Children Full of Life - grade 4 students in Kanazawa, Japan learn deep life lessons from their incredible teacher and from each other. I strongly recommend this as awesome, but one caveat: keep tissues handy. (5 parts, 40 minutes total, English)
posted by madamjujujive
on Jul 25, 2009 -
48 comments
"
I just began photographing desperately. I really overshot because I was so desperate to always keep the camera going; every moment I stopped photographing I really felt like I might faint, or burst into tears, or come apart, or something like that."
[more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Dec 9, 2008 -
23 comments
American audiences remember
Akira Kurosawa as the genius of the samurai epic, a past master who used the form both to revise and revive Western classics - Shakespeare with
Ran and
Throne of Blood, Dostoevsky with
Red Beard and
The Idiot, Gorky with
The Lower Depths - and to give splendid and ultimately immortal life to new archetypes, as in
The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Yojimbo. But Kurosawa also made films of his own time. His
masterpiece, in fact, was the quiet story of a gray Japanese bureaucrat dying in post-war Tokyo, and of his attempt to do something of lasting good before he leaves. The film is
Ikiru ("To Live"; 1952).
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Jan 29, 2008 -
46 comments
Sven Nykvist leaves us. A master at the subtle manipulation of light, the multiple academy award winner and longtime Ingmar Bergman collaborator (including Persona, and the Through a Glass Darkly/Winter Light/The Silence trilogy) has passed away at 83.
more obits [1] [2]
more about him [1] [2]
posted by juv3nal
on Sep 21, 2006 -
22 comments
The Dance of Death. Die Totentanz: A German-language
site spotlighting, for example, the dance of death in
literature,
graphic art,
music and
film. For those, like me, whose German is not so good,
this page offers an English-language history of the phenomenon, and the Catholic Encyclopedia has an
article too. See also
Holbein's Dance-of-Death;
Lübeck's Dance-of-Death; and umm,
this.
posted by misteraitch
on Jul 3, 2003 -
14 comments
Death in the snow - a body is found in the frozen North Dakota woods. The cops say the dead Japanese woman was looking for the $1m she saw buried in the film Fargo. But the story didn't end there.
An interesting read via
Follow Me Here.
posted by madamjujujive
on Jun 12, 2003 -
50 comments
"Donald looked upon violence as an artist might look on paint..." Director Donald Cammell committed suicide at home on April 24, 1996. Because of the location of the gunshot wound he inflicted on himself, he stayed alive and conscious for 45 minutes. He asked for a mirror to observe his own death. Foreshadowing this, in Cammell's underrated 1987 film
White of the Eye, serial killer David Keith holds a mirror up to a victim's face as she dies. Filmmaker and author Kenneth Anger said
"I predicted Donald Cammell's suicide. He was in love with death." He wrote seven films and directed six, ranging from the controversial end-of-the-psychedelic-sixties counterculture gangster film
Performance (starring Mick Jagger),to the schlocky
Demon Seed (based on a Dean Koontz novel), in which Julie Christie is raped by a computer, to a
documentary about U2. A man of unusual talent, Cammell was an enigma even to those closest to him.
"Cammell knew that nothing was as ever as it looked, that there was no single, simple truth." His body of work, as diverse as it is sparse, reflects this. Three different biographers are working on Cammell projects, and a fascinating biodocumentary
Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance was released in 1998. His films are well worth seeking out, taken as a whole, they present an interesting psychological picture of their creator, and taken separately, they're thoughtful and interesting examinations of perception, reality, violence, and the nature of power.
posted by biscotti
on Jan 13, 2003 -
25 comments
