☛ March To The Moon: photo from the Gemini IV mission depicting astronaut Edward White during NASA’s very first EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity), June 3, 1965, 19:45 GMT, shot with a Zeiss Planar 80mm lens mounted on a Hasselblad 500c 70 mm camera on Kodak Ektachrome film. Photo ID: S65-30431_G04-H. Flash is required to access some features. All photographs are in the public domain. Processed images (all except RAW) should be credited to NASA/JSC/Arizona State University.

Original captions read as follow:

Astronaut White floats in zero gravity of space northeast of Hawaii. White is attached to the spacecraft by a 25-ft. umbilical line and a 23-ft. tether line,both wrapped in gold tape to form one cord. In his right hand White carries a Hand-Held Self-Maneuvering Unit (HHSMU). The visor of his helmet is gold plated to protect him from the unfiltered rays of the sun.

This is one of 363 hi-res restored photographs related to the Gemini IV mission. Processed (enhanced) photographs for all Gemini missions were recently made available by NASA online. Each photographs is offered in three different resolution. The one I’m using is the smallest one: it’s a 553 kB 600×626 PNG file. One can also download a medium resolution (a 7MB 2205×2300 PNG file), a full resolution (a 28.1 MB 4410×4600 PNG file) or even an uncompressed RAW image (a huge 60.9 MB 4410×4600 TIFF file). Learn more about how the scans were made and how the original photographs were restored and enhanced.

The Gemini Program was the second human spaceflight program ran by NASA. It was preceded by the Mercury program (during which astronaut Alan Shepard became the very first American to orbit in space: see previously here “50 Years Ago: First American In Space”) and followed by the Apollo program (which ran from 1961 to 1972) and the Space Shuttle program (from 1981 to 2011).

An overview of the Gemini program is also available at the John F. Kennedy Space Center website:

The Gemini Program was conceived after it became evident to NASA officials that an intermediate step was required between Project Mercury and the Apollo Program. […]

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced December
7, 1961, a plan to extend the existing manned space flight program by development of a two-man spacecraft. The program was officially designated Gemini on January 3, 1962. It was named after the third constellation of the zodiac, featuring the twin stars Castor and Pollux. The program was operationally completed with the Gemini XII flight.

First spotted via WIRED.com

― Mais quelle est votre attitude maintenant vis-à-vis de la religion?
― Je n’ai pas d’attitude. J’ai été élevé dedans. Je pourrais répondre «Je suis toujours athée, grâce à Dieu.» Je crois qu’il faut chercher Dieu dans l’homme. C’est un attitude très simple.

☛ L’Express: “Luis Buñuel: athée grâce à Dieu” by Michèle Manceaux, May 12, 1960, p. 41.

Image from Luis Buñuel’s interview in L'Express, May 12, 1960, p. 41

That’s the original form of the quote known in English as “Thank God I’m an atheist”. Here’s an English translation of the original exchange between Luis Buñuel and Michèle Manceaux (as quoted above):

― But now what is your attitude towards religion?
― I have no attitude. I was raised in it. I could answer “I’m still an atheist, thank God.” I believe we must seek God within man himself. This is a very simple attitude.

Seventeen years later, Luis Buñuel had a different attitude toward the subject of religion. He discussed it during an interview he gave for The New Yorker:

Buñuel’s work is born of the humor of a sad man distressed by his own vision of the world but with a fond eye for the mass of self-deceptions that make life bearable. He is one of the most mannerly men I have ever met. The only thing that stirs him to impatience is the sort of charity that is seen as a virtue by people who don’t question the anguish that makes charity necessary. “I’m not a Christian, but I’m not an atheist either,” he says. “I’m weary of hearing that accidental old aphorism of mine ‘I’m not an atheist, thank God’ It’s outworn. Dead leaves. In 1951, I made a small film called ‘Mexican Bus Ride,’ about a village too poor to support a church and a priest. The place was serene, because no one suffered from guilt. It’s guilt we must escape, not God.” (The New Yorker: “Long Live the Living!” by Penelope Gilliatt, December 5, 1977, p. 54)

There’s most likely a small confusion when Buñuel quotes his own aphorism: instead of “I’m not an atheist, thank God” ―which doesn’t correspond what he said in 1960― one should read “I’m an atheist, thank God”. That’s the “aphorism” Buñuel didn’t agree with anymore in 1977.

Image from Luis Buñuel’s interview in The New Yorker, December 5, 1977, p. 54

☛ The New Yorker: cover art by Peter Arno, October 27, 1928. © Condé Nast, 2012.

Peter Arno was a famous American cartoonist. His cartoons were published in The New Yorker from 1925 up until 1968. From the book The comic worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams, and Saul Steinberg by Iain Topliss:

By that date [May 1930] Peter Arno (1904-1968) was the most celebrated and influential cartoonist working at The New Yorker ―and perhaps in America― a position he consolidated over the next twenty years. His drawings of clubmen and chornies, dowagers and doormen, lushers and lechers, comically compromised in the cabaret world of hotel lobbies, gentlemen’s clubs, theaters and speakeasies of a New York City that was the very capital of capitalism, had made him the most famous cartoonist of his day. The first collection of his drawings, Peter Arno’s Parade, with an enthusiastic introduction by William Bolitho, was issue in 1929 by the libertarian publisher Horace Liveright (of Boni and Liveright fame) and was so successful it was reprinted twice within a month of its appearance. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, p. 21)

A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.

☛ W.H. Auden The Life of a Poet by Charles Osborne, London: Michael O’Mara Books Limited, 1995, p. 339. Amazon.

I was able to track down the original source for this quote with the kind assistance of Alan Jacobs, editors of The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (Princeton University Press, 2011; Amazon).

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) was an Anglo-American poet. From the BBC website:

He continued to publish poetry including ‘The Age of Anxiety’ (1947) for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He collaborated with Kallman on the libretto for Stravinsky’s opera ‘The Rake’s Progress’ (1951). From 1956 to 1961 he was professor of poetry at Oxford University.

Below is a selection I made from Auden’s obiter dicta. What are those exactly? They are a collection of passing remarks made by Auden and noted by his friend and biographer Charles Osborne (obiter dicta is Latin for “said in passing”). They are not part of any poem or book written by Auden and remain undated. There are four pages of such remarks. They appear at the very end of Osborn’s book, on chapter 13 (PDF).

• I always have two things in my head – I always have a theme and the form. The form looks for the theme, the theme looks for the form, and when they come together you’re able to write. (336)

• The problem with the behaviouralists is that they always manage to exclude themselves from their theories. If all our acts are conditioned behaviour, surely our theories are, too. (337)

• The older one gets, the more one values the age of friendship, as if it were a vintage. (337)

• My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain. (338)

• Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation. (338)

• I don’t go along with all this talk of a generation gap. We’re all contemporaries, anyone walking this earth at this moment. There’s a certain difference in memories, that’s all. (338)

• I admire the young when they’re anti-money, but what they mustn’t do is take money from papa and then criticize his way of life. (339)

What I realized during this Australian Open is that Nadal sets the tone for this state of affairs more than anyone else, certainly more than Federer. Roger is so cool and frictionless that, most of the time, he seems less like a prism of epic intensity than a dispassionate analyst of it.6 Djokovic, since his ascent, has been so much better than everyone else that he’s largely been able to act like a careful clinician, the administrator of his own talent. And Murray has lost to the other guys so often that his anger and frustration seem basically inconsequential. In other words, the game may be epic for the fans, but you won’t always catch that ground note of holy-shit intensity if you only watch the other three players. Left to themselves, they don’t exactly project deep contact with the secret fires of time.

Nadal, though? He plays like he’s fighting giants. It’s not just the sneer, or the muscles, or the hair, or that forehand — you know, the one where he swoops the racket all the way around his head like he’s whipping the team pulling his chariot. It’s also that frantic tenacity that used to drive me so nuts. Federer seems devastated when he loses but he also seems to sense losses coming and accept them before they arrive. When Nadal falls behind, he turns the match into life and death. He gets mad. He hesitates less. He hits the ball harder. He doesn’t look sad or scared. He looks defiant, and he plays like he’s possessed.

☛ Grantland: “Nadal vs. Djokovic: Here We Are Again, My Friend” by Brian Phillips, January 30, 2012.

Great sport journalism for what must have been, by all accounts, an epic 5 hours 53 minutes Grand Slam match (I haven’t watched it). This colorful analysis offered by Brian Phillips ―which could have been titled “Battle of the Titans” or more simply ”Titanomachy”― is just as interesting as those produced by David Foster Wallace (see “Federer as Religious Experience” by David Foster Wallace, August 20, 2006).

The match was played at Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne, Australia. It started on Sunday January 29, 2012 and finished around 1:40 the next Monday morning (Australian Eastern Standard Time).

About Brian Phillips:

He is a staff writer at Grantland, and his work has appeared in Slate, Deadspin, The New York Times Magazine, The Awl, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, and Poetry, among other publications. (The Run of Play: About)

In 2007, he founded The Run of Play: “a blog about the wonder and terror of soccer”.

I first found Phillips’s article via more than 95 theses, Alan Jacobs‘s Tumblr blog.

☛ The Beekeeper (Ο Μελισσοκόμος) by Theodoros Angelopoulos, Greece, 1986, screen capture at 01:52:57.

In the following lines I discuss a central episode from the film The Beekeeper and some general aspects of Angelopoulos’s style. At the end, I list relevant references about Angelopoulos’s films and the ways online media reacted to his death (obituaries).

• • •

The Beekeeper

When I learned about Angelopoulos’s death, I had just finished watching The Beekeeper for the second time. The film is about an aging man, husband and father, Spyros (played by Marcelo Mastroianni). The old man, visibly wearied by a long life, just retired from school teaching. For some reason, he seems to have lost touch with his family. His wife Maria and his son Aris do not understand him anymore. The only thing he cared about just escaped him: his youngest daughter got married and is leaving with her new husband, far away from the family home.

It’s springtime and the snow is melting away. Spyros is also a beekeeper. He has been for many years just like his father, and his grand-father before him. He must now take his beehives on the road, like every year, in search of flower fields further south.

On his way, he sometimes stops to meet colleagues and old friends. Early in the film, he picks up a young woman (Nadia Mourouzi) in need of a ride. She has no past and he, no future. Together, they’ll make an intense and difficult journey.

One night, in the middle of this journey, Spyros stops alone in a city to visit two long-time friends. One of them is sick and we find him lying in a hospital bed (he’s played by Serge Reggiani). They nonetheless sit and drink together, they share some laughters and some memories. They make plans to go walk by the beach at dawn and admire the sea.

They are unexpectedly interrupted by two nurses who came to check on the patient. Spyros and the third friend politely retire in order to give the man some privacy. In the doorway, Spyros suddenly stops. While he was being treated, his friend extended an arm and started knocking rhythmically with his knuckles on a nearby table. It’s Morse code. Spyros, still in the doorway with his friend, is the only one who’s able to understand what’s being communicated. He translates out loud:

The first time it was a sunny day
We were blinded by the infinite light
None of our desires was hidden
We were vainly looking for a shade

Spyros (Marcello Mastroianni) translates out loud a poem his sick friend (off screen) is communicating in Morse code.

The little poem shared between friends acts like a spell attempting to resurrect a world which vanished in the mist of time. Although it’s been gone a long time already, they can’t help searching for a sign of it, in a perfume, a song, a landscape.

Maybe that’s what Spyros is looking for in the young hitchhiker he just met. He’s longing for her, but hopelessly because he understands, consciously or not, that she will never be able to give him back his youth. She can’t conjure up the time that went by already. He really has nothing significant to get from her. And yet he can’t help desiring her passionately ¹.

Later, the three men reunite again and go on the beach. The place is empty, it’s dawn and the the sun is about to come up. The sick man goes first to face the waves. He extends his arm and dances a little bit. He remembers how some other time, in the very same city, he and others had the opportunity to change history (most likely referring to his involvement in the Second World War).

Suddenly he turns back, facing the sleeping city and starts yelling: “Hey you! Hey you inside!”. He looks like he’s trying to wake the living from the slumber of their actuality. It feels like he needs to communicate the story of another time, a time that once existed when he too was present, well alive, full of dreams and hopes, constantly in action.

Spyros's friend (played by Serge Reggiani) tries to wake the sleeping city.

Nobody answers the repeated calls.

The film doesn’t end there. But this episode is emblematic of its main themes: love, despair, longing for lost paradises and failure to communicate.

• • •

Angelopoulos’s style

The cinema of Theo Angelopoulos is notorious for its extensive use of long takes and slow paced sequence shots (plan séquence in French). The Travelling Players (released in 1975) runs at about 230 minutes and is made of about 80 shots (see The Guardian: “Theo Angelopoulos: The Travelling Players” by Derek Malcolm, June 15, 2000). Therefore the “average shot length” is approximately 172 seconds per shot (roughly three minutes). For Angelopoulos’s film Eternity and a Day, the ASL is 114.3 seconds. In comparison, the ASL for The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) is around 2 seconds (for more information about ASL, see Cinemetrics; for a discussion about The Bourne Ultimatum’s fast pace, see David Bordwell “The unsteady Chronicle”, August 17, 2007). As an example of Angelopoulos’s style, here’s a four-and-a-half minutes sequence shot from the film Eternity and a Day which was the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner in 1998 (I did not chose it because it’s my favorite but because it’s the longest I could find on YouTube):

In an interview he did with Serge Toubiana and Frédéric Strauss back in 1988 he talks about his way of filming:

If I have to explain this, I would say that my preference for the long shot, the sequence shot, stems from my rejection of what is generally referred to as parallel editing, for I consider it fabricated. For historical reasons I accept the work of all those who resorted to this type of montage, like Eisenstein, but this is not my kind of cinema. In a certain manner, for me, each shot is a living thing, with a breath of his own, that consists of inhaling and exhaling. This is a process that cannot accept any interference; it must have a natural opening and fading. (Theo Angelopoulos: interviews, edited by Dan Fainaru, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2001, p. 72)

Theo Angelopoulos, circa 1975. Photo by Keystone/Getty Images.

If one adds the fact that his films are not always cheerful, often punctuated by long silences and shot against the bleak and rainy landscape of northern Greece (instead of the stereotypical settings of Greece’s sunny islands), one can understand why Angelopoulos’s work, despite numerous awards, were not always well received.

In April 1997, American critic Roger Ebert wrote of Ulysses’ Gaze (which has previously won the Special Jury Prize at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival):

Because it is a noble epic set amid the ruins of the Russian empire and the genocide of what was Yugoslavia, there is a temptation to give “Ulysses’ Gaze” the benefit of the doubt: To praise it for its vision, its daring, its courage, its great length. But I would not be able to look you in the eye if you went to see it, because how could I deny that it is a numbing bore? (“Ulysses’ Gaze” April 18, 1997)

Ebert went on to give the film one star (in comparison, he gave The Bourne Ultimatum three-and-a-half stars).

Is this another failure to communicate? Does Angelopoulos speak in Morse code? It seems the experience provided by his films echoed the themes he was preoccupied with during the years of his artistic practice. He speaks of another world, another time, and maybe also another cinema. His films use a language that has become unfamiliar to many of us. It’s not always easy to understand what he’s trying to say. In his essay on Angelopoulos, David Bordwell remarks:

Indeed, part of the fascination of Angelopoulos’s cinema is its almost naive anachronism. This filmmaker, so attuned to history (or History), so sensitive to post-Communist emigration and the war in the Balkans, appears unaware of how dated his artistic ambitions seem. (“Angelopoulos, or melancholy” in Figures traced in light: on cinematic staging, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, p. 140).

For some, this difficulty (if it’s experienced as such) will be enough to dismiss the man and all of his work. For others though, it will be a different experience. They will perceive something in one of Angelopoulos’s foggy and unsettling long sequence shots: fragments of a poetic message, a dizzying atmosphere, a new feeling (on Rotten Tomatoes Eternity and a Day scores at 90% with the audience and at 95% with the critics). Hopefully it will be enough of a reason to give the filmmaker a chance, to take a couple of hours in the solitude of a cinema and to try to understand parts of what he had to say. After all, what is there to gain from a journey devoid of any difficulties or obstacle?

• • •

References

• Theo Angelopoulos doesn’t have an official website: he has two. The first one (.gr) has been recently updated (Flash is required for some features). The home page has a note about the upcoming shooting of Angelopoulos new project The Other Sea (it now remains unfinished). Strangely enough this update was archived on January 24 of this year around noon. Angelopoulos died on the evening of the very same day. At the time of this writing, there’s no mention of his death on this website.
• There’s a second (.com) official Theo Angelopoulos website (Flash is required). At the time of this writing, it seems it hasn’t been updated since 2009. There’s no mention of the filmmaker’s death and it announces The Dust of Time as an “upcoming film” (it was released in early 2009). There’s also a page about The Beekeeper. On this page, one can read a quote from Angelopoulos about the signification of the last sequence of this particular film. The quote is not referenced: it comes from the interview Angelopoulos gave to Michel Ciment in 1987: Theo Angelopoulos: interviews, edited by Dan Fainaru, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2001, p. 53.
• Until recently, some of Angelopoulos’ films, especially the earlier ones, were really hard to find and, when they were available, it was usually on VHS. On November 2011, European distributor Artificial Eye released The Theo Angelopoulos Collection Vol. 1. It includes all his feature films made before 1980: Reconstruction (1970), Days of ’36 (1972), The Travelling Player (1975) and The Hunters (1977). It’s a Region 2 DVD, but at least it’s out there. To my knowledge, none of his films exist on Blu-ray. A search on Amazon quickly shows the availability of his other films on DVD.
• David Bordwell’s essay “Angelopoulos, or melancholy” is really worth reading. The 10 first pages of the essay are available online at Google books. Right at the beginning of the essay, Bordwell “confess[es] [his] divided affection for [Angelopoulos's] sprawling, majestic, irritating works.” He explains:
  

  Certain of them (for example, Ulysses’ Gaze; Eternity and a Day, 1998) seem to me deeply flawed, inflating their thematic statement at the expense of narrative density. Others, such as The Travelling Player (1975) and The Hunters (1977), are remarkable accomplishments, but often they read better in critical commentary than they play on the screen. Four, however―Alexander the Great (1980), Voyage to Cythera (1983), Landscape in the Mist (1988) and The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991)― seem to me authentic masterpieces, attaining grandeur without becoming grandiose. Still, none of the films lacks awe-inspiring passages, and all sustain, sometime brilliantly, that tradition of staging and shooting that is the concern of this book.

  The introduction to Bordwell’s book is available on his official website.

• Andrew Horton is the Jeanne H Smith Professor of Film and Video Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He wrote two books about Theo Angelopoulos. Part of those books can be previewed online at Amazon: The Last Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos (Westport: Praeger, 1997; Amazon) and The Films of Theo Angelopoulos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999; Amazon).
• Sense of Cinema has an excellent introductory article on Angelopoulos: it gives a general idea of his filmography along with a bibliography and additional web resources. See “Theo Angelopoulos” by Acquarello, issue 27, July-August 2003.
• As usual, MUBI offers an excellent round-up of relevant links about Angelopoulos: it’s a great place to start searching (I’ve referenced some of those links above). See “Theo Angelopoulos, 1935-2012” by David Hudson, January 24, 2012.
• [UPDATE - February 2, 2012] Catherine Grant’s web-archive Film Studies For Free offers around twenty links pointing to “high quality academic studies of his work, including a number of freely-accessible, book-length items”: see “Voyage to Cinema: Studies of the Work of Theo Angelopoulos” (Feb. 2, 2012).
• Obituaries in English:
  • The New York Times: “Theo Angelopoulos, Greek Filmmaker, Dies at 76” by Margalit Fox, January 25, 2012. Excerpt:
    

    If Mr. Angelopoulos’s work was not universally known in the United States, the explanation could be found in his style, the antithesis of Hollywood studio fare.

    Seen most often here on the art house circuit, his movies are dreamy, atmospheric and enigmatic. Many are allegories that illuminate the painful history of 20th-century Greece, from its occupation by the Nazis in World War II to its brutal civil war in the late 1940s.

    Visually evocative, often beautiful, his films contain long sections with little or no dialogue. They are suffused with melancholy symbolism, all of it intensely personal and some of it intensely obscure. They are typically organized around very long takes that can assume the form of wordless meditations on space, as the camera pans slowly across a landscape.

  • The Telegraph probably produced the most interesting obituary about Theo Angelopoulos: “Theo Angelopoulos” January 26, 2012. Excerpt:
    

    He was also much influenced by Michelangelo Antonioni, especially in his use of landscape to mirror the mood of a scene and of so-called “dead time”, when nothing is happening, yet the camera goes on filming even after the characters have walked out of the shot. He once said: “If I were asked to define my cinema, I would call it a cinema of dead spaces sandwiched between times in which things take place.”

  • Another interesting obituary came from The Guardian: “Theo Angelopoulos obituary” by Ronald Bergan, January 25, 2012. Excerpt:
    

    The Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos, who has died aged 76 in a road accident, was an epic poet of the cinema, creating allegories of 20th-century Greek history and politics. He redefined the slow pan, the long take and tracking shots, of which he was a master. His stately, magisterial style and languidly unfolding narratives require some (ultimately rewarding) effort on the part of the spectator. “The sequence shot offers, as far as I’m concerned, much more freedom,” Angelopoulos explained. “By refusing to cut in the middle, I invite the spectator to better analyse the image I show him, and to focus, time and again, on the elements that he feels are the most significant in it.”

  • Also from The Guardian an article exploring the theme of Incompleteness in Angelopoulos’s films: “Theo Angelopoulos: one last unfinished tale for chronicler of modern Greece” by Peter Bradshaw, January 25, 2012. Excerpt:
    

    Ultimately, Angelopoulos’s themes are the great themes of exile and return, and the equivalent interior, spiritual sense of alienation and longing for peace. They connect with another great Greek trope: the wanderings of Odysseus. Angelopoulos’s work was recurrently about this endless journeying towards a home receding over the horizon. Ulysses’s gaze was Angelopoulos’s gaze – long, steady and profoundly mysterious.

  • The Washington Press used a press dispatch from The Associated Press: “Award-winning Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos killed in road accident at age 76”, January 24, 2012.
  • From Reuters: “Greek director Angelopoulos dies after accident during shooting” by Renee Maltezou and Ingrid Melander, January 25, 2012.
  • The Hollywood Reporter: “Legendary Greek Filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos Dies”, January 25, 2012.
  • Variety used the press dispatch from The Associated Press: “Theo Angelopoulos dies at 76”, January 24, 2012.

• Obituaries in French:
  • Le Monde, L’Express, Le Figaro and Libération first broke the news using the same press dispatch from AFP (Agence France Presse). Le Nouvel Observateur used a different press dispatch from AP (Associated Press).
  • The following day Le Monde published a short article: “Theo Angelopoulos, l’éternité et une nuit” by Jacques Mandelbaum, January 25, 2012. Excerpt:
    

    Le tournant du XXe siècle, dont le cinéaste avait inscrit les convulsions dans le marbre, aura pu donner l’impression qu’Angelopoulos s’était éloigné de nous, ou que la marche de ce temps qui lui était si cher nous avait éloignés de lui. Ses films se faisaient plus rares, ils étaient reçus avec moins d’attention et de ferveur. On aurait pu croire qu’il était un homme du passé s’il n’avait préparé, au moment où la mort l’a cueilli, un film sur la crise en Grèce, et plus largement en Europe. Son titre était L’Autre Mer : il nous aurait sûrement surpris.

  • Same thing with L’Express which published a short article the next day: “Cinq choses à savoir sur Theo Angelopoulos” by Thomas Baurez, January 25, 2012. Excerpt:
    

    C’est en 1980, que Theo Angelopoulos est définitivement identifié sur la carte du cinéma mondial. Son cinquième long-métrage Alexandre le Grand, l’histoire d’un bandit dans la Grèce du début du XXe siècle, est récompensé par la presse à la Mostra de Venise. Son Voyage à Cythère, oeuvre matricielle des films contemplatifs à venir, est célébré par cette même presse au festival de Cannes en 84. Il obtient en 88, le Lion d’Argent à Venise pour Paysage dans le brouillard, puis le Grand Prix au festival de Cannes pour Le regard d’Ulysse en 95. Enfin, c’est la consécration avec la Palme d’or pour L’éternité et un jour, film fleuve sur la fin d’un homme et plus sûrement d’un monde.

  • Slate.fr also published an original article: “Théo Angelopoulos: l’éternité, un jour” by Jean-Michel Frodon, January 25, 2012. Excerpt:
    

    Prenant en charge la mémoire de son pays ravagé par les dictatures successives, la guerre civile, le massacre des résistants communistes, l’exil des Kapetanios survivants, l’impossible articulation d’engagements anciens et de contraintes nouvelles, Angelopoulos est l’un des cinéastes européens qui aura le plus attentivement pris en charge les grands bouleversements idéologiques de l’après-guerre, avec générosité et lucidité.

  • Humanité has an original article: “Dernier voyage pour Theo Angelopoulos” January 25, 2012. Excerpt:
    

    Théo Angélopoulos a marqué l’histoire du cinéma européen, après avoir fait émerger un “nouveau cinéma grec” dans les années 70 à la chute du régime des colonels, pétri de lenteurs et de méditations pour raconter les blessures de la Grèce et de l’humanité. “Peut-être que c’est triste, mais mon ancêtre Aristote disait que la mélancolie est la source de la création”, disait-il en 1999 lors de sa leçon de cinéma au festival de Cannes, un an après y avoir reçu la Palme d’Or pour son film L’éternité et un jour, un long-métrage en forme de réflexion sur la mort.

  • Serge Kaganski wrote a small piece for Les Inrocks: “La mort du cinéaste grec Theo Angelopoulos”, January 25, 2012. Excerpt:
    

    Mais tout n’est pas perdu pour les Grecs : en disparaissant, Angelopoulos laisse derrière lui une nouvelle vague prometteuse incarnée par les jeunes et fougueux Yorgos Lantimos, Athina Rachel Tsangari ou Panos Koutras.

    The best Greek film I’ve seen recently is Dog Tooth by Yorgos Lantimos (IMDb).

  Previously on Aphelis: “Greek Director Michael Cacoyannis Dies at 90 (1921-2011)” and “Proust : les paradis qu’on a perdus / paradises we have lost”

  • • •

  ¹ Perhaps it will be adequate here to add a note about the “eros of melancholy”. Spyros is emblematic of a certain description of the melancholic disposition. See for example Giorgio Agamben’s Stanzas:
  

  […] it might be said that the withdrawal of melancholic libido has no other purpose than to make viable an appropriation in a situation in which none is really possible. From this point of view, melancholy would be not so much the regressive reaction to the loss of the love objects as the imaginative capacity to make an unobtainable object appear as if lost. If the libido behave as if a loss had occurred although nothing has in fact been lost, this is because the libido stages a simulation where what cannot be lost because it has never been possessed appears as lost, and what could never be possessed because it had never perhaps existed may be appropriated insofar as it is lost. (Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, tr. by Ronald L. Martinez, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1977]1993, p. 20)

  The key point of this hypothesis lies in the idea that the melancholic disposition is possible because nothing was lost in the first place. Spyros thinks he is longing for his youth or for some other object of desire from his past. However, it’s more than likely that he’s essentially longing not for things as they were, but for the constructed memory he now has of them. What he wants belongs to the order of the phantasm: one cannot (re)possess a phantasm. However, one can imagine the phantasm as something lost, out of reach, and then appropriately long for it. That way ―even if it’s a paradoxical way― a person can enjoy something she never had in the first place. In this view, melancholy can be understood as a tortuous workaround to the object of desire. ↪

☛ The New Yorker: accompanying photo for James Woods’ review of The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, January 23, 2011, p. 79. Photo by WireImage contributor Dominique Charriau. © WireImage.

The original caption by WireImage reads as follows:

Michel Houellebecq gives a press conference after he received the 2010 Prix Goncourt at Restaurant Drouant on November 8, 2010 in Paris, France.

I find it to be quite a startling portrait. For an instant, Houellebecq seems to be impervious to the surrounding agitation. He looks directly at the camera and display a somehow enigmatic, unsettling smile. The all scene is dimly lit and is reminiscent of the use of chiaroscuro in painting.

In fact, it really looks like a painting to me (a painting by Caravaggio: that would fit with the use of chiaroscuro). Furthermore, I can’t help but to think the photograph bears some resemblance with Christian art. Houellebecq is represented as a respected figure who has some important news to share. He is surrounded by media representatives ―modern apostles― who are willing to transmit his message all over the world.

With one important discrepancy: in the Christian tradition, the Messiah brings good news (literally euangelion, “good news”). In contrast, Houellebecq’s novels usually reveal an uncanny and worrying reality. Is he simply the bearer of difficult and hard news: a disangelist? Or does his prose supposed to help us discover and engage in a more autonomous path through modernity? Perhaps the reading of Sloterdijk’s essay La compétition des bonnes nouvelles could help clarifies some of those ideas (originally published in 2000 as Über die Verbesserung der guten Nachricht. Nietzsches fünftes Evangelium; it has yet to be translated into English at the time of this writing). It certainly wouldn’t be the first time parallels are found between Nietzsche’s writings and Houellebecq novels.

☛ Vimeo: “PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet” by Kirby Ferguson and Fight for the Future, uploaded on October 25th, 2011. Licensed under (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).

From the Fight for the Future website:

The video above discusses the Senate version of the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In the Senate the bill is called the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).

The video was produced by Kirby Ferguson whom some may already know for his series “Everything is a Remix”. Currently, his official website redirect to the “SOPA Strike” website (his Vimeo profile is still accessible). It does so to raise awareness about negative effects the “Stop Online Piracy Act” bill could have if it was to be adopted by the United States House of Representatives. One can read the official documents associated with this bill proposal over at The Library of Congress website: Bill Text H.R.3261.IH

Kirby Ferguson is not the only one to be “on strike” today (for 24 hours). A lot of website joined the “Strike Against SOPA & PIPA” movement in an effort to convince House Representatives to vote against the bill on January 24th, 2012: see for example Wikipedia and Wired (below).

From The New York Times:

Wikipedia is the latest Web site to decide to shut on Wednesday in protest against the two Congressional bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act, often called SOPA, and the Protect IP Act, which is often called PIPA. The bills have attracted fierce opposition from many corners of the technology industry. Opponents say several of the provisions in the legislation, including those that may force search engines and Internet service providers to block access to Web sites that offer or link to copyrighted material, would stifle innovation, enable censorship and tamper with the livelihood of businesses on the Internet. (“Wikipedia to Go Dark on Wednesday to Protest Bills on Web Piracy” by Jenna Wortham, January 16, 2012).

Screen capture of Wikipedia's Protest SOPA splash page (January 18, 2012)

Screen capture of WIRED's Protest SOPA splash page (January 18, 2012)

A couple of days ago The White House issued a statement against the SOPA initiative:

Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.

Many observers now believe the SOPA bill will likely be rejected on January 24th. See for example The Atlantic: “Internet Rejoices: SOPA Is at Death’s Door” by Rebecca J. Rosen, January 17, 2012.

The title is a little bit misleading. The SOPA will not simply vanished but will most probably be put on hold pending further modifications. It is not the first attempt of this kind nor will it be the last. And it’s far from being an initiative limited to the United States: France has the Hadopi law, Spain the Sinde Law and the United-Kingdom has the Digital Economy Act. Josette Garcia, the PR / Marketing Manager for O’Reilly in the UK, recently wrote an interesting post compiling relevant information about all those: “SOPA, PIPA, Hadopi, DEA, ACTA, Sinde and it goes on” (January 16, 2012).

Finally, for those who thinks this is boring, serious stuff, I suggest learning about it through the perspective of The Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman: visit his protest page.

When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

☛ Mark Twain’s Notebook, Authorized Edition: The Complete Works of Mark Twain, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, vol. XXII, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935, p. 345.

In the book, this quote appears under the chapter XXXI “Vienna”. Mark Twain most likely wrote down this thought when he stayed in Austria’s capital city, between September 1897 and May 1899.

This volume of The Complete Works of Mark Twain is available online as a PDF file (20.7Mo) at the Internet Archive website.

I wasn’t able to track down the same quote in “Mark Twain Papers” editions published more recently by the University of California Press. At the moment of this writing, the official websites for The Mark Twain Papers and Project (hosted by the University of Berkeley) and the Mark Twain Project are not responsive.

Scan from “Mark Twain's Notebook”, Authorized Edition: The Complete Works of Mark Twain, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, vol. XXII, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935, p. 345.

☛ Morrison Hotel Gallery: “Charles Mingus, NYC, 1959”, black and white photograph by Don Hunstein. © Sony Music Entertainment, 2012. Some features on the website require Flash.

Original captions from the Morrison Hotel Gallery:

This shot of Mingus at the “Ah Um” and “Dynasty” sessions finds the jazz legend in a genial mood listening to spinning seat-belts of tape, forecast the future in the high-tech state-of-the-art audio control room of fifty years ago. Producer Teo Macero can be glimpsed working his sonic magic in the upper right hand of the frame in this Don Hunstein photograph.

The Morrison Hotel Gallery was founded in 2001 with the mission to preserve and promote music photography as a fine art. Their gallery located in SOHO, New York, is a collection of some of the most iconic portraits of musical artists of the twentieth century. Their website offers large reproductions of some of this collection (searchable by musicians, photographers, bands, etc.) along with detailed informations (year, location, name of the photographer and context). For more about the Morrisson Hotel Gallery one can see their About page and watch the ten minutes profile produced by SundayArts in 2010 to mark the 10th anniversary of its existence.

The Charles Mingus’ portrait shown above was shot by well known music photographer Don Hunstein. From his official website:

Don Hunstein’s iconic photographs have become symbols of an era. In the history of music photography, Don’s work during his 30 years at Columbia records is unsurpassed in its scope and breadth. Through his subtle humor and quiet nature, he was able to record many great moments in music history. He photographed the famous and the not so famous. Hundreds of album covers and behind the scenes work. His photographs documented a rare time when musicians spent time on their art, rather than their publicity.

Check some of his album covers photographs.