Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

Paris, the Luminous Years

PARIS, 12 DECEMBER 2010 — Paris, the Luminous Years, to be shown on PBS television across the United States as of 15 December (check local listings), is a first-rate documentary film on the ‘City of Light’. Perry Miller Adato’s love for Paris shines out not only in her thoughtful exploration of the role played by the French city in the creation of the arts during the early twentieth century (1905 -1930), but also in her portrayal of the city of today. Supported by excellent archival footage, sh

Timothy Snyder: The Holocaust We Don’t See: Lanzmann’s Shoah Revisited

[Timothy Snyder is Professor of History at Yale. His new book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, was published this month. (October 2010).] Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, opening this month in New York twenty-five years after its original release, is one of the great works of art of the twentieth century. As it begins, Simon Srebnik, a Polish Jew who was one of two survivors of Chełmno, returns to the death facility at Lanzmann’s request, and sings a song of his boyho

AMC Gets on Board Post-Civil War Drama ‘Hell on Wheels’

For its next original series AMC is going back to the ’60s — the 1860s, that is. On Wednesday AMC, the cable-television home of the period drama “Mad Men” (as well as “Breaking Bad” and “The Walking Dead”), said it had committed to a full season of “Hell on Wheels,” a series set in post-Civil War America....

Paris Back When the Modernist Feast Was First Moveable

Paris isn’t what it once was. And neither is PBS. And for that reason alone, “Paris the Luminous Years” is as illuminating about the state of public television as it is about Paris at the dawn of modernism. This film, which has its premiere on PBS on Wednesday, looks at the city that seduced the likes of Picasso, Chagall, Apollinaire, Diaghilev and of course, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. It pays homage, though, not in the seditious, inventive spirit of the avant-garde that Paris on

The Great Rustici Emerges From the Shadows

FLORENCE — By the time Giovanfrancesco Rustici’s bronzes for the Baptistery of Florence’s cathedral were being cast at the end of 1509, Leonardo da Vinci had left the city forever, never to return. Vasari declared the bronzes “the most perfect and harmonious by a modern master” and nothing to rival them was made in Florence until the arrival in the city of Giambologna nearly half a century later. Rustici’s “Preaching of St. John the Baptist,” hoisted into position over the Baptiste

Theatrical Stumbles of Historic Proportions

HISTORY is being quickly shuttled off Broadway stages and back into the library stacks this fall, as three new high-aiming, talent-rich shows that delve into the American past for subject matter are playing to sparse audiences. The musicals “The Scottsboro Boys” and “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” are closing with unhappy dispatch, despite reviews that range from respectful to ecstatic. And the new John Guare play about the Louisiana Purchase, “A Free Man of Color,” looks likely to eke out its li

Deborah Lipstadt: "Shoah" Remains the Monumental Documentary

[Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, is the author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving. Her latest book, The Eichmann Trial, will be published by Nextbook Press in 2011.] When Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s documentary on the Holocaust, was released in 1985, it was immediately lauded by critics as pathbreaking, epic, and a sheer masterpiece. Simone de Beauvoir, in her introduction to the published tex

Maker of ‘Shoah’ Stresses Its Lasting Value

Even at 85, Claude Lanzmann is not one to rest on his laurels or shirk a controversy. A quarter of a century after his documentary “Shoah” transformed the way the world regarded the Holocaust, the film is about to be re-released in the United States — an event he welcomes as long overdue. Then again, Mr. Lanzmann also argues that “Shoah” is not really a documentary, and that “Holocaust” is “a completely improper name” to describe the Nazis’ extermination of six million Jews during W

Government Money Woes Hit the Local Museums

When the Oakland Museum of California was founded in 1969 as a “museum for the people,” there was no question about who would pay for it. The museum’s land was owned by the city, its building was operated by the city and its collection belonged to the city. Admission, now $12, was free. But the fiscal crisis affecting governments across California is changing the way museums operate. The Oakland museum recently announced that it would seek to radically alter its relationship with Oa

Henry Louis Gates Jr.: W.E.B. Du Bois' Talented Tenth in Pictures

[Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, at Harvard University.] Visitors to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 were introduced to escalators, pictorial panoramas, the Paris Metro and the first films with sound. They also encountered -- in a section of the vast world's fair aptly titled exposé nègre, or Negro exposition -- an unusual photo exhibit: hundreds o

Masters of Math, From Old Babylon

If the cost of digging a trench is 9 gin, and the trench has a length of 5 ninda and is one-half ninda deep, and if a worker’s daily load of earth costs 10 gin to move, and his daily wages are 6 se of silver, then how wide is the canal? Or, a better question: if you were a tutor of Babylonian scribes some 4,000 years ago, holding a clay tablet on which this problem was incised with cuneiform indentations — the very tablet that can now be seen with 12 others from that Middle Eastern

Preserving China's Musical Heritage

In Shanghai’s super-modern Grand Theater, a fashionable, mainly young audience applauds enthusiastically as Guo Yong takes center stage. He acknowledges the semicircle of musicians around him and prepares to play a solo. But Guo does not raise a flute, trombone, or oboe to his lips; instead, he proudly holds aloft a large bushy tree branch covered in leaves. Blowing on one of the leaves, he produces a sound that mimics the twittering of birds as he plays a traditional Buyi folk song. The other m

BBC and Discovery Channel Join Forces for ‘History of the World’

The BBC and the Discovery Channel, which collaborated in the past on “Planet Earth” and “Life,” are starting work on another joint documentary, “History of the World.” They said on Monday that the series would cover 20,000 years of humanity in eight episodes, or roughly 2,500 years an episode. Their prior series have used state-of-the-art cameras to capture natural habitats, but that’s not an option in “History of the World,” so they will instead rely on re-enactments a

An Exhibition That Gets to the (Square) Root of Sumerian Math

Papyrus, parchment, paper ... videotape, DVDs, Blu-ray discs — long after all these materials have crumbled to dust, the first recording medium of all, the cuneiform clay tablet of ancient Mesopotamia, may still endure. Thirteen of the tablets are on display until Dec. 17 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, part of New York University. Many are the exercises of students learning to be scribes. Their plight was not to be envied. They were mastering mathematics based

Spielberg, Daniel Day-Lewis team up for Lincoln biopic

Hollywood star Daniel Day-Lewis will play 16th US president Abraham Lincoln in a biopic to be directed by Oscar-winner Steven Spielberg . Lincoln, adapted by playwright Tony Kushner from Doris Kearns Goodwin book Team of Rivals. Spielberg has been attached to the project for years and earlier Liam Neeson was attached to star as Lincoln. Kushner and Spielberg had earlier teamed up for Oscar-nominated Munich. Spielberg will begin filming the movie next year. He is

"Made in Dagenham": A patronizing film about working-class feminism

It's not like "Made in Dagenham" marks the first time a fascinating historical episode has been made into mediocre melodrama. Moviemakers have ransacked history since the medium was invented, but the combination too often results in bad movies and bad history. You can't even call "Made in Dagenham" bad -- it's a competent entertainment, built around an enjoyable performance by the superb English actress Sally Hawkins (Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"). But it does manage to take a crucial turning point in feminist and labor history -- an event loaded with ambiguous significance -- and render it into one of those gang-of-gals movies full of bicycles, reggae songs, underwear shots and scenes of emotional growth. (Memo to producers: You can't use Jimmy Cliff's "You Can Get It if You Really Want" in your movie. You just can't. It is against the law.) There can be no doubt that the story of the female machinists' strike in 1968 at the Ford plant in Dagenham, England, is worth telling. That event in an east London industrial suburb had social consequences that were arguably a lot more meaningful and far-reaching than, say, the invention of Facebook.... It was a moment that suggested class politics wasn't just for guys and feminism wasn't just for well-bred university girls.

Long Missed and Awaited, Tully Hall Organ Greets Its Public

Lincoln Center could have been forgiven if it had gone a little crazy in celebrating the reinstallation of the lovable Kuhn organ in the renovated Alice Tully Hall, now the only pipe organ in a major concert hall in New York. From the time of the instrument’s removal in 2006 until it was finally put back in place in recent months, fearful, not to say paranoid, organ fanciers greeted the center’s repeated assurances that the instrument would return in all its glory, and then some, with unalloyed

For the next generation of Beatles fans, the wait could soon be over.

For the next generation of Beatles fans, the wait could soon be over. Apple is expected on Tuesday to announce that it has finally struck a deal with the Beatles, the best-selling music group of all time, and the band’s record company, EMI, to sell the band’s music on iTunes, according to a person with knowledge of the private deal who requested anonymity because the agreement was still confidential. Depending on the terms of the deal, customers for the first time will

’60s Hollywood: Power Shifted (or Did It?)

THE story of what is often called New Hollywood, the era of the easy riders, raging bulls, to borrow the title of Peter Biskind’s 1998 best seller, has been told numerous times. It goes something like this: By the early 1960s the old studio system was in shambles, run by old men who, out of touch with the times-they-are-a-changin’, were churning out pricey duds like “Cleopatra” to shrinking, indifferent audiences. Just in the nick of time a new movie-savvy generation of directors,

J. R. Ewing Shot Down Communism in Estonia

Imagine growing up in the Estonian capital city, Tallinn, during the cold war and discovering “Dallas” transmitted by television from Helsinki across the Gulf of Finland. Life in the 1970s was drab in Estonia, then a Soviet republic under the thumb of Moscow. In the eyes of the Communist leadership, that American serial with its jousting millionaires epitomized the creeping allure of capitalist decadence. In the facetiously lighthearted documentary “Disco and Atomic War