'Saint Joan': Constance Cummings as the George Bernard Shaw heroine. Constance Cummings on stage: From sex-change farce and Emma Bovary to Juliet and 'Saint Joan' (See previous post: “Constance Cummings: Frank Capra, Mae West and Columbia Lawsuit.”) In the mid-1930s, Constance Cummings landed the title roles in two of husband Benn W. Levy's stage adaptations: Levy and Hubert Griffith's Young Madame Conti (1936), starring Cummings as a demimondaine who falls in love with a villainous character. She ends up killing him – or does she? Adapted from Bruno Frank's German-language original, Young Madame Conti was presented on both sides of the Atlantic; on Broadway, it had a brief run in spring 1937 at the Music Box Theatre. Based on the Gustave Flaubert novel, the Theatre Guild-produced Madame Bovary (1937) was staged in late fall at Broadway's Broadhurst Theatre. Referring to the London production of Young Madame Conti, The...
- 11/10/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
In his introduction to Alan Berliner's film, "First Cousin Once Removed," which screened as part of the "Documentary Short List" program recently at Doc NYC, the festival's Artistic Director Thom Powers mentioned that most filmmakers he knows stop watching their films with audiences after the first few screenings, but Berliner is the exception. Berliner, whose experimental documentary films "Wide Awake," "The Sweetest Sound," "Nobody's Business," "Intimate Stranger" and "The Family Album" have been broadcast and screened at festivals all around the world, makes a point of watching his films along with an audience almost every chance he gets. "First Cousin Once Removed," which Eric Kohn called "equal parts psychological mystery and lyrical treatise on the passage of time," chronicles the late Edwin Honig, a poet and professor (as well as a cousin of Berliner's) and his life with Alzheimers. Below, Berliner explains why he relishes the opportunity to watch his films with an audience.
- 12/20/2013
- by Alan Berliner
- Indiewire
The 6th Istanbul Documentary Days was blessed with an outstanding location for a documentary film festival: a park which has become a cause and a symbol of an urban uprising movement that has spread to the whole of the country. What makes it even more fantastic is that it was not meant to be so. It all happened naturally, so to speak.
In 2012, an announcement was made that there was a plan to turn Gezi Park, a small historical park in central Istanbul, into a shopping mall area. Activists for environmental as well urban rights launched a campaign to preserve the park. As work which would destroy the park began in the second half of May this year, a small group of activists set up tents in the park to stage a peaceful protest.
As the police reacted violently to push the protesters out of the park, tens of thousands...
In 2012, an announcement was made that there was a plan to turn Gezi Park, a small historical park in central Istanbul, into a shopping mall area. Activists for environmental as well urban rights launched a campaign to preserve the park. As work which would destroy the park began in the second half of May this year, a small group of activists set up tents in the park to stage a peaceful protest.
As the police reacted violently to push the protesters out of the park, tens of thousands...
- 7/22/2013
- by N. Buket Cengiz
- The Moving Arts Journal
Alzheimer’s is one of the most tragic diseases for a creative person. While physically painless, the dementia and memory loss are dreadful impairments that no mind should have to bear, and that seems to be especially the case for celebrated artistic minds like that of Edwin Honig. The late poet and critic is the subject of a new documentary by Alan Berliner, the renowned maker of deeply personal experimental nonfiction films. Previous works of his include An Intimate Stranger, which focuses on his maternal grandfather, and Nobody’s Business, which is about his father. His relationship to Honig is directly spelled out in the new doc’s title, First Cousin Once Removed. In addition to that familial bond, though, Berliner considers his mother’s cousin to be his mentor and friend; Honig’s estranged adopted kids meanwhile imply that the filmmaker was treated more like a son than they each were. Making...
- 10/13/2012
- by Christopher Campbell
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
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