If There Is Much In The Window There Should Be More In The Room

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Camille Claudel (1988) ~2~




Camille Claudel is a 1988 French film about the life of the 19th century female sculptor Camille Claudel. The movie was based on the book by Reine-Marie Paris, granddaughter of Camille's brother, the poet and diplomat Paul Claudel. It was directed by Bruno Nuytten, co-produced by Isabelle Adjani, and starred her and Gérard Depardieu. The film had a total of 2,717,136 admissions in France.






The film recounts the troubled life of French sculptor Camille Claudel and her long relationship with legendary sculptor Auguste Rodin. Beginning in the 1880s with a young Claudel's first meeting with Rodin, the film traces the development of their intense romantic bond.


The growth of this relationship coincides with the rise of Claudel's career, helping her overcome prejudices against female artists. However, their romance soon sours, due to the increasing pressures of Rodin's fame and his love for another woman.

These difficulties combine with her increasing doubts about the value of her work to drive Claudel into an emotional tumult that threatens to become insanity.



1989 - Nominated for two Academy Awards: Academy Award for Best Actress and Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
1989 - Received five César Awards, including the César Awards for Best Film and Best Actress.
1989 - Isabelle Adjani received the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 39th Berlin International Film Festival

Camille Claudel (8 December 1864 -- 19 October 1943) was a French sculptor and graphic artist. She was the elder sister of the poet and diplomat Paul Claudel.







http://stagevu.com/video/wdkcqlgyhuvi

*Media belong to their respective copyright owners/sources/distributors and appear here as fair use. This page is solely informational and educational and intended for no other purpose than that as well as being not for profit*




Source:
RADolanko
stagevu.com

Friday, July 20, 2012

Camille Claudel (1988) ~1~


Camille Claudel is a 1988 French film about the life of the 19th century female sculptor Camille Claudel. The movie was based on the book by Reine-Marie Paris, granddaughter of Camille's brother, the poet and diplomat Paul Claudel. It was directed by Bruno Nuytten, co-produced by Isabelle Adjani, and starred her and Gérard Depardieu. The film had a total of 2,717,136 admissions in France. 


The film recounts the troubled life of French sculptor Camille Claudel and her long relationship with legendary sculptor Auguste Rodin. Beginning in the 1880s with a young Claudel's first meeting with Rodin, the film traces the development of their intense romantic bond.

The growth of this relationship coincides with the rise of Claudel's career, helping her overcome prejudices against female artists. However, their romance soon sours, due to the increasing pressures of Rodin's fame and his love for another woman.

These difficulties combine with her increasing doubts about the value of her work to drive Claudel into an emotional tumult that threatens to become insanity.

1989 - Nominated for two Academy Awards: Academy Award for Best Actress and Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
1989 - Received five César Awards, including the César Awards for Best Film and Best Actress.
1989 - Isabelle Adjani received the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 39th Berlin International Film Festival

Camille Claudel (8 December 1864 -- 19 October 1943) was a French sculptor and graphic artist. She was the elder sister of the poet and diplomat Paul Claudel.

http://stagevu.com/video/pdkpzggrrfcn


This is not a movie about sculpture. Those who have seen Camille Claudel's work report that some of it has a power that is almost disturbing - that there is an urgency in her figures suggesting she was not simply shaping them, but using them to bring her own emotions to life. The film "Camille Claudel" is more concerned with her personality and passions than with her art, and so it is hard to judge, from the evidence on the screen, how good a sculptor she really was.


She is above all a lonely woman, because she chooses to do with her life what her society says no decent woman should do. She chooses to love who she will, and she wants to be an artist - to create sculptures out of clay, just as if she were a man. It is hard to say which of her choices is the most offensive. And when she goes mad, it is impossible to say whether the seeds of madness were there from the beginning, or whether she was driven to madness by a society that could not accept a woman who lived for herself.



Camille Claudel has until now occupied only the footnotes of late 19th century art. She was one of the mistresses of Auguste Rodin, the willful sculptor who is known to everyone, if only for "The Thinker." She was often his model, and for a time she worked as his collaborator. She left behind many sculptures, which can be seen here or there, not much remarked, while Rodin's work has been enshrined in the pantheon. She spent the last 30 years of her life in a madhouse.-  Roger Ebert
 




*Media belong to their respective copyright owners/sources/distributors and appear here as fair use. This page is solely informational and educational and intended for no other purpose than that as well as being not for profit*




Source:
RADolanko
stagevu.com

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Gustav Mahler - Origins

This year, the entire music world is celebrating the 152th anniversary of the birth of Gustav Mahler’s (July 7, 1860, Kalischt [Kaliště] – May 18, 1911, Vienna), perhaps the greatest Austrian symphonist and conductor. Mahler was best known during his own lifetime as one of the leading orchestral and operatic conductors of the day, but he has since come to be acknowledged as among the most important post-romantic composers – a remarkable feat for a figure whose mature creativity was concentrated in just two genres: song and symphony.


Gustav Mahler: Origins


From a vast and mysterious opera rehearsal stage (Gustav Mahler's "home away from home" for much of his life), San Francisco Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) introduces us to the compelling life and music of Gustav Mahler.

For Mahler, and for us the audience, his creativity was "a voyage of self-discovery." Happy, sad, frightening, grotesque – no matter what, MTT suggests, Mahler's life events provided the essential raw material with which he created his unique universe.


Michael Tilson Thomas journeys to the provincial Austro-Hungarian city of Gustav Mahler's childhood, traces his musical roots, follows his rise as a young conductor, and, with the help of the San Francisco Symphony, escorts us through the stunning creation and shocking premiere of Mahler's First Symphony. 












Mahler was born in 1860 to a Jewish tavern-keeper and his ill-matched wife. 












He grew up in the small provincial city of Iglau (present-day Jihlava), midway between Vienna and Prague, in the heart of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire.




MTT roams the city, finding clues to the sounds which shaped Mahler's imagination: the marching military bands of this garrison town, the rituals of the Synagogue, the bells and choirs of the churches, the drunken roistering in his father's tavern, the passing street musicians.




The subtlest sound of all was "Naturlaut" (the sound of nature itself), which Mahler sought whenever he escaped the city for a few brief hours.


He opens his First Symphony with his version of this sound – a soft, haunting and long-held sound effect from the violins – "a vast sonic horizon", as MTT calls it, which gives a hint of the cosmic scale of the Mahler symphonies to come.




There is a strand of happiness in Mahler's music. His youthful creativity produced the much-loved "Songs of a Wayfarer" in 1883.

This refreshing, tuneful songbook (excerpts sung here by Thomas Hampson) first stated musical themes he would insert in the First Symphony and re-use for the rest of his life. 

Its title gives a hint of how Mahler saw himself, too: the restless, sensitive searcher – "part poet, part journeyman and wandering Jew". 




But, as MTT explains, there were darker strands in Mahler's personality. 


The First Symphony suggests nightmarish scenes and parental confrontations from his childhood. 

Already, the theme of death looms large: Mahler lost many of his siblings, and both his parents died before he turned 30. The film intercuts orchestral performance with dark images from period folk tales and the Austro-Hungarian preoccupation with war.

Mahler coped with his demons through irony: already in his First Symphony, we discover the sharp juxtapositions of the beautiful and the tragic, with "the absurd, the silly and the grotesque." These sudden emotional twists became a trademark of Mahler's music for the rest of his life, however far he journeyed from the stultifying confines of Iglau.
In 1875, at the age of 15, Mahler had won a place at the Vienna Conservatory of Music and entered a different universe.  
The film follows his subsequent career, as he started to climb the ladder of success. Summer jobs in backwater spa-town operas were followed by more prestigious appointments throughout the Empire, until in 1888 he was appointed director of the second most important Opera House in Austro-Hungary: Budapest.

In his briefcase, however, was a work more radical than any he was asked to direct in the Opera House his own First Symphony. He paid for a local hall to get it performed, and it stunned and shocked the audience. 

Its shattering climax brings all the strands of early Mahler together: the beauty, the conflict, the irony, the dark memories – even a direct quote from Handel's Hallelujah Chorus. What lay ahead for the young maestro?







Watch on PBS. See more from Keeping Score.







*Source:video.pbs.org