Most wonderful when /
they scatter --- /
The cherry blossoms. /
In this floating world, /
does anything endure?
(Chireba-koso / Itodo sakura wa / Medetakere / Ukiyo ni nani ka / Hisashikarubeki}
--- from Tales of Ise, by Narihira
The final trio. Anke Vondung as Octavian. Maki Mori as Sophie. Anne Schwanewilms as Marschallin. Directed by Uwe Eric Laufenberg. The orchestra is the Dresdenstaatskappele.
From Wikipedia:
The Marschallin, Sophie, and Octavian are left alone. The Marschallin recognizes that the day she so feared has come, as Octavian hesitates between the two women (Trio: Marie Theres'! / Hab' mir's gelobt). In the emotional climax of the opera, the Marschallin gracefully releases Octavian, encouraging him to follow his heart and love Sophie. She then withdraws elegantly to the next room to talk with Faninal. As soon as she is gone, Sophie and Octavian run to each other's arms. Faninal and the Marschallin return to find the lovers locked in an embrace. After a few bittersweet glances to her lost lover, the Princess departs with Faninal. Sophie and Octavian follow after another brief but ecstatic love duet (Ist ein Traum / Spür' nur dich), and the opera ends with little Mohammed running in to retrieve Sophie's dropped handkerchief, and racing out again after the departing nobility.
Der Rosenkavalier (Op. 59) (The Knight of the Rose) is a comic opera in three acts by Richard Strauss ...
The opera has four main characters: the aristocratic Marschallin, her very young lover Octavian Rofrano, a part sung by a woman, her coarse, philandering country cousin Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau, and his young prospective fiancée Sophie von Faninal, the lovely daughter of a rich Viennese bourgeois. Baron Ochs, having arranged with Sophie's father Faninal to combine his noble rank with Faninal's money by marrying Sophie, asks the Marschallin to suggest an appropriate young man to be his Knight of the Rose, who will present a silver rose to Sophie on his behalf as a traditional symbol of courtship. She recommends Octavian. When Octavian delivers the rose, he and Sophie fall in love on sight, and must figure out how to prevent Baron Ochs from marrying Sophie. They accomplish this in a comedy of errors that is smoothed over with the help of the Marschallin.[4]
But while a comic opera, Der Rosenkavalier also operates at a deeper level. Conscious of the difference in age between herself and Octavian, the Marschallin muses in bitter-sweet fashion over the passing of time, growing old and men's inconstancy, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that her nomination of him as Knight of the Rose and his and Sophie's subsequent love are no accident - realising that she will inevitably lose Octavian sooner or later, she has chosen to set him free.
When I invited Nellie McKay to participate in Project Song, I figured she'd write some witty words and hammer something out on the piano. I don't mean to make it sound so simple, but listen to the music of Nellie McKay, and she's the one who makes it seem so easy.
McKay came into our studio looking as if she'd just walked off a movie set. In fact, at times in conversation, a young Judy Garland came to mind. She took great care with her curly blonde hair and her beautiful pinstriped suit.
I laid some photographs and some words on our makeshift bar for her to consider as jumping-off points for the song she would write over the next few days.
It didn't take long for McKay to settle on a black-and-white photograph of some men dancing the Charleston out in front of a movie theater. To go with the picture, she chose the word "Bravado." Those two things would inspire and inform her song.
And then, despite a bit of hemming and hawing, McKay proceeded to sit behind the grand piano and begin drawing musical staff lines on some note paper. She began composing her song.
Here's what I now know that I didn't know at the time: In just a few hours of playing at the piano, Nellie McKay wrote her song. I know that now, because I can look at the zoom lens of our video camera and see all the scribbles in her notebook. The words are mostly there, and so is the music.
From my perspective in the control room of our studio, what I heard for the better part of our first day was some tinkering, some scribbling, and more tinkering. She'd pick up the ukulele and play more piano, but I couldn't hear a song emerging.
It came on gradually, in layers, with a foxtrot drum part and the sound of thunderstorms, loons, and a barking dog. She played the cello and added haunting vocals.
The lyrics, however -- and even the title -- were a closely kept secret until the final hours of the final day.
And this is it, a song about a London hotel called the Cavendish. A song about some of its guests, like D.H. Lawrence and The Beatles, and of better, simpler times. A wonderful theatrical journey from Nellie McKay -- someone who seems connected with the past and unsure of her present. She knocked me out with her creation.
We've documented the entire creative process, shot by NPR video producers David Gilkey and John Poole.
I came so far for beauty
I left so much behind
My patience and my family
My masterpiece unsigned
I thought I'd be rewarded
For such a lonely choice
And surely she would answer
To such a very hopeless voice
I practiced all my sainthood
I gave to one and all
But the rumours of my virtue
They moved her not at all
I changed my style to silver
I changed my clothed to black
And where I would surrender
Now I would attack
I stormed the old casino
For the money and the flesh
And I myself decided
What was rotten and what was fresh
And men to do my bidding
And broken bones to teach
The value of my pardon
The shadow of my reach
But no, I could not touch her
With such a heavy hand
Her star beyond my order
Her nakedness unmanned
I came so far for beauty
I left so much behind
My patience and my family
My masterpiece unsigned
Edward Yang's final film 'Yi Yi' is a delicate, assured exploration of a year in the life of one Taiwanese family.
March 20, 2011|By Dennis Lim, Special to the Los Angeles Times
A three-hour drama that spans a year in the life of a middle-class Taipei family, Edward Yang's "Yi Yi" (2000) opens with a wedding and closes with a funeral. It's a film that includes a birth and a death and encompasses just about everything in between, from the awkward pangs of first love to the persistent stirrings of middle-aged regret.
Yang's most widely acclaimed film (it won him the best director prize at Cannes), "Yi Yi" turned out also to be his swan song: He died in 2007 at age 59. It still hurts to know that there will never be another Edward Yang film, and it's almost as infuriating that this remains the only one of his seven features available on DVD in the States — the Criterion Collection has just issued a Blu-ray high-definition edition.
Along with Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Yang was a central figure in the New Taiwanese Cinema that emerged in the 1980s, and to those familiar with his earlier films, many of which approached the contradictions of Taiwanese life and history with a mordant humor and anger, the serenity of "Yi Yi" might have suggested the softening of age. But the film has held up extremely well.
A work of remarkable delicacy and assurance, so detailed and fully inhabited that it seems to renew itself and its connection to the viewer with each encounter, it stands today as a reminder not only of Yang's mastery but also of just how few filmmakers possess the wisdom and generosity that humanist cinema of this sort truly requires.
The Jians, the family in "Yi Yi," live in a Taipei high-rise. When the grandmother suffers a stroke, the doctor urges her family members to talk to the comatose woman, a daily ritual that takes on an air of confession and prayer. Compelled to recite the details of her life, her daughter, Min-Min (Elaine Jin), is seized by an existential panic over her monotonous existence ("I live a blank," she wails) and escapes to a spiritual retreat.
At the wedding banquet that opens the film, Min-Min's husband, N.J. (Wu Nien-jen), runs into the lover he left decades ago, and finds himself face-to-face with the missed opportunity that has haunted his entire adult life. Distant and prone to tuning out the world, N.J. is nonetheless an enormously sympathetic presence. Increasingly disillusioned with his job at a computer company, he finds unexpected solace in a potential business partner from Japan, Ota (the great Issey Ogata).
The handful of scenes between these two men are richer than most movies in their entirety — it's one of the film's more resonant ironies that its most direct, profound interactions are between two strangers who communicate only in halting English.
No less than their parents, the Jian children exist in their own private worlds. Teenage Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), who fears her thoughtlessness may be responsible for her grandmother's stroke, strikes up a friendship with a new neighbor and that girl's troubled boyfriend. Eight-year-old Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang), subjected to bullying at school, retreats into his own imagination — and becomes fascinated with photography as a means of better seeing and understanding the world.
Like many filmmakers since Michelangelo Antonioni, Yang favors the default cinematic language of alienation, observing his characters from a distance and framing them in windows and as reflections. But there is never doubting the tenderness and empathy behind the camera. Even as he emphasizes the fundamental loneliness of his characters, Yang doesn't seal them off. Instead he shows that they exist within a generational cycle, a social system, a physical world.
There are traces of autobiography for those inclined to look for them. Like N.J., Yang studied engineering and worked in computer design. But it's little Yang-Yang, cute though never cloying, who emerges as a director surrogate of sorts: a budding artist but more than that, a curious soul, just coming to realize the mysteries of human subjectivity.
There are no easy resolutions in "Yi Yi," which is what makes it at once deeply sad and exhilarating. Among its most clear-eyed insights, the movie shows that the yearning for second chances that defines many a midlife crisis often amounts to a sentimental fantasy. The rare film that can truly be called universal, "Yi Yi" ponders questions that pertain to us all: How did we end up with the lives we have, and how do we accept them, if we choose to do so? More than a movie that stays with you, it's one to live with.
Two for the Road is a 1967 British comedy drama film directed by Stanley Donen about the twelve-year relationship between an architect (Albert Finney) and his wife (Audrey Hepburn). The movie was considered somewhat experimental for its time because the story is told in a non-linear fashion, with scenes from the latter stages of the relationship juxtaposed with those from its beginning, often leaving the viewer to extrapolate what has intervened, which is sometimes revealed in later scenes. The film largely takes place in France, with the central focus of each part being that the couple are travelling to the South of France on a road trip. Several locations are used in different segments, to show continuity throughout the 12-year period. The screenplay, written by Frederic Raphael, was nominated for an Academy Award. The movie was also ranked #57 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Passions.
From Jeff Shannon at Amazon.com:
Best known for light, entertaining musicals such as Singin' in the Rain, director Stanley Donen grew more adventurous (and less successful) in the latter stages of his career, but this edgy romantic comedy from 1967 has proven to be one of Donen's best, most enduring films. Jumping back in forth in time, the film chronicles the marital ups and downs of a stylish British couple (Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn) as they travel on various vacations over the course of their 12-year marriage. The separate vignettes combine to form a collage of joys and pains as the young couple struggles to maintain their fading marital bliss. In this regard, the film is refreshingly sophisticated in its treatment of the difficulties of long-term commitment, and with Hepburn and Finney in the leads, great performances are drawn from the acerbic wit of Frederick Raphael's screenplay. Fashion mavens will also marvel at Hepburn's astonishing wardrobe of late-'60s fashion--she's a showcase for summer couture, looking fantastic in everything from candy-striped bellbottoms to hip sunglasses and outrageously stylish hats. Some of the melodrama clashes with forced comedy (such as tiresome running gags or a cartoonish portrayal of crass American tourists), but that doesn't stop Two for the Road from being timelessly appealing and truthful to the challenge of lasting love. --Jeff Shannon
Video below is Deanna Kamiel's interview of Godard in 1980, at the time of the release of "Every Man for Himself."
GODARD COMEDY, 'EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF'
By VINCENT CANBY
Published: October 8, 1980
IT would be misleading to say that Jean-Luc Godard's brilliant new comedy, ''Every Man for Himself,'' the French title of which is ''Sauve Qui Peut/La Vie,'' is the story of Paul, Denise and Isabelle. Though it's primarily about Paul, Denise and Isabelle, as well as about amorous bellboys, patient pimps, lecherous businessmen, opera singers who won't shut up, modern milkmaids and total strangers, it's not a story in any familiar way. Rather it's about this particular time and place in history as reflected in a series of cockeyed ephiphanies and paradoxes.
Paul (Jacques Dutronc), a shrewd, good-looking young man with a strong sense of style and his own importance, which is paramount, works in a Swiss television station. He is separated from his wife and skeptical, 12-year-old daughter, though they are on speaking terms. Denise (Nathalie Baye), who works with Paul and has been having an intense, quite unsatisfactory affair with him, is thinking about changing her life by a move to the country. The glamour has gone out of television for Denise. There must be more to life than trying to get hold of Marguerite Duras or, as she puts it tersely, ''I want to do things, not just name them.''
Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a country girl with a ravishingly pretty, poker face and the practicality of a peasant, has come to the city to make her living as a prostitute. This is not a fate worse than death for Isabelle, nor is she degraded by her work. She remains removed from it. In the way of a registered nurse, she's efficient and cool in every emergency.
Though Paul has his job as an anchor, he is without essential aims. He's drifting. Denise is restless, but has no clear notion how to improve things except to get up and move. Isabelle saves her money and, you suspect, she'll one day open a beauty parlor or a boutique. In the meantime, she hasn't the leisure to be happy or unhappy.
In the course of ''Every Man for Himself,'' whose English title was ''Slow Motion'' when it was shown at Cannes this year, Paul, Denise and Isabelle meet and, in various combinations, talk, argue, observe and make love, then separate. There are no thunderous emotional confrontations, but, by the end of the film, one's perceptions have been so enriched, so sharpened, that one comes out of it invigorated. ''Every Man for Himself'' leaves you with a renewed awareness of how a fine movie can clear away the detritus that collects in a mind subjected to endless invasions by cliches and platitudes and movies that fearlessly champion the safe or obvious position. It's a tonic.
At one point in the movie, the introspective Denise writes in her journal, ''Something in the body arches its back against boredom and aimlessness,'' which is what Mr. Godard seems to do instinctively when he starts to make a movie. No matter how outrageous some of his public statements about film making and film makers, he swoops and soars above and around his subjects with a grace that defies analysis. It's simply what he does, and does better than anyone else of his generation.
''Every Man for Himself,'' his first theatrical film since ''Tout Va Bien'' in 1971, recalls the greatest of his ''prerevolutionary'' films of the 60's -''Pierrot Le Fou,'' ''Vivra Sa Vie'' and ''Weekend,'' and, being so completely controlled and disciplined, it may even be more effectively revolutionary than his Maoist movies. Dialetics on the soundtrack can be tuned out. When they are in the images, they pass directly into one's memory bank.
There's not a banal shot or a predictable moment in the film, which has an effect similar to that of poetry or good prose. It invites one to respond to familiar sights and sounds as if coming upon them for the first time. Watching the film is a process of discovery, sometimes funny, sometimes scary.
Though the three principals are given more or less equal time, Isabelle is clearly the film's focal point, whether she is participating in an elaborately choreographed foursome that suggests a Rube Goldberg contraption designed to make sex simple, or being kidnapped by her pimp, who must teach her a lesson. Isabelle has been holding out on him. The pimp is not cruel, but he is firm. As he spanks her in the back seat of his limousine he makes her repeat after him, ''Nobody is independent, not whores, not typists, not duchesses, not servants, not champion tennis players.''
Later, when Isabelle's young sister decides to turn tricks, Isabelle gives her pointers in return for 50 percent of the take. Individual images as well as entire sequences are dense with detail. A bit of random violence seen in the background while Denise waits in a train station puts her restlessness into perspective. Without seemingly being aware of it, the movie conveys a terrific feeling of loss, of something gone forever, in Paul's relationship with his daughter. The film is not ''about'' fathers and daughters, but what it says, in passing, is more disturbing than some entire novels.
The film is unsually beautiful without being pretty; its style detached, except for those moments when the director calls attention to a look or a gesture through the use of stop-motion. Even then, it's not as if Mr. Godard were telling us what to think, but, rather, suggesting that we consider the possibilities. In this fashion each embrace of Paul and Denise - slowed down as a rapid succession of still photographs -becomes a possibly fatal collision. It's no wonder they're breaking up.
The actors are so much a part of the texture of the film that they can't be easily separated as performers' performances. ''Every Man for Himself'' is a single seamless endeavor, a stunning, original work about which there is still a lot to say, but there's time. I trust it will outlive us all.
Three Drifting People
EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF (Sauve Qui Peut/La Vie), directed by Jean-Luc Godard; screenplay (French with English subtitles) by Jean-Claude Carriere and Anne Marie Mieville; photography by William Lubchansky and Renato Berta; music by Gabriel Yared; edited by Anne Marie Mieville and Mr. Godard; produced by Alain Sarde and Mr. Godard; A Zoetrope Studio release; distributed by New Yorker Films. Running time: 87 minutes. This film is not rated.
Isabelle Riviere . . . . . Isabelle Huppert
Paul Godard . . . . . Jacques Dutronc
Denise Rimbaud . . . . . Nathalie Baye
Second Costumer . . . . . Roland Amstutz
Isabelle's Sister . . . . . Anna Baldaccini
First Costumer . . . . . Fred Personne
Woman . . . . . Nicole Jacquet
Elevator Attendent . . . . . Dore de Rosa
Opera Singer . . . . . Monique Barscha
Paul's Daughter . . . . . Cecile Tanner
Paul's Former Wife . . . . . Paule Muret
Piaget . . . . . Michel Cassagne
While Provencal cooking enraptures poet and traveler alike, it does not put on airs. Indeed, from the Alps to the Mediterranean it is often dubbed the "poor man's cuisine." This is exactly what gives it strength and imagination. Other regions of France possess more obvious wealth and traditions, and to the eyes of the world are seen as the culinary power brokers and custodians of the science of taste. They will keep you at the table for hours. Here, impetuous winds (the mistral off the water and the tramontana from the north), a burning sun, dry earth and the brisk, choppy sea have dictated other, more immediate rituals and knowledge.
Provence, before it became a pacific territory to be conquered only by the tourist, experienced much unhappiness and many invasions in the course of its history. It learned from such excursions to nourish its men and women to live long and to live on little.
Featuring olive oil and the combined herbs and produce of the south of France, this one-dish country dinner will transport you to a café table in Aix in a heartbeat.
ingredients
1 pound tomatoes (3 to 4 medium), cut into wedges
1 large onion, cut into wedges, leaving root ends intact
1/2 cup drained brine-cured black olives, pitted if desired
4 large garlic cloves, sliced, plus 1 teaspoon minced
3 tablespoons olive oil, divided
2 teaspoons herbes de Provence, divided
1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 whole chicken (about 3 1/2 pounds)
Equipment:
Equipment: kitchen string
Accompaniment: crusty bread
Garnish: chopped flat-leaf parsley
preparation
Preheat convection oven to 400°F for regular oven to 425°F with rack in middle.
Toss together tomatoes, onion, olives, sliced garlic, 2 tablespoons oil, 1 teaspoon herbes de Provence, fennel seeds, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper in a 13- by 9-inch or other 3-quart shallow baking dish. Push vegetables to sides of dish to make room for chicken.
Stir together minced garlic, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper, remaining teaspoon herbes de Provence, and remaining tablespoon olive oil.
Remove excess fat from chicken and pat dry, then rub inside and out with seasoning mixture. Tie legs together with string, then put chicken in baking dish.
Roast until an instant-read thermometer inserted into thickest part of a thigh (do not touch bone) registers 170°F, about 1 hour in convection oven; 1 to 1 1/4 hours in regular oven.
Let chicken stand 10 minutes before carving. Serve with vegetables and pan juices.
Notes:
- I never use canned olives.
- You can use commercially-prepared herbes de provence (Cost Plus World Market has them), but according to Richard Olney, these usually contain too many herbs, including rosemary, lavender and sage. For Olney, a good mixture is composed of thyme, oregano, savory and marjoram, in descending proportions.
L'année dernière à Marienbad - Alain Resnais (1961)
Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais' epochal Last Year at Marienbad (L'année dernière à Marienbad) has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. Written by radical master of the New Novel Alain Robbe-Grillet, this surreal fever dream, or nightmare, gorgeously fuses the past with the present in telling its ambiguous tale of a man and a woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) who may or may not have met a year ago, perhaps at the very same cathedral-like, mirror-filled château they now find themselves wandering. Unforgettable in both its confounding details (gilded ceilings, diabolical parlor games, a loaded gun) and haunting scope, Resnais' investigation into the nature of memory is disturbing, romantic, and maybe even a ghost story.
available on Amazon. 
(2000) opens with a wedding and closes with a funeral. It's a film that includes a birth and a death and encompasses just about everything in between, from the awkward pangs of first love to the persistent stirrings of middle-aged regret.
" tries to answer this question.
