one piece

Merry Christmas

 

“Nothing is small when it comes to childhood.” ~ François Truffaut

 

 “I Never Tire of filming with children,” François Truffaut once said. “All that a child does on-screen, he seems to do for the first time.” More than any of the director’s other works, Small Change (1976) is devoted to cataloguing these magically fresh exploratory acts and gestures.

Made in collaboration with the people of Thiers, a steep-sloped town in central France, Small Change was shot over a two-month school break during the summer of ’75. Truffaut’s workshop approach to filming a group of child nonactors brings to mind Laurent Cantet’s recent film The Class (2008), but unlike that timely docudrama on classroom politics, Truffaut’s film is an ode to the peculiar delicacy and resilience of youth.

Read more here.

 

Small Change runs November 25–December 1 at the IFC Center in New York. For more details, click here. The film will also screen on November 24 as part of the French Institute’s “François Truffaut: A Winter Portrait” film series. For more details, click here.

“Quartett” at Brooklyn Academy of Music

 Passion burns cold in Robert Wilson’s trance-inducing production of “Quartett,” Heiner Müller’s ruthless reimagining of Choderlos de Laclos’s 18th-century novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Lights of many colors dye the all-too-mortal flesh of the figures assembled here to recall the blood-drawing games of lust they once shared. Sometimes their faces glow a reptilian green; on other occasions they are drenched in satanic red.

Yet the hues that seem to capture their spirit most exactly are a frostbitten blue and a pure Arctic white. The dying woman at the center of this forbidding journey into retrospect, which is being conducted at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, may have lived her life in the heat of a chain of carnal embraces. But her world is definitely ending not in fire but ice.

“Quartett,” which opened Wednesday night and runs through Nov. 14, may well be the sexually frankest play in New York this side of a backroom peephole. But with a cast led by the formidable French actress Isabelle Huppert in a magnificently mannered performance, it is the very opposite of an aphrodisiac.

via: "A Minuet Between Sexual Predators" By Ben Brantley

"One Art"

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

         Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” 

         Photograph: Uta Barth

Nick and Nora

"What I love about this perfect book is that every time you read it, you see something new in it; every time you read it, you think it’s about something other than what you thought it was about the last time you read it. It’s a masterpiece. And it’s short." Nora Ephron

Link: Nora Ephron's Must Reads -- The Daily Beast

Happy 2nd Birthday Blake!

Today was good. 

Today was fun. 

Tomorrow is another one. 

Dr. Seuss

Happy Independence Day

AMAGANSETT, N.Y.—1969.

© Elliott Erwitt / Magnum Photos

Michael Jackson R.I.P.

Happy Father's Day

© Henri Cartier - Bresson/ Magnum Photos

"Found and Interviewed" -- David Lynch

Fans of David Lynch probably wouldn't have pegged the avant-garde director (Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet) as an Internet star, but he's well on his way now. Lynch launched The Interview Project online this week--he traveled the country and filmed several interviews with strangers, and will post mini-documentaries on the project's Web site every three days. We love the idea of groundbreaking filmmakers taking their work directly to the Web, so we're all for this idea. Plus, it's David Lynch. Come on.

via: The Daily Beast