21 October 2024

“There Are Not Many Rules in Art, but Being Honest Is One of Them”: In Conversation with Photographer Sarah Fuchs

Photograph by Sarah Fuchs

 

In the photography of Sarah Fuchs, light and shadow have a poetic function. Sarah has the ability to bring a subject to light, while leaving room in the shadows for seductive curiosity and imagination. Spare in detail, she orchestrates black and white in her photographs to create a visually interpreted sense of depth. Her colour photography, bearing traces of playfulness, is rich and free, yet another context with scope for the imagination, and her portraiture I can best describe as lyrical images that work more with character and the wonder of being than with physical beauty.

What started with travel photography has led in time to an artistic pursuit of a higher degree of abstraction, to new explorations, to a new ability to think in images in a more unconventional form and to the conviction that success is tied to one’s fulfilling one’s own artistic vision and not much else. With self expression, honesty and feeling at the center of her work, Sarah Fuchs is experimenting with an alternative perspective of photography, seeing it afresh.

Sarah’s work has been published in Kaltblut Magazine, Polka Magazine, Kyoto Journal, Passion Passport, YOLO Journal, The Culture-ist. She has two upcoming group exhibitions in Berlin, “The Look of Others” and “Soft”.

In our conversation, we talk about Sarah’s journey as a photographer, how her perception of visual beauty has changed over the years, Berlin, and turning to nature and her inner self as inspiration.

 

Photograph by Sarah Fuchs

 

Sarah, do you always carry a camera with you?

No, I don’t. I have to be in a particular mindset and, ideally, alone to take pictures. Obviously, this is different when I do a fashion shoot, but when I work on my projects I have to take a minute to get into the mode and slow down and tune into my surroundings. If I’m with friends, or in a rush, or on my way somewhere I am rarely able to just stop and take a picture and move on again. I need time to let the moment sink in. 

 

A photographer once told me that his best photographs are still in his head. Are there moments when you feel you need to put your camera down even if you find yourself in that particular mindset to take pictures and just witness the moment?

Oh absolutely! I never take pictures at events, concerts, dinners, etc. Even when I work on my projects, there are moments when I realise I just need to take a break and a deep breath and be in the moment. It’s easy to start obsessing over getting the picture. I think my best work happens when I’m able to also let go.

 

What led you to photography? When did you know this was the path you wanted to pursue creatively?

It has been a roundabout journey to photography. I initially studied law and politics and worked in international politics and the NGO sector for many years. I was 28 when I decided I wanted to become a professional photographer. I think I resisted a creative career for a long time because of the uncertainty that comes with it. But the more I tried to make so-called sensible career choices the clearer it became that it just wasn’t possible for me to do it. Or rather, I wasn’t happy doing those jobs. I started getting into photography when I was living in South Korea and, initially, my way into photography was through travel photography. I was living all over the world and so I published my first pieces from all the places I lived in and visited. It was only when I moved to Berlin that I started pursuing the style that I’m currently working in. 

 
 

”It’s easy to start obsessing over getting the picture.
I think my best work happens when I’m able to also let go.”

 
 

Was it hard to publish those first photographs?

It was easy enough to get them published in magazines actually. But mentally it was so hard! I struggled a lot to let go and just put my work out there. I was so afraid that people would judge it or not like it. It took a lot of time to get used to exposing myself like that. Especially as my work has gotten more and more intimate and personal.

 

 
 

”I think if we learn to look at the world with fresh eyes
we can see all the magic that is constantly going on around us.”

 
 

Photographs by Sarah Fuchs

 

Your project ‘Unwearied Still’ is an ode to Yeats’ poem ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’. Could you tell us a few words about this project? And what other artists do you find inspiration in?

I’m a very restless person. For most of my adult life, I have been constantly moving from country to country, changing what I do and where I go. So my biggest challenge when I started photography was that I kept running out of patience. I was constantly starting new projects and moving on to the next thing. And while my tempo and curiosity have allowed me to do a lot of work, it started to feel like a hinder at some point. I realised that, to grow in my field, I had to practice patience. So the series ‘Unwearied Still’ became an exercise in maintaining a routine and a consistent practice over a longer period. I take pictures of the swans in my neighbourhood almost every day, and I have been doing it for almost half a year now.  

I find inspiration in a wide range of art and artists, it will be hard to list them all. I love surrealism. I’m a big fan of the work of Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Dora Maar, and Florence Henri. I also love Czech Avant-Garde photographers like Jaroslav Rössler, František Drtikol, and Jaromir Funke.

 
 

”I realised that, to grow in my field,
I had to practice patience.”

 
 

Being observant and having your eye naturally tuned in to the world around you may often be the first elements that come to mind when thinking of photography. But what I find fascinating about your photography is that you approach it from different perspectives, imagination and illusion becoming part of your visual narrative. What is it that you seek to explore in your work?

I seek to find beauty in the unconventional, the uncanny, and the unexpected. I try to push the boundaries of what’s possible when reality is bent and reshaped through the lens and create imagery that challenges our perception of reality. What I love about photography is its ability to make the real unreal, and the unreal real. I think we are increasingly living disenchanted lives and I would love for my work, even for just a moment, to make people look and wonder what it is that they are seeing. To create a moment of surprise and a magical feeling. I think if we learn to look at the world with fresh eyes we can see all the magic that is constantly going on around us. Whether it’s a strange shadow over a face, or a sculptural shape of a bird in the water, or the bold colours of a flower. I love to think that even the most conventional thing can be mysterious and wonderful if we just look at it with new eyes. 

 

I completely agree with you, we’ve lost that sense of wonder and belief in magic, a world we now seem to lose forever when we are no longer children, although I personally hope we don’t. Did you love stories as a child? Written or visual, or both?

I loved stories, and books a lot! I’m an only child, so I spent a lot of time in my own head and fantasy worlds. I was less preoccupied with visual stories. Films and photos didn’t matter to me as much until later in my teens. To this day, I love a good book that can transport me into a different world.

 

Photograph by Sarah Fuchs

 

Could you name a few of the books that made you dream the most or which had the most lasting impression on you? 

As a child, I loved fantasy books. I don’t remember the specific titles of them anymore unfortunately. As I grew older, I got into Japanese and South Korean literature, specifically Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, and Han Kang.

 

Which were the films and photographers you were first drawn to when you began to be interested in visual storytelling?

I really love expressionist films, and I think German expressionism is very interesting and these films still inspire me today!

In the beginning, the photography I was drawn to was very rich in colour and texture. I would obsessively follow the work of the Magnum photographers. With time, I’ve come to see that type of imagery with a more critical eye, especially where western photographers travelled to other parts of the world and created a very narrow and orientalist representation of those places and people. 

 

I agree and I have to admit that a few photographers have immediately sprung to mind when you mentioned this, the Western stereotypes about certain cultures and how they chose to focus on misery and pain leaving out positive aspects of those places. The fault is as much the photographers’ as the publishers’ who sold that image and message, I believe. You have lived in different parts of the world and travelled a lot. Has that fostered a deeper sense of empathy and understanding within you? 

I think so. I have also been very privileged to travel a lot when I was younger, so I think the general exposure to different people and cultures from a young age made me a lot more aware of the different ways people live and to not judge or think of anything as better or worse than something else. My background studying international politics and law with a human rights focus further amplified this. Of course I will always have my context and my way of thinking about things, and it is hard to fully escape a mindset that is instilled by the society you grow up within. But I try to constantly learn and be open, and to question my own beliefs about things.

 

Photographs by Sarah Fuchs

 

And because you mentioned your German expressionism inspiration, do you prefer black and white, or colour photography? 

My first love was colour photography, but I find myself drawn more and more to black and white photography. I think when it comes to portraits, I prefer black and white, but I also still love playing with bold and vibrant colours. 

I play a lot with abstraction in my work, and I think there are certain shapes and subjects that are so familiar to us that it allows for a lot of abstraction. These kinds of subjects I prefer to photograph in black and white to really emphasise its shape and texture. A face is so recognisable to us that it can handle an extraordinary amount of abstraction. Similarly with hands. And animals like swans. 

 

A defining moment for you as a photographer was: …

Perhaps a strange answer, but heartbreak was a defining moment for me as a photographer. Just after I moved to Berlin my 7-year-long relationship ended, and it left me with so much pain and confusion that I could only deal with through making art. The experimental style I work with now came out of that period. I was in disarray and so the photos I started making became as blurry and distorted and strange as I was feeling at the time. It was an incredibly liberating feeling. I felt like I had lost everything and that there was nothing left to lose. So I just started experimenting and playing with my medium. Before this time, I made very traditionally beautiful images. After the breakup, I think my images gained a new depth. 

 
 

”I don’t think there are many rules in art,
but I do think being honest is one of them.
It is the hardest part about being an artist.”

 
 

What does now a beautiful image mean to you?

Oh, that is a tough one. The first answer that pops to mind is an image that is honest. I don’t think there are many rules in art, but I do think being honest is one of them. It is the hardest part about being an artist. I don’t think there is anything more special than seeing an image or a piece of art that feels like the artist was truly honest.

 

That’s a precious lesson to be learned especially these days when there is such a blurred line between authenticity and artificiality. What keeps you grounded and trusting your own voice? 

I believe I have gotten better and better at just doing what I want to do, and not pursuing trends or creating images that I think people will like. And funnily enough, the less of a crap I give about what people think about my work, the more popular it seems to get! I think there is a big desire for authentic work and voices. This is still a work in progress for me, but it does give me hope that I’m on the right track. It has helped me to define success for myself as creating work that I am proud of regardless of other people’s opinions.

 

Photograph by Sarah Fuchs

 

That’s a fine and very sound, healthy, definition of success. What advice would you give someone struggling to change professional paths, or to find that something that make them feel fulfilled?

It’s so easy to look back at your past and wish for things to have been different. And it’s easy to get stuck thinking you have wasted time or that it’s too late to change.

My advice would be to not think about your younger self, or to think about all the time and effort that went into making other choices. If you feel like making a change or pursuing a creative career, then just go for it.

It will be hard, but it will be even harder to continue doing the same old thing.

 

You were born in Norway, you are currently based in Berlin, having lived in other parts of the world in between. Where do you call home?

Home has changed a lot over the years. Right now Berlin really feels like home, but it took time to get there. In the end, the place doesn’t matter that much, but the people that surround you. I have met some truly amazing people in this city, and I think Berlin now feels more like home than any place I have ever lived before.

 
 

“Berlin is, in many ways, a tough city, but it is also
a very open and honest city. And I like that a lot.”

 
 

What is the best part about living in Berlin and which you would miss if you lived anywhere else in the world? 

I feel very free in Berlin. This could also be due to my age or the phase of life that I am in. Perhaps I would feel similarly in other cities at this time. But I happen to be feeling free here now. And it’s a place where a lot of outsiders find belonging. It is, in many ways, a tough city, but it is also a very open and honest city. And I like that a lot.

 

Do people make the place?

I think it’s both. This city also attracts a certain type of person that, in turn, creates the atmosphere that Berlin is known for. Without the remarkable history of Berlin, I don’t think it would be the kind of free-space it is today and has been for a long time. 

 

Photograph by Sarah Fuchs

 

In this time and age, what do you wish people appreciated more?

Hmm, there are so many things I could list here. But I think kindness and weirdness and differentness. We are so fast at judging the things and people we don’t understand. This is not new, of course, but I do feel like we are all drifting apart and that there is little patience invested in understanding each other. I could probably write pages about this, and what I am sharing here is a massive oversimplification, but yeah, kindness and differences. 

 

Sarah, one last question: If you could be anywhere in the world right now, preparing to take a photo, where would you want to be?

Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week.

 

Photograph by Sarah Fuchs

 

Website: sarah-fuchs.com | Instagram: @sarah.fuchs

 

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Posted by classiq in Interviews, Photography | | Comments Off on “There Are Not Many Rules in Art, but Being Honest Is One of Them”: In Conversation with Photographer Sarah Fuchs
8 October 2024

“I Like My Use of Colour in It”: Nicholas Ray on the Costumes of Johnny Guitar

”Johnny Guitar”, 1954, directed by Nicholas Ray | Republic Pictures

 

There is a sequence in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar where the townspeople all wear black. These are supposedly “respectable citizens” who try to defend their land from the arrival of the Eastern people and the railroad. They are all men, all except one, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge). She is their ringleader. She wears a dress, but it’s black, too, and sober, and she has a pistol under her belt. Joan Crawford represents the threat. She is Vienna, a self-made woman, the owner of a saloon in the outskirts of the small Old West town, waiting to cash in because the railroad will pass right through her property. In this particular scene, Vienna is wearing a white gown and she is playing the piano set against a burnt orange stone wall in the background. The visual composition of this scene, alternating between Crawford all dressed in pure white and that assembly of human hypocrisy in head-to-toe black, is astonishing and even more striking than the vivid, painterly colours (the reds and yellows and blues) used by Nicholas Ray throughout the entire movie. “I like my use of colour in it”, the director revealed. “I thought that ideas such as using the black and white costumes of the posse, and so on, were… all right. All the more credit to us in that the colour process at our disposal wasn’t up to much: for example, not cover its defects, we filmed a lot of dissolves directly in camera, when the technical means at your disposal are inadequate, you always go back to the early methods of filming.”
 

Joan Crawford in ”Johnny Guitar”, 1954, directed by Nicholas Ray | Republic Pictures

 
Johnny Guitar – at its 70th anniversary this year – is a colour Western Noir, and this is just one of the elements that contribute to its uniqueness, and also why that black and white costumes sequence is so haunting. Nicholas Ray, one of the pioneer independent American filmmakers, broke down the rigid barriers of the Western genre – “I had decided to violate all the rules of the Western” – not just in the extreme stylisation of the film, but also in reversing the colour coding and especially genre archetypes, one of the very first films to do so (and to a greater extent than Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious, 1954, with Marlene Dietrich, or Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns, 1957, with Barbara Stanwyck). In Johnny Guitar, women – Vienna and Emma – assume roles previously exclusively reserved to men, while men are a little more than mere objects of desire for the two.

“I’m Clark Gable, it’s Vienna that’s gotta be the leading part,” was Joan Crawford’s demand to Nicholas Ray for making the film. He thought it was a crazy idea at first, but scriptwriter Philip Yordan, trying to keep troubles with the producers at bay, convinced Ray to accept the challenge: “She was Clark Gable, that’s all. Every time, you thought of her as a man; you don’t think of her as Joan Crawford. And that’s the way Nick directed her, very masculine.” In the book Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Bernard Eisenschitz writes how Johnny Guitar borrows both from Casablanca and To Have and Have Not, with Curtiz’s film playing “a not inconsiderable role in the masculinization of Crawford: the action centering on a song that is taboo, the devotion of the employees in the threatened saloon, and the nocturnal meetings in the deserted establishment, make Bogart rather than Gable the model for Vienna’s character.”

We first see Vienna atop a staircase, dressed in a black buttoned-up shirt, black trousers and black leather boots (while two main male characters wear green and pink). She soon points the gun to the same group that would later return wearing black (the men of the town and Emma, or better said Emma and her posse of cowboys and lackeys whom she easily dominates). They burst into Vienna’s saloon and home, trying to put the blame of a stagecoach robbery on her. Vienna is prepared to defend herself and her property at all costs. Crawford’s bigger than life star persona and her steely look suited this raw, man’s-world role, and her red lipstick seems to be the only thread of femininity left – “I never met a woman who was more a man. She thinks like one, acts like one, and sometimes makes me fell like I’m not,” observes her croupier, Sam (Robert Osterloh) talking to her former lover, Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden). It is not however, because the delicate white dress worn later in the film in that visually staggering sequence shows she still holds on to her feminine sensitivity. She may be materialistic and mannish, but her femininity will be revealed by love.

 

Joan Crawford in ”Johnny Guitar”, 1954, directed by Nicholas Ray | Republic Pictures

 

Crawford is magnificent in her role. Strong, mannish, gun-slinging, shrewd and unapologetic about her choices and her past, she builds her character from the ground up and yet she doesn’t let you all in. She is void of sentimentality and feminine stereotypes. It’s more than a defensive mechanism, one that is closely linked to a past love and which re-enters her life, Johnny Guitar. It’s living life by her own rules. She likes being herself. “A man can lie, steal, and even kill, but as long as he hangs onto his pride, he’s still a man,” she tells Sterling Hayden’s Johnny, piercing him with her stark black eyes. “All a woman has to do is slip once and she’s a tramp.” The reason why Emma hates Vienna so much is in fact fear of what she doesn’t understand.

Vienna has another male suitor, Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady), who is also the object of interest for the other female protagonist, Emma. “He makes her feel like a woman and that scares her,” Vienna says about Emma and Dancin’ Kid. In her longest scene on screen, her speech outside, up against the tree, Mercedes McCambridge was reportedly directed by Ray to “play this all the way through – unremittingly – as the sulphuric acid that cuts through Crawford’s sweetness and light. Without any let-up.”

Nicholas Ray’s film is so twisted, and unconventional, and operatic, and political and ahead of its time, and cinematic, and theatrical, and mythical, all in one, that it’s no wonder it was met with negative opinions in America. Europe however thought differently of it and François Truffaut dedicated an ode to it: “It is dreamed, a fairy tale, a hallucinatory Western”, “the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream”. He concluded: “Anyone who rejects Johnny Guitar should never go to the movies again, never see any more films. Such people will never recognize inspiration, poetic intuition, or a framed picture, a shot, an idea, a good film, or even cinema itself.”

 

Reversing colour coding in ”Johnny Guitar”, 1954, directed by Nicholas Ray | Republic Pictures

 

Note: This article was originally published in 2019 and has now been revised on the occasion of the film’s 70th anniversary this year.

 

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Posted by classiq in Film, Film costume | | Comments Off on “I Like My Use of Colour in It”: Nicholas Ray on the Costumes of Johnny Guitar
1 October 2024

Back to the Future: The New Visual Inspiration

 

I have always liked large scale magazine pages: the impact of that visual storytelling is unequalled. But just as the screens have gotten smaller and smaller and films can now be watched on one’s phone instead of the big screen (how, I myself don’t quite fathom), so is a magazine editorial more likely to be flashed into your eyes from behind a digital screen than envelope you with the restlessness of a new adventure when you unfold the pages of a magazine.

But alas, there are wonderful people out there who aren’t afraid of going against the grain and who know how to best tell visual stories: through the old, tangible beauty of the raw paper. Printed on large format matte paper, with immersing photography spreads interspersed with just as inspiring big types that are bound to live room for the imagination, this is the kind of imagery and storytelling you get lost in and go back to again and again, letting yourself get carried away wherever the story takes you and beyond. To learn, discover, stay curious and creative.

When I asked artist Heather Chontos about her earliest visual inspiration, the first thing she mentioned was Peter Lindbergh’s photography for Harper’s Bazaar, a magazine which, with its larger than the usual fashion magazin format, provided the photographer with more space and freedom for his visual storytelling. “Thus was the time of photographer Peter Lindbergh who I worshiped. My walls were plastered with images from these magazines and I would add drawings and paintings to them. I loved Nadja Auermann’s face and would add to her images quite often. I was probably 10 or 11 at the time. […] It is, for example, when film went to digital and the time and quality was not used in the same way to get the final image. No more Polaroids warming under our armpits, instead, a band of pointed fingers around a screen at one of a hundred frames collected through a cable attached to the camera were analysed by teams of people saying “move this to the right”, “move this to the left” and then back again with the options of perfecting everything frame by digital frame. It lost the magic of chance of something happening that was un-expected, un-planned, that was so boring to me and so now some of that quality of content is forgotten and/or unknown by these new generations. I really sound like an old lady when I say this, but, for me, all of the magic was in the suspense and the imperfection of a captured moment and that feels a bit lost now, it feels like we concoct our content to ridiculous and unnatural standards.”

 

 

So here are my favourite three magazines that inspire me visually more than any other print media at the moment. Classic, untamed and endlessly adventurous.

 

 

Légende.
Each issue of Légende magazine focuses on an iconic figure, personalities who defined or define the times they lived or live in. Each story is told by historians, journalists, illustrators and photographers. Past issues have been dedicated to Brigitte Bardot, Rafael Nadal, Zinédine Zidane, Nelson Mandela, Queen Elizabeth II. In the digital era of fragmented information and content and abbreviated everything, Légende puts everything in perspective and presents an actor, or a sportsman, or a musician, or a queen with dignity, elegance and untarnished value. “It is conceived as a collector’s item. Only on paper can we produce this effect,” says editor-in-chief François Vey.

 

 

SIRENE.
A community of free spirits. It’s about wilderness in all its majesty and about the human side of the ocean. A bridge between people and the sea. Large recycled paper pages (made from algae, to make use of excess algal blooms from lagoons at risk), rough and porous as only salt water stains can be, large white spaces, pure as a sea horizon, and page-turner stories that will put you on the same wave-length with a surging community looking at the oceans as the intersection of the planet’s destinies.

 

 

Waves & Woods.
“An earth and ocean publication conscious of lives lived in these surroundings and the positive impact they are making in their environments.” – Matthew Wigglesworth, the in-house artist for issue 32. It’s not just about their stories, but it somehow manages to channel your own creativity, your own sense of freedom that drives you to create new paths.

 

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Posted by classiq in Culture, Editorial, Photography | | Comments Off on Back to the Future: The New Visual Inspiration
23 September 2024

September Newsletter: Opening Night, Bemelmans and Acoustic Ashcroft

 
 

Photos: Classiq Journal

 
 

”I discipline my illustrations as is,
but they must be absolutely clear for children.
A flower must be a flower, the sun must be the sun.
It can be stylised, it can be the image of a thing,
but it must be clear, simple, and at once understood.”

Ludwig Bemelmans

 

 

Viewing

Opening Night, 1977
John Cassavetes

It is one of the best films about an actor’s life and work. There have been other great movies about the world of theater or film – All about Eve (1950), A Star Is Born (1954), Birdman (2014) – but John Cassavetes’ Opening Night lays bare the drama of an actor and the all-consuming act of acting like no other.

Myrtle Gordon (superbly played by Gena Rowlands) is a star actress in the prime of life, performing in out-of-town previews of a new play in which, for the first time, she will play an older woman. Ben Gazzara plays the director, Joan Blondell is the playwright, and Cassavetes himself plays the leading man. Myrtle wreaks psychodramatic improvisations upon the text, she gets drunk, chain-smokes, sows chaos among her colleagues because nobody knows why she acts this way. We do not easily identify with Myrtle either and that’s exactly what Cassavetes wanted to prevent. Cassavetes’ films are about life, emotions, feelings. But life is not simple. This is a harrowing and profound film that makes you think. “You have to fight knowing, because once you know something, it’s hard to be open and creative; it’s a form of passivity – something to guard against,” the director said.

The entire film has a loose, fluid shooting style, it’s like you can not really tell whether what you see is Cassavetes and the actors backstage rehearsing and improvising or the actual movie – this was a director who always took the risk of being an original. But in the last scene, when Myrtle comes in late, drunk, for the opening night of the play, Cassavetes and all his players appear to have genuinely improvised it (something the filmmaker often did), in front of a theatre full of extras playing the audience. It is a brilliant all-the-world’s-a-stage effect.

Myrtle is alone, she’s on her own, she has no family, no responsibility than her own, and is in desperate fear of losing the vulnerability she feels she needs as an actress. That’s her whole life, being an actress. “I have no family, no kids. This is my life. This is it for me,” she says desperately at one point. And she goes to extreme lengths to keep that vulnerability. And she hangs on to it, she hangs onto her ideas. She knows that the only measure of her success, and of her life, is what she can create and express on stage. And that if she can not do that, she’s lost. She’s very honest to herself, she doesn’t go along with the crowd, she doesn’t want to accept someone else’s point of view, she wants to find her own answers. And she goes after them unapologetically. That she succeeds in the end, that she redeems her role, is very moving and hopeful. “An actor is a very loyal person to life, a person who fights against all odds to make something work and doesn’t want to be fed a lot of lies,” said John Cassavetes. I think every person should apply this to their own life. The only measure of someone’s success is being authentic and true to oneself.

 

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, 1973
Sam Peckinpah

There is something about summer and the beginning of autumn that makes me listen to Bob Dylan, almost exclusively, including his soundtrack for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Sam Peckinpah’s western (and by that I mean the 1988 Turner Preview Edition) marked Dylan’s first dramatic role, playing frontier drifter Alias, an associate of the gunfighter Billy the Kid (a role written specially for him after he persuaded Rudy Wurlitzer, the scriptwriter, to include him in the film because of his fascination with the myth of the “Kid”), and his first soundtrack album, a score that perfectly reflects the film’s melancholic infusion. The times were indeed “a changin’”, as Dylan sings, and so are Kris Kristofferson and James Coburn as the film progresses. But the most heart-wrenching scene is when Slim Pickens as Sheriff Baker, having been shot by the Kid, finds enough strength to walk by the river where he sits down on a rock, quietly, wordless, his hand over his wound and waiting to die, as his wife watches helplessly – Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door is the only narrative needed. When the music so perfectly matches the scene, the emotions flooding you cross the boundaries of film in unknown ways.

 

La lumière d’en face (The Light Across the Street), 1955
Georges Lacombe

A film noir in the tradition of Le dernier tournant, 1939, Pierre Chenal’s version of The Postman Always Rings Twice, fueled by the sensuality of Brigitte Bardot, one year before she would star in Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu créa la Femme, when she would take her place in the sun.

 

Tchao Pantin (So Long, Stooge), 1983
Claude Berri

Claude Berri’s career is, to say the least, not very open to the policier. Tchao Pantin was a departure from his ouvre. He went dark, beyond conventions. It was filmed almost entirely at night, in neighborhoods that were very popular at the time, the 11th and 18th arrondisments, and Belleville, with a gas station acting as one of the characters, its neon lighting reinforcing the dark atmosphere of the film. Lambert (Coluche), who works there nights, befriends a young small-time pusher (Richard Anconina), their friendship changing track abruptly when the latter is caught up by his actions, which will trigger Lambert’s own dark past. With the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s hard to come across this kind of sincere, raw, decent films anymore.

 

 

Reading

I could look and look and look at a Ludwig Bemelmans illustration, especially the many small, drawn moments coming together to create a narrative. Like a child who sits still and observes, takes it all in and creates his own universe; it’s wonderful to watch a kid, unrushed, attentive at the world, curious. Bemelmans’ drawing skills were vast, he experimented with different formats and techniques, created the widely acclaimed children’s books Madeleine, illustrated for The New Yorker, Town and Country, and Holiday magazine, painted the mural on the walls of the bar at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City, one of my favourite of his works. But one of his greatest gifts was that he was a raconteur, a storyteller who recorded life as it went on all around him. The book Ludwig Bemelmans, is part of the fantastic series The Illustrators, having none other than Quentin Blake as consultant.

 

A cover that makes you buy the book, and with good reason: Dorothea Lange: Seeing People. In the 1930s, the portrait photographer took to the streets of San Francisco to show in her pictures the desolation developing in the city during the Depression. “It was a way of her to see the world.” The cover of the book shows a weathered hand holding a weathered cowboy hat. “A hat is more than a covering against sun and wind,” Lange said. “It is a badge of service.” The working man’s hat, or the cowboy’s hat, has held a fascination for other photographers as well, as photographer Laura Wilson writes in her book (for a more in-depth conversation about Laura’s work, here is my interview with the photographer).

 

Selvedge programme manager Catherine Harris talks about her lifelong companions, clothes, weaving through her memories like vibrant threads. In my conversation with Polly Leonard, the founder of Selvedge magazine, she also shared a few great reading recommendations worth having a look at.

 

Listening

The soundtrack: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

 

The album: Acoustic Hymns Vol. 1, Richard Ashcroft

 

The podcast: The Caro Podcast, with Natalie Jones. The episode featuring Caroline Strecker, a personal favourite and an extraordinary maker – she is the founder of repurposed leatherwork brand Rag of Colts, is incredibly inspiring and up-lifting.

 

Making

Matthew Wigglesworth is a British artist living on the Sunshine Coast in Australia. His art was what first made me buy the magazine Waves & Woods – he was the guest-artist for that issue, which holds beautiful memories of a summer well lived – which has since become one of my favourite print publications. Matthew’s illustrations are like a celebration of the sea, nature and the beauty of each day.

 

Ludwig Bemelmans mural on the wall of the bar of the Carlyle Hotel, New York City | Collage of illustrated letters on hotel writing paper written by Ludwig Bemelmans to his young daughter, Barbara, c.1940s (from the book “The illustrators: Ludwig Bemelmans”

 

Exploring

The city of Los Angeles through film. I am honord to be a contributing writer to this wonderful book: World Film Locations: Los Angeles, Vol.2 Movie scenes, essays and location maps exploring the city through film. The book pairs incisive synopses of carefully chosen film scenes – both famous and lesser-known – with an accompanying array of evocative full-colour film stills, demonstrating how motion pictures have contributed to the multifarious role of the city in our collective consciousness, as well as how key cinematic moments reveal aspects of its life and culture that are otherwise largely hidden from view.

The book, edited by Gabriel Solomons, Jared Cowan and Fabrice Ziolkowski, and published by Intellect Books and Chicago University Press, will be available this November in Europe and in December in the US. More details here. As always, I am incredibly grateful to Gabriel Solomons, my editor at The Big Picture magazine and Beneficial Shock, for the opportunity to write about cinema from a new perspective.

 

The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Wachstumsversuche, with Sarah Schill. Sirene Journal, Racquet, and Waves & Woods in print.

 

”World Film Locations: Los Angeles, Vol. 2” will be released in November 2024 (more details here)

Posted by classiq in Books, Culture, Film, Newsletter | Comments Off on September Newsletter: Opening Night, Bemelmans and Acoustic Ashcroft
31 August 2024

Read Instead…in Print

 
 

“The immediate subject will consistently be the visible image.”

 
 

Read instead…in print No.34

 

Shiguéhiko Hasumi’s book, Directed by Yasujirō Ozu, has finally been translated into English. Why does a book about film matter? I believe that the first quality that a book about film must meet is its ability to make you want to watch the films. Directed by Yasujirō Ozu does that. “This book is concerned specifically with what we can see on screen and how it stimulates our cinematic sensitivity,” reveals the author. “In other words, I would like to attempt to discuss the films only in their capacity to live as real film experience. The immediate subject will consistently be the visible image.” Entire scenes from Ozu’s films are projected through Shuguéhiko Hasumi’s words. Even those you haven’t seen, such as That Night’s Wife was in my case, where the writer effortlessly makes you see and live the scene marked by a sartorial story that happens to be one of the most beautifully written film costume analysis, centered around one of the character’s fedora hat.

 
 

“The dream of Directed by Yasujirō Ozu is that hopefully
many readers will be filled with desire to see the films
and rush to the theater before they finish reading.”

 
 

Read instead… in print is about a good book about cinema or filmmakers. No discursive, pretentious analyses, no verbose scrutiny. Because the idea is to invite you to read the book, not read about it here. But instead of using social media, I use my journal. Back to basics. Take it as a wish to break free of over-reliance on social media (even if it’s just for posting a photo of a good book) for presenting my work, cultural finds and interests. These are things to be enjoyed as stand-alone pieces in a more substantial and meaningful way than showing them in the black hole of Instagram thronged with an audience with a short attention span. This is also a look through my voluminous collection of books about film that I use as research in my adamant decision to rely less and less on the online and more on more on print materials.
 
 

MORE STORIES

Read instead…in print No.29: Cary Grant’s Suit

Stéphane Audran, Vermeer and Lagerfeld: The Visual Richness of Babette’s Feast

Read instead…in print No.9:
Tavernier’s “Amis américains Sous-titre Entretiens avec les grands auteurs d’Hollywood”

Posted by classiq in Books, Film, Read instead...in print | | Comments Off on Read Instead…in Print