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Didn’t realize he was in his 90s. Did Criterion use him for any supplements going back to the laser days?

FrauBlucher wrote: Fri Sep 27, 2019 10:46 pm Didn’t realize he was in his 90s. Did Criterion use him for any supplements going back to the laser days?

He did a commentary for The Adventures of Robin Hood and an audio essay for Scaramouche.

Behlmer's commentary for Notorious was recorded for laserdisc and re-used for the DVD and recent Blu/DVD reissue.

He did a lot of tracks for Warner - The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca, and Gone with the Wind being among the big titles. His GWTW track is incredible as he pretty much goes into every aspect of production and casting without any quiet stretches (he even talks over the overture, intermission, and entr'acte!) He also did one for the original DVD release of Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with Richard Fleischer

Yankee Doodle Dandy is another one of the WB titles. Also Frankenstein for Universal and Laura, The Black Swan and Captain from Castile for Fox in my collection. Looking forward to listening to the last two. Really knowledgeable and likeable guy.

Eric Pleskow, former President of United Artists and Orion Pictures

Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, whose reputation stretched well beyond his film scores, but there were an impressive number of those - the IMDB lists 76 credits, including Georgiy Danelia's Mimino (1977) and Kin-Dza-Dza (1986) and Eldar Shengelaya's Blue Mountains (1983).

I saw Jessye Norman perform in Shanghai circa 2008.
Quite a voice.

Philip Gips, who designed the posters for Rosemary's Baby, Alien, and forum favorite Downhill Racer.

Director-screenwriter Janusz Kondratiuk, who was never exactly a household name outside his native Poland (his creative input into Roman Polanski's early short Mammals is probably his highest-profile international credit), but he and his brother Andrzej had a substantial cult following at home - I wrote about them here.

(The Kondratiuks are probably best known for 1970's Hydro-Riddle, a Polish superhero movie whose central conceit is that the very idea of a Polish superhero is fundamentally ridiculous - although I was impressed by Janusz's solo-directed A Cat with a Dog from 2018, a clearly autobiographical film about a man forced to become his brother's full-time carer following a debilitating stroke).

Ed Ackerson, musician who recorded witha variety of bands, has passed away of cancer. I primarily knew him from the 90s band Polara.

Czech actress and (briefly jailed) human rights activist Vlasta Chramostová. Unsurprisingly, her filmography fizzles out after she became one of the signatories of the Charter 77 document, and only fitfully sprang into life post-1989, but before then she regularly appeared in films from 1949 onwards, most notably as the title character's wife in Juraj Herz's The Cremator (1968).

Stephen Moore - Voice of Marvin in the radio and TV Hitchikers, many other TV, film and stage roles.

Fiery Angel wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 8:25 pm Harold Bloom

Damn. He was a formative influence back in my late teens. I see his flaws more clearly now, but his message, that we should read closely and deeply, and that literary quality trumps ideology, are values I hold even today.

That NY Times article was an irritating read. Its lack of fairness was unsurprising, but no less annoying for that. Far from someone who only liked to read white men, Bloom was one of the most searching and wide-ranging readers and accepted genius in whatever form it came. Precisely because literary quality was all that moved him, he was never prejudicial against race, gender, sexuality, religion, what have you. The article points out he never included Alice Walker in his lists of great authors, which just reminds me of Charlie Rose confronting him about the same thing only for Bloom to praise instead the terrific and lesser known African-American poet, Thylias Moss.

Mr Sausage wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 8:38 pm

Fiery Angel wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 8:25 pm Harold Bloom

Damn. He was a formative influence back in my late teens. I see his flaws more clearly now, but his message, that we should read closely and deeply, and that literary quality trumps ideology, are values I hold even today.

That NY Times article was an irritating read. Its lack of fairness was unsurprising, but no less annoying for that. Far from someone who only liked to read white men, Bloom was one of the most searching and wide-ranging readers and accepted genius in whatever form it came. Precisely because literary quality was all that moved him, he was never prejudicial against race, gender, sexuality, religion, what have you. The article points out he never included Alice Walker in his lists of great authors, which just reminds me of Charlie Rose confronting him about the same thing only for Bloom to praise instead the terrific and lesser known African-American poet, Thylias Moss.

He goes into his thoughts on the contentious stance in one of his Charlie Rose Show appearances and tries in vain to make it clear to his critics that as a social liberal he doesn’t object to the politics but to the artistry of a work being considered secondary to its politics. He’s clearly in the mode of anti-theory professors that still reside (perhaps in fewer numbers these days) in English departments around the world, and his stance is inflexible to a degree I don’t share, but his actual argument isn’t as outrageous as his detractors make it sound— he simply thought a lot of second class or worse modern literature was being bolstered, at the expense of outre “classics” that had stood the rest of time until recently, for reasons beyond their aesthetic worth. That’s debatable on a case by case basis, of course, but it’s far from the slander that gets ascribed to his views

I think Bloom’s passion and love of literature was admirable (and sometimes absurdly and embarrassingly florid), and as a figure who seemed always preoccupied in the last few decades with his own inevitable death in terms of his own focus on questions of the canon and why it matters, this is the kind of announcement that carries a particular weight

Funny to think of him as anti-theory (which he was, at least of continental theories) because he was himself so densely theoretical back in the 70s and was even associated with the Yale deconstructionists, for instance having an essay published in the book Deconstruction and Criticism alongside essays by Derrida and de Man. He claims never to've been a deconstructionist and that his own theories were, in his words, antithetical to theirs. I believe him. But he came to dislike both politically motivated theories and totalizing theories, turning against even his mentor and most profound influence, Northrop Frye, for flattening and homogenizing cultural traditions, in Bloom's view. But then Bloom's own influence theory could be rather totalizing. He was a complicated guy

I still admire his early theory of English poetry as a Romantic tradition (rather than the Romantics being a break from it), with the Romantics seeking a return to the poetry of imagination and energy represented by Milton and Spenser in order to continue the true tradition of English poetry, as they saw it. Their efforts bequeathed that same tradition onwards through Tennyson and Browning on down to modernists like Yeats, Eliot (despite his protests), Crane, and Stevens. I'm sure there are holes in the theory experts could pick at, but I do love the idea of Romanticisim as a primary poetic strain in tradition and not just a few navel gazing neo-pastoral poets that a lot of people mistakenly think.

I also admire his idea that Romantic poets are in fact anti-nature poets: that their initial poetry is in contest with nature, seeking to use the imaginative consciousness to overgo it and become primary. This project is doomed to fail, and by the end of their careers these poets manifest a melancholy sense of having failed in their projects (see: Shelley's Triumph of Life, Wordsworth's Peele Castle, and Keats' Fall of Hyperion).

I'm saddened to read of the death of Leah Bracknell today at the age of 55 from cancer. She was primarily (almost solely?) known for her 26 years on Emmerdale playing Zoe Tate, one of British soap's first lesbian characters, and crass as it may sound in an obituary post, I'll admit to having a bit of a crush on her as a teenager.