Tudo que é bom vem aos pares: Livesey & Walbrook

This brings us to Clive’s duel with Theo in Berlin, 1902, where an unreal attention to the artifices of honourable action is a sublimation of the real, the visceral, and potentially the homoerotic. The excessive observance of detail before and during the duel marks both the period and the officer class as one fatally disassociated

War Starts at Midnight!

É, nem lacrimejei. Art Goes On Forever – A Tribute to The Archers Nota: Faltaram Elusive Pimpernel, The Battle of the River Plate, Oh… Rosalinda!!, Ill Met by Moonlight, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing e Spy in Black, alguns destes compreensivelmente porque não foram devidamente restaurados e seria covardia colocar perto de Narcissus e

24 Frames: Sixty Glorious Years (Herbert Wilcox, 1938)

Se hoje você tem o desprazer de ver o Príncipe Charles de kilt, culpe o Albert, infelizmente nem só de Walbooks, Pearces e Firths vive a realeza britânica. E não foi apenas o kilt que ele tornou popular, reza a lenda que o seu xará Príncipe Albert, o piercing peniano, foi criado especialmente para ele,

Black Narcissus – Bastidores

Wohlbrück não pode mesmo ficar longe dessas desgraças?

24 Frames: Ringmaster

… e eu? Quem sou eu nessa história? O carrossel? O autor? O apresentador? Um transeunte? Eu sou você. De fato, qualquer um como você. Eu sou a personificação do seu desejo, em desejar saber tudo. As pessoas sempre sabem apenas um lado da realidade e por quê? Porque conseguem enxergar apenas um lado das

The Queer Aesthete, The Diva, And The Red Shoes

Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film – Alexander Doty Related articles British Queer Cinema: A Canterbury Tale

24 Frames: The Red Shoes Ballet

Isso é o que acontece quando neguinho resolve fazer uma sequência em live-action do Fantasia do Disney. On a more practical level, the multimedia nature of film has made it the ideal means for achieving a synthesis of poetry, music, movement and drama. Nevertheless, only a handful of filmmakers has attempted the kind of fusion

Walbrook versus Karajan

Karajan conduzindo a platéia. Walbrook conduzindo a platéia *The Battle of the Walzes (Walzerkrieg, Ludwig Berger, 1933) Não posso fazer nada, lembrei do Karajan quando vi essa cena, mas este faz um trabalho de contenção bem mais eficaz.

Mann, Diaghilev, Mahler, Powell, Visconti, Russell

Serge Diaghilev and Thomas Mann never met, it seems. Yet the life of one and the imagination of the other overlapped to an obviously extraordinary degree. Coincidence is our term for concurrence that is not consciously willed and that we cannot explain in any definitive sense. However, if we retreat from the restrictive world of linear causality and think in terms of context and confluence rather than cause, then it is undeniable that there were many influences – to begin with, those of Venice and Wagner – at work on the imagination of Mann and Diaghilev, two giants of twentieth-century aesthetic sense, influences that led one to create a certain fiction and the other actually to live strikingly near that fiction.
Moreover, one must ask whether Mann’s story was any less real than Diaghilev’s life. Heinrich Mann, in review of his brother’s novella, saw that the central issue of Death in Venice was “Which came first, reality or poetry?” In his “Life Sketch” of 1930, Thomas Mann spoke of the “innate symbolism and honesty of composition” of Death in Venice, a story that, he asserted, was “taken simply from reality.” Nothing was invented, he claimed, none of the settings, none of the characters, none of the events. Tadzio, it has since been established, was in fact a certain Wladyslaw Moes, a young Polish boy on holiday in Venice. Jaschiu was one Janek Fudakowski. Aschenbach bore a distinct resemblance to Gustav Mahler, who died in 1911. Thomas Mann, whose art as a whole is striking in its fusion of autobiographical and imaginative experience, called his novella “a crystallization.”

Rites of Spring: the Great War and the birth of the Modern Age – Modris Eksteins

Top-dúzia: Emeric Pressburger

Olha que engraçado, quando comecei a estudar os caras pensei logo: aposto que um dos dois é sagitariano. Fui ver a data do Powell e não, fui ver a do Pressburger e… é lógico. Ah, hoje também é aniversário do Fritz Lang, Walt Disney, Otto Preminger, Nunnaly Johnson e Fritz Arno Wagner. Aparentemente é um

The Churchill Incident

At the same time as appearing in Blimp, Anton Walbrook was also contracted to perform in Watch on the Rhine in the West End. Only on matinee days did this cause real inconvenience, when the actor had to be whisked away by waiting car at noon on the dot. One evening during the play’s interval, there was a knock on Walbrook’s dressing-room door. There stood Winston Churchill, redfaced with anger. The Prime Minister proceeded to berate the actor for taking part in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp: `What’s this supposed to mean? I suppose you regard it as good propaganda for Britain?’ To which Walbrook replied: `No people in the world other than the English would have had the courage, in the midst of war, to tell the people such unvarnished truth.‘

Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter – Kevin Macdonald

Jacques Chabassol & Anton Walbrook

Mr Walbrook gosta de menininhos e menininhas de dezesseis anos em O Caso Maurizius (Julien Duvivier, 1954)

24 Frames: I Was Jack Mortimer (Ich war Jack Mortimer, Carl Froelich, 1935)

CARL FROELICH (Carl August Hugo Froelich) Born September 5, 1875, Berlin (Germany) Died February 12, 1953, Berlin (West Germany) Considered one of Germany’s most dependable directors of melodrama and comedy during the 1920s and 1930s, Carl Froelich was referred to by colleagues as ‘the old hand’ due to his lengthy career in the industry. After

24 Frames: O Estudante de Praga (Der Student von Prag, Arthur Robison, 1935)

ARTHUR ROBISON (aka Artur Robison) Born June 25, 1888, Chicago (Illinois, USA) Died October 20, 1935, Berlin (Germany) The director of one of Weimar cinema’s enduring classics, SCHATTEN (Warning Shadows, 1923), Robison made his name as a consummate professional in a range of genres. Born into a family of German-Americans, Robison grew up in the

Anton Walbrook versus James Mason

O que liga ambos aqui não é necessariamente Moira Shearer e o balé e sim talvez uma inspiração comum: Max Reinhardt. O Lermontov de Red Shoes é notoriamente inspirado em Sergei Diaghilev (com uma pitada de Alexander Korda), assim como o Coutray de The Story of Three Loves é notoriamente uma homenagem ao pai do

24 frames: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

*Também conhecido como o filme que Churchill ferozmente odiava. A sustained body of work signed by two directors constitutes a no less impressive exception to the rule of the film director as demiurge, and the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who together wrote, produced, and directed 15 films during as many years, is

Oh… Rosalinda!! (1955)

Este filme traz imediantamente duas palavras gravadas por todo canto: KEN RUSSELL. Se este não é o pai dos musicais de Russell durante os anos 70, então é coisa do espírito santo. O que esperar de um homem que foi fazer balé só porque viu Sapatinhos Vermelhos? Não é claro que depois de ver uma

À Meia-Luz (Gaslight, Thorold Dickinson, 1940)

When later remade as Gaslight (1944) with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, the studio (MGM) attempted to have all prints of this earlier version destroyed. Fortunately, it was unsuccessful (in fact it is thought that director Thorold Dickinson surreptitiously struck off a print himself before the negatives were binned).