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Ondine (2009; 2010 U.S. release)

Directed by Neil Jordan

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

Water spirits have beguiled humans–at least in folklore and literature–for some time. Their origins resist definition. Whether known as elementals, nymphs, mermaids, nixies, melusines, ondines or selkies, they portend tragic destinies for themselves and those they ensnare. Fifteenth-century Swiss/German physician Paracelsus discussed them quite seriously. Composers, choreographers and artists have created legendary operas, ballets and beautifully illustrated picture books featuring them, particularly during the Romantic period; German author Baron Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s 1812 novel Undine is one notable example.

Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan’s (Michael Collins; The Crying Game) 2009 film Ondine merges varying mythic strands but focuses on the selkie, or seal maiden, a creature found in Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Icelandic folk tales. Sightings of selkies continue to be recorded, most frequently off the coast of the Orkney and Shetland islands where seal mythology seems to have begun. Selkies, it is said, can shed their seal coats and live on land. In some tales, she (or he) marries a human, bears children and then must leave without warning, recalled beneath the waves; in other stories, a human hides or burns the coat, as dramatized in the 1994 John Sayles film The Secret of Roan Inish. Stranded, these sea creatures express their longing for the waves as a low keening song.

In Jordan’s film, one day fisherman Syracuse (Colin Farrell), otherwise known as “Clown,” hauls in his nets with no catch. Failure does not surprise him–Syracuse is a pretty luckless fisherman. But snagging a beautiful, half-drowned woman (Polish actress Alicja Bachelda) gets a rise out of this laconic chap. A former alcoholic, Syracuse hasn’t been on the wagon long enough to trust his eyes. After reviving and calming her, Syracuse tells the woman he will get help. Terrified of discovery, she begs him to hide her. Syracuse doubts he can do this in Castletownbere, a tiny village on the Beara peninsula in southwest Ireland. Until he has a better plan, he takes her to his mother’s cottage built into the cliffs overlooking the sea. Not long after, she is spied by Syracuse’s daughter, Annie (Alison Barrie) who, like Syracuse, comes to know her as Ondine. The term derives from the French word for “wave.”

Immediately, Jordan engages viewers’ sympathy with Syracuse’s self-deprecating, droll questions and replies. Dublin native Farrell’s (Crazy Heart) portrayal of the prince in clown’s clothing should win him more fans. Bachelda as Ondine sparkles as a cross between tragic heroine, lucky charm, Super Woman and super model. Despite these near-perfect performances, Barrie’s Annie steals the show. Wheel chair-bound, awaiting a kidney transplant, Annie has the great misfortune of two alcoholic parents. Taunted by schoolmates, she spends her days whizzing around in her electric chair, scouring library shelves and developing an OED-caliber vocabulary. Perhaps the most precocious of the many cheeky young characters in film today, Barrie’s Annie should grate just a bit. She doesn’t because this know-it-all metes out wisdom sparingly, and only to those she deems worthy.

After Annie and Ondine become fast friends, Annie reads everything she can about selkies in folklore studies and old picture books she secures from the library. Not one to take anything on faith, Annie acquires the facts she needs to convince herself and Syracuse of Ondine’s magical existence. In one affecting scene, Annie ponders the puzzle Ondine presents while tracing an illustration English artist Arthur Rackham made for a 1909 edition of Fouqué’s story. Such touches are Jordan’s stock-in-trade. A master of brevity, Jordan limits action and dialogue to essentials, each move and expression acted as a symbol of character; each word spoken the necessary one. For instance, Jordan inserts Syracuse’s confessions (the village doesn’t have an AA) at pivotal moments to bring the fantasy to ground. Guaranteed to draw wry smiles, his scrupulously honest revelations merely earn sad head shakings and patient lack of judgment from Stephen Rea as long-suffering priest. Their friendship poignantly conveys the gift of acceptance–scars, faults and misdemeanors, the rose, its thorns and everything in between.

Although far more mature than Syracuse and her mother, Maura (Dervla Kirwan), Annie remains a child. Underneath her stoical acceptance of life’s disappointments, Annie dares to believe that Ondine will stay and she will get better. Yet she is prepared for a different ending and, when the fiction unravels, Annie adjusts. After all, she might still get her wish. Ondine is a fairy tale that hardcore realists can appreciate. Even in troubling times, wishes come true.

The Grand Manner by A.R. Gurney

Directed by Mark Lamos

Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, New York City

June 2-August 1, 2010

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

American playwright A.R. Gurney’s work immerses audiences in Northeastern WASP culture. Much of his material draws from his background in this milieu. Born in Buffalo, Gurney graduated from St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, NH, then attended Williams College in Williamstown, MA, and the Yale School of Drama. While teaching at MIT, he began to write plays. In 1981, he debuted The Dining Room, a comedy of manners exemplifying Gurney’s career-spanning terrain. Like Jane Austen, Gurney understands that close readings of social microcosms yield universal truths; with ample doses of wit and wisdom, Gurney dramatizes hidden agendas and blatant pretensions. Yet barbed as his humor can be, Gurney brings an insider’s affection to his characters and their foibles.

Longtime Gurney colleague writer Romulus Linney described his fellow Yale graduate as bold and adventurous, referring to Gurney’s interpretations of theater conventions.1 For example, Gurney’s The Fourth Wall (1992), soon to be staged by TheatreWorks at The Fourth Wall Theatre in Upper Montclair, NJ, challenges the invisible barrier, or “Fourth Wall,” between actors and audience. In this play, Gurney conflates the “real” and the imagined by eliminating the fragile boundary between the stage and the seats. The Fourth Wall also expresses Gurney’s doubts about his career direction at mid-life and a playwright’s influence beyond the footlights.2

In June, Gurney’s most recent work, The Grand Manner, opened at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, directed by Mark Lamos.3 A poignant, compressed drama laced with signature Gurney humor, The Grand Manner recounts a brief meeting between the young Gurney, called Pete, and a theater legend. At the time, Gurney was at St. Paul’s. His father insisted he become a physician, but Gurney toyed with pursuing a less secure career choice. In February 1948, he traveled to New York with a ticket for a performance of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Martin Beck Theater, starring First Lady of the Stage Katharine Cornell.4 The Berlin-born Cornell was raised in Buffalo. Wherever she went, whatever location she chose for a residence, Cornell considered Buffalo as her home. When Gurney’s grandmother writes to Cornell to arrange a meeting with the boy post performance, Cornell readily accepts. Gurney’s father believes the visit will squelch the theater bug but, again, the boy has other plans.　

Cornell’s legendary status derives from two tributaries: her never-failingly gracious, well-bred presence, and her pioneering efforts to revitalize American theater. “Grand” in the noblest sense, Cornell had every advantage that wealth and prominence affords. Unlike Gurney, whose family disparaged the theater, Cornell’s father was an amateur director and, later, managed a local theater. When Cornell put on backyard plays, he encouraged the child’s passion. By the time her mother died in 1915, Cornell had already set her sights on Broadway. With inherited money, she moved to New York. Soon Cornell’s glamorous looks and engaging personality began to win leading roles.

Dubbed “Kit” as a child because of her boyish features, Cornell cultivated interior qualities. She understood the human need to be recognized, as well as the appeal of good manners and humility. To her, audiences were not faceless crowds of ticket holders. Her words, smiles and tears were for individuals. They knew it and became devoted fans. For admirers from her hometown, Cornell’s welcome extended to backstage visits for the sharing of news and memories. She opened some of her plays in Buffalo, and whenever she appeared there while on tour, Cornell performed her most convincing role: hometown girl.

In 1921, Cornell married actor/director Guthrie McClintic. The production company they formed put little-known playwrights to work and exposed audiences to rarely performed works (including those by George Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare). They employed many actors who became legends, including Orson Wells, and they gave work to others who might otherwise have forsaken the stage. McClintic directed his wife in some of her most famous projects; for example, Candida (1924), The Brownings of Wimpole Street (1931), Lucrece (1932), Alien Corn (1933) and St. Joan (1935).

In Gurney’s flashback, Pete’s visit comes at a juncture in Cornell’s career. In her mid fifties, she feared but accepted the fickle nature of celebrity.5 Connecting her fate with the decline of live theater Cornell dreaded being pigeon-holed as a tragedienne, too “grand” to play grittier parts. A wide-eyed Pete decides to be accommodating and readily critiques her performance as Cleopatra. Too long protected from genuine criticism by her husband, her faithful personal assistant, Gert, and the notable reviewers who counted her a friend, Cornell hungers for truth. Without it, she tells Pete, theater is dead. Television and film, she cautions, capture dead performances. Even at the end of her career, when producers offered few parts, Cornell scrupulously avoided both. Roles, she believed, were created between actor and audience.

Exuding charm, Kate Burton (The Constant Wife; The Elephant Man) plays Cornell from all sides: confident professional, aging has-been, vain celebrity and humble Buffalo gal. As Pete, Bobby Steggert (Ragtime) is suitably awe-struck, the perfect blank-slate against which the others reveal their secrets. Gurney gives his ironic, quick-shot jokes to McClintic (Boyd Gaines) and Gert (Brenda Wehle). Gaines (Gypsy; Twelve Angry Men) as McClintic alternates with increasing rapidity from sophisticated producer to flawed human being. Wehle’s (Pygmalion) Gert organizes Cornell’s life with military precision, gruffly advising Pete on the ways of the world from a Broadway perspective. Hints of a magnanimous spirit and love for Cornell will endear Gert to audiences, while a pathetic seduction of Pete punctures McClintic’s pomposity.

The Grand Manner might be considered a coda to Gurney’s Buffalo Gal (2008), also directed by Lamos. Buffalo Gal examines the predicament of aging film star Amanda, who returns to her hometown Buffalo for a revival of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Working under a director who represents the unsung stalwarts of regional theater, Amanda begins to note uncomfortable parallels between her own life and that of her character, Madame Ranevsky. Both go home hoping to recapture a magic that exists only in memory. In reality, home is already lost to them. In the end, Amanda decides that Hollywood’s promises trump live theater’s rewards. With The Grand Manner, Gurney allows another Buffalo Gal to tell a story in which live theater is the victor.

1 “A.R. Gurney” in BOMB (96/Summer 2006): http://bombsite.com/issues/96/articles/2838. Linney met Gurney in the 1950s at Yale.

2 Opening on September 24, 2010, the TheatreWorks production features Gurney’s The Fourth Wall and Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound. For more information, go to: http://www.4thwalltheatre.com/index.html

3 The Grand Manner opened at Lincoln Center on June 2, 2010, and runs through August 31.

4 Cornell was so fashioned by New Yorker critic Alexander Woollcott.

5 Born in 1893, Cornell gave her birth date as 1898. She died in 1974.

Agora (2009, released to the U.S. market June 2010)

Directed by Alejandro Amenábar, screenplay by Amenábar and Mateo Gil

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

At its most dramatic, political ambition and religious fanaticism have destroyed entire civilizations. Yet these dangerous bedfellows also threaten culture at subtle levels, no more so in the ancient world than in our own. Director Alejandro Amenábar’s latest film, Agora, works both ends of the spectrum. Set in a Roman-ruled Alexandria torn by religious hatred between pagans, Jews and early Christians, Agora centers on the life, work and death of fourth-century Neoplatonic philosopher, mathematician and teacher Hypatia (ca.360-415 AD). On the surface, Agora is a bloody exposé of the death of reason. Under the blood and gore, the senseless savagery and massacres, the director orchestrates a human drama fueled by fear, hunger and greed. Digging to the roots of violence, Amenábar reminds viewers that, indeed, we have not come so far.

Born in 1973 in Santiago, Chile, just prior to Pinochet’s coup, Amenábar was politicized at an early age. His mother lived through the Spanish Civil War, and after the coup his Chilean father moved the family to Madrid. With poor scholastic achievements behind him and a talent for film and music, Amenábar switched course.1 Now known for his fever-pitch psychological thrillers, he has been dubbed by reviewers as Alfred Hitchcock’s successor. Like Amenábar’s 2004 release The Sea Inside (Mar adentro), based on quadriplegic Ramón Sampedro’s 28-year crusade to legally terminate his life, in many ways Agora is atypical for his work. With The Sea Inside, the director risked a more elastic treatment than he used in his previous, highly controlled horror films.2 Viewers get to know Ramón (Javier Bardem) through two women who love him. In a 2004 interview published in Venice Magazine, Amenábar spoke of Ramón’s writings:

“He talked about loving, but not possessing someone. To be able to accept not owning a person. At the same time, he felt that he owned his own life, but he also didn’t mind getting rid it.”3

Similarly, Agora considers Hypatia through the people who love and admire her. Otherwise, she remains closed, yielding little evidence of an emotional life. That said, the beautiful Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) has plenty of passion for her studies, the contents of the last great bastion of learning in Roman Egypt, the Alexandria library, and the Chinese puzzle presented by Ptolemaic astronomy. While her students (young pagans, Christians and slaves) pine over her and noble pagans wrangle with Christian persecutors, Hypatia literally has her head in the clouds. She submits to no god or God, champions learning as the salvation of humanity, and believes that true justice is logical and egalitarian. The only axiom she never questions, “More things unite us than divide us,” reverberates through the film.

Ironically, Hypatia contemplates a universe far beyond human imaginings, symbolized by Amenábar’s cutaways to expansive clips of the cosmos; but her personal experience is narrow, limited to the sheltered environment provided by father Theon (Michael Londsdale). Theon encourages her to forsake marriage and motherhood for scholarship. Another irony: Hypatia’s beauty sits uncomfortably with her scrupulously honest (i.e., blunt) speech. For example, when student/suitor Orestes declares his love she responds with a handkerchief soaked in menstrual blood. Could she be less clear? Could he be less offended? Nevertheless, despite his lighthearted approach to lessons, Orestes remains devoted to Hypatia’s mind as well as her body.

As the film progresses Amenábar stacks irony, contradiction and opposition. Orestes’ counterpart, slave Davus (Max Minghella), thinks deeply about Hypatia’s theories and offers lines of inquiry that impress her. Where Orestes can state his feelings, Davus must hide them. Where Orestes not only survives her rebuff but renews the chase, Davus bristles when Hypatia refers to his slave status. Like other slaves, he is ripe for the Christian’s promises of power and bread for the meek and hungry. Perhaps more so, with wounded pride igniting his resentment. Viewers will not wonder at his vulnerability to recruitment by charismatic street preacher Ammonius (Ashraf Barhom) for the black-robed Christian militia, the Parabolini.

Amenábar sets Davus’s conflicted religious zeal against Orestes’ politically motivated conversion when Orestes becomes Roman prelate. Against these, the director places Synesius of Cyrene’s conventional, if peaceful, faith. Eventually, former Hypatia student Synesius becomes a powerful bishop. The devotion of all three of her formal pupils attests to Hypatia’s truly noble character but cannot save her. She is sacrificed to Christian extremism and martyred for the truth. She will not forsake reason, even when it fails. She has pledged her life to the agora, the open-air forum for trade–ideas as well as commodities. Like Sampedro in The Sea Inside, she feels she fully owns her life and its disposition.4

Weisz (The Lovely Bones; The Constant Gardener) plays Hypatia to perfection. Suspicious of emotion, Hypatia discounted its value to intellectual discourse and reasoned judgment. Hypatia can shed tears: for her father, bludgeoned in the agora; for the scrolls burned by the rabble; and for Orestes’ and Davus’s compromises. In the film’s most powerful scene, Orestes attends Hypatia while she ponders the lack of love in her life. Clearly capable of feeling loss, Hypatia then easily turns her thoughts to her astronomical quandary. Is her mistrust of emotion a subterfuge? Due to lifelong training? Or a well-reasoned choice. As Hypatia would no doubt counsel, viewers should judge for themselves.

1 Amenábar has scored most of his films. Dario Marianelli scored Agora.

2 Amenábar wrote the screenplay for The Sea Inside with Agora collaborator, Spanish director Mateo Gil.

3 The interview is available at: http://thehollywoodinterview.blogspot.com/2010/01/alejandro-amenabar-and-sea-inside-open.html

4 For a lyrical fictional portrait of Hypatia, readers should acquire a copy of Ki Longfellow’s moving Flow Down Like Silver (Eio Books, 2009).

The Golden Child by Penelope Fitzgerald

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

Media hype surrounding the recently opened Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at New York City’s Discovery Center Times Square echoes the “Egypt-mania” coloring much of the 1970s. Viewing approximately 3,500-year-old Egyptian funerary art and artifacts displayed in a global tourist mecca is a bit unsettling but, in 21st-century America, anything might happen, including King Tut’s appearance at Disney World. In the 1970s some of the artifacts discovered in the 18th-century dynasty boy king’s tomb came West, once again since their discovery in 1922, first appearing at the British Museum in London for more than 1.6 million visitors.1 From there, the exhibit traveled to the former Soviet Union, Japan, France, Canada and West Germany. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York provided the U.S. venue, which ran from late 1976 to spring 1979. In America, more than 8 million people waited hours to see these gilded, priceless objects. As art works, they dazzled the eye; as cultural objects, they provided a glimpse of early human history far removed from the modern age. Initial reception to the Discovery Center’s show indicate that all things Tut continue to enthrall adults and children.

In 1977, English writer Penelope Fitzgerald reflected on art as entertainment in her first novel, The Golden Child. Although she began to publish at age 60, the Booker Prize-winning writer appears to have been born to the profession. Daughter of Punch editor Edmund Knox (1879-1958), Fitzgerald counted among other illustrious relatives her father’s brothers: crime writer Ronald Knox, cryptographer Dilly Knox and biblical scholar Wilfred Knox. Her aunt Winifred Peck was a novelist, and her stepmother daughter of Winnie-the-Pooh illustrator Ernest H. Shepard. From 1977 to 1985, Fitzgerald wrote eight novels filled with refined wit, ironic humor and incisive social commentary. For many of her settings, plots and characters, Fitzgerald drew on personal experiences as World War II correspondent for the BBC (Human Voices), drama school teacher (At Freddie’s), houseboat denizen (Offshore) and bookshop clerk (The Bookshop).

Before her death in 2000, Fitzgerald commented that she wrote The Golden Child for her husband, an Irish soldier, who was declining from a terminal illness. Set in an institution meant to recall the British Museum and its 1972 Egyptian exhibit, The Golden Child opens with an unforgettable scene: faceless crowds of men, women and school children on a queue circling the museum and park. Encouraged by newspaper headlines across the country, they wait to see the “golden treasure” of the Garamantes, an ancient race of Saharan desert dwellers. This trove consists of a young king’s relics and a cache of gilded toys for afterlife amusement. Securely ensconced in the museum’s upper reaches, their elderly eccentric discoverer, Sir William, refuses association with his 1913 find. Yet he expresses concern for the queues subjected to inflated entrance fees; freezing temperatures; and inferior refreshments and facilities. In return for their patient endurance, the queues receive a few moments to view the treasure. As efficient security staff keeps the ball rolling (and the queue moving) and curators seethe at the public’s intrusion on their hallowed halls, Fitzgerald manipulates the curators’ long-simmering fears, jealousies and ambitions into a well-plotted whodunit.

But in Fitzgerald’s hands, murder and mystery merely expose museum politics and human greed. Provoked by doubt of the treasure’s authenticity, the impeccably attired museum director sends a lowly exhibition planner named Waring Smith to consult an elusive Soviet authority. Not surprisingly, the Soviet regime has a stake in the treasure unearthed thousands of years ago in Central North Africa.2 Arranged by the director’s perfectly correct secretary, Waring Smith’s travel plans place him in a group of savvy tourists. Unlike him, they own winter-wear equal to sub-zero Moscow temperatures. Dodging their hostile stares and shivering through snow-laden streets, Waring Smith struggles with personal problems (mortgage, neglected wife, career potential). Meanwhile, his consciousness matures. Fitzgerald narrates his trip as something of a comic opera or visit to a hall of mirrors. He cannot fail to connect the queues outside his museum with endless lines of citizens waiting outside the Kremlin to view an embalmed Lenin; one night spent at the circus opens his eyes to the skewed perceptions of power and authority promoted from above: underneath their polished veneer, he realizes, the clowns lead the band. Dressed by the best London tailors, educated at Oxford and Cambridge, the men pulling the strings are fools. And in the hands of fools, power is dangerous.

Before the exhibit, Waring Smith knew his superiors to be capable of professional murder, never imagining that they can kill more than a reputation. Now summoned back to London, he realizes that Sir William and the odd-ball museum personnel he champions (a nap-prone, pregnant secretary; a devoted body guard; a conflict-promoting technician) are models of decency. Governments, museums and multinational corporations hope to gain pots of money and prestige from the treasure, but Sir William wants none of it.

Quiet and quirky, Fitzgerald’s novels are wonders of subtlety and wisdom. Their plots and characters reveal absurdities in the human condition hidden in plain sight. While it is easier to ignore our failings, it is far more entertaining to consider them played out in finely crafted fiction. In The Golden Child, the museum stands as one powerful element in a vast politically motivated chain. In truth, the Greatest Show on Earth is a human drama, and art an intangible given material form and driving the action.

1 The tomb was opened by English archeologist Howard Carter and his team in 1923.

2 Believed to be of Berber origin, the Garamantes of Southern Libya ruled the interior central part of North Africa from ca.500 BC to 500 AD.

The Gaudí Key by Esteban Martín and Andreu Carranza (Morrow, 2008; Harper pbk, 2009)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

When Catalan modernist architect Antonio Gaudí died in 1926, not only did he leave his Sagrada Família, a cathedral of vast scope, design and symbolism, unfinished; a labyrinthine trail of imagery, allusions and historical references remains for admirers of his peculiar rendering of neo-gothic style to decipher. Gaudí reviled Renaissance ideals of symmetry and regularity. Gothic religious architecture was conceived to be a mirror of the cosmos, as well as a book of stone meant to be read by the faithful. Messages conveyed in stone directed worshippers to truths too precious to be laid bare before the blind, ignorant or blatantly evil. Elaborate weavings of ancient myth and legend, classical philosophy, medieval theology, zoology, nature and occult mysticism might appear within Christian narratives set in stone. Gaudí’s unfinished masterpiece contains all of these and more. Scholars and aesthetic detectives will continue to conjecture, theorize, project and, of course, argue amongst themselves while, ultimately, Gaudí’s work resists definitive interpretation.

Gaudí’s fierce defense of his Catalan heritage and traditional Catalan styles anchors his work. From Moorish and oriental motifs, European art nouveau and ideas promoted by architects at home and abroad (e.g., 19th-century French architect Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc), Gaudí absorbed a prodigious number of influences. He filtered these through his personal, essentially medieval Christian worldview to construct buildings mirroring God’s creation; his aim, to become God’s architect on earth. Certainly, a lofty goal but this giant of an artist was a simple man. Dressing like a pauper, living in his studio, toiling with few breaks and even fewer conveniences, Gaudí dedicated his life to his work and, in his later years, his work to his God.

For readers eager for an exhilarating (and exhausting) ride through Gaudí’s Barcelona, a good place to start is Esteban Martín and Andreu Carranza hair-raising thriller, The Gaudí Key. The authors have made fiction a cauldron in which they stir a heady mixture of fact, fantasy, history and mystery. Although most reviewers have compared The Gaudí Key to Dan Brown’s 2003 blockbuster, The Da Vinci Code, it seems more accurate to place it with Catalan author Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s work. Like Angel’s Game, Zafón’s follow-up to his outstanding Shadow of the Wind, The Gaudí Key is a bit too ambitious. At times, multiple plots spin off, diverting the pace. Still, fascinating considerations of, for example, the Catalan Renaixença, Zeno’s Paradoxes, the Garden of Hesperides, suiseka (the Japanese art of stones), fractal mathematics, ancient Christian societies and an elusive alchemist known as Fulcanelli provide the novel’s high points. The places at which Gaudí’s life merges with these discourses might cause eyebrows to raise and heart rates to rise; in the instance of Fulcanelli, the alchemist disappeared in 1926, the year Gaudí died, and during her childhood María, the main character, read one of Fulcanelli’s critical works, Le Mystère des Cathédrales (The Mystery of the Cathedrals), published in Paris in–you guessed it–1926.

Adept at layering recurring symbols, Martín and Carranza orchestrate echoes that will leave many readers incredulous at Gaudí’s genius. Numerical symbols include the number seven (knights, Greek letters, riddles, buildings). Other types of imagery pop up time and again: animals (tortoises, pelicans); flowers and plants (sunflowers and mushrooms); shapes (circles, squares, stars, crosses, pentagrams), fairy tales (breadcrumb trails, enchanted houses) and maps (Barcelona, Ursa Major, one on María’s skin). As with Gaudí’s cathedral, this trove of sign and symbol masks a simple idea. Martín and Carranza suggest that, as guardian of Christ’s cornerstone, Gaudí was murdered rather than victim of a streetcar accident. Committed by the Corbel, the name of an evil society (as well as an architectural term), represented on the facade of Sagrada Família by a demon holding a bomb, the murder has been repeated 80 years later with the death of Gaudí’s now elderly apprentice. Next in line is the apprentice’s granddaughter, María. She and her lover, Miguel, have six days (echoing the six directions and six days in which God created the world) to find the place where Gaudí hid the 300-year-old relic. Between gruesome murders, María and Miguel accept their destiny as saviors of Christendom and life partners.

The English-language translation of the original, written in Catalan, lacks Gaudí’s flourish, but competently propels the many narrative threads. More felicitous, descriptions of seven Gaudí projects holding clues for María–Casa Vicens, Parc Güell, Sagrada Família, La Pedrera, Casa Batlló, Casa Calvet and Palacio Güell–have force and clarity. If not entirely successful as a thriller, The Gaudí Key succeeds as a bow to a gifted son of cauldron-makers whose vessels of stone contain mystical worlds yet to be revealed. By suspending disbelief, readers will be enthralled as they are caught in Martín and Carranza’s intricate gothic web.

Contemporary Filmmaking at its Best at the IFC

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

For independent film fans, New York City is a great place to live. A visit to the small but stylish Paris Theatre in midtown provides a bit of culture between morning window shopping on Fifth Avenue and (we recommend) afternoon tea at the New York location of the famous Viennese Demel Café.1 Downtown, venue choices expand with the Angelika Film Center and Landmark Sunshine Cinema on Houston Street and Anthology Film Archives in the East Village. In Greenwich Village, the Independent Film Center (IFC), housed in the historic Waverly Theater, presents a low-key face to the world and might easily be missed by those walking up and down Sixth Avenue on their way to Fourteenth Street or Bleecker. But film buffs know it well; one look at the IFC marquee or printed calendar of events whets the appetite for gluttonous indulgence. It is no wonder that many of those “in the know” stop here, skipping the shopping (and, alas, the pastry) for a three- or four-course meal of superior filmmaking.

Opened in June 2005, the IFC underwent a four-year renovation to create five state-of-the-art cinemas with living room-style seating. Along with new independent and foreign films and documentaries, the IFC has a Weekend Classics series; a “Short Attention Span Cinema” consisting of short-film screenings prior to the start of featured films; and a gallery displaying vintage movie posters from around the world. Viennese pastry does not figure into the snack-bar mix, but there is organic popcorn with, yes, real butter.

On the spring 2010 calendar are three films as diverse as they come: an Academy Award-nominated animated feature inspired by a medieval illuminated manuscript (The Secret of Kells); a blistering exposé of greed and political intrigue in the art world (The Art of the Steal); and a revisionist fairy tale (Barbe Bleue/Bluebeard) starring the first recorded serial killer. While only one is truly appropriate for children–and it isn’t the fairy tale–most adults will be variously charmed, entertained, provoked and enlightened by all three.

The Secret of Kells, directed by Thomm Moore and Nora Twomey with a screenplay by Fabrice Ziolkowski

Compiled sometime between the sixth and ninth centuries, the illuminated manuscript that has come down through the ages as the Book of Kells (also known as the Book of Columba after the sixth-century, book-loving Irish saint who travelled to the Scottish island of Iona to spread the Christian faith) continues to intrigue scholars, artists and folklorists, as well as general audiences entranced by the intricate designs etched in harmonious hues that decorate each page. Even more astounding, the book survived hundreds of years of threats from natural disasters, fire, religious turmoil and foreign invasions.

This animated feature directed by Thomm Moore, a joint venture of production companies in Belgium, France and Ireland, makes real for children and adults the power of the book’s visual symbols and the lengths to which people–here 12-year-old Brendan and an aging master illuminator–have gone to protect it. Viking invasions during the eighth and ninth centuries caused monks on Iona to flee to Ireland. In Moore’s film, the Vikings who overrun the abbey in Ireland where Brendan lives with his uncompromising uncle, the abbot, and a group of monks colored in an ethnic rainbow, are shown as dark, looming shapes. The invaders and spirit figures from Ireland’s pagan past are mildly frightening, as they are whipped into a frenzy by Celtic music (pulsing bodhrán beats overlaid with haunting penny whistle).

Although Moore glosses over the history of the Book of Kells, it is likely that many viewers will want a greater understanding post closing credits. Such is the success of Moore’s visuals, a kaleidoscopic melange of mostly hand-drawn swirls, spirals and bold geometrics lushly colored to resemble a Celtic Garden of Eden, that his whimsical film will appeal to the widest range of ages.

The Art of the Steal, directed by Don Argot

The subject of Don Argot’s documentary is money and power, but the conclusion here defies the certainty that one equals the other in the eyes of the world. Centering on the multimillion-dollar art collection amassed by Albert C. Barnes, who rose from working-class background to Philadelphia physician, medical researcher and pharmaceutical company owner, Argot’s film promotes the view that Barnes’s will has been deliberately subverted by the city (Philadelphia) and institutions (e.g., the Philadelphia Museum of Art) from which he hoped to protect the works.

At the time that Barnes (1872-1951) purchased top-shelf pictures by the likes of Van Gogh, Renoir, Picasso and Cézanne, the American art establishment jeered at their work. Barnes reviled the museum system as a commercial enterprise prostituting great art works to draw large audiences that did not appreciate them. He built his own private gallery in the suburbs of Philadelphia, decorated to his idiosyncratic aesthetic code, and invited scholars and students rather than city museum-hoppers. The Barnes Foundation stipulated a by-invitation-only policy and seemingly prevented his collection from being sold or lent to other museums.

After his death, a devoted follower ran the foundation until her death in 1988. Dramatized in Argot’s film, what happened thereafter will elicit strong feelings, whether one believes that Barnes’s wishes should be respected or that the caliber of his collection demands public display. Between these extremes hovers a very real concern; ignoring Barnes’s wishes may have served money-and-power seekers, not Barnes or his collection.

Barbe Bleue/Bluebeard, adapted and directed by Catherine Breillat

Originally, French author and poet Charles Perrault (1628-1703) wrote his fairy tales for an elite adult audience resident at the court of Louis XIV. Born into an aristocratic family, Perrault aspired to the lofty artistic ideals of his times. He injected intelligence and wit into his romantic stories, inspired by the form and content of oral tales. Perrault’s literary fairy tales were immensely popular, all the rage at court. As with Grimm and Andersen, later Perrault was folded into the children’s cannon, despite the violence and dark themes percolating in his work.

French author/filmmaker Catherine Breillat (The Last Mistress; Fat Girl) remembers reading “Bluebeard” as a 5-year-old fan of fairy tales. The impact that this and other traditional stories had on her emerging feminist consciousness resounds through her beautiful rendering of Perrault’s shocker.2 Known for her controversial portrayals of women’s internal lives as they unfold within class-conscious misogynist societies, Breillat has been marginalized by censors and timid promoters. Reviewers have commented on the comparatively staid tenor of Breillat’s Bluebeard, yet the sense of calm pervading the film reflects Breillat’s reverence for fairy tales and their creators. Like them, she has mined story for the greed and cruelty inherent in quests for domination.3

Breillat organized her film as a story within a story, with two sets of sisters living centuries apart. In interviews, Breillat identifies herself with a defiant young girl, 1950s era, who sneers at her sister’s fears. Perrault’s cautionary tale reveals the price women pay for disobeying men. Breillat’s film reveals the price they pay for fearing them. Fairy tales appeal to children primarily, perhaps, because their finely tuned sense of justice refuses to accept the underdog’s defeat. From Jack the Giant Killer to Clever Gretchen, characters in folk and fairy tales win children’s hearts by using their wits to defeat brute strength. In the murky waters of adolescence, Breillat’s territory, women awaken to the rules of the game. In Bluebeard, the filmmaker once again tackles the hate men have for willful women to highlight the love women have for their murderers. It is a chilling view.

1 Located on the lower level of the Plaza Hotel on West 58th Street, the Demel Café serves world-class Viennese pastry from the Demel Bakery, founded in 1786 in Vienna.

2 For admirers of fractured fairy tales, Breillat work stands with celebrated stories and studies by authors Alison Lurie, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Marina Warner, Terri Windling and scholar Maria Tatar. For a 2002 addition to Windling’s Fairy Tales series, Fitcher’s Brides, Gregory Frost wrote about a Bluebeard figure living in the 1830s in New York’s Finger Lakes district. An outstanding list of works incorporating the theme (e.g., a novella by Anatole France, poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson, short story by Shirley Jackson, operetta by Jacques Offenback and Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, Ariane et Barbe-bleu) can be accessed at: http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/bluebeard/themes.html

3 Prior to the official March 26, 2010 release date of Briellat’s Barbe Bleue/Bluebeard, Anthology Film Archives showed the film in its Bluebeard on Film series along with Ernst Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), Edgar G. Ulmer’s Poverty Row production (1944); Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947); Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door (1948); and Michael Powell’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1964).

Ukrainian Museum, New York

Founded in 1976 by Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, Inc. (UNWLA), Ukrainian Museum, New York, is an impressive resource, and not only for Ukrainians living in or visiting the city. The multi-disciplinary approach taken by the museum directors and curators inspires for its reach into all aspects of culture. Perhaps most notable is their commitment to preserving tradition, linking past to present, and discovering ways to retain bodies of work for display in a setting most congenial to their creators’ intentions.

Now located in New York City’s East Village, at 222 East Sixth St., the museum offers a variety of educational programs associated with its exhibits. Consisting of works of folk and fine art, photographs and historical documents, the museum’s exhibits have traveled throughout the U.S., Canada and to Ukraine.1 The permanent collection also contains a delightful group of children’s folk costumes made in divergent eras and regions, reflecting varying styles and motifs, as well as some made in the U.S. in the 1960s based on authentic Ukrainian designs.

The museum’s location on a quiet street sets it nearly worlds apart from the bustle of Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile, with the staff offering a personal welcome that, alas, seems impossible to find at the larger institutions. Inside, pristine spaces on three floors are filled with works ranging from folk art and craft to contemporary works by living artists, labeled with text in Ukrainian and English. On view now are three shows exemplifying the range of the museum’s holdings: Fine Art/Folk Art: A Dialogue (closing February 28, 2010); the on-going A Generous Vision: A Major Gift of Works by Mychajlo Moroz; and The Gift of Art: A Major Gift of Arcadia Olenska-Petryshyn Paintings (closing March 7, 2010). The major exhibit, Fine Art/Folk Art, contains works by Moroz (1904-1992) and Olenska-Petrysyn (1934-1996), placing these artists within the context of Ukrainian art history.

Fine Art/Folk Art: A Dialogue signals the first time the curators have attempted to combine works from the fine and applied art collections, and the experiment works without any jarring seams. Not surprisingly, examples of Cubist/Constructivist sculptor and graphic artist Alexander Archipenko’s (1887-1964) works are highlights. Instinctively, the curators have connected his elegantly stylized The Ray (1956) with typically stylized religious icons, revealing his roots in the spiritual art of Byzantium. Similarly, they have used Archipenko’s bronze sculpture The Dance (1912-1913), along with works by Jacques Hnizdovsky (1915-1985) and Halyna Mazepa (1910-1995) to connect to colorful and still-strong Ukrainian folk dance traditions. Much of the work in this show comes from the Hutsul region in the southeastern part of the Carpathian Mountains. Moroz’s paintings celebrate this area, its folklore and customs.

Other outstanding gifts and long-term loans to the museum gathered for Fine Art/Folk Art are Mykhailo Chereshnovsky’s (1911-1994) noble bronze sculpture Portrait of My Wife (1950), Chereshnovsky’s intriguing wooden The Sun Shines for Everyone (1960) and Vasyl Hryhorovych Krychevsky’s (1873-1952) lovely watercolor and oil landscapes expressing his longing for his homeland. An architect, Krychevsky’s design for the Poltavske Zemstvo building (1902-1903) is a masterfully original take on Ukrainian folk tradition within the prevailing Art Nouveau style of his times.2

A charming array of pysanky, Ukrainian Easter eggs, decorated in the 1920s by Iryna Bilianska (1899-c.1965) reminds viewers of the centuries-old traditions that link generations of Ukrainian artists. After considering the vibrant colors and intricate details of Bilianska’s designs, visitors should view a small display of eggs and embroidered shirts demonstrating the strength and remarkable variety of decorative motifs traced to far flung regions of Ukraine.3

The Moroz and Olenska-Petryshyn exhibits represent large-scale gifts by the artist’s family members; 127 Moroz landscapes and portraits in oil given by his widow in 2007 and 44 works spanning styles, genres and media pursued by the artist during her career by Olenska-Petryshyn’s husband.

On March 24, the museum opens a new exhibit, Ukraine-Sweden: At the Crossroads of History (XVII-XVIII Centuries). Developed by the National Museum of Ukrainian History in Kiev for the 300th anniversary of the Swedish-Ukrainian alliance, the Battle of Poltava and the death of Ukrainian Cossack leader, patriot Ivan Mazepa (1644-1709), the exhibit drew large audiences (including King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden) in Kiev during its run in 2008-2009. For more information, go to www.ukrainianmuseum.org

1 Past exhibits shown at Ukrainian Museum, New York, include: Traditional Designs in Ukrainian Textiles (1978); Masterpieces in Wood: Houses of Worship in Ukraine (1982); Treasures of Early Ukrainian Art: Religious Art of the 16th-18th Centuries (1989); The Changeless Carpathians: Living Traditions of the Hutsul People (1995); Graphic Works by Alexander Archipenko and Oil Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings by Alexis Gritchenko (1998); The Cossacks: Their Art & Style (2008); Thread to the Past: Ukrainian Folk Art from the 1933 World’s Fair (2008); and an annual display of decorative Ukrainian Easter eggs (pysanky).

2 Krychevsky’s design is shown along with his paintings. The building now functions as the Poltava Regional Museum in central Ukraine.

3 Bilianska’s work as an Easter Egg decorator was discovered in the 1920s by Damian Horniatkewych (1892-1980), a professor of art history and collector of Ukrainian fine and folk art. At the time that he left Ukraine for Canada during World War II, Horniatkewych owned a large collection of Bilianska’s pysanky, which his son gave to the museum in 2008.

Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, with essays by Richard Cleary, Neil Levine, Mina Marefat, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Joseph M. Siry and Margo Stipe (Skira Rizzoli in association with the Solomon R. Guggenheim and Frank Lloyd Wright foundations, 2009)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

It is impossible to gauge which image stands tallest in the minds of his admirers (and detractors): Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) the man or his architectural designs. Wright’s towering personality, troubled personal life and rocky road to success make for a dramatic story. In 2007, journalist Nancy Horing made her debut as a novelist with Loving Frank, a fictional rendering of the most troubled period of Wright’s life, when he suffered professional setbacks; questioned the turn his life and career had taken; and left his first wife for Mamah Cheney, the spouse of a client, with tragic results.

While some Wright scholars might have raised an eyebrow at Horing’s portrayal of their heroe, her book registered spots on national bestseller lists and introduced Wright to many who knew only of his acclaimed Prairie-style homes. The bulk of Wright’s commissions consisted of private residences, but he directed much of his considerable energy and enviable imagination toward designs for public spaces. Now, 50 years after his death, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has displayed an outstanding collection of Wright’s projects, public and private, to mark the 50th anniversary of its Wright-designed building. In association with the Guggenheim and the Frank Lloyd Wright foundations, in May Skira Rizzoli released the exhibition catalogue. No doubt, it will earn a place with other long-famed and indispensable Wright references.1

For the general reader, the catalogue provides a porthole to Wright’s brilliance as architectural philosopher. Readers will notice that many of the projects detailed in the show and catalogue were not realized. Soon into the book’s texts, they will understand, along with Wright, that architecture in the most profound sense is not about floors, walls, roofs and windows. Builders build, but Wright explored space from within outward. He aimed to create complete environments in which people could flourish. For Wright, human beings deserved organic architecture reflecting the natural setting and expressing their aspirations. Even more so, Wright promoted a connection to the wider community. Throughout his life, he wrestled with ideas for addressing this need, as well as other challenges of urban life. For example, his designs for Broadacre City, a truly sub-urban development proposed in model form in 1935, contained the flowering of ideas seeded in earlier projects. 2 In Broadacre City, Wright used design as a tool to erase barriers between city and country, organically integrate such modern necessities as cars, reinforce community ties, and protect personal privacy.

The 360-page catalogue contains 250 color and 15 black-and-white illustrations and retails for US$75. Designed by Tsang Seymour and printed by Amilcare Pizzi in Milan, the volume’s production values are impeccable. The catalogue design highlights Wright’s practice of rendering his ideas in numerous studies, perspectives and floor plans. Text placed as narration to the visual story functions almost like audio components of exhibitions; this approach is particularly effective in Wright’s case.

In five essays, Wright scholars view his legacy from different directions converging at the point of his underlying architectural vision. Margo Stipe explains his philosophy of organic interior and exterior space. Joseph M. Siry describes Wright’s designs for Unity Temple in Oak Park, IL (1905-08); the Annie M. Pfeiffer Chapel at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, FL (1938-41); Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins Park, PA (1953-59); Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwatosa, WI (1956-61); and other houses of worship. Richard Cleary relates Wright’s experiences with contractors and craftsmen, including those connected with his designs for housing blocks (American System-Built and Usonian houses). Neil Levine demonstrates Wright’s quadruple block plan as the origin of the Prairie house. And Mina Marefat gives readers a tour through Wright’s grandest (and final) urban project, the unbuilt “Greater Baghdad Cultural Center.”3

Features of the Baghdad plan include an opera house, university, art gallery, museum, bazaar, fountains, bridges and a statue of Haroun-al-Rashid (the fifth Abbasid caliph, 786-809), one of Wright’s childhood heroes from A Thousand and One Nights. To connect buildings and public spaces, Wright chose the ziggurat. Like the spiral (implemented by Wright in plans for the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective and Planetarium for Sugarloaf Mountain, MD, and in the Guggenheim building), the ziggurat was his way of expressing a universal and cultural geometric symbol of unity while achieving a complex architectural aim. A section of color plates follows the essays, focusing on projects in the Guggenheim exhibit. Organized chronologically, eight of the nine projects are amplified by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer; Marefat provides text for a segment on Baghdad.

Two additional titles join Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward on Skira Rizzoli’s spring 2009 list. Frank Lloyd Wright: American Master, with text by Kathryn Smith and photographs by Alan Weintraub, offers readers 350 new images of Wright’s designs built from the beginning of his career through the Guggenheim, opened six months after his death. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Heroic Years: 1920-1932 by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer identifies Wright’s bold determination (and outrageous confidence) as key to his triumph over financial ruin and personal scandal during these years.

One of Wright’s most famous contributions to philosophical and practical architecture, the Guggenheim was given landmark status in 1990 by the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission; in 2005, the museum was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. With nine other Wright-designed buildings, it appears on the UNESCO World Heritage Center tentative list for designation as a national treasure.4

Looking back on his career in the pages of Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, readers may detect a nearly pre-determined destiny for Wright from his earliest days designing and building for his equally formidable family, Welsh farmers and preachers settled in Wisconsin. As such, he becomes akin to some of his heroes from childhood and beyond: Don Quixote, Haroun al-Rashid and Lao Tzu, among them. Springing from a supremely self-assured clan with roots in the stone-and-oak landscape of Wales, Wright traveled his own road, accepting it as a difficult choice. Fiercely held notions of human dignity and a democracy more God-given than political are coded into every one of his controversial designs. However one feels about Wright’s philosophy or particular built projects, as presented in this catalogue Wright is a monumental figure. From within and outward, he expressed ideals and found design solutions that cannot be ignored in our economically, environmentally and creatively challenged world.

1. Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward opened at the Guggenheim on May 15, 2009, and closes on August 23, 2009.

2. Wright discussed these ideas in a 1932 article, “The Disappearing City,” published in book format (90 pages with five black-and-white illustrations) by William Farquhar Payson. Drawn from a lecture he gave in 1930 at Princeton University, the article went through many revisions. A second edition appeared in 1945, titled When Democracy Builds. Later, he rewrote and expanded the text for a final version, The Living City, published in 1958.

3. Margot Stipe is curator and registrar of collections at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Scottsdale, AR, and Spring Green, WI; Joseph M. Siry is professor of art history and American studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT; Neil Levine is a professor of the history of art and architecture at Harvard University; Mina Marefat is an architect practicing in Washington, DC, and a former senior architectural historian at the Smithsonian Institution; and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer is director of archives at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

4. The 10 buildings being considered include the Guggenheim Museum; Taliesin, Wright’s home in Spring Green, WI; and Taliesin West and studio in Scottsdale, AZ, which serves as the headquarters of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

Felipe Galindo presents “All the World in Manhattan”, a series of humorous works on paper inspired by the convergence of different cultures in New York.

The New York-based cartoonist, illustrator and animator has exhibited his work extensively, and has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Newsday, Mad and many other publications worldwide.

He has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Puffin Foundation and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. Awards include recognitions from the New York Council for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the United Nations Correspondents Association.

Opening Reception: Thursday, June 18th, 6-8pm

La Galeria,
Boricua College,
3755 Broadway (156th street),
New York NY 10032
Web:  www.felipegalindo.com

Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri: 10am-6pm, Sat. by appointment.

With this downturn in the world economy, nothing is safe including the art market.  Below is an open letter from Sanford Smith, which also applies to exhibition openings and open studios.

With the unbelievable proliferation of art and antiques shows in the last several years, dealers have to make intelligent choices about where they will exhibit.  Sheer numbers of attendees should not be your focus. Palm Beach, Miami, Washington and the Piers in NY turn out huge numbers of people, but in most cases, the producers of these shows “paper” the area.  For years, one Palm Beach show has been notorious for “papering” every retirement community in South Florida. My 85-year-old uncle goes to every Miami and Palm Beach show because free tickets arrive in his mailbox. When the shows are over, I normally get a phone call from him complaining about the $5 they charged him for a cup of coffee.  My uncle is not a client any of you want.

The shows we produce do not depend on volume—they depend on quality. A turnout of 4,000 to 5,000 interested patrons are worth far more to you than the 40,000 or 50,000 “tire-kickers” that attend these other shows.  We have always produced specialty shows targeted to a specific clientele who have expressed serious interest in the material.  We will continue to operate this way in this difficult economic climate because we believe, as we have always believed, this produces the best results for exhibitors.

For the fall, we have decided to combine ART20 and MODERNISM into one show.  The material compliments each other.  We will also bring together our two charities—the Brooklyn Museum and Planned Parenthood—for the preview party. They will each bring in their own patrons and I believe we will have a very good preview party leading up to a good show.  Because of the fact that we are combining the shows, we will only have room in the show for approximately 35 to 40 ART20 dealers and 35 to 40 MODERNISM dealers—far fewer in each show than last fall.  You will be receiving more information from us in the coming weeks.