| Richter to join O'Brien on TBS talk show By 2010-10-12T16:30:59ZNEW YORK (AP) -- When Conan O'Brien debuts his new, late night talk show on TBS he'll have an old friend and colleague by his side.... hosted.ap.org |
Brief Encounter: Archive review From the Observer, 25 November 1945Noël Coward's Brief Encounter (New Gallery) is, to my mind, not only the most mature work Mr Coward has yet prepared for the cinema, but one of the most emotionally honest and deeply satisfactory films that have ever been made in this country. I doubt very much if it will be generally popular. It represents a confidence so utterly frank that few people will be simple enough to accept it as true.It is the story of a middle-aged married man and a middle-aged woman who meet by accident, fall deeply in love, and agree to separate and get over it. Their rendezvous is a station refreshment room in a North-Country market town. He is a doctor, who comes in every Thursday to take over a morning's duty at the local hospital. She is a housewife, who comes in to change her library book, go to the pictures and do her weekly shopping. He catches the 5.40 down. She catches the 5.43 up. For a few stolen moments each week, over thin cups of tea from the urn and the prosaic Bath bun, they escape into a world of enchantment that would probably never have been theirs had they met earlier, when each was free; when neither had contracted responsibilities that were heavy enough to escape from. The tragedy of their romance is that it is doomed to be barren from the start. From the instant when the couple realise that their relation is something stronger than mere friendship, their happiness is lost. Innocence of action betrays the guilt of thought. The woman becomes suddenly aware of the weight of affection that holds her to her husband, the hundred tiny steely threads that bind her to her home. The man, while ready enough to throw over his own traces, is tender enough to respect hers, and so they part.The film has the benefit of three beautiful performances. Celia Johnson's as the wife, Trevor Howard's as the lover and Cyril Raymond's as the husband. The sweetness, the sobriety, and the fresh delicacy of these performers prevents the film from ever becoming sordid. I do not like the technical trick of telling the story in the form of an off-scene commentary. To my mind, Miss Johnson's face, and her walk, and her eyes, can tell a story, or impart a mood, or reveal a confidence without the help of any narrative.Romanceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Andrei Rublev: Archive review From the Guardian, 16 August 1973Tarkovsky's film Andrei Rublev switches from black and white into colour for the last five of its 146 minutes, and the camera tracks quietly over Rublev's masterpiece, "Abraham's three angels". This is the first we see of the great icon painter's work, yet Tarkovsky makes his film one of the most convincing portrayals in art of an artist; he succeeds by concentrating on the man's humanity.It may be the theme of the individual bucking the system that has brought about the film's strange fate. It won a prize at Cannes in 1969 then disappeared. It has been announced on occasions since, but failed to appear. Other than the press screening at the NFT this week, no shows in London have been planned. Maybe its producers, Mosfilm, are waiting for reactions to its single screening at the – dare one say? – relatively obscure Edinburgh International film festival to decide on the film's future as far as western screenings go. Rublev lived in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. From what we see of his icons in the film, his achievement is roughly parallel to Giotto's a century earlier, though since the economy and society was not at the stage of emerging Renaissance Italy's, the break with tradition was nothing like so conclusive. But his paintings move away from the hieratic Byzantine style towards a dramatic and human interpretation of Christianity: we first see his dilemma when he is commissioned to decorate a cathedral with a Last Judgment and he seizes up because he cannot bring himself to paint admonitory scenes of souls in torment. […]Andrei Tarkovsky's movie works through a slow, unstressed accumulation of scenes and images: August storms, winter fields, a vision of a crucifixion in the snow; peasants and monks struggling through the inhospitable landscape, nobles on horseback cantering at leisure; an intensely wrought group of heads. He pared drama of vision; the deliberate grandeur of perception.Rublev's dilemma is resolved after he watches a young craftsman at work on a huge church bell, untrammelled by doubts, pressing ahead through all difficulties. Nothing is said, nothing even hinted: but it becomes obvious that Rublev (played phlegmatically by Anatoly Solonitsyn) recognises in the young bellmaker his own careless, youthful genius and is fired anew. It's not the easiest of films but its lack of stylisation and its subtlety will cause it to be recognised in years to come as one of the best Soviet works. DramaWorld cinemaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
All Together Now: CMJ Festival Hosts 1,200 Bands What started as an industry confab in New York City has grown into a massive music marathon, where more than a thousand bands vie for their big break feedproxy.google.com |
Auf wiedersehen Britart: Germany wins when it comes to art | Jonathan Jones Is Germany the greatest European art nation of the 20th century?Which country leads Europe in contemporary art? Britain, of course, you answer. Look at all those people flocking to Tate Modern. Wrong. The best artists in Europe today are German. The towering geniuses Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer radically contrast in how they conceive art yet both, from their divergent perspectives, one super-cool, the other romantic, achieve a profundity that makes most British art look trite.But to widen the question – which was the greatest European art nation of the 20th century? France? Wrong again. It was Germany. Only Germany has been at the forefront of modern art from the early 20th century right up until today. Paris declined as a creative capital after 1939, but German artists have been revolutionary for 100 years without missing a beat. The passion of expressionist painting and cinema, the fragmentation grenades of Dada, the idealism of the Bauhaus and realism of Neue Sachlichkeit – these German art movements of the early 20th century did not give way, as in France, to cultural decline but instead burned on into the 1960s and 70s, when Joseph Beuys showed that art can still reach into myth and memory to renew the world. Beuys and his legacy – continued by Kiefer, rejected by Richter – coincided with a great renewal of German cinema: for one aspect of the German genius is that fine art and film have merged there since the days of Murnau.And a final question – who created the Renaissance? Well, Italy did, but Germany was the first northern country to adapt Renaissance ideas to its own culture, and the only land north of the Alps to produce one of the masters of the High Renaissance – the towering figure of Albrecht Dürer, whose genius is celebrated in a timely new book by Norbert Wolf. It was Dürer whose readiness to embrace the new technology of the printing press – his prints are as great as his paintings, or greater – set the modernising, forward-looking, and productive tone of German art right down to today, when new art flourishes in a Berlin that is the worthy heir to the cosmopolis portrayed in Kirchner's painting Potsdamer Platz. Anyone who spends a couple of days in Berlin's museums and galleries will come to the conclusion that the Germans really are better at art.ArtGerhard RichterJoseph BeuysGermanyFW MurnauWorld cinemaJonathan Jonesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |