Passages

[domino harvey]

The Gary in me recommends you all go watch Blindfold in her honor and thank me later

[Feego]

Her performance in Girl with a Suitcase is magnificent. She is simply one of my favorite presences in cinema. I rewatched Fitzcarraldo a couple of years ago, and I may be one of the few people who prefers the first part of the movie, before Kinski embarks on his mad voyage, and part of that is because of her absence in the second half.

[flyonthewall2983]

Her arrival to America with Morricone's perfect cue makes me cry each time. You're not alone in feeling that way with that particular performance.

For me it’s when she arrives and finds her new family dead. It is such a staggeringly quiet moment when the daughter is killed before father screams and it all goes down before the moment we see the face of the villain. The impending sadness can even be felt in those great establishing shots with the score screaming from the heavens as Jill’s rider disdainfully passes the railroad crew.

Back to the moment she rides up to her new home, it is almost a little funny how it stops but quickly forgotten by the time the music is reintroduced and the screen fills with her sorrowful expression at it all. Her entire performance is brilliant but it is right up to this moment that holds onto so much of what follows, and how it projects against this epic story of good and evil.

[hearthesilence]

Danny Thompson, great bass player who was a founding member of Pentangle and has recorded with Nick Drake (Five Leaves Left), John McLaughlin, not a relative but frequent collaborator Richard Thompson (Hand of Kindness, Amnesia, Mock Tudor among many others), Kate Bush (The Dreaming, Hounds of Love among others), ABC, Tim Buckley, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Donovan, Graham Coxon, Marianne Faithfull, Peter Gabriel, the Incredible String Band, Bert Jansch, John Martyn, Alison Moyet, Rod Stewart (on Every Picture Tells a Story no less), David Sylvain, Talk Talk, Loudon Wainwright III, and many others.

[JSC]

Do yourself a favor and listen to 'Train Song' from Pentangle's Basket of Light album.
Great ensemble playing, Thompson is amazing.

[tolbs1010]

I thank you for this rec. Great live clip of it on YouTube.

[beamish14]

Henry Jaglom

[hearthesilence]

Henry Jaglom

I was wondering why he wasn't going to be at the NYFF for the new restoration of Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, and that answers my question.

[MichaelB]

Paolo Taviani's London Q&A was suddenly cancelled for what turned out to be the same reason.

[Never Cursed]

Assata Shakur

[Gregory]

George Hardy, 100, who appeared in multiple documentaries about the Tuskegee Airmen. He was the last surviving pilot of the segregated all-Black wing of the United States Army Air Force. I couldn't even find an English-language article to link.

Ruth Posner, 96, actor and Polish Holocaust survivor

[thirtyframesasecond]

Danny Thompson, great bass player who was a founding member of Pentangle and has recorded with Nick Drake (Five Leaves Left), John McLaughlin, not a relative but frequent collaborator Richard Thompson (Hand of Kindness, Amnesia, Mock Tudor among many others), Kate Bush (The Dreaming, Hounds of Love among others), ABC, Tim Buckley, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Donovan, Graham Coxon, Marianne Faithfull, Peter Gabriel, the Incredible String Band, Bert Jansch, John Martyn, Alison Moyet, Rod Stewart (on Every Picture Tells a Story no less), David Sylvain, Talk Talk, Loudon Wainwright III, and many others.

I could immediately tell which of the tracks he played on on Brilliant Trees / Secrets of the Beehive - astonishing playing on The Ink in the Well, The Boy with the Gun and Orpheus.

[Drucker]

Kaleb Horton, a well-liked and unique Journalist and (dare I say) Twitter/online personality died this morning from a seizure. He published this very cool piece in Rolling Stone earlier this year.

[hearthesilence]

Saw that too. What an awful way to find out. He's had a history of seizures including at least one major one, but it's still a bit of a shock.

FWIW, he wrote this great piece about Merle Haggard in 2016. May be the best he's ever written as he's from Bakersfield himself. (Too bad MTV took it down because they ditched music altogether - fortunately he was able to find it and repost it on his own site.) He was covering the 2016 election for MTV but an editor there was wise enough to let him write about this too.

[colinr0380]

Poet Tony Harrison, who created a stir when his poem V, with its strong language, was aired on Channel 4 in 1987 in a film directed by Richard Eyre. His other brush with film was when Harrison himself directed his state of Britain (and Europe) piece Prometheus in 1998 (the linked video comes from its single UK television screening to date, again on Channel 4, back in 2000).

What my boss Zeus long planned to do, was melt man down and mould anew.
Smelt the old stock and re-cast a better mankind from the last and "better" was his way of saying "Man with a bent for more obey"
Zeus would have fulfilled his dreams but for Prometheus and his schemes, whose theft of fire first blurred the line dividing Mankind and Divine
By letting lower challenge higher. By giving mere Men Zeus's fire.

___

We've got knowledge; we've got fire / We've raised ourse'ns up out o' th'mire
Diso-bloody-bedience got us over / the barbed wire fences of Jehovah
But when they'sens "bring back barbed wire / round bramleys and round bakehouse fire"
There's not one joy that some bloody berk'll / want it ringed with a red circle
Gods - or men who are summat similar / Hermes or some downhill Himmler
Those in power would like t' red ring / round almost bloody everything

There is also a 1983 recording of Harrison's production of Aeschylus' Oresteia directed by Peter Hall - see also Part II and Part III plus the documentary The Oresteia at Epidaurus.

[Gregory]

Jørgen Leth, 88, known for his documentary A Sunday in Hell (1977) and his surreal short film The Perfect Human (1968), for getting canceled in Denmark twenty years ago, and for being a close friend and colleague of Lars von Trier

[colinr0380]

... who got Leth to remake The Perfect Human five times (including one with the animation team behind Richard Linklater's Waking Life and before they did A Scanner Darkly!) in The Five Obstructions.

[knives]

In the past year I’ve really gotten into his films. There’s a fun sort of casual structuralism to them.

[beamish14]

Sara Jane Moore, who was almost successful in assassinating President Gerald Ford 50 years ago. A documentary on her from Robinson Devor (The Woman Chaser, Zoo, etc.) debuted at festivals last year

[Gregory]

Renato Casaro, 89, Italian artist known for his posters for films such as: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), My Name Is Nobody (1973), Quadrophenia (1979), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Tenebrae (1982), Octopussy (1983), Never Say Never Again (1983), Dune (1984), Flesh and Blood (1985), Red Sonja (1985), Over the Top (1987), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), Fire, Ice and Dynamite (1990), The Sheltering Sky (1990), Dances With Wolves (1990), and Army of Darkness (1992).

I was at the cinema to see a film almost every day [as a child]. As well as enjoying the films themselves, I fell immediately in love with the posters that were displayed when a new film was showing. I used to go by the cinema every day to see if they were changing the posters and when they were I would ask if I could take them home. I was usually in luck and would run home with the poster and go into my bedroom to study it before attempting to paint a copy of it. I always did this because it helped me to understand how the artist had achieved the finished result.

[beamish14]

The poster for Army of Darkness is an absolute miracle of draftsmanship and vision

[jbeall]

Renato Casaro, 89, Italian artist known for his posters for films such as: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), My Name Is Nobody (1973), Quadrophenia (1979), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Tenebrae (1982), Octopussy (1983), Never Say Never Again (1983), Dune (1984), Flesh and Blood (1985), Red Sonja (1985), Over the Top (1987), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), Fire, Ice and Dynamite (1990), The Sheltering Sky (1990), Dances With Wolves (1990), and Army of Darkness (1992).

The Guardian has a nice gallery of some of his posters here.

[Gregory]

Nice. He captured the Christian menace of Annie Wilkes so well

[JamesF]

Renato Casaro, 89, Italian artist known for his posters for films such as: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), My Name Is Nobody (1973), Quadrophenia (1979), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Tenebrae (1982), Octopussy (1983), Never Say Never Again (1983), Dune (1984), Flesh and Blood (1985), Red Sonja (1985), Over the Top (1987), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), Fire, Ice and Dynamite (1990), The Sheltering Sky (1990), Dances With Wolves (1990), and Army of Darkness (1992).

The Guardian has a nice gallery of some of his posters here.

Unfortunately they used the wrong poster for Fistful; this is Casaro’s, painted for the German re-release in the 1970s.

[MichaelB]

Hungarian director Judit Elek - the link is to a retrospective introduction, but it also sadly now doubles as an obituary.