Playing Chess With Stanley Kubrick

Jeremy Bernstein remembers his games with the American filmmaker

Stanley Kubrick (right) plays chess with George C. Scott on the set of Dr Strangelove: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

From Jeremy Bernstein (The New York Review of Books):

I told him I had a date with a chess hustler in Washington Square Park to play for money. Kubrick wanted the name. “Fred Duval” I said. Duval was a Haitian who claimed to be related to Francois Duvalier. I was absolutely positive that the name would mean nothing to Kubrick. His next remark nearly floored me. “Duval is a patzer,” is what he said. Unless you have been around chess players you cannot imagine what an insult this is. Moreover, Duval and I were playing just about even. What did that make me?

Kubrick explained that early in his career he too played chess for money in the park and that Duval was so weak that it was hardly worth playing him. I said that we should play some time and then left the apartment. I was quite sure that we would never play. I was wrong.

I wrote a Talk of the Town on my meeting with Kubrick, which he liked. I was thus emboldened to ask if I could write a full scale profile of him. He agreed but said that he was about to leave for London to begin production of what became 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still better, I thought: I could watch the making of the film. Our first meeting was at the Hotel Dorchester in London where he was temporarily living with his family. Kubrick brought out a chess set and beat me promptly. Then we played three more games and he beat me less promptly. But I won the fifth game!

Seizing the moment I told him that I had been hustling him and had deliberately lost the first four games. His response was that I was a patzer. All during the filming of 2001 we played chess whenever I was in London and every fifth game I did something unusual. Finally we reached the 25th game and it was agreed that this would decide the matter. Well into the game he made a move that I was sure was a loser. He even clutched his stomach to show how upset he was. But it was a trap and I was promptly clobbered. “You didn’t know I could act too,” he remarked.

The scene now shifts to the spring of 1972. I was spending the year at Oxford, and spent some Sundays with the Kubricks. Our interest again turned to chess but this time it was with the imminent match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in Iceland. One Sunday, Kubrick and I watched Fischer’s interview with Mike Wallace for “60 Minutes.” It was around the time of Fischer’s birthday and Wallace had come with a cake. “I don’t like that kind of cake,” Fischer said graciously. Then he told Wallace how he had learned to play chess. His older sister had taught him the moves. He soon began beating her so he spotted her pieces. Then he said that that no longer worked so he began playing with himself—Fischer vs. Fischer. “Mostly I won,” he commented with no trace of humor.  [Read More]

Find Stanley Kubrick on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Exploring The Shining
• Kubrick's Total Cinema
• Stanley Kubrick Photographs: NYC Subway
• Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Stanley Kubrick: A Design Compendium

Exploring The Shining

A glimpse inside the Kubrick Archive

A still from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980)

Model for the Overlook Hotel

Model for the Overlook Hotel

Location of the Overlook Hotel

From the BFI (British Film Institute)

With the recent release of the original extended US version of The Shining, the Stanley Kubrick Archive, held at the University of the Arts London’s Archives and Special Collections Centre, has seen an increased interest in the materials relating to the director’s 1980 classic. As Michael Herr wrote in his short memoir of Kubrick: “Stanley didn’t like to talk about his films; he’d tell you how but never why.” The same is true for the Kubrick Archive, but it undoubtedly contains some tantalising pieces which give us an insight into how the films were made and the lengths to which Kubrick went to make the film he wanted.

The Archive documents the planning for the set construction with extensive research photographs of the Timberline Lodge in Mount Hood, Oregon (the model for the exterior of the Overlook Hotel) and the interiors of the Awahnee Lodge Hotel (the model for many of the Overlook’s interiors) in Yosemite National Park, California. Then there are the hundreds of photographs of the miniature models built by the cinematographer John Alcott to plan the lighting; the technical drawings planning the building of the sets; and the production stills documenting their construction, including the giant façade built on the backlot of Elstree Studios.

The Archive also shows the great attention to detail which Kubrick applied to the advertising of his film. Catriona McAvoy researched in the archive for her MA dissertation. She highlights the correspondence between Kubrick and Saul Bass who designed the poster for the original release of the film. She refers to the letter in which Kubrick explains that all of Bass’s designs are “beautifully done but [none] of them are right”. He requests “A GREAT MANY PENCIL ROUGHS” but then asks, “By the way, what happened to the face version which you showed me in London?”

The closing line of this letter is also truly exciting as it reveals Kubrick’s thematic aims for the film: “ps. I would like to suggest it is a film of terror (a must) and the supernatural (if possible).”

But probably my favourite items from The Shining materials are the copies of Stephen King’s original novel, which are littered with Kubrick’s handwritten annotations, prising out ideas from the story and expanding on narrative and character points. As Nathan Abrams of Bangor University told me, “They not only gave me insight into what Kubrick was intending… [but also suggest] a body of additional texts that he was thinking about while working on the screenplay.” [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Stanley Kubrick: A Design Compendium
• Krzysztof Penderecki: Horror Composer
• Richard Steinitz, György Ligeti
• Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Stanley Kubrick Photographs: NYC Subway

Paul Thomas Anderson: An Autocritique

From the Los Angeles Review of Books

Paul Thomas Anderson

From Greg Gerke (Los Angeles Review of Books):

The bounty of responses to Paul Thomas Anderson and his films speak to his artistry. After David Lynch and Terrence Malick, he is the star of the American narrative cinema and is certainly leagues more commercial than those two old souls, now name brands. Because he is a contemporary, I confess a competition. It is one-sided, but not drooling. What I have made in the past five years may pale to what The Master is. Many pages and many words that don’t cohere into one principled mountain risk the dyspepsia that graces the internet, our mutual multi-glutinous mouthpiece. Our mediums are different, our means are different, one doesn’t know the other exists — it sounds like many crush relationships, but it is the basis for more than thwarted love or genuine repulsion.

Critics carry the stain of envy into the thoughts they print, especially those emboldened enough to critique without having ever made the art that can exasperate them. E. M. Cioran, the crotchety Romanian, master of despair and champion of the unsuccessful writer and artist said, “To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.” The plexiglass irony complicating the situation is that Anderson works in the vein I presupposed would fill my life full when I was 20. He didn’t go to film school; for a few years, I did. I left it with only two years completed, in addition to numerous Bergman-enamored screenplays that would never see production. He put in time as a production assistant, while I moved across the country to his coast to find tai chi, tofu, and women who didn’t believe in underwear. Later, I farmed my way across Europe, while Anderson simply realized what Kubrick and John Cassavetes counseled — if one wanted to make a film, one had to go out, get money any way one could, and make a film. Hard Eight, his first, came out in 1996. Two years later, I sat in a meadow at 8,000 feet in Arizona and told myself, by pressing the words into a notebook, that I would be a writer, not a film director. The Rilkean moments of beginning to see were starting to accumulate. I began to make fictions and characters who would not be seen speaking, but whose monologues and dialogues would have to cut the internal ear of the audience.

Anderson kept pushing himself and after Magnolia came a great shift in his world-view and probably his life situation, though I will only call the shift aging. It’s not when sadness entered — babies were born — but when his age squeezed out the adolescent endeared of pre–Cape Fear Scorsese, an overreliance on the steadicam, and such Lite-Brite touches as having Georges Bizet’s famous aria in Carmen become the ending pivot of a scene between a cop and his love interest in Magnolia. In 2005 he served as the insurance director for A Prairie Home Companion because of Robert Altman’s health and age and began to birth his own style: quiet, measured, and magnifying. It is with his last two features (There Will Be Blood and The Master) that Anderson has answered Ingmar Bergman’s call for a young filmmaker to have something to say, announcing this with the first shot of the former, as he fades in to an intricately aligned long shot of three cracked mountains, accompanied by the swelling strings on the soundtrack. Images and sound more and more speak for dialogue, sound manipulation spurs mystery, and his editing produces images often offset and unexpected, if not unique in their rhythms — most triumphantly in the cutaways when Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell remembers Iris and then tries to visit her in the end, as both scenes begin on slight roving movement (an Anderson signature) toward her parent’s house, from left to right in the former scene, with an old blue car in the foreground, and from right to left in the latter, with the same car a little closer to the camera (and in slow motion), so for a moment the audience sees Quell through its windows. In these scenes the alterations of distance, speed, and longitudinal movement bring us into the moody mind of Quell when he pursues one of the few humans he has a genuine bashful feeling for. Yet it is mostly the mugs of Daniel Day-Lewis, Phoenix, and Philip Seymour-Hoffman that tailor the line, paint, swirl, and swish of his mise-en-scène. [Read More]

Find Paul Thomas Anderson on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• The Master: Official Trailer (2012) [HD]
• There Will Be Blood

Richard Steinitz, György Ligeti

A new biography of the composer, published by Faber and Faber

György Ligeti

From Faber and Faber:

An illuminating study of the life and work of György Ligeti, one of the best-loved and most original composers of our time.

For 50 years György Ligeti has pursued a boldly independent and uncompromising course, yet his music is widely loved and admired. Ever since Stanley Kubrick's (unsanctioned) use of his music on the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey, interest in Ligeti has extended far beyond the classical domain. He is the only living composer whose complete output, including juvenilia, is being systematically issued on CD.

Published to coincide with the composer's eightieth birthday, Richard Steinitz's compelling new book is both an illuminating study of the music and its associative ideas - drawn from literature, theatre, the visual arts, fractal mathematics, ethnic cultures and other maverick composers - and of Ligeti the man. Ligeti has confided in Steinitz a mass of previously unknown biographical information. The result is an astonishing account of his early upbringing in Romania, of his terrifying yet surreal experiences in the war, and of his difficulties attempting to forge an identity as a young composer under repressive censorship in Communist Hungary, before his dramatic escape to the West in 1956.

The story continues via Ligeti's association with the Western avant-garde and his increasingly masterful sequence of highly individual compositions, which Steinitz brings vividly to life through informative commentaries as well as through the composer's own words. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Tom Service on Arvo Pärt
• Arvo Pärt on Tintinnabulation
• György Ligeti's Gravesite
• Krzysztof Penderecki: Horror Composer
• There Will Be Blood
• Glenn Gould and Beethoven's Tempest Sonata
• Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey

'2001 is a nonverbal experience'

A still from 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick

From skibinskipedia.org:

Playboy: Much of the controversy surrounding 2001 deals with the meaning of the metaphysical symbols that abound in the film — the polished black monoliths, the orbital conjunction of Earth, Moon and sun at each stage of the monoliths’ intervention in human destiny, the stunning final kaleidoscopic maelstrom of time and space that engulfs the surviving astronaut and sets the stage for his rebirth as a “star-child” drifting toward Earth in a translucent placenta. One critic even called 2001 “the first Nietzschean film,” contending that its essential theme is Nietzsche’s concept of man’s evolution from ape to human to superman. What was the metaphysical message of 2001?

Stanley Kubrick: It’s not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. 2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to “explain” a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film — and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level — but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man’s destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life. But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain ideas found in 2001 would, if presented as abstractions, fall rather lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual categories; experienced in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one’s being. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Stanley Kubrick: A Design Compendium
• Stanley Kubrick's Still Photography
• Krzysztof Penderecki: Horror Composer
• Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange
• Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange: The Exhibition

Stanley Kubrick Photographs: NYC Subway

The Gothamist posts a selection of the filmmaker's still photographs

Photograph: Stanley Kubrick

Photograph: Stanley Kubrick

From Gothamist (thanks to Sam Slote for drawing my attention to the link):

These photos were all taken by Stanley Kubrick during his time as photographer for Look Magazine. The series of images, from the Museum of the City of New York's expansive archives, is titled "Life and Love on the New York City Subway." The images were taken in 1946 and show straphangers from that time... as well as a gum machine right there on the subway platform. Back in the day, the platforms had candy, cigarette, and even horoscope machines! [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Stanley Kubrick: A Design Compendium
• Stanley Kubrick's Still Photography
• Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange
• Krzysztof Penderecki: Horror Composer
• Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange: The Exhibition

Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange: The Exhibition

John Rylands Library, Manchester · 20 August 2012 - 27 January 2013

The International Anthony Burgess Foundation

From The International Anthony Burgess Foundation: 'Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel, A Clockwork Orange, celebrates its fiftieth birthday in 2012. To mark the anniversary, the International Anthony Burgess Foundation is holding a new exhibition on the history of A Clockwork Orange at the John Rylands Library, Manchester, in collaboration with the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts, London. [...] The exhibition will look at the history and impact of the novel, examining the way in which A Clockwork Orange outgrew itself – becoming a Stanley Kubrick film, a stage play with music, and a focus for debate about youth, authority, evil, and the nature of free will.' Admission is free and the exhibition is open daily. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange
• 20 Most Iconic Book Cover Designs?
• Stanley Kubrick: A Design Compendium

Stanley Kubrick: A Design Compendium

Flavorwire celebrates the director's attention to detail

A still from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

From Flavorwire (link via 3:AM Magazine): 'As adept at depicting the mundane in painstakingly perfect detail as he was at representing fantastical, freakish worlds beyond the imagination, Kubrick often said that “if it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.” The Kubrick catalogue is a testament to this brave declaration. Illustrating his exceptional understanding of humanity and the dark depths of the human psyche, click through to revisit his masterful oeuvre through the lens of a brilliant balance between the banal and bizarre design that shows up in every film he ever made.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Stanley Kubrick's Still Photography
• Krzysztof Penderecki: Horror Composer

Roger Ebert on Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

American film critic reflects on the subtleties of Hitchcock's 1958 film

A still from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)

Film critic Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times) reflects on the news that Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo has displaced Citizen Kane as the BFI's Greatest Film Ever Made (thanks to Michael John Goodman for the link): 'The king is dead. Long live the king. Welles' "Citizen Kane" has been dethroned from the Sight & Sound list of the greatest films of all time, and replaced by Hitchcock's "Vertigo." It's not as if nobody saw this coming. The list first appeared in 1952, and "Vertigo" (1958) made the list for the first time only in 1982. Climbing slowly, it placed five votes behind "Kane" in 2002. Although many moviegoers would probably rank "Psycho" or maybe "North by Northwest" as Hitch's best, for S&S types his film to beat was "Notorious" (1947). That's the one I voted for until I went through "Vertigo" a shot at a time at the University of Virginia, became persuaded of its greatness, and put it on my 2002 list.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Vertigo tops BFI's 50 Greatest Films Ever Made
• Kim Novak remembers Vertigo
• Martin Scorsese on Hitchcock's Vertigo
• Costume and Identity in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo
• Saul Bass and Alfred Hitchcock

David Lynch: Director of Dreams?

'He shows us the strangest damn things.'

Laura Harring and Naomi Watts as Rita and Betty in Mulholland Dr. (2001)

Nicholas Lezard asks why the films and television shows of David Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr., Twin Peaks) exercise such a lasting grip on our imaginations: '[...] we are unsure what is dream and what is reality. This is at least the most consistently abiding characteristic of dreams when we are experiencing them, and in his book Lynch on Lynch, in which the director talks engagingly, if not always revealingly, about his work, Chris Rodley (who edited the book) puts it very well: that the borderland between dream and reality in his work (although he's specifically talking about Mulholland Dr.) is "a badly guarded checkpoint where no one seems to be stamping passports".' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Lynch on Music, Ideas and Brutality
• David Lynch, Works on Paper
• David Lynch in Paris
• Inside David Lynch's Club Silencio, Paris
• Is David Lynch Retiring from Film?
• Will Self Interviews David Lynch

Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange

The International Anthony Burgess Foundation celebrates landmark anniversary

Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange: A Multi-Disciplinary Conference

28 June to 30 June 2012

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962), the International Anthony Burgess Foundation is holding a multi-disciplinary conference to examine its profound and enduring impact on literature, film, music, theatre and society.

Call for Papers

The conference will assess the history and reception of A Clockwork Orange in all its manifestations. Papers of 20-30 minutes in length are invited on any aspect of A Clockwork Orange and its legacy. Possible topics might include the linguistic and/or musical aspects of Burgess’s novel; invented languages; the film versions directed by Andy Warhol and Stanley Kubrick; the stage adaptations by John Godber, Anthony Burgess and Ron Daniels; translations into other languages and media; the history of book design; the political and Cold War contexts of the book and films; and the continuing influence of Burgess’s text on popular music, fashion, or other aspects of youth culture and counter-culture.

The conference will be supported by the UK premiere of Burgess’s Clockwork Orange music, a new Burgess/Kubrick exhibition at the John Rylands Library (in collaboration with the Stanley Kubrick Archive), and a film season at the Cornerhouse cinema.

If you would like to submit a paper, please send an abstract of 200-300 words to director@anthonyburgess.org

The closing date for submissions is 31 March 2012.

Burgess Foundation PhD bursary

Call for applications

Applications are invited for a PhD bursary, to support research into the literature or music of Anthony Burgess. The bursary will support a scholar beginning his or her studies in the academic year 2012-13.

Areas of research might include Anthony Burgess and his contemporaries, or a critical investigation into one of the areas in which Burgess published (e.g. dystopia, historical fiction, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Joyce, literary journalism, literary biography, or translation).

Applicants should submit a detailed proposal and two academic references (in English). To be eligible, applicants should already have been offered a place on an accredited university PhD programme.

For further information please write to director@anthonyburgess.org.

The closing date for applications is 31 March 2012.

Website

The International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• 20 Most Iconic Book Cover Designs?
• Anthony Burgess: Unpublished Work Discovered
• Anthony Burgess on Finnegans Wake
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Writers' Autographs
• Stanley Kubrick's Still Photography

Krzysztof Penderecki: Horror Composer

Penderecki's music has been used to score a number of horror classics

Jack Nicholson stars in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980)

Tom Service writes: 'If you've seen Stanley Kubrick's The Shining more than a couple of times, or if you've been renewing your relationship with William Friedkin's The Exorcist over Halloween; if you've enjoyed Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island or marvelled at David Lynch's Inland Empire, I've got news for you. You're a Penderecki fan – even if you've never heard of Poland's most famous living composer.' [Read More]

William Burroughs talks to Philippe Mikriammos

A conversation published online by Dalkey Archive Press

William S. Burroughs. Photograph: Bob Willoughby

Philippe Mikriammos interviews William Burroughs about autobiography, archives, the picaresque novel, cut-ups, influences, withdrawal, A Clockwork Orange, evil, politics, living in New York, and other topics (link via Biblioklept) [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: William S. Burroughs

Disjecta: This week's links

Stanley Kubrick's favourite typeface, Futura

This week, UK leader of the Liberal Democrats pays tribute to Irish writer Samuel Beckett; a series of seminars are to be held at Oxford University discussing Beckett's life and work; Continuum Philosophy promote a new edition of poetry by none other than German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche; and a topical conference is to be held at the Freud Museum in London under the title 'Psychoanalysis, Money and the Economy'.

Literature:

Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies 2010
Samuel Beckett Gesellschaft: German Samuel Beckett Society website
Samuel Beckett: From 1995, British publisher John Calder reflects on friendship with Beckett
Happy Birthday, Harper Lee
Joshua Ferris: Author discusses his new book, The Unnamed, on KCRW
The Calder Collection
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
Maud Newton: Among The Times' 50 Bloggers Who Really Count

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Friedrich Nietzsche: Continuum Philosophy celebrates a new collection of Nietzsche's poetry
Sigmund Freud: Freud Museum in London is now on Twitter
Sigmund Freud: Freud Museum Conference: Psychoanalysis, Money and the Economy

Film:

Stanley Kubrick: A fan of the Futura typeface
David Mamet: New York Times critics discuss Glengarry Glen Ross
Billy Wilder: An interview on the writing process
Fritz Lang: A restored version of Metropolis to find UK release this summer

Art:

Avigdor Arikha 1929-2010
Happy birthday, Tate Modern
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Genius at Work
Samuel Beckett: An exhibition of John Minihan's photography
Phillipe Halsman: Photographs of famous people jumping. Simple as that!

Television:

David Simon: The creator of The Wire discusses jazz, Katrina and new series Treme

Etc.:

Piano + Players: A new website from Craig Swanson
Samuel Beckett: Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg names his hero


Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the
A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Disjecta: This week's links

Jenny Trigg directs an adaptation of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable

This week we have a number of exciting Beckett-related news items for fans of literature, theatre, photography and film. A letter reveals Philip K. Dick's personal response to seeing Blade Runner realized on-screen. The Brick City Bike Collective traces a path to Philip Roth's childhood home. And Martin Scorsese directs a tribute to one of his directing heroes, the master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock.

Literature:

Don DeLillo: On White Noise and Point Omega
Don DeLillo: Jewish Journal reviews Point Omega
Samuel Beckett: Beckett and contemporary atheism
Samuel Beckett: An extract from The Unnamable
Philip K. Dick: A response to seeing Blade Runner realized on-screen
Thomas Bernhard: On uncanny primates
Thomas Bernhard: Correspondence with publisher released
William Shakespeare: New Cardiff Shakespeare website launched
William Shakespeare: The Guardian asks 'Who really wrote Shakespeare'?
Philip Roth: Brick City Bike Collective visits Roth's childhood home
William Faulkner: On writers and their work
Keith Ridgway: John Self on Ridgway's Horses
Haruki Murakami: Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood to score Norwegian Wood adaptation
52 Poems: Faber & Faber's poem of the week

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Jean Baudrillard: The Violence of the Image (2004)
Samuel Beckett: A Lacanian reading of the Three Novels, 'Undermining the Symbolic'

Film:

Samuel Beckett: Jenny Trigg's adaptation of The Unnamable, reminiscent of early David Lynch
Stanley Kubrick: Film poster artwork
Andrei Tarkovsky: Graphic artwork of Tarkovsky's films
Alfred Hitchcock: Review of David Thomson's The Moment of Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock: Exploring Hitchcock's influence on Martin Scorsese
Alfred Hitchcock: Scorsese directs Hitchcock tribute, Key to Reserva
Chris Petit: Iain Sinclair on Content

Art and Photography:

Samuel Beckett: Bob Adelman's photographs of Beckett in Paris
Samuel Beckett: Save the Portobello Road Mural campaign
Andy Warhol: Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg on Andy Warhol

Theatre:

Samuel Beckett: A new production of Endgame begins in Dallas, Texas.

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the
A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Disjecta: This week's links

Image: Samuel Beckett on the set of Quadrat.

This week, Tablet Magazine reviews the new David Mikics biography of French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The London Review of Books examines Philip Roth's most recent novel, The Humbling. And Mark Thwaite has published an essay on the theme of madness in Shakespeare's works. There's also an interview with Alice Herz-Sommer, the last woman alive to have known Franz Kafka; Cormac McCarthy appears on Oprah, where he discusses the influence of James Joyce on his writing style; and there's a chance to see the German television productions of Quadrat 1 + 2, written and directed by Samuel Beckett.

Literature:

Best European Fiction Events 2010
Mervyn Peake: Titus Awakes in new addition to the Gormenghast series
Allen Ginsberg: A review of Howl, a film based on Ginsberg's life
J. G. Ballard: Etsy's Ballardian fridge magnets
Postmodern Novel and Society: From The Quarterley Conversation
Apocalypse Literature
Cormac McCarthy: Discusses the influence of James Joyce on his work
Philip Roth: London Review of Book's on Roth's recent novel, The Humbling
William Shakespeare: Mark Thwaite on Shakespeare and Madness
Franz Kafka: Alice Herz-Sommer, the last woman alive to know Kafka personally
Martin Amis: On writing Time's Arrow

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Jacques Derrida: The Culture Machine on Sean Gaston's Derrida, War and Literature

Jacques Derrida: A review of David Mikics new biography

Walter Benjamin and Psychoanalysis: On new book, Catastrophe and Survival

Slavoj Žižek: Žižek discusses First as Tragedy, Then As Farce on French radio

Søren Kierkegaard: On translating Kierkegaard into English

Music:

Morton Feldman Interview
Jazz: The BBC and the future of Jazz
Jazz: Ornette Coleman: Jazz Revolutionary
Jazz: American Legends: Sonny Rollins

Film:

The Big Lebowski: Coen Brothers' film as Shakespearian play
Stanley Kubrick: Trivia on Jack's typewritten notes in The Shining

Television:

Newsnight Review: Host Kirsty Wark discusses the revamped BBC arts show

Art:

Bauhaus: Exhibition of Bauhaus at the Museum of Modern Art

Theatre:

Samuel Beckett: Quadrat 1 + 2

Etc.:

Inspiring Teachers
Reading Your Way Out Of Depression

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Disjecta: This week's links

(Herbert Bayer’s design for a cinema. 1924–25. Image via Design Observer)

Literature:

Martin Amis on Vladimir Nabokov
William S. Burroughs: Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Computer
Paul Auster: The Rumpus interview with Paul Auster
Will Self: Will Self's introduction to Zamyatin’s cult classic novel, We
James Joyce: Philip French on the 1967 film adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Martin Heidegger: Nomadics has déjà on the recent Heidegger and Nazism debate.
Assuming Gender: Call for papers for the Spring 2010 issue of new academic journal.
Slavoj Žižek: Žižek discusses his new book, First as Tragedy, Then As Farce (via PhilosophyBites)

Film:

Stanley Kubrick: Brian Eno on Barry Lyndon (via Ballardian)
Stanley Kubrick: Anthony Burgess and Malcolm McDowell on A Clockwork Orange (via Ballardian)
Stanley Kubrick: Steven Spielberg on Stanley Kubrick, speaking in 1999
Woody Allen: Roger Ebert reviews the new Woody Allen film, Whatever Works
Woody Allen: French auteur director Jean-Luc Godard speaks to Woody Allen
Michael Haneke: Sight and Sound reviews The White Ribbon.

Music:

David Bowie: Marc Spitz's new David Bowie biography
Kraftwerk: Amazon offer a comprehensive image of the new Kraftwerk Catalogue box-set.
Velvet Underground: Velvet Underground to reunite in New York.
Jazz: All About Jazz on the year 1959: The Year Classic Jazz Albums Were Born
Jazz: Sonny Rollins headlines this year's London Jazz Festival

Art & Design:

Architecture: Bauhaus at MoMA (via 3:AM Magazine)
Photography: Thomas Struth's Streets of New York
Brian Eno: Brian Eno and Steven Johnson on environments that foster innovation (via Jessa Crispin)
Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty (via 3:AM Magazine)
Leonardo da Vinci: The secret behind Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile (via boa_arts)

RIBA celebrates architecture in film

A retrospective

As the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) celebrates its 175th anniversary, a season of films explores the most distinctive and influential examples of architecture in film. Jonathan Glancey names his top five, which include Fritz Lang's German masterpiece Metropolis and Stanley Kubrick's Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove. Perhaps inevitably, Ridley Scott's dark and dystopian science fiction film, Blade Runner, also receives a worthy mention:

Metropolis translated into another futuristic dystopia, this time a vision of LA in 2019. The opening shots, as the camera pans over a 700-storey skyscraper and the sky glows with industrial smoke, fire and acid rain, is as magnificent as it is disturbing. It's another interpretation of the Tower of Babel, of course; this time the headquarters of the company that makes the humanoid "replicants" that do the dirty work for human beings.

Scott says that the sets were conjured from a variety of haunting images: Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks, the skyline of Hong Kong at night, the fiery industrial landscape of Tyneside and Teesside of Scott's childhood, the French comicbook Métal Hurlant [Heavy Metal], and, quite clearly, Metropolis. Scott places these nightmarish exteriors in architectural contrast to the theatrical, spooky inside of LA's real-life Bradbury Building, designed by George Wyman in 1893, which is cast as the headquarters' interiors. Significantly, the original architect claimed that his style was influenced by Edward Bellamy's book, Looking Backward (1887) – itself a work of utopian sci-fi. Wyman admired the passage in which Bellamy describes a typical commercial building of the future as a "vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet above". [Read More]

Jonathan Glancey, 'From Metropolis to Blade Runner: architecture that stole the show'

guardian.co.uk, 5 November 2009

More:

• The Guardian | In pictures: RIBA celebrates architecture in film
• RIBA | Of Dreams and Cities: Architecture in Film
• BFI Southbank | Of Dreams and Cities: November Schedule

David Bowie: 40 Years

An anniversary retrospective

Graeme Thomson reflects on the musical career of David Bowie, spanning four decades:

In some respects "Space Oddity" was a false dawn, widely regarded as an opportunistic novelty number timed to coincide with the moon shot. Bowie, meanwhile, never felt at ease playing the winsome acoustic troubadour. Bored by the "denim hell" and frayed authenticity of the likes of Led Zeppelin, he eventually hitched his wagon to the overt theatricality of glam rock, creating Ziggy Stardust, the quintessential Bowie construct. Incorporating elements of mime, kabuki and the droogs as portrayed in Stanley Kubrick's [A] Clockwork Orange, Ziggy was the ultimate representation of pop-star-as-alien, driven by the robust buzz-saw guitar riffs of Mick Ronson. Three years after the first, Bowie's second appearance on Top of the Pops was genuinely iconoclastic, his performance of "Starman" denoting 1972 as Year Zero for a generation of punks, Goths, new wavers and New Romantics.

Having achieved lift-off, Bowie followed through on his promise to make a "wild mutation" as a rock'n'roll star. Only five years passed between 1971's Hunky Dory and the corrupted Aryan beauty of Station to Station, but in that time Bowie bounced from hokey folk to glam to hard rock to frigid Eurodisco, mutating en route into Aladdin Sane, Hallowe'en Jack and the Thin White Duke.

Falling on each emerging trend - disco, Philly soul, electronic minimalism, new wave - as it stole into view, he was a magpie with a priceless knack for pinching ideas from the cultural margins and siphoning them into the mainstream through his own work. One biographer defined him as a "style vampire", a mannequin dressed in a series of beautiful, borrowed clothes. "Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas," said Brian Eno, his on-off collaborator for three decades. "But that sounds like a definition of pop to me."

He certainly looked and acted the part. Sexually voracious - when he met his first wife, Angie, in 1969 they were famously "fucking the same bloke" - he was impossibly thin and vampiric, those fangs and odd, mismatched eyes emitting an unearthly vibe. Like all great pop stars, he contrived to paint the grim grind of sustained drug-taking as a vaguely noble quest, a way of seeking new dimensions rather than making emergency repairs to a fractured psyche. In Bowie's case, mired in cocaine addiction, those dimensions involved dystopian visions where the occult, the Holy Grail and fascism met in some futuristic, Ballardian hell.

Recovering in Berlin from these nightmares in 1976 and 1977, Bowie made the most influential records of his career. Low and "Heroes" were dense, pensive, occasionally hilarious works marrying US R'n'B with the electronic Euro pulse of Neu and Kraftwerk. Lodger (1979) and Scary Monsters (1980) concluded his journey from secluded drug dependency to boisterous commercial rejuvenation, but after that his creativity crumbled. [Read More]

Graeme Thomson, 'Hallowed Spaceboy' 

New Statesman, 22 October 2009

More information:

• Youtube: Alan Yentob interviews David Bowie in Berlin, 1978
• A Piece of Monologue: David Bowie and the Berlin Period
• Golden Years: David Bowie in 1977
• Golden Years: David Bowie in 1978

Stanley Kubrick's Still Photography

The Chicago Tribune offers a selection of images

'Few people know that before he started making movies, Stanley Kubrick was a star photojournalist. In the summer of 1949, Look magazine sent him to Chicago to shoot pictures for a story called "Chicago City of Contrasts."'

Chicago Tribune

I've spent this morning drinking hot, black coffee and looking at still photography by Stanley Kubrick, taken back in 1949. The Chicago Tribune offers a small gallery of Kubrick's photographs, before he established a reputation for himself as a filmmaker. It's wonderful to see the richness of the prints, and the evocative, atmospheric moods of post-war urban life. You can see the gallery by clicking here.

But if that isn't enough for you, and I'm supposing it won't be, a beautiful collection of Kubrick's photography has been published in Rainer Crone's Stanley Kubrick: Drama and Shadows.