1 pce.

"...guided along as it were a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life."

Museum of Jurassic Technology

Documentary on Luchino Visconti

"Dance Olympics"

My Illustration for a Russian performance of Ludwig Minkus’s “Don Quixote.” 

Read more in this week's New Yorker.

Fall Down Laughing: The Hilarious, Risky Cinema of Buster Keaton

Often categorized with great silent comedy masters Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton (1895 – 1966) stands out as the most fearless, difficulty-defying physical showman of his era. Combining riotous comedy with heart-stopping risk, Keaton truly understood the place of peril in comedy, and his films offer the best proof that laughs and gasps naturally go hand-in-hand. An intuitive actor and deft choreographer of sight gags, Keaton’s films exhibit a surprising subtlety, and a beauty in composition that rivals the best silent directors of any genre.

As a very young child, Keaton toured in vaudeville with his parents and trained from an early age to be hurled and swung about for chuckles. Whether being thrown into an orchestra pit or through a bass drum (hence the nickname “Buster”), he would emerge from these alarming stunts with a deadpan expression that brought down the house. This would eventually be part of his grown-up onscreen signature: a solemn mug in the face of uproarious disaster. This contradiction is at the heart of all of Keaton’s films, and is seen most terrifically in his finest works, including the railroad thrill-ride THE GENERAL (in which Keaton famously sits on the front of a moving locomotive), the seafaring romp THE NAVIGATOR (complete with a scuba-diving sequence) and the fantasy detective comedy SHERLOCK JR. (during which Keaton actually fractured his neck while performing a dangerous stunt).

"It's said that Chaplin wanted you to like him, but Keaton didn't care. I think he cared, but was too proud to ask. Buster survives tornadoes, waterfalls, avalanches of boulders and falls from great heights, and never pauses to take a bow: He has his eye on his goal. And his movies, seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising how, without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness." - Roger Ebert

 Aero Theatre

  1328 Montana Avenue,
 Santa Monica, CA 

 Fri, April 22 - Sun, April 24

 

"Pina"

PINA is a film for Pina Bausch by Wim Wenders.

The feature-length dance film was shot in 3D with the ensemble of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch and shows the exhilarating and inimitable art of the great German choreographer who died in the summer of 2009, inviting the viewer on a sensual, visually stunning journey of discovery into a new dimension: right onto the stage of the legendary ensemble and together with the dancers beyond the theater, into the city and the surrounding industrial landscape of Wuppertal – the place that was the home and center of Pina Bausch's creative life for more than 35 years.

Elizabeth Taylor 1932-2011

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.

~Elizabeth Taylor

" They were all impressed with your Halston dress and the people that you knew at Elaine's."

Elaine Kaufman, who became something of a symbol of New York as the salty den mother of Elaine’s, one of the city’s best-known restaurants and a second home for almost half a century to writers, actors, athletes and other celebrities, died Friday in Manhattan. She was 81.

To the patrons she knew at her Upper East Side establishment, Ms. Kaufman was the quirky, opinionated, tender-hearted and imposingly heavyset proprietor who came in almost every night to check on things and schmooze, moving from table to table and occasionally perching herself on a stool at the end of her 25-foot mahogany bar.

With those she did not know, her demeanor varied; some accused her of being rude, though she indignantly denied that she ever was. As she put it, she had little time to explain to dissatisfied customers why they were being directed to tables in the back, known as Siberia, or led to the bar or even turned away, when they could clearly see empty tables along “the line.”

The line was the row of tables along the right wall of the main room, extending from the front to the back and visible from the entrance. Those tables were almost always saved for the most valued regulars, with or without reservations. One regular was Woody Allen, who filmed a scene for “Manhattan” at Elaine’s.

Elaine’s, in fact, was a scene, a noisy restaurant and bar celebrated as a celebrity hangout that all but shouted “New York” to the rest of the country, if not the world. For Billy Joel, in his 1979 hit “Big Shot,” the very name connoted the uptown in-crowd. (“They were all impressed with your Halston dress/And the people that you knew at Elaine’s.”)

“Quartett” at Brooklyn Academy of Music

 Passion burns cold in Robert Wilson’s trance-inducing production of “Quartett,” Heiner Müller’s ruthless reimagining of Choderlos de Laclos’s 18th-century novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Lights of many colors dye the all-too-mortal flesh of the figures assembled here to recall the blood-drawing games of lust they once shared. Sometimes their faces glow a reptilian green; on other occasions they are drenched in satanic red.

Yet the hues that seem to capture their spirit most exactly are a frostbitten blue and a pure Arctic white. The dying woman at the center of this forbidding journey into retrospect, which is being conducted at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, may have lived her life in the heat of a chain of carnal embraces. But her world is definitely ending not in fire but ice.

“Quartett,” which opened Wednesday night and runs through Nov. 14, may well be the sexually frankest play in New York this side of a backroom peephole. But with a cast led by the formidable French actress Isabelle Huppert in a magnificently mannered performance, it is the very opposite of an aphrodisiac.

via: "A Minuet Between Sexual Predators" By Ben Brantley

"Song of the Witches"

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,

In the caldron boil and bake;

Eye of newt and toe of frog,

Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,

Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,

For a charm of powerful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Cool it with a baboon's blood,

Then the charm is firm and good.

By William Shakespeare

 The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (1983)

Photograph: Yasuhiro Ishimoto

Halloween, Chicago 1950s

 

"Adventures of Prince Achmed"

If you ask the average person what the first feature-length animated film was, just about everyone will answer Walt Disney's "Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs". But Disney's film wasn't the first animated feature by a longshot. Arguably, that honor belongs to Lotte Reiniger's "Adventures of Prince Achmed". 

In 1923, Reiniger and her husband and business partner, Carl Koch began work on an ambitious project... a feature length silhouette puppet film based on "The One Thousand and One Nights". She worked with animator Bertold Bartosch and background artist Walter Ruttman for three years on the film. The paper cutouts were jointed using wires and delicately arranged on top of a lightbox, where it was photographed frame by frame. Reiniger continued to animate her distinctive silhouette films up into the mid-1970s. 

On Nov. 11 and 15 the artist Kara Walker will introduce one of the earliest feature-length animated films, Lotte Reiniger’s “Adventures of Prince Achmed” (1926), as restored by the Deutsches Filmmuseum.