Monthly Archives: February 2012

‘Room 237′ A Film on Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’

February 21, 2012
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Cracking the Code in ‘Heeere’s Johnny!’

WHEN “The Shining” was released in 1980, many viewers, including the critic Pauline Kael, left theaters mystified by what they had just seen. Expecting a standard frightfest based on a Stephen King best seller, they got an unexplained river of blood surging out of hotel elevators, a vision of cobwebbed skeletons and a weird guy in a bear suit doing something untoward with a gentleman in a tuxedo.

Three decades on, scholars and fans are still trying to decipher this puzzle of a film directed by Stanley Kubrick. To them it’s only ostensibly about an alcoholic father, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) going more than stir crazy while his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and son, Danny, try to cope in an isolated hotel, the Overlook. Mr. Kubrick was famously averse to offering explanations of his films — “I have found it always the best policy to allow the film to speak for itself,” he once wrote — which has led to a mind-boggling array of theories about just what he was up to…..

New York Times


How Stanley Kubrick Kept His Eye on the Budget, Down to the Orange Juice

February 21, 2012
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Nothing revealed Stanley Kubrick’s singular intelligence — nor his endearing humor and humanity — more than budgetary decisions. He wore his producer’s hat as ingeniously as his director’s one, confounding expectations.

Before he arrived in New York for the opening of 2001, stories of his obsessive genius preceded him. He had a pilot’s license, but wouldn’t fly after monitoring the control towers at various airports, finding their safety inadequate. He knew the best dental procedures and rumors spread that he had an open telephone to the dentist’s office when a family member underwent treatment….

Moviefone

Remain in light: Mulholland Dr. and the cosmogony of David Lynch

February 21, 2012
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As our ten-yearly poll to find the Greatest Film of All Time gets ever closer, B. Kite considers David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. in the light of the Vedanta-inspired spiritual philosophy that underpins all the director’s work

Despite the accusations of incoherence sometimes made against them by critics who ought to know better, the films of David Lynch seem to share a remarkably consistent cosmogony that can be sketched as follows: the soul originates in light and unity and has its home there. Although this unity can never in fact be divided, the soul takes on the guise of individual identity, or separateness, and enters the theatre of the world. Once in place, it often forgets its origins and mistakes its role for its being or, in dim intervals of recollection, believes itself so soiled by violence or dark multiplicities of desire that it imagines itself isolate, forever drifting, alone and homeless. But that is the ultimate illusion, and the bleakest. The soul’s essence remains untouched and untouchable, and after however many cycles of rebirth its eventual homecoming is assured, has happened, is perpetually happening. It only remains for the soul to wake up in order to realise it never left. Nearly every Lynch film has a happy ending…..

Sight and Sound

Jean Vigo: Artist of the floating world

February 21, 2012
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The sole full-length feature made by Jean Vigo, L’Atalante was a bridge between the surrealism of 1920s French cinema and the poetic realism of the 1930s. Graham Fuller makes the case for its inclusion in S&S’s forthcoming ‘Greatest Films of All Time’ poll

Jean Vigo’s great work about a pair of troubled newly-weds and the crusty old mate with the Hapsburg jaw and unfettered imagination who travels with them aboard the Normandy freight barge L’Atalante was based on a one-page scenario by Jean Guinée. This was the pen name of Roger de Guichen, who had been intrigued by the sight of a woman helming a barge on the Seine, and had named his fictional vessel after a frigate commanded by one of his ancestors in the Seven Years War. Following the banning of Vigo’s Zéro de conduite in 1933, the director’s supportive producer Jacques-Louis Nounez sent him Guinée’s scenario hoping it would deter him from the kind of radical experimentation that had illuminated Vigo’s scabrous 42-minute satire of boarding-school life….

Sight and Sound

Ebooks and literature

February 21, 2012
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Books That Are Never Done Being Written
Digital text is ushering in an era of perpetual revision and updating, for better and for worse
By NICHOLAS CARR

I recently got a glimpse into the future of books. A few months ago, I dug out a handful of old essays I’d written about innovation, combined them into a single document, and uploaded the file to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. Two days later, my little e-book was on sale at Amazon’s site. The whole process couldn’t have been simpler.

Then I got the urge to tweak a couple of sentences in one of the essays. I made the edits on my computer and sent the revised file back to Amazon. The company quickly swapped out the old version for the new one. I felt a little guilty about changing a book after it had been published, knowing that different readers would see different versions of what appeared to be the same edition. But I also knew that the readers would be oblivious to the alterations…..

The Wall Street Journal

A video interview with Robert Franzen

February 21, 2012
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Meet the Writers (B&N)

New York exhibition reviews from ArtForum

February 21, 2012
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New York Exhibitions

Artforum

Who Destroyed Classical Civilization?

February 21, 2012
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by Emmet Scott

For centuries scholars assumed that the civilization of ancient Rome, the civilization we now call “classical,” was destroyed by the barbarian tribes of Germany and central Asia who, during the fourth and fifth centuries swarmed into the Empire and destroyed the political power of the Eternal City. The migrations of the Goths, Vandals, and Huns, were held responsible for reducing Europe to an economic and cultural wasteland, and initiating the long period of backwardness we now call the “Dark Ages.”

This was the view that prevailed till the sixteenth century, at which point, in the wake of the Reformation, a new suspect was added: the Christian, or more accurately, the Catholic, Church. According to this idea (one that remains strikingly popular in the English-speaking world), Christianity was corrupted beyond recognition after the time of Constantine and from the fourth century onwards a power-hungry Church hierarchy, in cahoots with the Imperial authorities, kept the population of Europe in subservience and ignorance, effectively completing the destructive work of the Barbarians…..

New English Review

Cars, car parks and cities

February 21, 2012
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Between the Lines

That prized garage space or curbside spot you’ve been yearning for may be costing you—and the city—in ways you never realized. A journey into the world of parking, where meter maids are under siege, everybody’s on the take, and the tickets keep on coming.

By Dave Gardetta

Anyone scanning Disney Hall’s debut calendar in the fall of 2003 would have noticed the size of that first season’s schedule, 128 shows in all. That’s a weighty number for a new hall—one might have assumed it was chosen by venue management wanting the gravitas of a world-class chamber’s arrival or perhaps seeking a broad spectrum of music that could reflect the diverse city. Those guesses would have been wrong. Disney Hall had been built atop Parcel K, a county-owned square of land on Bunker Hill that long had sat empty, awaiting development. For decades Parcel K served a prosaic function: It was a parking lot. Commercial landowners like parking lots; they generate cash until better economic conditions arrive, and blank space can be converted into a more profitable moneymaking device—typically a building. The practice is called “land banking.”Yet before an auditorium could be raised on K, a six-floor subterranean garage capable of holding 2,188 cars needed to be sunk below it at a cost of $110 million—money raised from county bonds. Parking spaces can be amazingly expensive to fabricate…..

Los Angeles Magazine


Lucian Freud dismantled the established conventions of portrait painting

February 21, 2012
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Lucian Freud Portraits
National Portrait Gallery, 9th February-27th May

A parent on bedside watch might have had the notion. A certain kind of photographer, too—the kind obsessed, for instance, by isolated fragments and strange magnifications. But among established portrait painters, the idea that the soles of a woman’s feet might testify to her person as eloquently and forcefully as her face feels unique to Lucian Freud.

The picture I’m thinking of is “Annabel Sleeping,” a portrait Freud made of one of his grown daughters in the late 1980s. It shows a woman, lying asleep on a bed, wearing a sky-blue dressing gown.

What makes it unusual, as a portrait,  (and Freud thought of almost all of his pictures of people—and animals, too—as portraits) is that the subject is completely turned away from us. Not only are we not shown her face, we can’t even see the shape of her head. The closest we get is a spray of unkempt dark brown hair emerging from behind foetally hunched shoulders. The only parts of her body that are actually exposed are her ankles, her toes, and soles of her feet…..

Prospect Magazine