Wim Wenders' Better Half?
Donata Wenders has a new book.
Who?
Donata Wenders is the wife of director Wim Wenders (whose work I celebrate in Through a Screen Darkly).
And she Wenders has a new book of photography, arriving under the banner of a rave from that great photography critic we all know and love: Bono.
Transformation, transubstantiation: flesh somehow becomes spirit. Donata’s images feel eternal to me, like they were always going to happen. Observed, not posed. Poised for the next world, a better world, she brings that kind of vision to the here and now.
I learned this from the new Image Update, which has a review.
And here's Donata's website.
Doug Cummings on "Sunshine"
Doug Cummings turned in his last batch of reviews from the Los Angeles Film Festival today, and they include his response to Danny Boyle's sci-fi thriller Sunshine.
I've heard from one of you that Danny Boyle's Sunshine is the best film you've seen this year.
Cummings disagrees.
I couldn't have been more disappointed by the film, which I found to be tedious, empty, and a complete waste of time. Sure, it's got elaborate digital effects, great set design, and a thundering soundtrack, but what doesn't these days? Rather than a partly philosophical piece, the film plays like a cross between a disaster film and a slasher movie. It has a pretty ridiculous premise that is never remotely developed...
...
The film's ultimate function is to showcase its effects and shocks as it devises more and more elaborate ways of killing characters in visually appealing and heart-stopping ways. It has fewer ideas than Children of Men, which is saying something (or an average episode of Star Trek). And its technical accomplishment ... only intensifies its inanity: it's a digital drug, pure and simple, hoping you'll leave the theater breathless before forgetting about it completely and moving on to dinner.
I haven't seen it yet.
Tonight, the World has Lost a Great Artist
For the last few years, I have been hoping and hoping for another film by Edward Yang, who directed what has become one of the greatest treasures in my film library: Yi-Yi (A One and a Two).
But tonight, Edward Yang passed away.
Cancer.
The news breaks my heart. He was only 59. (Peter Chattaway alerted me to the news.) I did not know it, but he was sick for seven years.
To watch Yang's work was to see the world through the eyes of a man who delighted in children, who sympathized deeply with the passions and burdens of teenagers, who wrestled with the demands of adulthood, and who was pained by the dehumanizing effects of progress and the big city. His movies focused on Taiwan, but they were not primarily about Taiwan. They were about humankind.
They were about looking closer. Just as the young boy in Yi-Yi (appropriately named Yang-Yang) runs around with his first camera photographing the backs of people's heads so they can see what they otherwise could not, so Yang did just that: he captured life in a way that allowed us to see what we would otherwise miss about our behavior, our choices, the blindness that afflicts us incrementally, and the longing we all share for the restoration of something pure.
Oh, and yes... he clearly loved jazz.
I have seen very few films that can compare to Yi-Yi in conveying such a deep understanding of the beauty and wonder of life. Yang's canvas was the big screen, but he was a painter. His medium was the movies, but he was a poet.
Just as I still do when I think of Krzysztof Kieslowski, I will always wonder what Yang might have shown us if he had lived a little longer.
For me, this is one of those wounds that won't heal.
Time to get out the Criterion edition of Yi-Yi... to laugh and gasp and be amazed. And mourn.
UPDATE: More (via GreenCine Daily): A detailed bio at Sight and Sound, and an interview via The Guardian.
Tarkovsky's Top Ten
At Soul Food Movies, Ron Reed rediscovers Andrei Tarkovsky's top ten movies. Wow. That's a must-see list for all serious cinephiles. Having just seen The Sacrifice, the prominence of Bergman doesn't surprise me. If I hadn't known that The Sacrifice was a Tarkovsky film, I might have thought it was Bergman paying tribute to Tarkovsky rather than the other way around...
An English Professor Reports on Using "Through a Screen Darkly" in the Classroom
Many thanks to Christine Chaney, Ph.D., in the Department of English at Seattle Pacific University, for sharing these kind words...
Jeffrey Overstreet's Through A Screen Darkly was a remarkably compelling book for my university students in a recent core course on the arts and faith – for some students even a transformative experience. His powerful and honest testimony about his own life, education, and faith — and the role that film played in coming to terms with all three — helped students in this class to reach often profound new insights. Many of them felt that their growing-up experiences mirrored Mr. Overstreet's and were that much more willing, as a consequence, to follow him in his arguments about the power of God to speak truthfully and even prophetically through artists of all kinds, including filmmakers. But even for those students whose upbringing was very different than his, Mr. Overstreet's book challenged them all to think deeply about the arts in new ways, as university students should, and to look with insight and intentionality toward the unexamined areas of their engagement with popular culture. And because Through A Screen Darkly centered on such a popular art form as the movies, too, I found my students very willing to go deeper into their learning about the function and specifics of the arts in general, another strong plus in using this book as a core text. I highly recommend it in every way.
ChristianCinema.com interview: "Through a Screen Darkly"
Angela Walker at ChristianCinema.com has just posted what may be the most substantial interview yet about Through a Screen Darkly.
Tina Forkner on "Through a Screen Darkly"
At a writers' retreat several weeks ago, I met Tina Forkner, a novelist who was still dizzy with the excitement of just getting her first book contract. Tina's a storyteller with a poet's eye for detail, and it was a pleasure to get to know her a get a glimpse of the stories she's going to share with the world.
Tina and I come from very different places, but our experiences as artists within the church have had some striking similarities. I sent her a copy of Through a Screen Darkly, and was delighted to discover this description of it on her blog.
"Prince Caspian" Update
My least favorite part of Andrew Adamson's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe... the unimaginative, excessive battle scene.Read more
Andy Whitman: Music Blogger
When Andy blogs, I end up spending money on new music.
Here's his latest batch of discoveries. Beware.
