Premiering at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival to rave reviews (including our own), Terence Davies’ A Quiet Passion tackles the life and work of America’s premier lady of letters, Emily Dickinson. Starring Cynthia Nixon as Dickinson, the drama pulsates with repressed creativity and bridled vitality, textured by Davies’s painterly, atmospheric touches that capture those aspects as well as the distinct domesticity of the Dickinson household. At last year’s New York Film Festival, I was able to sit down with highly esteemed British filmmaker and discuss what drew him to Emily Dickinson, the cruelty of talent being unrecognized within their lifetimes, and films that inspired him: William Wyler’s The Heiress and Max Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman. With the film now opening in limited release this Friday, read our full conversation below.
The Film Stage: What drew you to making this, not typical, biopic of Emily Dickinson’s life?...
The Film Stage: What drew you to making this, not typical, biopic of Emily Dickinson’s life?...
- 4/12/2017
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
Fillip Cornershop Satiediously, vol. 2 (Unheard Universe) Following up on last year's initial Satie volume, Cornershop now delivers a unique reading of Satie's notorious "Vexations," the one-page piece which Satie said should be performed with repeats until it totaled 840 times through the printed text (or perhaps not; debate has raged since its 1949 publication). Cornershop brings the piece in at a monumental 48 hours (more traditional performances of the 840-times length range from 18 to 28 hours).
As I was wondering how Cornershop could achieve such a performance without the aid of caffeine, which in turn would mitigate against his chosen slow tempo, I noticed a splice after the 168th time through and then, in turn, after the 336th. Shortly after the latter, and concurrent with my wife's threat of divorce, I had to stop listening, but a little math revealed to me that 1 through 168 and 169 through 336 were precisely the same length, so it appears...
As I was wondering how Cornershop could achieve such a performance without the aid of caffeine, which in turn would mitigate against his chosen slow tempo, I noticed a splice after the 168th time through and then, in turn, after the 336th. Shortly after the latter, and concurrent with my wife's threat of divorce, I had to stop listening, but a little math revealed to me that 1 through 168 and 169 through 336 were precisely the same length, so it appears...
- 4/1/2015
- by SteveHoltje
- www.culturecatch.com
Photo by Liam Daniel.
"I don't want you
But I hate to lose you
You've got me inbetween
The devil and the deep blue sea." —Harold Arlen & Ted Koehler
The idiom "between the devil and the deep blue sea" refers to a dilemma where one must choose between two undesirable situations. In Terence Davies' filmic adaptation of Terence Rattigan's 1952 play of the same name—The Deep Blue Sea (2011) was commissioned by the Sir Terence Rattigan Charitable Trust to commemorate the centenary of the playwright—it might be thought that Davies is playing with the idiom's unconfirmed nautical origins. As a portrait of class structure in post-wwii England, Davies could be said to be borrowing from the reference that "between the devil and the deep blue sea" signifies how English Navy sailors were pressed unwillingly into service and then positioned beneath the upper deck (officer territory). Or, perhaps more accurate to its romantic subtext,...
"I don't want you
But I hate to lose you
You've got me inbetween
The devil and the deep blue sea." —Harold Arlen & Ted Koehler
The idiom "between the devil and the deep blue sea" refers to a dilemma where one must choose between two undesirable situations. In Terence Davies' filmic adaptation of Terence Rattigan's 1952 play of the same name—The Deep Blue Sea (2011) was commissioned by the Sir Terence Rattigan Charitable Trust to commemorate the centenary of the playwright—it might be thought that Davies is playing with the idiom's unconfirmed nautical origins. As a portrait of class structure in post-wwii England, Davies could be said to be borrowing from the reference that "between the devil and the deep blue sea" signifies how English Navy sailors were pressed unwillingly into service and then positioned beneath the upper deck (officer territory). Or, perhaps more accurate to its romantic subtext,...
- 3/21/2012
- MUBI
Collegiate Chorale/American Symphony Orchestra/James Bagwell
Bruckner: Te Deum/Tippett: A Child of Our Time
Carnegie Hall, February 3, 2012
It has been said in various ways that live performance affects the listener in ways no recording can duplicate. The sound vibration of the live, unamplified singer and orchestra plays not only to one’s ears, but to the body, the internal organs, and particularly to the heart. There is no denying that the sounds produced by The Collegiate Chorale, American Symphony Orchestra, and soloists Nicole Cabell, Marietta Simpson, and Russell Thomas, conducted by James Bagwell, made a beeline straight to the heart at Carnegie Hall last Friday night. Phil Spector at his height never constructed a “wall of sound” such as this!
The performance of Anton Bruckner’s Te Deum, a Latin hymn of praise customarily sung for the dedication of a church, the coronation of a monarch, and various other festivities,...
Bruckner: Te Deum/Tippett: A Child of Our Time
Carnegie Hall, February 3, 2012
It has been said in various ways that live performance affects the listener in ways no recording can duplicate. The sound vibration of the live, unamplified singer and orchestra plays not only to one’s ears, but to the body, the internal organs, and particularly to the heart. There is no denying that the sounds produced by The Collegiate Chorale, American Symphony Orchestra, and soloists Nicole Cabell, Marietta Simpson, and Russell Thomas, conducted by James Bagwell, made a beeline straight to the heart at Carnegie Hall last Friday night. Phil Spector at his height never constructed a “wall of sound” such as this!
The performance of Anton Bruckner’s Te Deum, a Latin hymn of praise customarily sung for the dedication of a church, the coronation of a monarch, and various other festivities,...
- 2/8/2012
- by Jay Reisberg
- www.culturecatch.com
Russell got inside the psychological and emotional realities of the composers he loved, for which we should be ever grateful
I had two surpassingly strange obsessions as a teenage music lover: Anton Bruckner and Arnold Bax. And so, it turned out, did Ken Russell. I could hardly believe it when, after making his Bruckner film in 1990, The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner – a study of the Austrian composer's obsessive compulsive disorders, monastic seclusion and infatuation with young girls – Russell made a TV film a couple of years later about Bax, The Secret Life of Arnold Bax, the biggest prime-time exposure this otherwise little-known English composer is probably ever going to get.
Russell himself played Bax, and Glenda Jackson took the role of one of Bax's lovers, the pianist Harriet Cohen (in fact one of her last acting jobs before devoting her life to politics). But the scene that's burned into...
I had two surpassingly strange obsessions as a teenage music lover: Anton Bruckner and Arnold Bax. And so, it turned out, did Ken Russell. I could hardly believe it when, after making his Bruckner film in 1990, The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner – a study of the Austrian composer's obsessive compulsive disorders, monastic seclusion and infatuation with young girls – Russell made a TV film a couple of years later about Bax, The Secret Life of Arnold Bax, the biggest prime-time exposure this otherwise little-known English composer is probably ever going to get.
Russell himself played Bax, and Glenda Jackson took the role of one of Bax's lovers, the pianist Harriet Cohen (in fact one of her last acting jobs before devoting her life to politics). But the scene that's burned into...
- 11/29/2011
- by Tom Service
- The Guardian - Film News
A late-Romantic composer who occasionally worked in a more modern style, Alexander Zemlinsky (October 14, 1871 – March 15, 1942) was something of a prodigy. Anton Bruckner was among his teachers. Brahms, impressed by the Symphony in D and a quartet, recommended Zemlinsky to Simrock, Brahms's publisher and arranged a stipend for the young composer. Zemlinsky was friends with the slightly younger Arnold Schoenberg and taught him counterpoint (in which Brahms had tutored Zemlinsky); Schoenberg later married Zemlinsky's sister.
The connection to Schoenberg (who studied music with no-one else) probably contributed to the revival of Zemlinsky's music, which was largely forgotten in the decades after the Nazis drove the Jewish composer first from Germany back to his native Vienna, and then to America, where he found none of the success Schoenberg achieved in exile.
A few choice volumes Decca's Entartete Musik series ("decadent music," the Nazis' phrase for music they found insufficiently Aryan or overly...
The connection to Schoenberg (who studied music with no-one else) probably contributed to the revival of Zemlinsky's music, which was largely forgotten in the decades after the Nazis drove the Jewish composer first from Germany back to his native Vienna, and then to America, where he found none of the success Schoenberg achieved in exile.
A few choice volumes Decca's Entartete Musik series ("decadent music," the Nazis' phrase for music they found insufficiently Aryan or overly...
- 10/14/2011
- by SteveHoltje
- www.culturecatch.com
Despite circumstances that would make most men bitter, Anton Bruckner (Sept. 24, 1824 – Oct. 11, 1896) in his mature symphonies and choral works wrote some of the most spiritual music since Bach's. Insecure, he spent his thirties studying with the dictatorial music professor Simon Sechter, who had briefly taught Franz Schubert. Brucker didn't compose a symphony until 1863, the "Study" Symphony, which he withheld (as he did the later so-called No. 0).
In Vienna, Bruckner was considered by many to be a naïve country bumpkin; he got unfairly entangled in the bitter Brahms-Wagner debates that split the city. Bruckner's symphonies were thus the object of myopic criticism from some in the Brahms camp, including powerful critic Eduard Hanslick (however, Wagner, Liszt, and Emperor Franz Joseph I were among those who praised or supported Bruckner). The unprecedented length of Bruckner's symphonies, which develop in slow-moving monoliths of sound, was an impediment for some listeners. Bruckner, an excellent organist,...
In Vienna, Bruckner was considered by many to be a naïve country bumpkin; he got unfairly entangled in the bitter Brahms-Wagner debates that split the city. Bruckner's symphonies were thus the object of myopic criticism from some in the Brahms camp, including powerful critic Eduard Hanslick (however, Wagner, Liszt, and Emperor Franz Joseph I were among those who praised or supported Bruckner). The unprecedented length of Bruckner's symphonies, which develop in slow-moving monoliths of sound, was an impediment for some listeners. Bruckner, an excellent organist,...
- 10/10/2011
- by SteveHoltje
- www.culturecatch.com
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