Passages

[colinr0380]

Youssef Chahine has died

An nice overview of Chahine's career from A.O. Scott.

[HypnoHelioStaticStasis]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What a fabulous author. Sad to see him go.

[John Cope]

Watch Sokurov's exquisite Dialogues as a fitting tribute.

[HypnoHelioStaticStasis]

Thanks for the recommendation John, wasn't aware of that, and I admire Sokurov a lot, will picking that up immediately. I feel like Sokurov would be a very good person to coax the normally modest Solzhenitsyn to convey his thoughts naturally. Two compassionate individuals always bring out the best in each other.

And I must say it again: this passing saddens me deeply. "Denisovich" really is one of the towering works of modern literature, flaws and all. The greatest art of all is severely flawed; it humanizes it, creating something real and empathetic.

I'm rambling.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Screenwriter Luther Davis.

Luther Davis, a playwright who won a Tony Award in 1954 for the book of the musical “Kismet” and a screenwriter whose films included “The Hucksters,” with Clark Gable, and “Lady in a Cage” with Olivia de Havilland, died on Tuesday in the Bronx. He was 91 and lived in Manhattan and West Palm Beach, Fla.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Jennifer Bassey Davis.

A busy author for the screen and the stage, Mr. Davis wrote 15 movies and dozens of scripts for television series, and he had a hand in five Broadway shows, including writing a 1945 play, “Kiss Them for Me,” about four sailors back from the war, and the book for “Grand Hotel,” the musical adaptation of Vicki Baum’s novel, which was directed and choreographed by Tommy Tune and which ran for more than 1,000 performances from 1989 to 1992.

[dx23]

Bernie Mac has died.

[flyonthewall2983]

Well, that came out of nowhere. He had some of the funniest scenes in Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven, the one with the van salesman comes to mind.

[colinr0380]

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Here's a section of Notre Musique.

[flyonthewall2983]

Issac Hayes

[MichaelB]

Isaac Hayes.

[MichaelB]

Terence Rigby

[kinjitsu]

Jerry Wexler

George Furth

[noelbotevera]

Jules Dassin, 1911 - 2008

[kaujot]

You can't die twice.

[Cinephrenic]

Would make a nice bond title.

[colinr0380]

Very nice Dassin tribute noelbotevera

[exte]

Would make a nice bond title.

Agreed.

[foggy eyes]

Manny Farber passed away over the weekend.

Artforum:

Manny Farber (1917–2008)

Manny Farber, an American painter and film critic, has died. A contributor to The New Republic, Time, The Nation, Film Comment, and Artforum, Farber’s reviews of and essays on films were compiled in several collections, including Negative Space. An early champion of American B-movies, in 1962 Farber coined the phrase “termite art” to describe art that “seems to have no ambitions toward gilt culture” and “leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” Susan Sontag once said, “Manny Farber is the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country has ever produced … [his] mind and eye change the way you see.” As a painter, Farber was as restless as the films he championed in his writing, and moved from abstraction to narrative work in the 1970s and '80s. A retrospective of his paintings originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 2003 and traveled to the Austin Museum of Art and the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. Farber’s art is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Also: a brief tribute from Glenn Kenny.

[Jeff]

Farber was the absolute best of the best as far as I'm concerned. I know that Roger Ebert was a major devotee, and I expect he'll have something up in the next day or two.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Composer Tadashi Hattori died on August 2 aged 100. Among his film scores were three early Kurosawas.

[pianocrash]

Farber was truly one of the few who turned criticism into an art form, into something really worth a damn, and I'm pretty sad to hear he's gone after all these years.

[Jeff]

Here is Ebert's take on his friend Manny Farber.

[noelbotevera]

Very nice Dassin tribute noelbotevera

Noel.

Thanks.

[colinr0380]

In a strange coincidence, last month I rewatched Christopher Petit's fascinating BBC documentary from 1998, Negative Space, on Farber's ideas. Hopefully this might be repeated or get a DVD release some time.

[foggy eyes]

A couple of tributes to Manny Farber: a conversation between David Schwartz and Paul Schrader at Moving Image Source, and Rosenbaum reprints a 1993 essay (They Drive by Night: The Criticism of Manny Farber) on his blog.