It’s the penultimate day of April, as well as Friday.
On April 29, 1916, the Easter Rising came to an end in Ireland, with many of the leaders soon to be shot. And, on this day in 1945, the concentration camp of Dachau was liberated by Allied troops. I can only imagine how the inmates, certain that they were doomed, felt when they saw the liberators. On this day in 1899, Duke Ellington was born, and Willie Nelson in 1933. Brian Charlesworth, my friend and former chairman, turns 71 today; if you know him, send him a note. Among those who died on April 29 were Ludwig Wittgenstein (1951), Alfred Hitchcock (1980), and Albert Hofmann (2008), the first person to synthesize LSD and describe its effects. I attended a lecture he gave to Richard Schultes’s class when I was a graduate student at Harvard, and was surprised how staid and dignified the man was. (I expected a raving druggie.)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is eyeing the old wellhouse, though there are plenty of flower-laden cherry branches for her to climb:
A: Are you coming in?
Hili: No, I have higher aims.
Ja: Idziesz do domu?
Hili: Mam wyższe cele.
And a bonus photo of the Princess sleeping with the d*g:
In Bristol, Bella the cat is in trouble with the Royal Mail for playing with the postie’s finger when he tries to deliver the mail, and she’s been given a restraining order. Finally, thanks to reader Barry, here’s a baby grasshopper giving a high five:
Alfred Hitchcock was a great film maker with a dozen classic films to his name.
“Psycho,” “Foreign Correspondent,” “Lifeboat,” “Strangers on a Train,” “Rear Window,” “Suspicion,” “Notorious,” “Dial M for Murder,” “To Catch a Thief,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” “The Birds,” “Marnie,” “Torn Curtain,” “Frenzy” and “Family Plot.”
It seems strange that he was nominated four times for Academy Awards, but never won. His Oscar nominations would have been fittingly suspenseful given that suspense was his middle name. I’m going to make it a point to see the few of his films I haven’t yet see.
Yes, and a man who lived in almost the exact same footprint as my grandfather – 1899 to 1980. All of his films had dialog, plots and suspense and some pretty good actors, even though one comment to me earlier on this subject was that they were so wooden compared to modern film.
I’ve learned that you can’t judge older films by the same standards as modern films. Styles change over time, and the way to get the most out of classics is to focus on the quality within the constraints of time. There was a period during the 30’s when film speech was a completely Hollywood-contrived blend of accents thought to be glamorous. Today’s films attempt to provide a hyper-realistic effect – sometime becoming so “natural” as to be almost incomprehensible. Characters today whisper and mumble their lines carelessly, but completely intentionally. In some, the plot is completely subservient to gestalt.
You are correct to a point and any who would attempt to compare something like Jurassic Park, Spider-man, X-men, Shrek, Avatar, or any of a dozen Tom Cruz movies to those mentioned in your Hitchcock comment would be off track for sure. But if a person grows up on a diet of animated, special affects, and SYFI what would they expect a real movie experience to be. Just sitting there bored to death waiting for the action.
The Hitchcock films separate the men from the boys, so to speak. 😉
A big factor is the much faster editing in contemporary films – The average shot length of English language films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/cinema-is-evolving/
As an outlier there Russian Ark, a 2002 historical drama film directed by Alexander Sokurov. It was filmed entirely in the Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage Museum using a single 96-minute Steadicam sequence shot.
I watched that with the wife – who has been through the Hermitage on several occasions – who loved spotting the rooms she’d been in. Can’t remember much about the plot, TBH, and she didn’t bother to translate more than a skim for me when she thought it appropriate.
However I do recall from the “Making of” on the DVD (hmmm, have I still got it?) the number of technical fixes they had to go through to bypass the battery-pack restrictions, software problems handling a single 96-minute take etc, getting the actors and extras from point A to point B without passing through frame at points C, D and E. Yes, it really was a single, 96-minute take.
True, and the recent German film ‘Victoria’ is one 138 minute take. But neither of those are Hollywood, and neither will be seen by a significant fraction of viewers. I am told that teenagers now find even a recent (to me) film like E T unbearably long-winded.
While we are here, personal favourite long takes are the 3-minute opening scene of Touch of Evil (Orson Wells 1958) and the 7-minute closing shot of The Passenger (Antonioni 1975). Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) was advertised as a single shot, but it has ten edits skillfully put together to make an almost seamless performance.
The Touch of Evil sequence has to be my favorite too. It’s long for a reason, not just to be long. It’s a long take following a couple waking up a busy street while a car, which has a bomb in the trunk, makes it’s way slowly along with them. The bomb is set to go off by a timer. The couple and the car come very close to each other 5 or 6 times. The suspense is deafening. The scene could have been done by Hitchcock, but, yes, it was Wells.
20 or so years ago in the courtyard of Kilmainham Gaol, where the leaders of the Easter Rising were executed.
A young tour guide, looking bitterly and dreamily to the sky, with curly dark hair and Northern Irish accent assembled us tourists.
“To your right, ladies and gentleman, is the wall where the British took Pádraic Pearse on the morning of May 3rd, 1916. They stood up him up and the firing squad shot him down. They picked up the body and carried it out through the door to your left. Then they took Thomas Clarke, stood him against the same wall. And they shot him down. Then they took Thomas MacDonagh…”
So the mesmeric and barbaric litany continued with the tour guide’s eyes still looking to the heavens. He described all 13 executions thus. Until he got to James Connolly. For good measure he heaped on the pathos, explaining that JC arrived in an ambulance: he couldn’t walk. So he was sat down on a chair. “And they shot him down.”
Melodramatic, but boy, did we feel guilty afterwards.
At least that’s how I remember it.
You know, the British Empire really needed a good PR advisor. Or to pay attention to the voices they had.
Almost as good a PR person as Eurocopter. Another 13 dead.
The cause as of pm Norway is unknown but eye witnesses said they saw the MRH & blades detach, sound like another MGB failure? and btw Eurocopter is no more, now Airbus Helicopters.
Yeah. Terrible the way that they keep on killing people without actually, like, fixing the problem.
Anyone fancy taking an EC225 to work?
A beautiful song in remembrance of April/May of 1916.
The first bison calf of the spring has been born at Fermilab and they are asking for names.
https://twitter.com/Fermilab/status/725369113338646529
Among the suggestions are Higgs Bison, Neil(or Eat) DeGrasse Bison, and Freeman Bison. Check out the hashtag #BisonNaming.
I imagine the inmates of Dachau didn’t feel anything at first. I think it is human nature to simply not immediately process that big a change of fortune. There’s also the issue that to set yourself up for more hurt, when you’ve been hurt as badly as humans can be and still live, is dangerous. There was probably much initial disbelief.