Saturday, 30 January 2016
Thursday, 28 January 2016
The Brideshead Generation Evelyn Waugh and His Friends By Humphrey Carpenter
'[The Brideshead Generation]
has both style and substance, and is above all an enjoyable
companion. It has a wildly amusing cast, here controlled by a skilful
director.' "Evening Standard"
'Jovial and entertaining, full
of the sort of stories that your friends will tell you if you don't
read it before them.' "Independent"
'Carpenter has read widely and
has collected an enormous fund of entertaining stories and facts.'
"Sunday Telegraph"
'Hauntingly sad and
wonderfully funny and by far the best thing Humphrey Carpenter has
done.' Fiona MacCarthy, "The Times"
Review By William Tegner on July 6, 2003
This is an admirable book,
well written, balanced and well researched. After a slightly hesitant
start, the scene shifts to Oxford in the early twenties; it comes
across as a very dissolute place, with distinct homosexual
undertones. The noticeable "public school" backdrop leaves
you wondering why anyone should send their child to an English
boarding school (at very great expense, incidentally). But they did,
and still do. However, at Oxford we are introduced to a veritable
galaxy of talent, including Evelyn Waugh, the lead character in the
book, Graham Greene, John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Anthony Powell
and others. There are some very amusing quotes and anecdotes.
But the book becomes
increasingly serious, and whilst not specifically a work of literary
criticism, it cites reviews and gives the background to the works of
Waugh and to a lesser extent others. It also looks at the curious
world of the Roman Catholic convert. At the end I felt a little sad
for Waugh and some of his contemporaries. In spite of their
achievements, by no means all of them seemed happy.
Books
of The Times; When Wit Was All And Kindness Was Nil
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: December
22, 1989
The Brideshead
Generation Evelyn Waugh and His Friends By Humphrey Carpenter 523
pages. Illustrated. Houghton Mifflin. $27.95.
''She almost wished
in this new mood of exaltation that she had come to the party in
fancy dress. It was called a Savage party, that is to say that
Johnnie Hoop had written on the invitation that they were to come
dressed as savages. Numbers of them had done so; Johnnie himself in a
mask and black gloves represented the Maharanee of Pukkapore,
somewhat to the annoyance of the Maharajah, who happened to drop in.
The real aristocracy, the younger members of those two or three great
brewing families which rule London, had done nothing about it. They
had come on from a dance and stood in a little group by themselves,
aloof, amused but not amusing.''
Evelyn Waugh's
wicked description of a party in ''Vile Bodies'' gleefully captures
the inane posturing of the Bright Young Things who came of age in
London during the 1920's, and at the same time it captures the
brittle mood of Waugh's own Oxford generation: a sense of postwar
futility gaudily disguised as frivolity; a yearning after the
aristocratic values of a vanished, nondemocratic age; a willful
determination to substitute hedonism and witty detachment for
seriousness and introspection.
Though Humphrey
Carpenter's new book, ''The Brideshead Generation,'' touches briefly
upon the forces that shaped Waugh and his friends -namely, the
convulsive aftereffects of World War I, and the emergence of a new
bourgeois society - it makes little serious attempt to situate this
group of writers within the continuum of English cultural history or
to assess its overall achievement. The reader who is interested in
the social impulses that led to the ascendency of Waugh's circle (a
group that included Cyril Connolly, Graham Greene, John Betjeman,
Anthony Powell, Nancy Mitford, Harold Acton and Brian Howard) would
do better to examine Martin Green's ''Children of the Sun,'' an
original and absorbing study that carefully examines the emergence of
these writers vis-a-vis earlier and later literary groups personified
by Kipling, Orwell and Auden.
As for ''The
Brideshead Generation,'' the book pretty much limits itself to
chronicling the careers of Waugh and some of his friends, drawing
heavily upon these writers' fiction and autobiographical works, and
such secondary sources as Christopher Syke's biography of Waugh.
Because these
authors wrote so cleverly about themeselves, because their lives were
so crammed with colorful anecdotes, ''The Brideshead Generation''
makes for fast, diverting reading. Though much of the material is
just old literary gossip, Mr. Carpenter manages to do a fluent job of
weaving this information in with pithy analyses of individual books
and casual sketches of overlapping social worlds. The reader gets to
see John Betjeman, the future poet laureate of England, carrying his
teddy bear (like Sebastian in ''Brideshead Revisited'') around the
Oxford campus; the young Graham Greene playing Russian roulette with
a loaded revolver, and an aging Waugh taunting unwanted guests with
his huge antique ear trumpet.
The snobbish,
insular realms of Eton and Oxford are conjured up in a couple of
brief chapters, and the reader is quickly immersed in the acutely
class-conscious politics of student society. The esthetic choices
made during these school days would later shape entire lives and
careers, but many of those choices appear to have initially been made
on completely arbitrary grounds.
According to Mr.
Carpenter, the future art connoisseur Harold Acton became an ardent
proponent of mid-Victorian style because his rival esthetes at Oxford
had already put dibs on the period of the 1890's; the only other
viable alternative - ''to become pure modern'' - was embraced by
Auden's circle. Waugh, Mr. Carpenter suggests, similarly gravitated
toward political conservatism as an expedient social measure. Though
he and his public school pals had ''sometimes posed as 'Bolshevik,'
'' writes Mr. Carpenter, Waugh realized, upon his arrival at Oxford,
''that if he were to join one of the left-wing groups at Oxford he
would 'find the competition too hot.' ''
In a well-known
passage in ''Enemies of Promise,'' Cyril Connolly posited the theory
that the experiences he and his contemporaries had undergone as
students were ''so intense as to dominate their lives and arrest
their development. From these it results that the greater part of the
ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious,
cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.''
Certainly the
adolescent aspect applies quite pointedly to many of the writers in
this volume. Though he outgrew his youthful fantasies of suicide,
Greene has spent the better part of his life traveling the globe,
looking for other ways of escape. With ''Enemies of Promise'' and
''The Unquiet Grave,'' Connolly became a specialist in the themes of
futility and self-reproach. Brian Howard evaded his early literary
promise by spending the better part of his life aimlessly wandering
about Europe, before committing suicide in 1958.
Waugh, of course,
went on to write a series of wonderfully comic novels - as well as
the more elegiac ''Brideshead Revisited'' - but by middle age, he had
sunk deep into an alcohol-soaked depression, his pose of defensive
detachment calcifying into a ferocious misanthropy that alienated
family and friends. He took a journalist to court for implying that
his brother Alec's books had sold more than his own; and he
complained that his own children were ''defective adults'' -
''feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humourless.''
By the end of his
life, he was constantly complaining that he was ''bored bored
bored.'' It was a depressing and somehow fitting end to a life that
increasingly revolved - like much of his social set's - around the
snobbish distinctions of wealth and class, and a glittering but empty
series of parties, drinking bouts and stupid jokes.
Tuesday, 26 January 2016
The Print Room / Castletown House / VÍDEO below
The Print Room/ Castletown House
The Print Room is
one of the most important rooms at Castletown. It is the only fully
intact eighteenth century print room left in Ireland. During Lady
Louisa’s time it became popular for ladies to collect their
favourite prints and then arrange and paste them on to the walls of a
chosen room, along with decorative borders. At Castletown, Louisa,
together with her sister Sarah, decorated this former ante room in
1768. She had been collecting prints since at least 1762, and the
Print Room can be seen as a scrapbook of mid eighteenth century
culture and taste. Included amongst the prints is Joshua Reynolds’
portrait of Louisa’s sister Sarah, sacrificing herself to the
graces. Continuing the family theme the north wall features a print
after Van Dyck of the children of Charles I, including the future
Charles II, Louisa’s great grandfather. Contemporary popular culture
is represented by two prints of the leading actor David Garrick; he
is pictured between the muses of tragedy and comedy above the
fireplace, and with the actress Sarah Cibber on the opposite wall.
Amongst the artists featured are, Rembrandt, Guido Reni, Teniers and
Le Bas.
Unusually this print
room survived changes in taste and fashion, although the room seems
to have been slightly rearranged in the mid 19th century. In the late
nineteenth century this room was used as a billiards room but the
present furnishings more accurately reflect its original purpose as a
small or private sitting room.
The English Print Room Phenomenon
Posted on 19 March
2010 by Kathryn Kane
The phenomenon of
the English Print Room …
The original print
rooms in great houses across the Continent were exactly what one
might suppose them to be, rooms in which fine art prints were
displayed. From the seventeenth century right though to the
mid-nineteenth century, the print room was a feature of many homes of
wealthy gentlemen who were connoisseurs of art. These print rooms
were typically smaller in size than a gallery for the display of
paintings, in keeping with the smaller size of most prints. The
prints displayed in these rooms could be rare or unique, and were
always of great value.
As had been done for
centuries, the prints might be kept in cabinets or in shallow drawers
in tables, should they be very fine or unusual prints. Alternately,
they might be kept in albums, often leather bound, to protect them
from the light. Each print was mounted on an album page of heavy
paper and originally, parallel lines of ink or watercolor borders
were made around the print on the paper. Often these parallel lines
were filled in with a colored watercolor wash, giving the effect of a
frame around the print. Or, the print might actually be framed on its
page by a paper frame made especially for the purpose. By the latter
decades of the eighteenth century, these paper frames had become very
popular and were usually designed and produced by the same
print-makers who were making the prints which they framed. Some print
collectors would use a wide and varying range of frame styles for
these paper frames, but others would settle on a single paper frame
style designed solely for their use. Once such collector who had his
own print frame design was the artist Thomas Lawrence, who had one of
the finest print collections ever assembled.
In some cases, the
prints were framed, sometimes under glass, and hung on the walls of
the print room, skyed as paintings would have been, that is, the wall
was carpeted with many prints in various sizes, hung in tiers from
the cornice or crown molding to the dado or chair rail. In many cases
in such print rooms, the walls were curtained, as were the walls of
some painting galleries. These curtains would be kept closed over the
prints, except when they were being viewed, in order to protect them
from light damage.
Another version of
the print room, which was found only in Britain, blended the
techniques of album and wall display. The prints were mounted
directly on the walls of the print room and were framed with the
paper print frames typically used to frame prints in albums. They
were arranged on the print room walls in skyed fashion, just as
actual framed prints would have been. An example of this blended type
of print room is the Print Room at Uppark in West Sussex. Prints
displayed in this way were typically inexpensive and commonly
available copies of popular paintings, rather than rare fine art
prints. These prints might be hand-colored or, more often they were
grisaille, in either shades of gray or sepia.
Print rooms of this
type were more likely to be seen in the homes of those without the
financial resources of affluent connoisseurs. Those with a taste for
art without the wealth to afford original paintings often purchased
the less expensive engravings of those works which they could display
in their homes in the same way the aristocracy displayed their
expensive paintings. For example, young Englishmen who took the Grand
Tour on a budget would acquire prints and engravings as souvenirs,
rather than paintings and sculpture. These engravings would then be
displayed in the print rooms of their homes when they returned.
Often, the decoration of these print rooms would be done by their
wives, sisters or mothers.
By the
mid-eighteenth century, many ladies, in all ranks of society,
collected inexpensive prints, often on a specific theme, like
animals, landscapes or mythological scenes. When they had gathered
enough, they would paste their prints to the walls of a small sitting
or dressing room. If they were impatient, they might decorate one
wall of a room as soon as they had enough prints, doing each
additional wall as they gathered more prints. Some young girls would
begin collecting such prints in anticipation of decorating a small
room in their home after they married. It was at about this time that
many stationers, printers and some booksellers sold the paper frames,
ribbon swags and other decorative paper embellishments which these
ladies needed to enhance their personal print rooms.
This last type of
print room was known only in Britain and occassionally in America.
There are no instances of this method of print display in Europe. It
also seems clear that these print rooms were seldom, if ever,
decorated by professional decorators. Most of these print rooms were
very personal spaces, most often decorated by the lady or ladies who
used them, even in rather grand houses. There are a few instances of
print rooms which were more public in nature, such as that at Uppark,
but in most cases, even those were most often the product of the
members of the household, usually female, who selected the prints,
decided their arrangement and color scheme, and affixed the prints
and their paper embellishments to the walls.
By the end of the
eighteenth century, instead of pasting the prints directly on the
walls of the room, it became the practice to paper the walls first
with a plain paper of a single, usually pale, color. The print rooms
in less affluent homes were papered with uncolored paper-hangings
which were painted after they were affixed to the wall. In either
case, once the paper was hung and dry, the prints would then be
pasted to that, after which the paper frames, ribbon swags and other
paper embellishments would be pasted to the walls to complete the
design.
Paper-stainers,
those who manufactured paper-hangings, soon got the idea of making
paper-hangings which were essentially ready-made print rooms. These
papers where covered with images of prints surrounded by paper frames
and other embellishments on a solid color ground. Once hung, they
were a good approximation of a print room with significantly less
effort. These paper-hangings, like the earlier print rooms, were
found only in Great Britain, and occasionally in America. There is
some evidence that sets of print-room papers were exported to Europe,
but not in high volume. These papers sold reasonably well in England,
but they did not replace the real print room. Even into the Regency,
there were too many ladies across the country who had their heart set
on creating their own print room to be willing to settle for one
ready-made of paper-hangings.
There are a few
large houses that have print rooms which are still intact. One of
these, the only one in Ireland, can still be seen at Castletown House
in County Kildare, Ireland. This was the home of Lady Louisa Lennox
Connolly, and her husband, Thomas Connolly. It is known that the
prints for this room were being collected as early as 1762. This room
has cream-colored walls covered with sepia-tone prints and
embellishments which Lady Louisa and her friends cut out and applied
to the walls. I had an opportunity to see this print room in person
when I was living in Ireland years ago. Though the room is rather
larger than the average print room, it is still a cozy, charming and
essentially feminine room, as were the majority of print rooms
created by the many English ladies who decorated their own personal
print rooms from the mid-eighteenth century though the early
nineteenth century.
Though the fashion
for print rooms in England began in the mid-eighteenth century, it
continued into the years of the Regency and there is no reason print
rooms could not be woven into the plot of a Regency romance. Ladies
might get together to help a friend prepare the prints and
embellishments to be affixed to a print room wall, gossiping all the
while. A young lady with a love of art might secretly plan her own
small print room, carefully collecting prints with botanical designs
or scenes from Aesop’s Fables, perhaps slipping out to the print
shops from time to time to search for more prints for her collection.
An impoverished widow might have to give up hope of her own print
room and settle for a room papered with a set of inexpensive
paper-hangings with a print-room design.
I was pleasantly
surprised to discover, during the course of my research for this
article, that the English print room has not faded into the mists of
history. I found two different web sites which offer services for
creating print rooms in the twenty-first century. I have no
affiliation with either of these companies, but both of them have a
number of good images of print rooms and offer services for those who
are interested in having their own print rooms two hundred and fifty
years after they were first fashionable. You can visit Holly Moore
Interiors or The English Print Room, for more information.
Castletown House, Celbridge, County Kildare, Ireland, is a Palladian country house built in 1722 for William Conolly, the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons.It formed the centrepiece of a 550-acre (220 ha) estate. Sold to developers in 1965, the estate is now divided between State and private ownership.
Monday, 25 January 2016
Hitchcock/Truffaut Documentary / Book / Hitchcock/Truffaut Official Trailer 1 (2015) -
2015 French-American documentary film directed by Kent Jones about François Truffaut's book on Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock/Truffaut, and its impact on cinema.
Truffaut interviewed
Hitchcock over eight days in 1962 at his offices at Universal Studios
to write his book, and the documentary features reflections from
directors including James Gray, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Wes
Anderson, David Fincher, Arnaud Desplechin, and Olivier Assayas.
It was first
screened at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and was shown in the TIFF
Docs section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.
Directed by Kent
Jones
Produced by Charles
S. Cohen
Olivier Mille
Written by Kent
Jones
Serge Toubiana
Based
on Hitchcock/Truffaut
by François
Truffaut
Starring Alfred
Hitchcock
François Truffaut
Music by Jeremiah
Bornfield
Cinematography Nick
Bentgen
Daniel Cowen
Eric Gautier
Mihai Malaimare Jr.
Lisa Rinzler
Genta Tamaki
Edited by Rachel
Reichman
Distributed by Cohen
Media Group
Release dates
19 May 2015 (Cannes)
2 December 2015 (US)
Running time
79 minutes
Country France
United States
Language English
French
Japanese
Hitchcock/Truffaut is a 1966 book by François Truffaut about Alfred Hitchcock, originally released in French as Le Cinéma selon Alfred Hitchcock.
First published by
Éditions Robert Laffont, it is based on a 1962 exchange between
Hitchcock and Truffaut, in which the two directors spent a week in a
room at Universal Studios talking about movies. After Hitchcock's
death, Truffaut updated the book with a new preface and final chapter
on Hitchcock's later films.
The book is the
inspiration for the 2015 documentary, Hitchcock/Truffaut.
In Hitchcock, film
critic François Truffaut presents fifty hours of interviews with
Alfred Hitchcock about the whole of his vast directorial career, from
his silent movies in Great Britain to his color films in Hollywood.
The result is a portrait of one of the greatest directors the world
has ever known, an all-round specialist who masterminded everything,
from the screenplay and the photography to the editing and the
soundtrack. Hitchcock discusses the inspiration behind his films and
the art of creating fear and suspense, as well as giving strikingly
honest assessments of his achievements and failures, his doubts and
hopes. This peek into the brain of one of cinema’s greats is a
must-read for all film aficionados.
Review:
‘Hitchcock/Truffaut’ Revisits the Master of Suspense
Hitchcock/Truffaut
NYT Critics’ Pick
By JEANNETTE
CATSOULISDEC. 1, 2015
“Psycho” (1960)
was the first film I saw in a movie theater, an experience that my
7-year-old self was ill-equipped to parse. Surrounded by jittery
adults, I puzzled over everything, and not just the frantic screaming
that mimicked Bernard Herrmann’s devilishly clever musical cues.
Why, I wondered, was Janet Leigh wandering around in her bra in the
middle of the afternoon?
That juxtaposing of
sex and terror was as essential to Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic
style as his meticulous deployment of icy blond actresses.
Disappointingly, Kent Jones’s documentary “Hitchcock/Truffaut”
— though not nearly as dry as its title — barely tickles
Hitchcock’s fascinating fetishes. Despite a promising nod to the
brilliant perversions of “Marnie” and “Vertigo” (which few
can deny is one terrifically sick movie), Mr. Jones remains rigidly
focused on hammering home the director François Truffaut’s
motivation for writing the 1966 book on which this film is based: To
lead Hitchcock, then widely considered a mere commercial entertainer,
out of the shoals of populism and into the cineaste spotlight.
Truffaut knew that hindsight was better than no sight at all.
Just as a snooty
reader might be enticed to the novels of Stephen King by a thumbs-up
from The New York Review of Books, movie buffs were likely to view
Truffaut’s enthusiasm for Hitchcock as a sufficient entree to their
discerning fold. But the book, an engrossing record of Truffaut’s
dayslong interview with his idol in 1962, did more than just
reposition its subject’s reputation. It also provided riveting
insight into the art and craft of moviemaking, revealing Hitchcock’s
mastery of time and space and his unwavering preference, honed by his
period of making silent movies, for image over dialogue.
Curating a selection
of the original interview recordings (whose sound quality is damn
near pristine), Mr. Jones fashions an unfaltering encomium that’s
entirely free of the highfalutin monologues that might deter
noncinephiles. Bob Balaban’s intermittent narration is soft and
unintrusive, and a chorus of lauded directors, mostly American and
all male (I can’t help thinking that a woman might have dug deeper
into the significant contributions of Hitchcock’s wife and
collaborator, Alma Reville), chime in with acuity and ardor.
What they don’t do
is show how their own movies might have been influenced by
Hitchcock’s technique, which Mr. Jones lovingly illustrates in
dissections of a few of the master’s most memorable scenes. Though
merely a tasting menu, these moments add jolts of pulpy fun and allow
their creator to speak for himself. The man who embraced many of the
characteristics that movie snobs love to denigrate — his genre; his
prolific output (at the time of the interview, he was just completing
his 48th film); the constraints of the studio system — is finally
his own best argument for the happy coexistence of art and
entertainment.
“Hitchcock/Truffaut”
is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Have you seen ‘Psycho’?
Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.
Sunday, 24 January 2016
The incorrigible latin lover. / Fernando Lamas / VÍDEO: How Did Fernando Lamas Feel About Billy Crystal's Impression of Him? - W...
 |
"When
a person has an accent, it means they can speak one more language
than you"
|
The incorrigible latin lover.
After Porfirio
Rubirosa , “Tweedland” presents Fernando Lamas.
“JEEVES”
 |
"Sometimes
other men said that he was gay, and nothing pleased him more than
proving them wrong with their own wives.”
|
Born Fernando Álvaro
Lamas y de Santos in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by 1942, he was an
established movie star in his native country. His first film made in
the United States was The Avengers in 1950. In 1951, he signed a
contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and went on to play "Latin
Lover" roles.
In 1951, he starred
as Paul Sarnac in the musical, Rich, Young and Pretty and as Juan
Dinas in the comedy, The Law and the Lady. Throughout the 1950s,
Lamas had leading roles in a number of MGM musicals, including
Dangerous When Wet with his future wife Esther Williams. After the
beginning of the 1960s, he turned to TV series; mostly appearing in
guest roles. From 1965 to 1968, Lamas had a regular role as Ramon De
Vega on Run For Your Life, which starred Ben Gazzara.
Lamas directed for
the first time in 1963. It was a movie titled Magic Fountain starring
his future wife Esther Williams. He directed another feature film,
The Violent Ones, which was released in 1967 and co-starred Aldo Ray
and David Carradine. He was most active directing on television,
doing episodes that included Mannix, Alias Smith and Jones, Starsky
and Hutch and Falcon Crest. The latter show co-starred his son,
Lorenzo.
Lamas was married
four times. His first marriage was to Argentine actress Perla Mux in
1940 and they had a daughter, Christina before divorcing in 1944.
His second marriage
was in 1946 to Lydia Barachi. Fernando and Lydia also had a daughter,
Alexandra. They were later divorced in 1952.
His third wife was
the American actress Arlene Dahl. They were married in 1954. They
were later divorced in 1960. Out of this marriage was born a son,
Lorenzo Lamas (born January 20, 1958).
His longest marriage
was to the well known swimmer and actress Esther Williams in 1969,
and they remained married until Fernando's death in 1982.
Fernando Lamas died
of pancreatic cancer in Los Angeles, California at the age of 67. His
ashes were scattered by close friend Jonathan Goldsmith from his
sailboat.
After his death,
Lamas's archetypal playboy image lived on in popular culture via the
"Fernando" character developed by Billy Crystal on Saturday
Night Live in the mid-1980s. The character was outlandish and
exaggerated but reportedly inspired by a remark Crystal heard Lamas
utter on The Tonight Show; "It is better to look good than to
feel good." This was one of the Fernando character's two
catchphrases along with the better-remembered "You look
marvelous!" (usually spelled "mahvelous" in this
context).
His friend, actor
Jonathan Goldsmith, took inspiration from Lamas for the character The
Most Interesting Man in the World.
