Eric Rohmer

[article by Dave Kehr reprinted in full from the New York Times]

January 12, 2010
Eric Rohmer, New Wave Filmmaker, Dies at 89
By Dave Kehr

Eric Rohmer, the French critic and filmmaker who was one of the founding figures of the internationally influential movement that became known as the French New Wave, and the director of more than 50 films for theaters and television, including the Oscar-nominated “My Night at Maud’s” (1969), died on Monday. He was 89.

His producer, Margaret Menegoz, announced his death in Paris, Agence France-Press reported. Relatives said he had been hospitalized a week ago but gave no further details about his condition, the news agency said.

Aesthetically, Mr. Rohmer was perhaps the most conservative member of the group of aggressive young critics who purveyed their writings for publications like Arts and Les Cahiers du Cinéma into careers as filmmakers beginning in the late 1950s. A former novelist and teacher of French and German literature, Mr. Rohmer emphasized the spoken and written word in his films at a time when tastes — thanks in no small part to his own pioneering writing on Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks — had begun to shift from literary adaptations to genre films grounded in strong visual styles.

His most famous film in America remains “My Night at Maud’s,” a 1969 black-and-white feature set in the grim industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand. It tells the story of a shy, young engineer (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who passes a snow-bound evening in the home of an attractive, free-thinking divorcée (Françoise Fabian).

The conversation, filmed by Mr. Rohmer in a series of carefully but unobtrusively composed long takes, covers philosophy, religion and morality, and while the flow of words at times takes on a distinctly seductive subtext, the encounter ends without a physical consummation. But a bond is formed between the two characters that movingly re-emerges five years later, when they meet again in the brief postscript that closes the film.

“My Night at Maud’s” was the third title in his “Six Moral Tales,” a series of films that Mr. Rohmer began in 1963, though for economic reasons it was the fourth to be filmed. In each of the six films, a man who is married or engaged finds himself tempted to stray but is ultimately able to resist. His films are as much about what does not happen between his characters as what does, a tendency that enchanted critics as often as it drove audience members to distraction.

“I saw a Rohmer movie once,” observes the Gene Hackman character in Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves” (1975). “It was kind of like watching paint dry.”

In his private life, Mr. Rohmer was reclusive if not secretive. “Eric Rohmer” was, in fact, a pseudonym, one of several that he experimented with early in his career. According to “Who’s Who in France,” he was born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer in Tulle, a city in southwestern France, on March 21, 1920; other sources give his birth name as Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer and place his origins in the northeastern city of Nancy.

After publishing the novel “Elisabeth” under the name Gilbert Cordier, he moved to Paris in 1950, where he began frequenting the ciné-clubs of the Latin Quarter, making the acquaintance of four other young cinephiles with whom his career would remain intertwined: Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette. With Mr. Rivette, he founded a short-lived film magazine, La Revue du Cinéma, but when that initiative collapsed after five issues, he joined the reviewing staff of Les Cahiers du Cinéma, a publication that acquired a fashionable notoriety for the violently iconoclastic reviews of the young Truffaut.

In 1952, Mr. Rohmer made his first attempt to direct a feature film, to be titled “Les Petites Filles Modèles,” but the project was abandoned when its producer declared bankruptcy. No footage is known to exist. Not until his Cahiers colleagues began to enjoy a measure of success as filmmakers — the term La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave) was coined by a journalist for L’Express in 1957 — was Mr. Rohmer able to mount another long form production. But “Le Signe du Lion” (1959), a moody tale of an American expatriate who finds himself down and out in Paris, did not capture the public imagination the way Truffaut’s “400 Blows” and Godard’s “Breathless” did, and Mr. Rohmer returned to editing Les Cahiers, a job he held until 1963.

Mr. Rohmer’s real breakthrough came in 1962 with the 26-minute short “La Boulangère de Monceau” (“The Bakery Girl of Monceau”). Filmed in 16-millimeter black and white, it was the first of the “Six Moral Tales,” based on fictional sketches he had written, he later said, long before he dreamed of becoming a filmmaker.

After a second short film, “La Carrière de Suzanne” (1963), Mr. Rohmer returned to the feature length format with “La Collectionneuse” (1967), the fourth episode of the series but the third to be filmed. The story of a young woman (Haydée Politoff) who systematically collects lovers, the film won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and restored Mr. Rohmer’s place in the front rank of the New Wave. The series continued with three more features: “My Night at Maud’s,” “Claire’s Knee” (1970) and “Love in the Afternoon” (1972).

After experimenting with two stylized period films, “The Marquise of O ...” (1976) and “Percival le Gallois” (1978), Mr. Rohmer initiated a new series, “Comedies and Proverbs,” with the 1981 “La Femme de l’aviateur.” The six films in this group were illustrated traditional sayings or quotes from celebrated authors (from La Fontaine to Rimbaud), and were largely built around the flirtations and fickle emotions of young people, and incorporated, notably in “Le Rayon Vert” (1986), a new element of improvisation.

Mr. Rohmer undertook a final series, “Tales of the Four Seasons,” with “Conte de Printemps” in 1990, this time providing a philosophical love story for each season of the year. The series ended with the exquisite “Conte d’Automne” in 1998, in which Mr. Rohmer moved beyond his focus on youth to tell a movingly autumnal story of a widow (Béatrice Romand) with a teenage son who finds love in an unexpected place.

Mr. Rohmer’s late career found him moving happily among small projects for television (including “L’Arbre, le Maire et la Médiathèque,” 1993), an early experiment with digital technology (“The Lady and the Duke,” 2001), and a true-life spy story (“Triple Agent,” 2004). His final theatrical film was the 2007 “Astrée and Céladon,” a retelling of a 17th-century love story with magical overtones, filmed in a self-consciously academic style that suggested the paintings of Poussin and Fragonard.

He is survived by a younger brother, the philosopher René Schérer, and by a son, the journalist René Monzat.

In opposition both to the intensely personal, confessional tone of much of the work of Truffaut and the politically provocative films of Godard, Mr. Rohmer remained true to a restrained, rationalist aesthetic, close to the principles of the 18th-century thinkers whose words he frequently cited in his movies. And yet Mr. Rohmer’s work was warmed by an undercurrent of romanticism and erotic yearning, made perhaps all the more affecting for never quite breaking through the surface of his elegant, orderly films.

[Film still from "My Night at Maud's]

"... the rich culture of communal sweat bathing"

January 16 - February 7, 2010
Medicine Lake
Plymouth, MN

The Black Bania
Elaine Tin Nyo, Taavo Somer, David Frank, Rik Horton, Paul D. Dickinson, Dwayne Williams, Thomas Thorpe, Matthew Schum

Black Bania is a smoking hot room on a frozen lake. A tipi will house a sauna room available for use by the public on a bring-your own-towel basis and provide additional space for restorative sauna related activity. We will explore the rich culture of communal sweat bathing referencing Finnish saunas, Russian banias, Roman baths and Turkish hammams, Korean zzimzilbangs, and Native American sweat lodges by providing a space for a series of intimate performances, intellectual exchange, and wholesome physical cleansing.

Part of Art Shanty Projects: "a four-weekend exhibition of performance, architecture, science, art, video, literature, survivalism and karaoke, ASP is part sculpture park, part artist residency and part social experiment, inspired by traditional ice fishing houses that dot the state’s lakes in winter."

[graphic from Google image search for "communal sweat lodge."]

Guitar Virtuoso Jimmy Page Hits 66

Jimmy Page, born January 9, 1944, featured in two performances of "Dazed and Confused" with The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin.

Rock on Jimmy.

The King

[With all due respect to Michael Jackson, we take a moment to salute the undisputed King of Rock 'n Roll on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth. In this clip the King, looking uncannily like a bad boy version of the Infant of Prague, sings the signature song of his post army, post bad Hollywood movie, Las Vegas Showroom era to adoring Hawai'ian fans bearing lays. Rock on Elvis.]

Elvis Aaron Presley January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977

Below are links to an assessment of Elvis tunes by the brilliant rock critic Ann Powers, writing for the LA Times.

King vs. King: Debating Elvis Presley's best songs
King vs. King: Debating Elvis Presley's best songs Part II

[Thanks to MFC in Valencia for the tip.]

In the Arts, Bigger Buildings May Not Be Better

[With thanks to SB in Carson City for the tip, reprinted in full from the December 12, 2009 New York Times, follow up to a November 2008 post regarding the Berkeley Art Museum.]

In the Arts, Bigger Buildings May Not Be Better
By Robin Pogrebin

Within months of its opening in 1997, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao had given the language a new term and the world a new way of looking at culture. The “Bilbao effect,” many came to believe, was the answer to what ailed cities everywhere — it was a way to lure tourists and economic development — and a potential boon to cultural institutions.

Municipal governments and arts groups were soon pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into larger, flashier exhibition spaces and performance halls.

Now the economic downturn has reined in a lot of these big dreams and has also led to questions about whether ambitious building projects from Buffalo to Berkeley ever made sense to begin with. Some are arguing that arts administrators and their patrons succumbed to an irrational exuberance that rivaled the stock market’s in the boom years.

Organizations were “blinded by the excitement of what it would be like to have this great new facility,” said D. Carroll Joynes, a senior fellow at the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center.

The recession, he said he believed, is not solely to blame for a recent wave of projects that have been delayed (like additions to the St. Louis Art Museum and the Cincinnati Art Museum); scaled back (like the new building of the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y.); put into question (the new Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center and the renovation of the New York Public Library’s main Fifth Avenue branch); or abandoned altogether (the expansion of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo).

In Mr. Joynes’s view, “The recession is exposing the weakness of a lot of institutions that were seriously overstretched” before it began.

“It’s exposing poor management and poor planning,” said Mr. Joynes, who is collaborating on a study of 50 cultural building projects completed from 1994 to 2008 and their planning processes. These were situations, he added, in which “nobody actually asked: ‘Is there a need here? If they build it, will they come?’ ”

Last month the University of California abandoned plans for a new 140,000-square-foot Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The project, designed by the high-profile Japanese architect Toyo Ito, was intended to replace a smaller existing building that does not meet seismic standards, but also to do much more: with its towering windows, huge interior spaces and curvaceous steel exterior, it was destined to become “an icon for the entire Bay Area,” Berkeley’s chancellor, Robert J. Birgeneau, said in 2008.

Less than half of the $200 million needed to build the Ito design had been raised, from private donors and the university, and the new economic reality put additional fund-raising in serious doubt.

But the museum was worried about more than just construction costs. While new wings and buildings can lead to increases in both visitors and donations, at least at first, they can also be a major drain on an organization’s operating budget.

“What has been thought of as a short-term asset can be a long-term problem,” said Jonathan Katz, the chief executive of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. “Facilities cost money to operate, and they deteriorate. The facility itself becomes a series of expenditures.”

Lawrence R. Rinder, the museum’s director, said the decision to build the Ito design came out of a “well-reasoned expectation” of what was financially possible before the recession. Still, he acknowledged, “the ongoing economic shock inspired us to evaluate not only the shorter-term capital campaign but also strategies for sustainable operation.”

The building, he said, would have increased operating costs 10 to 20 percent above the $8 million the museum now spends annually on all its operations. It is in the process of coming up with a “smaller-scale” plan for a new home, he added, which will probably cost about as much as the current building to operate.

Most arts professionals describe their building projects as born of necessity: they needed larger galleries to bring permanent collections out of storage; they needed audience amenities like larger restrooms and upgraded air-conditioning to draw ticket buyers; they needed a building that was up to current code. But some concede that it was hard not to be caught up in what Mr. Joynes called the “frenzy of building” made possible by the booming economy and spurred on by highly visible projects like Walt Disney Concert Hall, the expanded Museum of Modern Art and the new Alice Tully Hall.

“Museums, when they saw how much money other museums were raising, said, ‘Oh, we can’t miss out on this,’ ” said Terry Riley, a former head of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of architecture and design, who helped oversee that museum’s renovation by Yoshio Taniguchi. In many cases, he added, “it’s almost as though money drove the decision.”

Maxwell Anderson, the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which finished a major expansion in 2006 and is now completing a 100-acre park, said that “in part, all of us have been watching how these projects are perceived.”

“There is a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses quality to museum building,” he continued.

The Dia Art Foundation, which once had big plans for a 34,000-square-foot, column-free space at the entrance to the High Line in New York — before losing a board chairman who was also its main benefactor in 2006 — announced last month that it would instead build a 25,000-square-foot space on the site of a former garage it already owns on West 22nd Street in Chelsea.

Philippe Vergne, who became Dia’s director last year, defended the original plans: “It was what the world was — more was more.” But the recession “forced us to slow down” and really consider institutional needs, he said. What the foundation wants now is a simple, utilitarian space that makes art the main event.

“I want the ambition to be for the program, not the building — not, ‘Let’s go big because we’re addicted to big,’ ” Mr. Vergne said.

The economic downturn has had this effect on a lot of arts organizations, said Adrian Ellis, the executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the founder of AEA Consulting, a leading arts consultant.

“Cultural buildings became the way in which cities articulate their identity and vitality — they were driven not by the artistic community but by a civic agenda,” he said. Now the economy is pushing organizations into “deep reflection about what their purpose is and how best to realize it,” he said — reflection that can lead back to an arts-focused agenda, and to a renewed concern about “protecting their capacity to take artistic risks.”

“When you overexpand, you limit your ability to take those risks,” Mr. Ellis said. “Although expansion is usually seen as a sign of health, it is not always a sign of vitality.”

Mr. Joynes, of the University of Chicago, said that his study of cultural building projects aimed to explore this issue. “Do you do many more ‘Swan Lakes’ and take fewer chances artistically because you have big bills to pay?” he asked.

Cultural agencies and foundations are also reflecting on the institutions they help finance, albeit in more practical terms.

“We have become increasingly concerned about the sustainability of organizations as a result of these building projects,” said Alice L. Carle, program director of the Kresge Foundation, which supports nonprofit organizations nationwide. Ms. Carle said her foundation had decided to prioritize “renovation and repair projects over new construction and large expansions.”

“We’re more interested in helping shore up what organizations have already built,” she said.

Many institutions, of course, managed to complete their big projects before the downturn, though some may be experiencing builders’ remorse. For example, the $461 million Carnival Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, designed by César Pelli — whose vision statement promised it would transform the city into “the cultural capital of the Americas”— ended its first year, in October 2007, with a $2.5 million operating deficit, thanks to low ticket sales and high operating costs. (It has been kept afloat with the help of a $30 million gift from a philanthropist, Adrienne Arsht, for whom the center has been renamed.)

In Chicago, the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies owes $43.6 million of the $51.6 million it borrowed for its new building on South Michigan Avenue, completed two years ago. The institute’s galleries are now open only on alternate Sundays and the second Thursday of every month, its Wolfgang Puck kosher cafe is closed, and 26 percent of the staff has been cut.

The institute had expected income from event rentals and catering to help with revenue, and still hopes to find organizations that want to share the space. “We counted on a whole lot of weddings, bar mitzvahs, private parties,” said Hal M. Lewis, who became president and chief executive of Spertus in July. “These have materialized with less intensity than anticipated.”

Mr. Lewis, who was not around when the decision to build was made, says it was well intentioned, but describes the result as “an operating model and a debt service that requires us to live beyond our means.” Much of his energy these days is spent on efforts to change that result, though he tries not to dwell on what might not have been.

“I wish my hair would grow back too, but I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it,” Mr. Lewis said. “Now I’ve got to go on.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 25, 2009
Because of an editing error, an article on Dec. 12 about building projects by arts institutions that have been delayed or canceled because of the economic downturn erroneously included one museum among those that have delayed plans to build additions. The Columbus Museum of Art says that while fund-raising has been delayed for its addition, the project itself has not.

==

[graphic from The New York Times. Caption: "# Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects. A digital rendering of the canceled Berkeley museum’s exterior and pedestrian walkway."]

Burj Khalifa

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, tonight officially opened the tallest building in the world and revealed its new name: Burj Khalifa.

The glass-and-steel structure is now, officially, the tallest in the world, at 828 metres–2716.5 feet.

more

[text and graphic from The National]

Tipitina's celebrates its 32nd anniversary!

Tipitina's
32nd Anniversary Show featuring The Chilluns

Friday, Jan 15, 2010 10:00 pm (9:00 pm Doors)
Tipitina's (Uptown)
New Orleans, LA

"featuring Dave Malone (of The Radiators), Annie Clements (of Sugarland), Cranston Clements (of Twangorama), Johnny Malone, Darcy Malone, Spencer Bohren, and Andre Bohren (of Johnny Sketch & The Dirty Notes)"

$15.

From The Best of New Orleans :

"One of the best traditions in New Orleans music is its multigenerational families of performers. The names of Crescent City musical clans read like royalty: Marsalis, Lastie, Andrews, Neville, etc. The Chilluns combines several families, including the Malones (Dave, Johnny, D'Arcy), the Bohrens (Spencer and Andre) and the Clements (Cranston and Annie). The group will play some appropriate Motown and British Invasion covers as well as originals from both the elders and youngsters. Everyone has played with so many national and local acts that the repertoire is as full as a phone book. Johnny Sketch and the Dirty Notes open. Tickets $15 – David Kunian"

more | Tipitina's Calendar

[Graphic from Google Image search for 'Annie Clements']