Chatwin Edinburgh flat
Bruce was born on May 13, 1940
Susan Sontag wrote of him: “There are few people in this world who have the kind of looks which enchant and enthrall … It isn’t just beauty, it’s a glow, something in the eyes. And it works on both sexes.”
Werner Herzog said Chatwin was a great story teller..
German filmmaker Werner Herzog relates a story about meeting Chatwin in Australia while Herzog was working on his 1984 film, Where the Green Ants Dream. Finding out that Chatwin was in Australia researching a book (The Songlines), Herzog sought him out. Herzog states that Chatwin professed his admiration for him, and when they met was carrying one of Herzog’s books, On Walking In Ice. The two hit it off immediately, united by a shared love of adventure and telling tall tales. Herzog states that he and Chatwin talked almost nonstop over two days, telling each other stories. He said that Chatwin “told about three times as many as me.”[24] Herzog also claims that when Chatwin was near death, he gave Herzog his leather rucksack and said,”You’re the one who has to wear it now, you’re the one who’s walking.”
In 1987, Herzog made Cobra Verde, a film based on Chatwin’s 1980 novel The Viceroy of Ouidah, depicting the life of Francisco Manoel da Silva, a fictional Brazilian slave trader working in West Africa. Locations for the film included Brazil, Colombia and Ghana. via his wiki..
Cobra Verde was based on Bruce Chatwin’s novel The Viceroy of Ouidah.
Click to see large ( Photo by Eve Arnold)
INDIA. Bruce CHATWIN interviewing in Delhi for the Sunday Times. 1977 On the Road with Mrs G. (A witty and charming article on Indira Gandhi by Bruce Chatwin- they talked about Joan of Arc & Margaret Thatcher- describing a leader out of touch.)
Click to see large
Not a travel writer but a traveling writer, he was a biblioperipatetic. He read, that is, as he walked — large swatches of Western literature and thought were lavished on the places and people he visited — and he walked as he read.
In Patagonia
The quest writing was dazzling at the time (I reviewed some of it, and was dazzled). Visiting the aged Nadezhda Mandelstam, he sorts out body and soul. She lies curled up in bed, shabby and unkempt, welcoming a gift of marmalade, sniffing at a bottle of less than premium Champagne and getting Chatwin to straighten a painting she’d knocked awry by hurling an unsatisfactory book at it. It was modernist white-on-white: ”Perhaps that is all one can do today in Russia?” she muses.(via There’s No Place That’s Home)
Bruce Chatwin Photo by James Ivory
In the summer of 1972, before starting to work as an adviser on art at the Sunday Times, Chatwin went to Oregon (USA) trying to finish his nomad book. He stayed in a cabin, owned by the film director James Ivory, in the Lake of the Woods (Klamath County).
Chatwin met Ivory in England in 1969, at the house of the painter Howard Hodgkin near Bath.
Here is a Chatwin’s picture taken by Ivory in the Oregon desert (1972): (via Facebook)
What Am I Doing Here?
In this text, Bruce Chatwin writes of his father, of his friend Howard Hodgkin, and of his talks with Andre Malraux and Nadezhda Mandelstram. He also follows unholy grails on his travels, such as the rumour of a “wolf-boy” in India, or the idea of looking for a Yeti.
Mr. Blank trolled for subject matter on the American periphery, in cultural pockets where the tradition is long but the exposure limited. His films often have a geographic as well as cultural specificity, and food and music are often the featured elements. His musical subjects included Norteño bands of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, Cajun fiddlers of Louisiana and polka enthusiasts from across the country.
“You could call him an ethnographer; you could call him an ethnomusicologist or an anthropologist,” Mr. Hackford said. “He was interested in certain cultures that Americans are unaware of. He shot what he wanted, captured it beautifully, and those subjects are now gone. The homogenization of American culture has obliterated it.”
Scott Walker: 30 Century Man is a 2006 documentary film about Scott Walker. The film gets its title from the Scott 3 song “30 Century Man”. It is directed and co-produced by Stephen Kijak, with Grant Gee serving as director of photography. It charts Walker’s career in music, with a focus on his songwriting, and features exclusive footage of recording sessions for his most recent album
Scott Walker is the recluse’s recluse – a singer and writer who went from teenage heartthrob with incredible hair to tortured soul in the space of four eponymous albums between 1967 to 1969. In the 43 intervening years he has released only four more “proper” solo albums, each more eremitic than the last (plus others of standards and country ballads he would rather expunge from history).
His hero was the Flemish chansonnier Jacques Brel, whose music he had been turned on to by a German Bunny Girl he had picked up at a party in the Playboy Club on Park Lane. ‘I don’t listen to Brel that much now,’ he says, ‘but in those days, hearing him sing was like a hurricane blowing through the room.’
Pola X is the soundtrack album to Léos Carax’s film of the same name composed, and produced by the American solo artist Scott Walker. The soundtrack also includes contributions from Smog, Sonic Youth, Fairuz, Nguyên Lê, and M. Luobin Wang. It was released on 17 May 1999. It was Walker’s first full soundtrack.
Peter Singer’s thoughts on the ethics of consumption are amplified against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue’s posh boutiques. Slavoj Zizek questions current beliefs about the environment while sifting through a garbage dump. Michael Hardt ponders the nature of revolution while surrounded by symbols of wealth and leisure. Judith Butler and a friend stroll through San Francisco’s Mission District questioning our culture’s fixation on individualism. And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West—perhaps America’s best-known public intellectual—compares philosophy to jazz and blues, reminding us how intense and invigorating a life of the mind can be.
Featuring Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor. (via)
Sunaura Taylor (Astra’s sister) and Judith Butler on the street of San Francisco.
Going against the norm of “serious” documentaries tending to be depressing, Taylor here creates a film of substance that is nevertheless light on its feet. Neither the walking philosophers nor their conversations stop for a moment during Examined Life, so the result is physically and mentally energetic piece of filmmaking. And as the ideas in Taylor’s film are engaging and thought-provoking without being overly complex, we are left invigorated rather than bamboozled.
One of Taylor’s inspirations comes from Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker – Scott McLemee
NONFICTION FILM – MOVIES – Experiments in terror – Director Barbet Schroeder has a particular flair for films that expose the evil that walks among us.(LAtimes)
Terror’s Advocate: Barbet Schroeder Talks
I was using Verges as a way to tell the history of terrorism, using him to lead us into the world of terrorism. It all started with the war in Algiers. It ended with the two towers in New York. But it didn’t end with the two towers, unfortunately. Never before Algiers did you have blind terrorism attacking people in cafes who were guilty of being part of a race or group. The Palestinians after that took their lead from the Algerians. This was the story of the film, to see how terrorism evolved from the very beginning, when it was more beautiful and heroic and got corrupted rapidly.(Via)
Celebration of “Algerian Day”, carrying the portrait of Djamila Bouhired.
Verges defended German Magdalena Kopp, wife of Carlos the Jackal and may have been her lover. Verges seems to have had a lifelong sexual attraction to terrorist women such as Djamila and Magdalena. In the film Verges is an enigmatic figure who enjoys enhancing his own myths. He disappears for eight years 1970-1978 and is rumored to be in Cambodia (era of the Khmer Rouge) but seems to have been mostly living in a small hotel in Paris hiding from the family of an African dictator who Verges promised to get released from prison but the dictator died instead. The extended section of film on Carlos the Jackal was possible because Carlos spent much of his time “hiding” in East Germany where the GDR’s Stasi dedicated an entire division to following his every move, copying his correspondence and recording his phone calls. Schroeder is able to tap this goldmine of information including recordings of Carlos’ own voice ranting that he knows Verges has been sleeping with his wife.
What will surprise is the breadth and veracity of Jacques Verges activities over the last half century. It reads as a who’s who of the revolutionary / terroristic movements of the world. (Member review from Lovefilm)
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).
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.
Astra Taylor
