‘L’Enfance Nue’ is striking in the blandness of its imagery. There is nothing aesthetically to distinguish the reality of this film from the reality of one’s everyday life. As the film opens on a dreary day on a street lined with concrete buildings, one shivers at the truthfulness of Pialat’s world. Life would never look so real were it reflected in a mirror.
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Alice wears a breastplate: it’s a rather flattering breastplate, as breastplates go. Her long strawberry blond curls cascade on to its metal surface, framing her pale white cheeks and reminding us that she’s still pretty despite her new warrior image. The heroine of Tim Burton’s newest film- a remake of the Lewis Carroll story ‘Alice in Wonderland’- is thirteen years older but no more cynical. In fact, she sometimes believes six impossible things before she even has her morning frappuccino.
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On a cold evening in February, well-dressed theatregoers in cravats and crisp white shirts gathered in the lobby of the Duke Theater on 42nd street. They were there to see ‘Measure for Measure’, the latest Shakespearian offering from Theater for a New Audience and its most fashionable director, Arin Arbus. What began as patches of hushed conversation soon escalated into a cacophony of sound with the arrival of more audience members and anticipation hung in the air.
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Viewing Inka Essenhigh’s ‘Minor Sea Gods of Maine’ reminds us of turning the first page of a wonderful storybook. We delve back into our imaginations and explore the celestial images of our dreams on canvas. A ghostly green sea seeps over rocks. Finely drawn waves form a frothy beaked gargoyle, sitting on the edge of a rocky precipice. A long green limb emerges from the sea and penetrates the sky: Dimensions and boundaries become meaningless aside from one fine line marking the horizon. Brush strokes seem gentle but precise in creating this mythical otherworldly scene, a throwback to religious pagan imagery.
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After a hugely successful debut with Othello last February, director Arin Arbus returns to Theater for a New Audience with another Shakespearian offering in the form of Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s quintessential problem play. The story of a society dealing with extremism, puritanical religious views clashing with the reality of a sexually explicit society, the plot should pose little problem for contemporary audiences. However, we often have trouble coming to terms with the theme of chastity on which the story so desperately hinges. Despite powerful staging and strong performances from the cast, Arbus’ production fails to clear that common hurdle and, at times, the production doesn’t ring true.
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Towards the end of Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold’s most recent contribution to the film world and winner of the Jury’s award at the Cannes film festival, the heroine whips down her oversized tracksuit bottoms and urinates all over the carpet. Hurtling along at an unrelenting pace, the film has been building to this moment of release. It is an image so poignant that the viewer recoils and yet does not lose the thread of action even for a moment. We are held forcibly in this inner city concrete backwater for better or worse.
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Nominations have been announced. Check if your predictions were right…
After a tedious run of Othello at the public theatre, a more exciting prospect has arrived in the form of an Irish export. ‘Silver Stars’, a home-grown collaboration by Sean Millar and Brokentalkers theatre company, is a song cycle based on the lives of older Irish gay men.
Peering out the window of a train from London to Stratford Upon Avon, Adam Marple, a young American director, admires the passing English countryside and puzzles at the ‘festival culture’ so important to the traditions of British theatre. “It’s strange”, he says, speaking in a typically slow, drawn out manner, his usual thoughtful tone bringing the conversation to the brink of a full stop. “These cities like Stratford are packed pull of theatre-goers for, say, one month of the year, and then what? What happens to the city when everyone leaves?”
I guess it’s left there, devoid of the things that give it an identity, waiting for the next round of artists to come and give it life again. The trouble is that this reality could just as adequately apply to Marple’s life. As a theatre director emerging from Columbia’s Master of Fine Arts program, he is consumed by what he considers to be his vocation- making theatre necessary. Theatre is not simply his job, nor his art. It’s his life and his foremost priority. Marple’s dedication to his craft can start to seem a little strange if one looks closely and it is clear that theatre is the most vital component of the director’s existence, taking precedence over food (he didn’t eat for three days while working on Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard), water and human relationships. Without it, he is a little like an off-season Stratford- a man without a self.
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The first concert I’ve ever been to that involved commercial breaks, and suffered for it. Marketed as a concert with the filming for a TV station only mentioned as a side note, the organizers of John Mayer at the Beacon theater pretty much made an audience pay a hundred dollars a ticket to cheer and create ambient noise or ‘ambi’, as those in the biz like to call it. As Mayer muttered his way through the commercial intervals unscripted and unprepared, there was a distinct sense of being cheated amongst the troops- I mean, couldn’t he at least have prepared a joke or anecdote? Were we only there to serve the sales of his new album?
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