Shirin Neshat - Artist as Activist

Shirin Neshat: The Un-Private Collection: Artist as Activist from ALOUDla on Vimeo.

Olive Borden (July 14, 1906 – October 1, 1947)

She was an American
actress in silence and
early talkies. Nicknamed
"The joy girl".
Happy Birthday Olive!

The Desert of Forbidden Art

How does art survive in a time of oppression? During the Soviet rule artists who stay true to their vision are executed, sent to mental hospitals or Gulags.

Their plight inspires young Igor Savitsky. He pretends to buy state-approved art but instead daringly rescues 40,000 forbidden fellow artist's works and creates a museum in the desert of Uzbekistan, far from the watchful eyes of the KGB. Though a penniless artist himself, he cajoles the cash to pay for the art from the same authorities who are banning it. Savitsky amasses an eclectic mix of Russian Avant-Garde art. But his greatest discovery is an unknown school of artists who settle in Uzbekistan after the Russian revolution of 1917, encountering a unique Islamic culture, as exotic to them as Tahiti was for Gauguin. They develop a startlingly original style, fusing European modernism with centuries-old Eastern traditions.

Ben Kingsley, Sally Field and Ed Asner voice the diaries and letters of Savitsky and the artists. Intercut with recollections of the artists' children and rare archival footage, the film takes us on a dramatic journey of sacrifice for the sake of creative freedom. Described as "one of the most remarkable collections of 20th century Russian art" and located in one of the world's poorest regions, today these paintings are worth millions, a lucrative target for Islamic fundamentalists, corrupt bureaucrats and art profiteers. The collection remains as endangered as when Savitsky first created it, posing the question whose responsibility is it to preserve this cultural treasure.

The Color of Pomegranates / Sayat Nova (English subtitles).رنگ انار

سرگِی پاراجانُف فيلم ساز مشهور ارمنی - روسی ست که در سال 1924 در شهر تفلیس بدنیا آمد. رنگ انارفیلم ساختۀ او یکی از شاهکارهای سینمائی قرن بیستم است. تصاویر و صحنه های بی نظیر در این فیلم گویای عمیق ترین زوایای روح بشر می باشند گوشه هائی که پرداختن به آن تنها در توان تعدادی بسیار اندک از نوع بشر است صحبت ازتقابل "من" و "منیّت" یک هنرمند و خالق یک اثراست با جهان پیرامونش
فصل قبل از کودکی/ فصل کودکی و قسمتی از فصل جوانی: از ظهور در آستانه، تولد، سرگردانی بین زنانگی و مردانگی تا قبل از ظهور معشوق / فصل جوانی: عاشق شدن - دنیای اجتماعی / سرزمین مرده‌ها/ فصل میان‌سالی: به دیر رفتن و تقابل دوگونه زندگی در دیر .



Steeped in religious iconography, The Color of Pomegranates is a deeply spiritual testament to director Sergei Parajanov’s fascination with Armenian folk art and culture. It is also a controversial work, which, coupled with another of his films, Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors, led to his arrest and imprisonment in a Soviet Gulag for four years. The Soviets insisted he was guilty of selling gold and icons illegally and committing “homosexual acts.” In reality, his only crime was offending the tenets of socialist realism, both in his daring surrealistic form and in his choice of subject matter. While many of the popular films of this era in Soviet cinema were largely propaganda designed to serve the ideological interests of the regime, Parajanov chose to focus on the ethnography and spirituality of the Ukraine, Armenia, and Georgia.

Tehran has no more pomogranate

تهران انار ندارد - 2008.11.13

کارگردان: مسعود بخشی

Collaboration of Two Artists, Nin and Telberg

"AND she danced; she danced with the music and with the rhythm of earth's circles; she turned with the earth turning, like a disk, turning all faces to light and to darkness evenly, dancing towards daylight."

Anais Nin's first novel, "House of Incest" (1936), ends with this verbal image of release. A later edition of the book, published in 1958, does not, however, end with words, but rather with a visual image, a photomontage by Val Telberg of Sag Harbor. The picture portrays a nude dancer, her wide-flung arms solarized into torches. Superimposed on her torso are blades of grass, and behind the dancing figure is a beckoning doorway.

Nin, who died in 1977 at 73, is best known for her seven volumes of diaries written from 1914 to 1974. When she saw Mr. Telberg's work in 1950, Nin detected a kindred spirit. "She loved his photographs and decided he should illustrate 'House of Incest,' " said Sheryl Conkelton, associate curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art.

Theirs was a remarkable collaboration of two artists from different disciplines who produced a hybrid work of art combining words and pictures. " 'House of Incest' is the best thing Nin ever did, and Telberg's photomontages really capture the dreamlike state and Surrealist mood," said Benjamin Franklin 5th, a professor of English at the University of South Carolina and an expert on Nin's work.

Nin described Mr. Telberg's photography as a "spiritual X-ray." After seeing his images for her book, she wrote, "I have a feeling you have done it, . . . captured the book's intent without illustrating." In another letter she added, "Your montages are poetic in their own terms -- in their own language." Conference and Exhibition

Mr. Telberg and Nin worked in different media, but they had much in common. Both were cosmopolitan and attracted to Surrealism.

Nin was born in France in 1903, the daughter of musicians. Her Cuban father was a celebrated pianist and composer who deserted the family when Anais was 11. She began her diary on a boat to America, in an attempt to win him back.

Mr. Telberg, was born in Moscow in 1910 before the Russian revolution, was the child of a mother who was an artist and a father who was the last prime minister of Siberia before the Bolshevik takeover. The family fled to Korea and Japan before settling in China, where Mr. Telberg grew up.

Trained as a chemist, he moved to New York in 1938 and began studying painting under artists like George Grosz in 1942 at the Art Students League. A part-time job developing photographs soon lured him away from painting.

"Photography was faster," Mr. Telberg, 84, said in an interview. "The space between conception and performance is very short in photography. Photomontage is more exciting, more immediate than oil painting, which is very laborious." Debt to Abstract Expressionists

His darkroom technique owes much to the improvisatory style of the Abstract Expressionists. "Their attitude of experimentation with new visions and new images appealed to me," he said.

Mr. Telberg created his montages from a stockpile of negatives that he sandwiched together on a lightbox, without preconceived notions of a final product. In a method akin to free association, he layered a variety of negatives in different configurations as a leaping-off point that evolves into a finished composition.

"Val works in the darkroom the way a painter works in the studio," said Jim Richard Wilson, director of the Rathbone Gallery at Sage Junior College in Albany, which originated the exhibition of Mr. Telberg's work.(1994)

Like Nin, Mr. Telberg was interested in Surrealism. "What appealed to me was magic and anything unusual," said the photographer, who was friends with surrealist artists like Pavel Tchelitchew, Salvador Dali and the film maker Maya Deren.

"Val was happy to be included with the Surrealists, because they welcome accidents, use the unconscious, and act on dreams," a photographer, Warren Padula, said.

"But he was not part of a defined group." Mr. Padula, who curated a show of Mr. Telberg's photomontages for the Art House Odeon Gallery in Sag Harbor, added. "He's an American original."

Nin was part of a Parisian literary group in the 30's that included writers like Antonin Artaud, Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. "Surrealism," she wrote, "was part of the air we breathed." In "House of Incest," Nin tried to represent the subconscious, based on Jung's dictum to "proceed from the dream outward."

"Nin's greatest contribution was to liberate women through her diary. She opened doors to let women reveal their personal lives," said Suzanne Nalbantian, a professor of English and comparative literature at the C. W. Post campus of L.I.U. "Nin was seductive, erotic, very 20th-century and expressed herself with a freedom that is liberating."

Ms. Nalbantian, organizer of the conference on Nin, wrote "Aesthetic Autobiography" (St. Martin's), dealing with Nin's work.

Nin and Mr. Telberg shared an interest in avant-garde film making. When they met in 1950, "I was yearning to become a film maker, but I couldn't afford the equipment," Mr. Telberg recalled.

Instead he adapted cinematic effects like dissolve and jump-cut to still photography. "Val's photomontages have the feeling of movement that you find in cinema," said his wife, Lelia Katayen, a dancer and choreographer. "They take you from one image in time or place to another until they blend."

"Some critics say a Telberg photomontage is like a whole movie shown simultaneously in one frame," Mr. Padula noted.

Mr. Telberg contributed to a pioneering film, "Between Two Worlds" (1952), directing a dance sequence of superimposed frames projected simultaneously. The photographer also collaborated with Nin's husband, Ian Hugo, an experimental film maker, on the multi-image film "Bells of Atlantis" (1952), based on "House of Incest" and narrated by Nin.

After their brief alliance the careers of the artists diverged. Before her first diary gained acclaim when published in 1966, Nin had great difficulty publishing her novels. Even after she bought a printing press and produced her own editions in Greenwich Village in the 40's, Nin could not persuade critics to review her books.

In the 70's, however, she became a cult figure, a frequent speaker on the college circuit. She was considered a heroine of the women's movement, even though her brand of feminism was nondoctrinaire. Cacharel named a perfume, Anais, after the writer, and a film, "Henry and June," portrayed her friendship with Miller and his wife.

The conference at L.I.U. will offer further evidence of Nin's celebrity. Scholars from around the United States and as far away as Japan will debate Nin's fiction in terms of psychoanalysis and eroticism. Her brother Joaquin Nin-Culmell, a musician, will deliver the keynote address, friends will offer reminiscences, and her husband's films will be screened.

In contrast to Nin's fame, Mr. Telberg was not widely known, even though hewas an important figure in this country for creative, as opposed to "straight" or documentary, photography. His work appears in major collections like the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Museum, but his emotion-laden evocative montages, in which images merge like watercolor, never fit the former fashion for realism.

"I was interested in dream images," Mr. Telberg said. "I was considered crazy."

A 1983 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art paid homage to his montages, but difficulty in classifying his oeuvre delayed recognition. "He doesn't belong in the painter's field, and yet his work is like a painting," his wife said. "Nobody knew where to place him."

"Poets were more interested in my work than photographers," Mr. Telberg said, adding that he was friends in Greenwich Village, before moving to Sag Harbor in 1959, with New York School poets like Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery and the musician John Cage.

O'Hara, an art critic as well as poet, called Mr. Telberg "a painter who turned to photography in order to accomplish the pictures he could not find in paint."

"I try," Mr. Telberg said 40 years ago, "to invent a completely unreal world, new, free and truthful."

source: NY Times archive, museum of New Mexico/fine art, MOMA's web site

زنان - سیگار و ادبیات

در يک فيلم قديمي شوروي به نام « چهل و يکمين » که از روي رماني از بوريس لا ورينف به همين نام ساخته شده بود، صحنه اي وجود دارد که مرا هميشه به خود مشغول کرده است. فيلم داستان يک سرباز زن جوان و شجاع ارتش سرخ است که افسري خوش قيافه از ارتش سفيدها را دستگير مي کند. آن ها در يک کلبه قديمي در ميان صحرا قرار دارند و در انتظار بازگشت گروهان نظامي زن جوان هستند. سرباز ارتش سرخ که دگماتيسم به قلب مهربانش راه ندارد، عاشق دشمن ايدئولوژيک جذابش مي شود. در صحنه اي، وقتي که کاغذ سيگار افسر سفيد تمام مي شود، او با گشاده دستي، تنها چيز با ارزش اش، يعني دفتر رنگ و رو رفته اي که در آن شعرهاي خود را يادداشت مي کند، به افسر سفيد هديه مي کند

افسرسفيد سيگارش را با شعرهاي دختر جوان مي پيچد و در مقابل چشمان حيرت زده تماشاچيان، آن ها را به دود تبديل مي کند و به هوا مي فرستد، آن هم تا آخرين خط آنها را. آيا مي شود وضعيتي برعکس را تصور نمود؟ نه، چرا که اين صحنه هر چند هم که ساده لوحانه و متاثرکننده باشد، چيزي بيش از صحنه يک فيلم است؛ استعاره اي نمادين از تاريخ نوشته هاي زنان، موقعيت آنها در ارتباط با خلاقيت هايشان و هم چنين وضعيت مردان در مقابل خلاقيت همسرانشان.

در تمام طول تاريخ، مردان قريحه هاي ادبي زنان را به خاکستر تبديل کرده اند و زنان خود را به خاطر چند کلمه زيبا قرباني نموده اند. کم نبودند نويسندگان مرد بزرگي که در سخت ترين لحظات زندگي تنها به همت زن ها توانستند برپاي بايستند. به خاطر آوريم به عنوان مثال « نادژدا ماندلستام » که شعرهاي شوهرش « اوسيپ » را به خاطر مي سپرد و توانست بدين ترتيب اشعار فراواني از او را نجات دهد، آن هم در شرايطي که انگشت قدرتمند استالين بر روي دکمه « حذف » (١) فشار مي آورد.

تمام همسراني را به ياد آوريم که در عين حال همه چيز هستند: معشوقه، رفيق، ستايشگر، مترجم، همراه، ياري دهنده مالي، مشاور ادبي، تايپسيت، تصحيح کننده مطالب، ويراستاري مخلص، مذاکره کننده اي توانا در مورد قراردادها و نماينده تجاري هنرمند، الهام دهنده، قريحه، مشاور، همکاري پرشور و لطيف که در عين حال هم پيپ نويسنده را برايش آماده و هم دفتر کارش را مرتب مي کند، آشپزي با ذوق، مسئول آرشيو يا کتاب داري با ارزش، خواننده اي پرشور، محافظ امين دست نويس ها، الهه اي مستقر در معابد بزرگ ادبي، خدمتکار موزه هاي نويسندگان که هم به صحافي آثار بزرگ ادبي مشغول است و هم گرد و خاک کتاب هاي شعر را مي روبد، پايه گذار فعال بنيادهايي که به دنبال پخش کتاب هاي شاعران زنده و مرده هستند. بله، تمام اين زنان را به خاطر آوريم.

با وام گيري از زبان انفورماتيک مي شود گفت که زنان در طول تاريخ متن هاي ادبي را « ذخيره » (٢) کرده اند در حالي که مردان به دنبان « حذف » (١) آنان بوده اند.

چه تعداد از مردان (ديکتاتور، صاحب قدرت، مسئول سانسور، ديوانه، آتش افروز، فرمانده سپاه، امپراتور، رهبر) نفرتي عميق نسبت به «نوشته» داشته اند ! اين که گاه زني، ماهي تازه اي را در ميان ورق هاي شعر پيچيده است در مقابل تمام کتاب هايي که توسط امپراتور چين، چينگ هوان تي، به آتش کشيده شد چه ارزشي دارد؟ اگر اينجا و آن جا يک زن براي جمع کردن وسائل شيريني پزي اش از برگ هاي شعر استفاده کرده است در مقابل تن ها دست نويس نابود شده توسط کا.گ.ب. چه به حساب مي آيد؟ اگر موارد نادري بوده است که يک زن براي روشن کردن اجاق از صفحات يک کتاب استفاده کرده، اين مسئله در مقابل تمام کتاب هاي سوزانده ودود شده توسط نازي ها چه بهايي دارد؟ و اگر يکي از آنها براي پاک کردن شيشه از صفحات يک رمان استفاده کرده، اين کار در مقابل خاکستر کتابخانه سارايوو که به دست موشک هاي هاي کارازيک و ملاديک به آتش کشيده، چه داوري اي را بر مي انگيزد؟

آيا مي توان وضعيتي مشابه را بر عکس در نظر گرفت ؟ خير، اين مسئله در تصور هم نمي گنجد. در تمام طول تاريخ، زنان، اين خوانندگان متون، اين طعمه هاي کوچکي که به آساني صيد قلاب ماهيگيري نوشته ها مي شوند، همواره در کنار مردم قرار داشته اند. اين چنين است که در ادبيات نوپا کرواسي قرن نوزدهم، نويسندگان مرد، اين قلم به دستان توانا، تلاش مي کردند که زنان را متقاعد سازند که از خواندن مطالب آلماني دست بکشند، چرا که هيچ کس ديگري نوشته هاي آن ها، اين نويسندگان تازه کار، را نمي خواند.«هنگامي که يک ميهن پرست مي شنود که دختران، نه تنها از خانواده هاي مرفه ، بلکه حتي از ميان مردم عادي ، به زبان ملي بي توجهي مي کنند ، قلبش فشرده مي شود» و خوانندگان زن کرواسي ، اين زنان سخاوتمند، با ترحم نسبت به اين مردان، اما با بي حوصلگي و با خميازه به خواندن آثارشان پرداختند .... به اين ترتيب، مي توان گفت که ادبيات اين کشور کوچک به يمن اين زنان کتاب خوان پاگرفته است.

زنان همواره « روح » خانگي ادبيات بوده اند. استعاره اي از فرشتگان چيره دست، در پس پا گرفتن يک بنگاه نشر، مي توان سايه آن ها را همچون بنيان گزار حقيقي آن موسسه مشاهده نمود. در مقام تمام زحمات زنان، نويسندگان با گشاده دستي تنها نامي از آنها در ديپاچه کتاب مي برند، آن هم به صورت دسته جمعي. اين چنين است که نام زنان اغلب در مقدمه کتاب ها در پايان ليست افرادي قرار مي گيرد که از آنها تشکر مي شود : مسئولين ادبي، مشاورين ادبي، ويراستارها، دوستان و نهادها. در پايين اين هرم گاه نام يک « ماري « جين » يا «ورا » (٣) به چشم مي خورد.

برگرديم بر سر مسئله آغازي مان و و تکرار کنيم که تاريخ زنان، کتاب ، آتش و دود با هم يگانه است و غيرقابل تفکيک و حتي مي توان عجين. تنها زنان و کتاب ها بودند که در ميان شعله هاي آتش دوران تفتيش عقايد (انکيزيسيون) سوزانده شدند. مردان از لحاظ آماري جاي کم اهميتي در ميان اين خاکسترهاي تاريخ داشته اند. جادوگران (زنان باسواد) و کتاب ها (منابع دانش و لذت) هرگاه در طول تاريخ انسان لازم آمده، دستاورد شيطان معرفي شده اند (٤). اين حلقه با خودکشي استعاره اي شاعره آمريکايي، سيلويا پلات بسته مي شود که سرخود را در کوره اجاق آشپزي، اين نماد ياد آور دوزخ فرو برد.

براي پايان دادن به اين تاريخ تلخ، ماجرايي شادتر را تعريف کنيم. بازهم يک داستان روسي. مادري اهل مسکو، بي دليل، براي پسرش به شدت نگران بود: اين جوان شاگردي فوق العاده بود و عاشق ادبيات پوشکيني و غيره. با اين همه، مادر شک داشت که او از مواد مخدر استفاده مي کند. امري که به چشم او، بدترين کارها به حساب مي آمد. از اين رو مادر هر روز جيب هاي پسرش را مي کاويد. بالاخره يک روز آن چيزي را که به دنبالش بود، پيدا کرد : تکه اي معجون قهوه اي رنگ تيره که در ميان کاغذ آلومينيوم پيچيده شده بود. به جاي از بين بردن آن، اين زن تصميم مي گيرد که اثر مواد مخدر را بر روي خود آزمايش کند. با وجود نداشتن هيچ گونه تجربه اي در اين زمينه او موفق مي شود، درست و غلط، يک سيگاري براي خود بپيچد. ظهور ناگهاني پسر در آستانه در، مادررا از نشئه آرام بخشي که در آن فرو مي رفت، بيرون آورد

پسر فرياد زد : مهرچه کوچک من کجاست ؟

مادر با سبک بالي به او پاسخ داد : کشيدمش

در واقع معجون قهوه اي رنگ، آن چنان که مادر تصور مي کرد، حشيش نبود، بلکه قطعه اي از خاک مزار پوشکين بود که به چشم پسر مقدس مي آمد. اين زن در واقع خاک پوشکين را دود کرده بود و بدين ترتيب انتقام سرباز زن گشاده دست ارتش سرخ فيلم « چهل و يکمين » را گرفته بود، هماني که افسر « سفيد » خوش قيافه، شعرهايش را به خاکستر تبديل کرده بود.اين زن ناشناس شايد، بدون آن که بخواهد، صفحه انقلابي جديدي از تاريخ ادبيات را ورق زده باشد. مجددا متذکر مي شوم که « شايد » هرچه که باشد به هر حال بايد از اين زن تشکر نمود

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٣. Stacy Schiff نويسنده زندگي نامه « ورا » (خانم ولاديمير نابوکوف) مي نويسد. با توجه به ليست کارهايي که او هرگز انجام آن ها را فرانگرفت (تايپ کردن، رانندگي، آلماني حرف زدن، پيدا کردن اشيا گم شده، بستن يک چتر، پاسخ به تلفن، بريدن صفحات کتاب، صرف کمي وقت براي گياهان)، ساده است که تصور کنيم که « ورا » زندگي اش را صرف چه چيز کرده بود.

٤. در فيلم آمريکايي تايلور هاکفورد به نام وکلاي شيطان، نمايش مدرن شيطان بسيار قابل توجه است. در واقع شيطان (آل پاچينو) و همراهان مونثش خود را از روي دو نشانه مهم مي شناسند : آنها سيگار مي کشند (در آمريکا هيچ کس سيگار نمي کشد مگر آن که تحت تاثير نيروهاي شيطاني قرار گرفته باشد) و زبان خارجي را خيلي خوب صحبت مي کنند (آدم هاي باسواد هم تحت تاثير نيروهاي شيطاني قرار دارند).

منبع: مقالات لاموند دیپلماتیک

women without men

Shirin Neshat's first feature film

Henry and June(1990)

An Artwork By Kaufman

Of the two loud literary voices to be heard in ''Henry and June,'' Philip Kaufman's long, steamy and untethered account of the three-way romance involving the novelist Henry Miller, his wife, June, and the compulsive diarist Anais Nin, it is Nin's that emerges more clearly. The raw, reckless immediacy of Miller's work has been overpowered by Nin's more passionately overheated style.

Nin's posthumously published diary describing her intense attachment to both of the Millers is the basis for the film's screenplay by Mr. Kaufman and his wife, Rose. (Their son Peter is the film's producer, which makes for one highly unusual family undertaking.) That alone is not enough to account for the dominance of Nin's point of view. The film is also deeply in harmony with her thoughts at their most fulsome and hyperbolic, with her self-aggrandizing assessments, and with her idealistic embrace of sexual liberation as the pursuit of truth. Though ''Henry and June'' is set in Paris (in the early 1930's), its attitudes would be equally at home on many a college campus, circa freshman year.

As with Mr. Kaufman's earlier ''Unbearable Lightness of Being,'' this film brings together a brilliant, rakish man, a small and demure woman, and a bombshell. The first two, in this case, are Henry (Fred Ward) and Anais (Maria de Medeiros), who meet by chance and are instantly attracted to each other's ideas. ''I'd love to read something he's written,'' Anais muses after this encounter. ''Fat chance - he'll never get published,'' says a not very prescient companion. Nin initially appears as a tremulous young writer about to discover the subject that would consume her forever after. Marveling at a cache of quaint pornographic photos, she declares breathlessly: ''In that closet I became familiar with the endless varieties of erotic experience.'' The film presents those varieties as indeed endless, but it invests very little drama in who happens to be doing what to whom. The characters' sexual abandon is so complete that it robs the story of any shape.

Anais eventually expands her fascination with Henry to include the towering, voluptuous June (Uma Thurman). ''June appeared like an angel,'' she says. ''I offered her a fool's faith.'' Somewhere in the background as all this transpires is the patient Hugo (Richard E. Grant), the dim, stodgy husband who addresses Anais as Pussywillow.

The screenplay emphasizes Anais's enduring attraction to her husband. But the film undermines that by presenting him as a fool, at one point staging the kind of wild cinematic bacchanal in which the actors cavort wearing carnival masks and blue body paint. In the midst of this revelry, Hugo seduces his own wife while wearing headgear that makes him look like an owl. She takes him seriously, but the audience will not.

Meanwhile, Henry and Anais roam the cafes of Paris declaiming about ''literature as we know it, poetry as we know it'' and generally testing their own daring. They make love strenuously beneath a bridge by the Seine. They spend time with Brassai, who takes pictures in a whorehouse. Magicians do tricks. Accordions play. And Henry and Anais talk fervently about their own writing. ''Just read your goddamn book about D. H. Lawrence, and my, oh, my, it's one helluva book, Miss Nin,'' Henry says. Mr. Ward delivers lines like this with rascally fervor, but his is essentially an unplayable role. With his head shaved distractingly to simulate Miller's baldness, and with a screenplay that has him exhorting friends to read Spengler and Thomas Mann, Mr. Ward is asked to give more of an impersonation than a performance; still, he is always appealing. Miss de Medeiros, a photogenic actress who resembles Nin, is mostly called upon to let the camera study her huge, soulful eyes and brave little chin. Ms. Thurman, as the Brooklyn-accented June, takes a larger-than-life character and makes her even bigger, though the performance is often as curious as it is commanding. It says a lot about the film's posturing that Count Bruga, the sinister-looking little male marionette that June Miller really did carry with her as a kind of conversational prop, seems no more excessive here than anything else.

The film's sex scenes, photographed delicately by Philippe Rousselot and directed with great intensity by Mr. Kaufman, are particularly lofty. These sequences, often tinged with symbolism (a hand playing a guitar juxtaposed with a hand on a woman's breast), tend to be self-consciously bold. But they are also crucial, since the film's only real drama, indeed its only real story, hinges upon Anais's awakening attraction to June.

Even this is presented with excessive weight. An extended bit of foreshadowing finds Anais and Hugo uneasily visiting a bordello and paying to watch a sexual demonstration involving two women. Though the episode is elaborately staged and actually has some narrative purpose, it lacks the fire and candor to which any film about Henry Miller presumably aspires. Nothing about ''Henry and June'' is as daring as that.

source: NY Times

stealing beauty

در زندگی‌ گاهی اتفاق‌های جالبی‌ می‌‌افتد، سال‌ها پیش در ایران دوستی‌ فیلمی به من داد

با عنوان فارسی‌ "زیبای مزاحم".

فیلم در زمانی‌ که غرق در مسائل هنر و نقاشی و مجسمه سازی بودم شدیدا مرا تحت تاثیر

قرار داد.گذشت تا اینکه مهاجر شدم و شکل و شمایل زندگی‌ کاملا با آنچه که عمری به آن

خو گرفته بودم متفاوت شد.

هزارو یک مسالهٔ گوناگون که هر کدام ذهن و روحت را به سویی میکشند.

در میان تمام این دست و پنجه نرم کردن ها،ناگهان چیزی شروع به تکان دادن هزارتوی

وجودت می‌کند. تونل‌های تاریکی‌ که سالهاست گذری به آنجا نیفتاده به ناگاه روشن می‌‌شوند

و درست مثل احساسی است که شیی گمشده ت را پیدا کرده ای‌. نگاهی‌ به اطراف تونل

زیبای نیمه روشن میکنی‌ و میگویی من هم روزی از این فضا لبریز از لذت بودم.

بی‌ دلیل گمش کرده بودم و امروز با دلیل پیدا شد.

روز گذشته در بلاگ دوستی‌ ۲ کلیپ از این فیلم را دیدم.خیلی‌ جالب بود مثل تکان دادن

حافظهٔ دراز مدت با یک شوک ذهنی‌ که مرا تا جاهای دوری برد، پر از احساس‌های خوب.

سپاس از این دوست عزیز.