Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ...
Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits
This page features links to reviews of movies, documentaries and exhibits with a historical theme. Listings are in reverse chronological order. Descriptions are taken directly from the linked publication. If you have articles you think should be listed on the Pop Culture page, please send them to the editor editor@historynewsnetwork.org.
SOURCE: CHE (1-2-11)
[Thomas Doherty is a professor of American studies at Brandeis University and author of Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (Columbia University Press, 2007).]
"True grit"—once known as "sand" and not to be confused with cojones—is terse praise for the bedrock quality desired in the American male. Stoic, hard-edged, and laconic, the gruff embodiment of Hemingway's "grace under pressure" and Tom Wolfe's "the right stuff"; skilled in firearms, steady astride a horse or jockeying an F-16, he coolly performs the work at hand, usually a task involving the swift application of lethal force. No need to tell him to "man up."
For generations of American men, and women, the incarnation of that masculine ideal was John Wayne, who, in a fortuitous merging of on-screen persona and off-screen personality, won an Oscar playing a version of his own myth in True Grit (1969). This classic Hollywood western, maybe the last of the classic Hollywood westerns, was remade, or rather re-imagined, for this holiday season by the Coen brothers, with Jeff Bridges starring in the Wayne role. Since the Coens are Hollywood's most gifted genre-twisters, one might expect a sardonic spin on the western and its manly hero. But some conventions are resistant to revision. A faith in true gritness must come with the territory.
To understand why, and how, the genre trumps the brothers, let's take the measure of the Wayne myth. Before he became a punch line, a synonym for Ur-macho bluster (and an epithet for blundering America foreign policy), Wayne was an actor of some repute; by some reckoning, he was the most popular Hollywood star ever. He had "the longest and most successful career of any actor in film history," decreed Variety upon his death, in 1979, after it tallied the box-office profits from his 120-plus feature films.
Like most larger-than-life American archetypes, Wayne grew out of a conscious act of self-invention. Born in 1907, the son of an Iowa druggist who went bust as a California rancher, he dropped his androgynous birth name (Marion Morrison), borrowed his nickname from the family dog (Duke), and practiced his trademark say-that-again-pard'ner-and-you're-dead look in front of a mirror. Wayne knocked around for years in B-level horse operas until director John Ford cast him as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach (1939). Ford highlighted the entrance of the actor who became his surrogate son with one of the great star-is-born moments in Hollywood history: At the crack of a rifle and a pull-in close-up, Wayne rose true and strong out of the frontier landscape, another monolith against the sky in Monument Valley....
"True grit"—once known as "sand" and not to be confused with cojones—is terse praise for the bedrock quality desired in the American male. Stoic, hard-edged, and laconic, the gruff embodiment of Hemingway's "grace under pressure" and Tom Wolfe's "the right stuff"; skilled in firearms, steady astride a horse or jockeying an F-16, he coolly performs the work at hand, usually a task involving the swift application of lethal force. No need to tell him to "man up."
For generations of American men, and women, the incarnation of that masculine ideal was John Wayne, who, in a fortuitous merging of on-screen persona and off-screen personality, won an Oscar playing a version of his own myth in True Grit (1969). This classic Hollywood western, maybe the last of the classic Hollywood westerns, was remade, or rather re-imagined, for this holiday season by the Coen brothers, with Jeff Bridges starring in the Wayne role. Since the Coens are Hollywood's most gifted genre-twisters, one might expect a sardonic spin on the western and its manly hero. But some conventions are resistant to revision. A faith in true gritness must come with the territory.
To understand why, and how, the genre trumps the brothers, let's take the measure of the Wayne myth. Before he became a punch line, a synonym for Ur-macho bluster (and an epithet for blundering America foreign policy), Wayne was an actor of some repute; by some reckoning, he was the most popular Hollywood star ever. He had "the longest and most successful career of any actor in film history," decreed Variety upon his death, in 1979, after it tallied the box-office profits from his 120-plus feature films.
Like most larger-than-life American archetypes, Wayne grew out of a conscious act of self-invention. Born in 1907, the son of an Iowa druggist who went bust as a California rancher, he dropped his androgynous birth name (Marion Morrison), borrowed his nickname from the family dog (Duke), and practiced his trademark say-that-again-pard'ner-and-you're-dead look in front of a mirror. Wayne knocked around for years in B-level horse operas until director John Ford cast him as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach (1939). Ford highlighted the entrance of the actor who became his surrogate son with one of the great star-is-born moments in Hollywood history: At the crack of a rifle and a pull-in close-up, Wayne rose true and strong out of the frontier landscape, another monolith against the sky in Monument Valley....
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SOURCE: NY Daily News (1-2-11)
A new museum exhibit is striking a chord with historians and music buffs alike, offering them a glimpse inside the mind of piano-making royalty.
The diary of William Steinway is now on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The exhibit is part of a more than 20-year-long transcription project that resulted in an online archive of the 2,500-page diary, spanning from 1861 to 1896.
"It's an American immigrant story that I think a lot of people can relate to," said Anna Karvellas, the managing editor of the William Steinway Diary Project....
The diary of William Steinway is now on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The exhibit is part of a more than 20-year-long transcription project that resulted in an online archive of the 2,500-page diary, spanning from 1861 to 1896.
"It's an American immigrant story that I think a lot of people can relate to," said Anna Karvellas, the managing editor of the William Steinway Diary Project....
SOURCE: NYT (1-3-11)
Poor Robert E. Lee. All these years later he still can’t beat Ulysses S. Grant.
On Monday the PBS series “American Experience” offers its take on Lee, and the account is serviceable enough. But an earlier “American Experience” on Grant’s war years, scheduled for rebroadcast next Monday, is better.
There’s not much new to be learned about either of these men, of course, so the contest largely comes down to a matter of presentation. The Lee program favors lingering shots of fountain pens and drafting tools and, somewhat inexplicably, flowers in bloom, along with the usual still photographs of Lee, his family and his troops. The Grant program at least sprung for some live actors....
On Monday the PBS series “American Experience” offers its take on Lee, and the account is serviceable enough. But an earlier “American Experience” on Grant’s war years, scheduled for rebroadcast next Monday, is better.
There’s not much new to be learned about either of these men, of course, so the contest largely comes down to a matter of presentation. The Lee program favors lingering shots of fountain pens and drafting tools and, somewhat inexplicably, flowers in bloom, along with the usual still photographs of Lee, his family and his troops. The Grant program at least sprung for some live actors....
SOURCE: NYT (12-15-10)
PHILADELPHIA — The convulsive currents that roil the telling of American history have become so familiar that they now seem an inseparable part of the story itself. Here is a nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to a proposition of human equality, that, for much of its first century of life, countenanced slavery, institutionally supported it and economically profited from it. The years that followed have been marked by repair, reform and reversals; recompense, recrimination and reinterpretation. Extraordinary ideals and achievements have been countered by extraordinary failings and flaws, only to be countered yet again, each turn yielding another round of debates.
And here, in this city where the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were signed; where a $300 million Independence National Historical Park has been created, leading from the National Constitution Center to Independence Hall; and where the Liberty Bell, as a symbol of the nation’s ideals, draws well over a million visitors a year, a great opportunity existed to explore these primal tensions more closely on a site adjacent to the Liberty Bell Center in Independence park. Unfortunately, those opportunities have been squandered in “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” which opens on Wednesday.
It is almost painful, given the importance of this site, to point out that the result is more a monument to these unresolved tensions than a commemoration of anything else. After $10.5 million and more than eight years; after tugs of war between the city and the National Park Service and black community organizations; after the establishment of a contentious oversight committee and street demonstrations, overturned conceptions and racial debates, it bears all the scars of its creation, lacking both intellectual coherence and emotional power. On Wednesday the Park Service takes over the site with its work cut out for it, since rangers will have to weave the competing strands together....
And here, in this city where the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were signed; where a $300 million Independence National Historical Park has been created, leading from the National Constitution Center to Independence Hall; and where the Liberty Bell, as a symbol of the nation’s ideals, draws well over a million visitors a year, a great opportunity existed to explore these primal tensions more closely on a site adjacent to the Liberty Bell Center in Independence park. Unfortunately, those opportunities have been squandered in “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” which opens on Wednesday.
It is almost painful, given the importance of this site, to point out that the result is more a monument to these unresolved tensions than a commemoration of anything else. After $10.5 million and more than eight years; after tugs of war between the city and the National Park Service and black community organizations; after the establishment of a contentious oversight committee and street demonstrations, overturned conceptions and racial debates, it bears all the scars of its creation, lacking both intellectual coherence and emotional power. On Wednesday the Park Service takes over the site with its work cut out for it, since rangers will have to weave the competing strands together....
SOURCE: CultureKiosque (12-12-10)
PARIS, 12 DECEMBER 2010 — Paris, the Luminous Years, to be shown on PBS television across the United States as of 15 December (check local listings), is a first-rate documentary film on the ‘City of Light’. Perry Miller Adato’s love for Paris shines out not only in her thoughtful exploration of the role played by the French city in the creation of the arts during the early twentieth century (1905 -1930), but also in her portrayal of the city of today. Supported by excellent archival footage, she lets the artists themselves tell the story of Paris as the magnet which drew together all the greatest talents of the time in music, painting, sculpture, dance and literature. The film concentrates on an international group, which includes Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Josephine Baker, Marcel Duchamp, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Vaslav Nijinsky, Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein, among many others.
The French capital provided unique access to courageous art dealers who bought and dared to show the work of the avant-garde painters and sculptors, and interviews with such delightful artists as Marc Chagall are interspersed with throw-away comments, informing the viewer that Juan Gris was a draft dodger in Spain. On a more serious level, Miller has dealt intelligently with both the Dada and the Cubist movement, the former being a rebellious upsurge of rage against the war, born in a Swiss cabaret, which few of us actually understand. It was, it is pointed out, the "absurdity of an imbecilic war" which gave people like Francis Picabia and Max Ernst the right to break all rules and to attack all art, past and present.
The Cubist movement is dealt with more gently, with "Mr. Braque, a daring young man, reducing everything to little cubes…. and hammering out cubism in an upstairs room with Picasso"....
The French capital provided unique access to courageous art dealers who bought and dared to show the work of the avant-garde painters and sculptors, and interviews with such delightful artists as Marc Chagall are interspersed with throw-away comments, informing the viewer that Juan Gris was a draft dodger in Spain. On a more serious level, Miller has dealt intelligently with both the Dada and the Cubist movement, the former being a rebellious upsurge of rage against the war, born in a Swiss cabaret, which few of us actually understand. It was, it is pointed out, the "absurdity of an imbecilic war" which gave people like Francis Picabia and Max Ernst the right to break all rules and to attack all art, past and present.
The Cubist movement is dealt with more gently, with "Mr. Braque, a daring young man, reducing everything to little cubes…. and hammering out cubism in an upstairs room with Picasso"....
SOURCE: NYRB (12-15-10)
[Timothy Snyder is Professor of History at Yale. His new book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, was published this month. (October 2010).]
Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, opening this month in New York twenty-five years after its original release, is one of the great works of art of the twentieth century. As it begins, Simon Srebnik, a Polish Jew who was one of two survivors of Chełmno, returns to the death facility at Lanzmann’s request, and sings a song of his boyhood—about a white house, a house that is no longer—in the language of a country that was his homeland as it was of millions of Jews for centuries, a Poland made wretched by war. Mordechai Podchlebnik, the other survivor of Chełmno, in another conversation with Lanzmann, remembers human smoke against blue skies. The work of the stationary gas chambers began in German-occupied Poland on December 8, 1941. Here is the beginning of Lanzmann’s nine-hour reconstruction of the Holocaust, and in commencing with the faces and voices of Chełmno’s survivors, he has chosen well. Using no historical footage, Lanzmann instead elicits the detailed horror of mass death by asphyxiation at Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz from his own conversations with Jewish victims, German perpetrators, and Polish bystanders.
A quarter century ago, the Holocaust was not as widely recognized as it is today as an unprecedented evil. Lanzmann did much to change that. In his expansive “fiction of the real,” as he calls it, he is like a French realist novelist of the nineteenth century, addressing an injustice by painstaking research: a decade of reading; hundreds of risky conversations with victims, perpetrators, and bystanders; thousands of hours of unused film. This is “J’accuse” six million times over. Lanzmann is quite visible in the film, and heroically so. In his conversations with Jews and Germans and Poles, he is the perfect image of a French intellectual seeker of truth, doing what the existentialists spoke about but rarely did: imposing his mind and his will on a great emptiness, forcing it to take shape, and so leaving a trace of himself in history....
Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, opening this month in New York twenty-five years after its original release, is one of the great works of art of the twentieth century. As it begins, Simon Srebnik, a Polish Jew who was one of two survivors of Chełmno, returns to the death facility at Lanzmann’s request, and sings a song of his boyhood—about a white house, a house that is no longer—in the language of a country that was his homeland as it was of millions of Jews for centuries, a Poland made wretched by war. Mordechai Podchlebnik, the other survivor of Chełmno, in another conversation with Lanzmann, remembers human smoke against blue skies. The work of the stationary gas chambers began in German-occupied Poland on December 8, 1941. Here is the beginning of Lanzmann’s nine-hour reconstruction of the Holocaust, and in commencing with the faces and voices of Chełmno’s survivors, he has chosen well. Using no historical footage, Lanzmann instead elicits the detailed horror of mass death by asphyxiation at Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz from his own conversations with Jewish victims, German perpetrators, and Polish bystanders.
A quarter century ago, the Holocaust was not as widely recognized as it is today as an unprecedented evil. Lanzmann did much to change that. In his expansive “fiction of the real,” as he calls it, he is like a French realist novelist of the nineteenth century, addressing an injustice by painstaking research: a decade of reading; hundreds of risky conversations with victims, perpetrators, and bystanders; thousands of hours of unused film. This is “J’accuse” six million times over. Lanzmann is quite visible in the film, and heroically so. In his conversations with Jews and Germans and Poles, he is the perfect image of a French intellectual seeker of truth, doing what the existentialists spoke about but rarely did: imposing his mind and his will on a great emptiness, forcing it to take shape, and so leaving a trace of himself in history....
SOURCE: NYT (12-15-10)
For its next original series AMC is going back to the ’60s — the 1860s, that is. On Wednesday AMC, the cable-television home of the period drama “Mad Men” (as well as “Breaking Bad” and “The Walking Dead”), said it had committed to a full season of “Hell on Wheels,” a series set in post-Civil War America....
SOURCE: NYT (12-15-10)
Paris isn’t what it once was. And neither is PBS.
And for that reason alone, “Paris the Luminous Years” is as illuminating about the state of public television as it is about Paris at the dawn of modernism. This film, which has its premiere on PBS on Wednesday, looks at the city that seduced the likes of Picasso, Chagall, Apollinaire, Diaghilev and of course, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. It pays homage, though, not in the seditious, inventive spirit of the avant-garde that Paris once nurtured, but in the time-tested, didactic and dutiful tone of a typical PBS documentary.
Paris is still a wonderful city, but it no longer draws the world’s most innovative artists and thinkers. PBS is still a serious, responsible institution that shows good work, but creativity and élan have migrated to other networks and cable channels....
And for that reason alone, “Paris the Luminous Years” is as illuminating about the state of public television as it is about Paris at the dawn of modernism. This film, which has its premiere on PBS on Wednesday, looks at the city that seduced the likes of Picasso, Chagall, Apollinaire, Diaghilev and of course, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. It pays homage, though, not in the seditious, inventive spirit of the avant-garde that Paris once nurtured, but in the time-tested, didactic and dutiful tone of a typical PBS documentary.
Paris is still a wonderful city, but it no longer draws the world’s most innovative artists and thinkers. PBS is still a serious, responsible institution that shows good work, but creativity and élan have migrated to other networks and cable channels....
SOURCE: NYT (12-14-10)
FLORENCE — By the time Giovanfrancesco Rustici’s bronzes for the Baptistery of Florence’s cathedral were being cast at the end of 1509, Leonardo da Vinci had left the city forever, never to return.
Vasari declared the bronzes “the most perfect and harmonious by a modern master” and nothing to rival them was made in Florence until the arrival in the city of Giambologna nearly half a century later. Rustici’s “Preaching of St. John the Baptist,” hoisted into position over the Baptistery’s north door in 1511, was reputed to be the result of some form of collaboration with Leonardo, the exact nature of which remains uncertain.
Rustici was one of the great Renaissance sculptors in his own right, but his reputation has been obscured by his small output, now widely scattered. After being in place for nearly 500 years except for a brief period during World War II, his statues over the north door were removed in 2006 to rescue them from the effects of weather and air pollution.
After a painstaking program of cleaning and conservation, the statues now form the centerpiece of a revelatory exhibition at the Bargello Museum: “The Great Bronzes of the Baptistery: Giovanfrancesco Rustici and Leonardo,” curated by Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, director of the museum, Tommaso Mozzati and Philippe Sénéchal. The nearly 40 pieces in bronze, terra cotta, marble, maiolica and on panel and paper come from 19 collections in Europe and the United States....
Vasari declared the bronzes “the most perfect and harmonious by a modern master” and nothing to rival them was made in Florence until the arrival in the city of Giambologna nearly half a century later. Rustici’s “Preaching of St. John the Baptist,” hoisted into position over the Baptistery’s north door in 1511, was reputed to be the result of some form of collaboration with Leonardo, the exact nature of which remains uncertain.
Rustici was one of the great Renaissance sculptors in his own right, but his reputation has been obscured by his small output, now widely scattered. After being in place for nearly 500 years except for a brief period during World War II, his statues over the north door were removed in 2006 to rescue them from the effects of weather and air pollution.
After a painstaking program of cleaning and conservation, the statues now form the centerpiece of a revelatory exhibition at the Bargello Museum: “The Great Bronzes of the Baptistery: Giovanfrancesco Rustici and Leonardo,” curated by Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi, director of the museum, Tommaso Mozzati and Philippe Sénéchal. The nearly 40 pieces in bronze, terra cotta, marble, maiolica and on panel and paper come from 19 collections in Europe and the United States....
SOURCE: NYT (12-11-10)
HISTORY is being quickly shuttled off Broadway stages and back into the library stacks this fall, as three new high-aiming, talent-rich shows that delve into the American past for subject matter are playing to sparse audiences. The musicals “The Scottsboro Boys” and “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” are closing with unhappy dispatch, despite reviews that range from respectful to ecstatic. And the new John Guare play about the Louisiana Purchase, “A Free Man of Color,” looks likely to eke out its limited run playing to strictly limited houses after sharply dividing the critics. Staged history lessons, it would appear, are about as appealing to Broadway audiences these days as Shakespeare without celebrities.
Given their unusual subjects, a casual observer might draw the natural conclusion that these ambitious productions were too dark or civics-lessonish to suit the glitz-riddled precincts around Times Square, where flashy musicals merchandising nostalgia tend to thrive.
The harsh suffering of the African-Americans falsely accused of rape in Alabama in the 1930s does not, after all, seem a surefire subject for a musical entertainment. Ditto the ambiguous legacy of Andrew Jackson, the American president whose enforced relocation of the Indians is viewed by many as a major blot on the nation’s moral escutcheon. Mr. Guare’s chosen chapter from the United States history books is similarly no flag-waving Fourth of July picnic, depicting as it does the maneuvering among statesmen preceding the grand Louisiana Purchase and the treaty’s grim consequences for the country’s black population....
Given their unusual subjects, a casual observer might draw the natural conclusion that these ambitious productions were too dark or civics-lessonish to suit the glitz-riddled precincts around Times Square, where flashy musicals merchandising nostalgia tend to thrive.
The harsh suffering of the African-Americans falsely accused of rape in Alabama in the 1930s does not, after all, seem a surefire subject for a musical entertainment. Ditto the ambiguous legacy of Andrew Jackson, the American president whose enforced relocation of the Indians is viewed by many as a major blot on the nation’s moral escutcheon. Mr. Guare’s chosen chapter from the United States history books is similarly no flag-waving Fourth of July picnic, depicting as it does the maneuvering among statesmen preceding the grand Louisiana Purchase and the treaty’s grim consequences for the country’s black population....
SOURCE: Tablet (12-10-10)
[Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, is the author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving. Her latest book, The Eichmann Trial, will be published by Nextbook Press in 2011.]
When Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s documentary on the Holocaust, was released in 1985, it was immediately lauded by critics as pathbreaking, epic, and a sheer masterpiece. Simone de Beauvoir, in her introduction to the published text of the film, called it a “funeral cantata.” Holocaust scholars and film specialists, speaking with almost one voice, hailed it as not only one of the best Holocaust films ever made but as fundamentally different from all other films on the topic. In the ensuing 25 years, despite the release of numerous Holocaust films, this assessment has not been challenged. What gives this film its iconic status?
One obvious factor is, of course, its length. It is 564 minutes—approximately nine and a half hours—long. Presented in two parts, Lanzmann’s preference was that it be viewed in one day or, at the least, in two subsequent days. Sitting through it can be an exhausting, almost grueling, experience.
Ultimately, however, the power of this documentary is rooted not in what Lanzmann has done but in what he does not do. The film does not contain one moment of archival footage. There is no visual horror in Shoah: no scenes of Jews being loaded onto trains, marched out of ghettoes, or shot by Einsatzgruppen. There are no cadavers being bulldozed by the Allies into mass graves in the immediate aftermath of the “liberation” of the camps. Instead Lanzmann weaves together an intricate web of interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders. Because there is no representation of the horror, the viewer must imagine what happened, and, as Leah Wolfson of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has put it, “we hear the witnesses in an entirely different way.”...
When Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s documentary on the Holocaust, was released in 1985, it was immediately lauded by critics as pathbreaking, epic, and a sheer masterpiece. Simone de Beauvoir, in her introduction to the published text of the film, called it a “funeral cantata.” Holocaust scholars and film specialists, speaking with almost one voice, hailed it as not only one of the best Holocaust films ever made but as fundamentally different from all other films on the topic. In the ensuing 25 years, despite the release of numerous Holocaust films, this assessment has not been challenged. What gives this film its iconic status?
One obvious factor is, of course, its length. It is 564 minutes—approximately nine and a half hours—long. Presented in two parts, Lanzmann’s preference was that it be viewed in one day or, at the least, in two subsequent days. Sitting through it can be an exhausting, almost grueling, experience.
Ultimately, however, the power of this documentary is rooted not in what Lanzmann has done but in what he does not do. The film does not contain one moment of archival footage. There is no visual horror in Shoah: no scenes of Jews being loaded onto trains, marched out of ghettoes, or shot by Einsatzgruppen. There are no cadavers being bulldozed by the Allies into mass graves in the immediate aftermath of the “liberation” of the camps. Instead Lanzmann weaves together an intricate web of interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders. Because there is no representation of the horror, the viewer must imagine what happened, and, as Leah Wolfson of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has put it, “we hear the witnesses in an entirely different way.”...
SOURCE: NYT (12-7-10)
Even at 85, Claude Lanzmann is not one to rest on his laurels or shirk a controversy. A quarter of a century after his documentary “Shoah” transformed the way the world regarded the Holocaust, the film is about to be re-released in the United States — an event he welcomes as long overdue.
Then again, Mr. Lanzmann also argues that “Shoah” is not really a documentary, and that “Holocaust” is “a completely improper name” to describe the Nazis’ extermination of six million Jews during World War II. He complains that, in contrast to Europe, where “Shoah” has “never stopped being shown in movie theaters and on TV,” his film has “disappeared from the American scene,” elbowed aside by more palatable fare and thus allowing mistaken notions to propagate.
“This was by no means a holocaust,” he said during a recent visit to New York, noting that the literal meaning of the word refers to a burnt offering to a god. “To reach God 1.5 million Jewish children have been offered? The name is important, and one doesn’t say ‘Holocaust’ in Europe. This was a catastrophe, a disaster, and in Hebrew that is shoah.”...
Then again, Mr. Lanzmann also argues that “Shoah” is not really a documentary, and that “Holocaust” is “a completely improper name” to describe the Nazis’ extermination of six million Jews during World War II. He complains that, in contrast to Europe, where “Shoah” has “never stopped being shown in movie theaters and on TV,” his film has “disappeared from the American scene,” elbowed aside by more palatable fare and thus allowing mistaken notions to propagate.
“This was by no means a holocaust,” he said during a recent visit to New York, noting that the literal meaning of the word refers to a burnt offering to a god. “To reach God 1.5 million Jewish children have been offered? The name is important, and one doesn’t say ‘Holocaust’ in Europe. This was a catastrophe, a disaster, and in Hebrew that is shoah.”...
SOURCE: NYT (12-2-10)
When the Oakland Museum of California was founded in 1969 as a “museum for the people,” there was no question about who would pay for it. The museum’s land was owned by the city, its building was operated by the city and its collection belonged to the city. Admission, now $12, was free.
But the fiscal crisis affecting governments across California is changing the way museums operate. The Oakland museum recently announced that it would seek to radically alter its relationship with Oakland by having its nonprofit arm, the Oakland Museum of California Foundation, take over operations from the city.
Currently, about 60 percent of the museum’s operating costs are absorbed by the private foundation, and 44 of the 100 or so museum employees are city employees. Until the 1990s, the museum did not even have a private fund-raising body, but the institution was able to raise over $60 million for a capital renovation of its building, which made its debut last spring....
But the fiscal crisis affecting governments across California is changing the way museums operate. The Oakland museum recently announced that it would seek to radically alter its relationship with Oakland by having its nonprofit arm, the Oakland Museum of California Foundation, take over operations from the city.
Currently, about 60 percent of the museum’s operating costs are absorbed by the private foundation, and 44 of the 100 or so museum employees are city employees. Until the 1990s, the museum did not even have a private fund-raising body, but the institution was able to raise over $60 million for a capital renovation of its building, which made its debut last spring....
SOURCE: The Root (12-2-10)
[Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, at Harvard University.]
Visitors to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 were introduced to escalators, pictorial panoramas, the Paris Metro and the first films with sound. They also encountered -- in a section of the vast world's fair aptly titled exposé nègre, or Negro exposition -- an unusual photo exhibit: hundreds of images of black professionals and college students.
Mounted to counter stereotypes of blacks as backward and culturally bankrupt, the photographs in W.E.B. Du Bois' two albums, Types of American Negroes and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A., at the Paris Expo focused on successful African Americans who thoroughly embodied American middle-class values. These albums constituted a political act, a declaration of inherent nobility in the war over the politics of respectability and the nature of the Negro....
Revisiting these images today serves to remind us both of the history of the struggle for control of the black image in American society and the necessarily political discourses into which all black art at the time was drawn. But the photographs also make vivid the age-old class divisions within the African-American community -- class divisions born in slavery, first, and then made even more pronounced by the markedly different status of slaves and freed people over the course of slavery.
These class divisions persisted despite pointed reminders such as the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision in 1857 and the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s, which identified all black people before the law as members of one class -- a class that we might think of as the "class of Negroes," a class as defined by "all Negroes shall" or "all Negroes shan't."...
Visitors to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 were introduced to escalators, pictorial panoramas, the Paris Metro and the first films with sound. They also encountered -- in a section of the vast world's fair aptly titled exposé nègre, or Negro exposition -- an unusual photo exhibit: hundreds of images of black professionals and college students.
Mounted to counter stereotypes of blacks as backward and culturally bankrupt, the photographs in W.E.B. Du Bois' two albums, Types of American Negroes and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A., at the Paris Expo focused on successful African Americans who thoroughly embodied American middle-class values. These albums constituted a political act, a declaration of inherent nobility in the war over the politics of respectability and the nature of the Negro....
Revisiting these images today serves to remind us both of the history of the struggle for control of the black image in American society and the necessarily political discourses into which all black art at the time was drawn. But the photographs also make vivid the age-old class divisions within the African-American community -- class divisions born in slavery, first, and then made even more pronounced by the markedly different status of slaves and freed people over the course of slavery.
These class divisions persisted despite pointed reminders such as the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision in 1857 and the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s, which identified all black people before the law as members of one class -- a class that we might think of as the "class of Negroes," a class as defined by "all Negroes shall" or "all Negroes shan't."...
SOURCE: NYT (11-26-10)
If the cost of digging a trench is 9 gin, and the trench has a length of 5 ninda and is one-half ninda deep, and if a worker’s daily load of earth costs 10 gin to move, and his daily wages are 6 se of silver, then how wide is the canal?
Or, a better question: if you were a tutor of Babylonian scribes some 4,000 years ago, holding a clay tablet on which this problem was incised with cuneiform indentations — the very tablet that can now be seen with 12 others from that Middle Eastern civilization at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World — what could you take for granted, and what would you need to explain to your students? In what way did you think about measures of time and space? How did you calculate? Did you believe numbers had an abstract existence, each with its own properties?...
Spend some time at this modest yet thoroughly intriguing exhibition, “Before Pythagoras: The Culture of Old Babylonian Mathematics,” and you begin to realize that the answers can be far more cryptic than these tablets were before great scholars like Otto E. Neugebauer began to decipher them during the first half of the 20th century....
Or, a better question: if you were a tutor of Babylonian scribes some 4,000 years ago, holding a clay tablet on which this problem was incised with cuneiform indentations — the very tablet that can now be seen with 12 others from that Middle Eastern civilization at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World — what could you take for granted, and what would you need to explain to your students? In what way did you think about measures of time and space? How did you calculate? Did you believe numbers had an abstract existence, each with its own properties?...
Spend some time at this modest yet thoroughly intriguing exhibition, “Before Pythagoras: The Culture of Old Babylonian Mathematics,” and you begin to realize that the answers can be far more cryptic than these tablets were before great scholars like Otto E. Neugebauer began to decipher them during the first half of the 20th century....
SOURCE: Newsweek (11-21-10)
In Shanghai’s super-modern Grand Theater, a fashionable, mainly young audience applauds enthusiastically as Guo Yong takes center stage. He acknowledges the semicircle of musicians around him and prepares to play a solo. But Guo does not raise a flute, trombone, or oboe to his lips; instead, he proudly holds aloft a large bushy tree branch covered in leaves. Blowing on one of the leaves, he produces a sound that mimics the twittering of birds as he plays a traditional Buyi folk song. The other musicians on the stage include a Mongolian throat singer, an ethnic Kazakh from northwestern Xinjiang playing a two-stringed banjo, and a four-member Miao minority singing troupe from a village in southwestern Guizhou.
It’s the first time such music has ever been performed in the Grand Theater, a formal venue more accustomed to large Western symphonies playing Beethoven. But these musicians are all playing traditional songs from their various ethnic groups. The songs are interspersed with new, specially composed pieces inspired by these traditions, sung in lilting, ethereal tones by Zhu Zheqin, the Cantonese-born singer whose vision this concert embodies. Zhu, better known abroad as Dadawa, has always stood out in China’s contemporary music scene; in the 1990s she became the first Chinese musician to win international acceptance in the “world music” field with her Tibetan-inspired albums Sister Drum and Voices From the Sky. Now she has made it her mission to help preserve China’s traditional ethnic music....
It’s the first time such music has ever been performed in the Grand Theater, a formal venue more accustomed to large Western symphonies playing Beethoven. But these musicians are all playing traditional songs from their various ethnic groups. The songs are interspersed with new, specially composed pieces inspired by these traditions, sung in lilting, ethereal tones by Zhu Zheqin, the Cantonese-born singer whose vision this concert embodies. Zhu, better known abroad as Dadawa, has always stood out in China’s contemporary music scene; in the 1990s she became the first Chinese musician to win international acceptance in the “world music” field with her Tibetan-inspired albums Sister Drum and Voices From the Sky. Now she has made it her mission to help preserve China’s traditional ethnic music....
SOURCE: NYT (11-22-10)
The BBC and the Discovery Channel, which collaborated in the past on “Planet Earth” and “Life,” are starting work on another joint documentary, “History of the World.”
They said on Monday that the series would cover 20,000 years of humanity in eight episodes, or roughly 2,500 years an episode.
Their prior series have used state-of-the-art cameras to capture natural habitats, but that’s not an option in “History of the World,” so they will instead rely on re-enactments and computer graphics....
They said on Monday that the series would cover 20,000 years of humanity in eight episodes, or roughly 2,500 years an episode.
Their prior series have used state-of-the-art cameras to capture natural habitats, but that’s not an option in “History of the World,” so they will instead rely on re-enactments and computer graphics....
SOURCE: NYT (11-23-10)
Papyrus, parchment, paper ... videotape, DVDs, Blu-ray discs — long after all these materials have crumbled to dust, the first recording medium of all, the cuneiform clay tablet of ancient Mesopotamia, may still endure.
Thirteen of the tablets are on display until Dec. 17 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, part of New York University. Many are the exercises of students learning to be scribes. Their plight was not to be envied. They were mastering mathematics based on texts in Sumerian, a language that even at the time was long since dead. The students spoke Akkadian, a Semitic language unrelated to Sumerian. But both languages were written in cuneiform, meaning wedge-shaped, after the shape of the marks made by punching a reed into clay.
Sumerian math was a sexagesimal system, meaning it was based on the number 60. The system “is striking for its originality and simplicity,” the mathematician Duncan J. Melville of St. Lawrence University, in Canton, N.Y., said at a symposium observing the opening of the exhibition....
Thirteen of the tablets are on display until Dec. 17 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, part of New York University. Many are the exercises of students learning to be scribes. Their plight was not to be envied. They were mastering mathematics based on texts in Sumerian, a language that even at the time was long since dead. The students spoke Akkadian, a Semitic language unrelated to Sumerian. But both languages were written in cuneiform, meaning wedge-shaped, after the shape of the marks made by punching a reed into clay.
Sumerian math was a sexagesimal system, meaning it was based on the number 60. The system “is striking for its originality and simplicity,” the mathematician Duncan J. Melville of St. Lawrence University, in Canton, N.Y., said at a symposium observing the opening of the exhibition....
SOURCE: NDTV Movies (11-21-10)
Hollywood star Daniel Day-Lewis will play 16th US president Abraham Lincoln in a biopic to be directed by Oscar-winner Steven Spielberg
.
Lincoln, adapted by playwright Tony Kushner from Doris Kearns Goodwin book Team of Rivals. Spielberg has been attached to the project for years and earlier Liam Neeson was attached to star as Lincoln.
Kushner and Spielberg had earlier teamed up for Oscar-nominated Munich. Spielberg will begin filming the movie next year. He is also producing the biopic with Kathleen Kennedy, the Hollywood Reporter said....
.
Lincoln, adapted by playwright Tony Kushner from Doris Kearns Goodwin book Team of Rivals. Spielberg has been attached to the project for years and earlier Liam Neeson was attached to star as Lincoln.
Kushner and Spielberg had earlier teamed up for Oscar-nominated Munich. Spielberg will begin filming the movie next year. He is also producing the biopic with Kathleen Kennedy, the Hollywood Reporter said....
SOURCE: Salon (11-18-10)
It's not like "Made in Dagenham" marks the first time a fascinating historical episode has been made into mediocre melodrama. Moviemakers have ransacked history since the medium was invented, but the combination too often results in bad movies and bad history. You can't even call "Made in Dagenham" bad -- it's a competent entertainment, built around an enjoyable performance by the superb English actress Sally Hawkins (Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"). But it does manage to take a crucial turning point in feminist and labor history -- an event loaded with ambiguous significance -- and render it into one of those gang-of-gals movies full of bicycles, reggae songs, underwear shots and scenes of emotional growth. (Memo to producers: You can't use Jimmy Cliff's "You Can Get It if You Really Want" in your movie. You just can't. It is against the law.)
There can be no doubt that the story of the female machinists' strike in 1968 at the Ford plant in Dagenham, England, is worth telling. That event in an east London industrial suburb had social consequences that were arguably a lot more meaningful and far-reaching than, say, the invention of Facebook.... It was a moment that suggested class politics wasn't just for guys and feminism wasn't just for well-bred university girls.
All that stuff, the complicated social and political reverberations of the Dagenham strike, is totally fascinating -- but it's also just packing material around the edges of a standard-issue female-empowerment ensemble drama, complete with kicky period costumes, rapid Cockney chatter and shots of the women stripping down to their brassieres and slips for a day in the hot factory....
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