Art History

Jack Lemmon in The Apartment. 1960. USA. Directed by Billy Wilder These notes accompany screenings of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment on June 19, 20, and 21 in Theater 3. The Apartment won three Oscars for Billy Wilder as producer, director, and co-screenwriter. It is hard to recall a film so honored that is also so cynical (spoiler alert: in spite of its over-the-top romantic ending) or so lacking in visual elegance—both of which are typically valid criticisms of Wilder’s work. The Motion Picture Academy could have recognized the genius of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho that year, or even sprawling epics like Otto Preminger’s Exodus or Elia Kazan’s Wild River, but The Apartment seemed to have touched a contemporary, and possibly raw, nerve. Like the New Wave directors in France at the time, Wilder allows himself a few in-jokes: evoking his earlier Oscar-winning The Lost Weekend; poking fun at Marilyn Monroe (star of his recent The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot), whom he had come to dislike and who is embodied here by a look-alike/impersonator (Joyce Jameson); and mocking television’s destruction of classic movies (Grand Hotel, Stagecoach) with crappy reception and endless commercials. As always, Wilder presents all this with a subversive edginess. Bertrand Tavernier, the French director of The Clockmaker and ‘Round Midnight, succeeded the Godard/Truffaut/Chabrol/Rivette/Rohmer generation at Cahiers du Cinéma. He said recently: “The auteur theory is still working, but it has been caricatured. It was saying that within the best films of a director…you have an author…where he really had a chance of expressing his ideas. But the notion then came that the people working round him are less important. This is a mistake! This is a mistake!” Wilder is a particularly good example for making Tavernier’s point. Romanian-born I. A. L. Diamond began writing (or co-writing) Wilder’s films with Love in the Afternoon, and from that point they collaborated on all of them (with the lone exception of 1957′s Witness for the Prosecution) until the end of their respective careers. Diamond, almost a generation younger than Wilder, shared the director’s cynical subversiveness, and it is hard to find a director/writer duo as compatible in Hollywood history, except possibly for Josef von Sternberg and Jules Furthman—or Charles Chaplin and himself. Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment. 1960. USA. Directed by Billy Wilder In The Apartment, Fred MacMurray’s unsympathetic character is the head of a gigantic insurance company. Paul Douglas, originally cast in the role, died, and one can’t resist the idea that Wilder thought of MacMurray because he had played a shady insurance man in the director’s excellent melodrama Double Indemnity (1944). Wilder would also use Shirley MacLaine again in Irma La Douce. Jack Lemmon, of course, was a Wilder regular. It can be argued that, with The Apartment, Lemmon’s lightweight comedy persona began a progression into the serious actor of Days of Wine and Roses, Save the Tiger (for which he won an Oscar), and That’s Life. (Of course, he would still be hysterically funny in Blake Edwards’s The Great Race, Gene Saks’s The Odd Couple, and Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie and Avanti!). Some years ago, I contemplated doing a book on directors born (like Wilder) in or near Vienna, of which there were a disproportionate number. Most of them were Jewish, and they lent to the American cinema both genius and a diaspora-based questioning of conventional Anglo-Saxon values and sexual mores. In the silent era, the films of Erich von Stroheim (who would later star in Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo and Sunset Boulevard) not-so-subtly hinted at a kinkiness that the likes of a Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann would have called “anti-American.” In the 1930s, the Viennese-born Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich minced no images. In my monograph on Dietrich, I point out that in The Scarlet Empress, the rout

Detective Inspector John Rebus is the star of the excellent detective novels created by the Scottish writer Ian Rankin. Did the inspector ever realise what his surname meant?King’s College Cambridge found books of riddles and word puzzles that were published in the C16th e.g A Little Book of Riddles (1656). Anagrams and acrostics appeared in books and even high-brow literary journals got involved. Famous writers, poets and statesman such as Jonathan Swift, David Garrick, Horatio Walpole and William Cowper created puzzles for their own entertainment and the amusement of their clever contemporaries.Jacob Levernier described visual puns, rebuses and codes in late medieval art where “a good pun was its own reword.” Evidence for patrons’ interest could be found in images that drew on witty and often scholarly word play. Creative homonyms and lively rebuses appeared in sculpture, painting and archit­ecture. But Lever­nier was specifically interested in studies that were applied to sculpture whose imagery and message could be correlated to their architectural space.So what was a rebus? It was a visual pun or allusional device that used pictures to represent words, and especially parts of words. It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used from the late C15th to denote surnames. The ex­ample that most appealed was the rebus of Bishop Walter Lyhart of Nor­w­ich, con­sisting of a stag/hart lying down in water. “Hart” and “lying down” together represented Lyhart.Sir Ralph Shelton's rebus in NorfolkSir Ralph Shelton rebuilt the church at Shelton in Norfolk and in his will of 1497, he asked that his personal devices appear on every roof corbel and niche, as well as the nave aisle windows. The rebus used an "R" plus a "shell" plus a "tun/barrel", together representing the patron of the church: R. SheltonThe rebus alluded to the name, profession or personality of the bearer, and said in Latin Non verbis, sed rebus i.e not by words but by objects. Of all professions, rebuses were most popular amongst churchmen. John Goodall gave the example of John Islip, Abbot of Westminster (1500-53) whose rebus showed an “eye” with a man “slipping” from a tree. There were many sculpted “owl” rebuses on the walls, ceiling and tomb in the chantry chapel of Bishop Oldham (d1519), in Exeter Cathedral. Some versions had the word “dom” on a scroll hanging from the owl’s mouth, just in case the viewer needed help in being to read the bishop’s surname. Canting arms were heraldic bearings that represented the bear­er's name in a visual pun or rebus eg for Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the arms contained images of “bows” and of “lions”. But a family might have a rebus as a personal identification device, entirely separate from the family’s formal armorials. For example in the mid C16th Sir Richard Weston’s arms used: Ermine, on a chief azure five bezants. His rebus, on the other hand, was a “tun” i.e a barrel, used to designate the last syllable of his surname. It was displayed on terracotta plaques on his Surrey mansion.I presume that only the wealthy would require architectural sculpture carved on the front of their homes, and only the very literate would be interested in esoteric word games using three languages – Latin, French and English. The rebus might have been a common literary form of the age but Nils Thomasson published his book in 1661 that set out the rules for creating rebuses. Most importantly, a picture of an object could not be used to represent that word, since that took no intelligence to decipher at allThe V & A Museum has a modern example of a book plate. This C19th rebus, consisting of “trees” and “bees” was a simple rendition of the author's name Ashbee.**In 2007, the author Ian Rankin appeared in an BBC Four series, exploring the origins of his famous character, Inspector John Rebus. Called Ian Rankin's Hidden Edinburgh, Rankin looked at the origins of the character and the events that led to his creation. I would be keen to know if Rankin d

MoMA Studio: Exchange Café furniture by Caroline Woolard. Photo by Ryan Tempro When I was asked to propose a new learning format to MoMA, I suggested a café because I wanted to create a social space where meaning is made in dialogue, where objects can be touched, and where visceral knowledge is honored. Exchange Café is a social space dedicated to exchange, from unconventional encounters to barter and reciprocal economies. What follows is an explanation of some principles of the café, and the ways in which these principles could be extended toward a more engaging visitor experience at MoMA. Tychist Baker and Lauren Melodia of Milk Not Jails. Photo courtesy of Milk Not Jails 1. Waitstaff as Educators At MoMA Studio: Exchange Café, visitors are greeted by waitstaff with direct experience working in, with, and for solidarity economies. Educators are waitstaff with lifelong commitments to the topics at hand—Exchange Café waitstaff Lauren Melodia and Tychist Baker are organizers for Milk Not Jails; Kenneth Edusei is an organizer for participatory budgeting in Brooklyn; and Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Forest Purnell, and Carla Aspenberg are artists engaged in practices of reciprocity. Education happens in lived experience, through dialogue that connects artworks to activism and community organizing. Imagine that every time you walked into MoMA, you could elect to speak to a community organizer about the relationship between real-time organizing and the issues at stake in the artworks on view. Imagine if the interns, fabricators, and artists who made work could be hired as stewards for the work while it was on view, talking to the public about the construction, materials, and dialogue surrounding the work itself. 2. Education through Dialogue “Because the nature of Dialogue is exploratory, its meaning and its methods continue to unfold. No firm rules can be laid down for conducting a Dialogue because its essence is learning—not as the result of consuming a body of information or doctrine imparted by an authority, nor as a means of examining or criticizing a particular theory or programme, but rather as part of an unfolding process of creative participation between peers.” – David Bohm, “Dialogue: A Proposal” Exchange Café takes the social format of a café, taking the embodied roles and rules of a café as a space for learning. Greeted by waitstaff with direct experience in the topics at hand, visitors are led to consider artworks that focus on one-to-one agreements, artists who facilitate engagement in short-term encounters or long-term relationships of reciprocity. On the Exchange Café wall, the Exchange Archive acts as an emergent publication about one-on-one engagement, inviting contributions from the public. From artists who facilitate unconventional dialogue to artists who consider the barter of goods and services (the labor of producing a project) as integral to the meaning of the work, the Exchange Archive makes legible a desire for one-on-one interaction in MoMA’s collection and beyond. For example, Huong Ngo, Or Zubalsky, and George Monteleone’s ongoing project, the Dream Machine, asks anyone to “call the dream machine (1-877-877-5602) and leave a voice recording of your dream. It calls you back in about 15 minutes and plays a random dream from its memory.” Impossible to experience without a contribution, this project represents a network of anonymous reciprocity. Online, TheExchangeArchive.com (made by the MultiAgency Collective and myself) shows connections between projects, artists, and ideas, revealing the ways in which artworks emerge in dialogue between people, not in solitary isolation. As we state: Artists do not create work in a vacuum. Artists work in a dialogue with other people, so the Exchange Archive supports further artistic dialogue by showing the inspirations that flow between projects. As a research database for projects about exchange, the online archive serves as a foo

The 2012 Kochi-Muziris Biennale Having never visited a biennial—a fancy name for a recurring exhibition that explores the state of contemporary art—I had always been curious about this art-world phenomenon that has populated almost every nook and cranny of the globe since the first Venice Biennale in 1895. So a press release announcing India’s first biennial, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, caught my eye. What, I wondered, had brought this biennial into being? MoMA’s 12-Month Internship Program enabled me to turn my musings into a travel itinerary. I was bound for Kochi, a coastal city in Kerala, and then to Mumbai, where I hoped to deepen my understanding of India’s contemporary art scene. Amar Kanwar. The Sovereign Forest. 2010–ongoing. Multiple mediums. Installation view, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, December 12, 2012–March 17, 2013 Before embarking on my art adventure, I had doubted whether Kochi’s Biennale could fulfill the ambitions of its curators, Kerala-born artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, who proposed to “rewrite history” through Kochi—intending the Biennale itself to serve as a tool for opening “a new discourse…a new, hitherto unknown language of narration.” But my doubts dissipated soon after I arrived in Kochi. Unlike conventional exhibitions, biennials spread throughout their host location, becoming as much about that place as about the art exhibited there. And as places go, Kochi is rather special. The center of India’s spice trade from the 14th century onwards, today Kochi is a heady mix of Chinese fishing nets, industrial tankers, synagogues, mosques, and churches. Add to this Kerala’s socialist backdrop and educated population—Kerala boasts India’s highest literacy rate—and you have a highly switched-on exhibition context. In order to activate that context, the curators handpicked 94 artists from 23 countries to respond to Kochi. Among the many thought-provoking results, I was particularly impressed by two works that really brought Kochi’s charged situation to life. Combining rural film footage and native rice grains with hand-bound books filled with names and suicide dates, Amar Kanwar’s installation The Sovereign Forest (2010–ongoing) documents the plight of India’s farmers in the face of corporate land-grabbing. As my own reaction to the work moved from visual to emotional, I thought how relevant its core issues—possession and exploitation—were to the exhibition site itself; Aspinwall House, a warehouse complex that had never before been open to the public, was owned by an English trading company during the British Raj. Sheela Gowda. Stopover. 2012. Grinding stones. Installation view, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, December 12, 2012–March 17, 2013 Sheela Gowda’s Stopover (2012) consisted of 170 grinding stones—an Indian kitchen essential before electrical appliances—trailed across a disused Aspinwall House storeroom and onto a crumbling jetty. As I picked my way across this object graveyard, I noticed how calm the surrounding waters, once so frenzied with trade, are today. The stones’ gathering seemed to parallel the Biennale’s resuscitation of Kochi, a place whose use value isn’t quite what it once was. Presented in different contexts, both the stones and Kochi, I hoped, could take on new meanings—and new life. On my last day in Kochi, I met with co-curator Riyas Komu to discuss all things biennial. During our conversation, I was struck by his explanation of India’s need to hold this exhibition, specifically in Kochi. “Here,” he told me, “we are the museum.” It wasn’t until I arrived in Mumbai that this began to make sense. Though Mumbai houses several museums, their missions are heritage-driven, and none is exclusively dedicated to cutting-edge international art. This has forced other players in Mumbai’s art world to evolve in unusual ways. Commercial galleries behave like nonprofit spaces, exhibiting daring programming. During my visit, Gallery M

I read Mark Tedeschi’s book Eugenia Falleni: a true story of adversity, tragedy, crime and courage (published by Simon & Schuster, 2012) in two nights. The story is indeed tragic, but mesmerising in a car-crash sort of way. And I did not even mind the element of creative non-fiction - that is, while the evidence was based on official court records, the conversations were based on what might have been said.Born near Livorno, Eugenia Falleni was the eldest of an extremely large Italian family. She migrated with the family to New Zealand in c1877 as a toddler, where her father became a labourer and horseman. From a very early age, Eugenia knew with 100% certainty that she was meant to be a boy; she wanted to work in physically demanding jobs, including in brickyards. In a horrible attempt to normalise her, the father married her off to an older Italian man in Wellington; fortunately she escaped him.Her conservative Italian parents were disgusted with Eugenia’s behaviour and cut her off from family ties. This was the beginning of a life of secrecy and loneliness.Eugenia/Eugene was happiest when she became a full time male and joined a trading boat as a seaman. Only after a few years on the boat did the Italian captain accidentally twig to Eugene’s true identity. As a result Eugene soon found himself tormented by the other crew members and the victim of repeated, brutal rapes by the ship's captain.Eugene was dumped in a rural city in Australia, pregnant and without a cent. The baby Josephine Falleni was born in Sydney, and put into the care of an Italian family.Eugene now took on a new male identity as Harry Crawford. After a series of working class jobs in pubs and factories, in 1912 Harry started to work for a doctor in an affluent Northern Sydney suburb, responsible for the doctor’s horses and carriages. It was there what he met the doctor’s lovely young housekeeper Annie Birkett, a woman who had been widowed and left with a beloved young son to support. In Feb 1913 after knowing each other for only a short time, Crawford and Annie were married in church in Balmain. book cover of Eugenia Falleni, by Mark TedeschiSoon after their marriage the couple moved to Balmain where Annie ran a lolly shop. Although their sex life seemed a bit limited and their arguments not infrequent, Annie was a happy wife. She no idea that her husband was a biological woman, and the publicans at the hotel where Crawford worked also believed he was a man.In 1917 Annie heard about her husband’s true gender from a neighbour. She confronted Harry but he fudged the topic, fearing that Annie would go to the authorities. Worse, Annie decided to leave the marriage by having it annulled, whilst Harry desperately wanted the marriage to continue.By October of the same year Annie suggested that the two of them have a picnic near Lane Cove River, to clarify their impasse. According to Harry's later evidence, the two of them had a fight because Annie stated that the marriage was definitely over. Apparently Annie accidentally slipped and fell backwards; she hit her head on a rock and he could not revive her.Harry was in a total panic and as there was no-one else around in the picnic ground, Harry made the ridiculous decision to burn his wife’s body. He left it in open view but made sure it was unidentifiable. Naturally Annie's body was discovered within days, complete with cracks to the skull, but as the police could not discover the body’s identity, she was buried in a pauper's grave. When Annie's son asked Harry about his beloved mother, Harry replied that she had run off with another man.The tragedy might have made him wary about remarrying, but apparently not. In 1919 Harry met the middle-aged spinster Lizzie Allison and fell in love. They married in September 1919 with Harry recording himself as a bachelor on the wedding certificate. He continued to work in a hotel.In 1920 after not having any message from his mother, Annie's son had alerted the police to his mot

A cursory glance, or even lengthy stare directed towards a painting sometimes does not seem enough. During my visit to Rome in late 2012, I was enchanted by the three major Raphael panels on display in the Pinacoteca Vaticana. The Madonna di Foligno contains many fascinating details - from its cherubic clouds to unique depiction of a Renaissance astronomical event. The following post explores some of these details. Read more »

On any given day, The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Print Room may be full of studio art students viewing contemporary screenprints, art history students researching works for their term papers, or curators from other institutions planning exhibitions. Every now and then, though, it is visited by scholars whose primary interest is not art, but literature. This is often the case with our collection of Russian avant-garde books from the first half of the 20th century—a gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation in 2001—which is often consulted by scholars of Slavic and Eastern European studies, in addition to art historians. The Department of Prints and Illustrated Books has recently acquired five books written and designed by Hungarian authors and artists that complement and expand on our collection of Russian books. The books were published over a four-year span from 1921 to 1925 and are testaments to a tumultuous period in Hungarian history, during which ruling regimes rose and fell at a quick pace as the country’s government transformed from a monarchy to a socialist state. Russia was experiencing a similar period of ideological revolution and during these years Russian artists came to commingle with Hungarian expatriates, along with other proponents of avant-garde ideas, in various European capitals. From left: Alexander (Sándor) Bortnyik. Világanyám: összes versei. Elso könyv 1915 (The world, my mother: poems. First book 1915) by Lajos Kassák. 1921; Alexander (Sándor) Bortnyik. Novelláskönyv. Válogatott novellák 1911–1919 (Short story book: selected short stories 1911–1919) by Lajos Kassák. 1921 The first two books are by the author, poet, and art critic Lajos Kassák and were published in Vienna in 1921. Kassák had edited a variety of journals (political, literary, and artistic in nature) in Budapest since 1915. In 1920, after being imprisoned by the government for many months, Kassák escaped the country as did many of his compatriots. While other artists like László Moholy-Nagy fled to Berlin, Kassák established himself in Vienna. Ödön Palasovsky and Iván Hevesy. Manifesztum, 1922, A milliók kultúráját, Új muvészetet , Le a penész virággal (Manifesto, 1922, Millions Culture!, New Art!, Brake the Mold!). 1922 Prior to this emigration, Hungarian artists had been rather insular, though aware of German Expressionism through journals like Der Sturm and of artwork by their Soviet counterparts. The expatriation of Hungary’s artists exposed them to other avant-garde movements and more contemporary developments from Western Europe. Although there are many formal similarities between Russian Constructivism, which upheld art as a vehicle for political ideology, and its Hungarian counterpart Activism, they were theoretically very different—at least according to Kassák, who believed art to be autonomous of political engagement and both eternal and universal in constitution. The covers of these two books were designed by Sándor Bortnyik, an artist in Kassák’s circle. Both feature a combination of brightly colored backgrounds over which text and architectonic shapes are arranged in a dynamic fashion. In the early 1920s, many authors and artists, including Moholy-Nagy, published manifestos connecting political thought and artistic activity. This recently acquired manifesto (at right) was written by Iván Hevesy, a photographer and film critic, along with artist Ödön Palasovsky. Hevesy wrote many articles for Kassák’s journal Ma. Unlike the others, he remained in Budapest, where the book was published in 1922. From left: Alexander (Sándor) Bortnyik. A partok elindulnak (The shores heading out) by Aladár Tamás. 1925; Lajos Kassák. A partok elindulnak (The shores heading out) by Aladár Tamás. 1925 The books illustrated above are the same text, one designed by Bortnyik and one by Kassák himself. After years as an art critic, Kassák began creating his own artwork around 1921. The author, Aladár Tamás, was a writer, poet, and editor who founded

Cover of the exhibition catalogue Ellsworth Kelly: Chatham Series, published by The Museum of Modern Art The iconic American artist Ellsworth Kelly celebrated his 90 birthday on May 31, and in his honor, MoMA has reunited the 14 ell-shaped paintings of his seminal Chatham Series for the first time since they were originally exhibited in 1972. Though it is whimsical to think that the ell-shaped canvases were chosen as an ode to ELLsworth kELLy’s big day, the paintings are considered to be among Kelly’s greatest contributions to abstract art. Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture Ann Temkin details the fascinating story behind the series in MoMA’s new book, Ellsworth Kelly: Chatham Series. In 1970, Kelly decided to leave New York City, where he had been living and working since the 1950s, for a more rural environment. After a period of exploratory road trips, he settled in Spencertown, two hours north of Manhattan, and established a studio in the nearby town of Chatham. This newfound location proved to be an important influence in Kelly’s artistic development, serving as an inspiration for his work. Kelly’s studio in Chatham was in a 19th-century brick building featuring nearly 12-foot-tall windows along its upper floor. After spying the striking windows from the sidewalk while exploring the town, Kelly entered the barber shop on the ground floor of the building to inquire about the space and learned that, after stints as an opera house, banquet hall, roller rink, and more, it was functioning as a storage space, holding the town’s Christmas lights. The barber and a neighboring shopkeeper co-owned the space, and they agreed to rent it out to Kelly for $50 a month. The space was far more spacious than any studio Kelly has previous occupied, and the isolated location allowed him to explore his ideas without external influence. Ellsworth Kelly outside his studio, 13 Main Street, Chatham, 1970 After a year of transforming and customizing the space for his needs, Kelly began work on the first series he would produce there in 1971. Each of the 14 large-scale paintings in the Chatham series are made of two monochromatic canvases that are joined together at a right angle, yet no two are the same, allowing the artist to experiment with color and proportion. Temkins’s essay provides an in-depth exploration of the various aspects of this iconic series, including scale, process, and the reception the Chatham Series received when it was first exhibited to the public at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, in 1972. Ellsworth Kelly’s studio, Chatham, New York, 1972 The paintings now belong to 14 different collections, but Ellsworth Kelly: Chatham Series brings them back together for the first time since their debut so museumgoers and readers alike can explore one of Kelly’s most significant achievements in its entirety. For more on the series, download a free PDF sample of the exhibition catalogue for an excerpt from the essay. The book also features as essay by the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery that accompanied the first exhibition of the series, vibrant reproductions of each of the 14 paintings, additional illustrations including vintage photographs of Kelly’s studio, and much more.

Paris Belongs to Us. 1961. France. Directed by Jacques Rivette These notes accompany screenings of Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us on June 12, 13, and 14 in Theater 3. Jacques Rivette, who recently celebrated his 85th birthday—and is still active—seems to me to be one of the most uneven, and certainly less prolific, of the major figures to come out of the French New Wave. Both he and Eric Rohmer started earlier than the rest of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd, making several shorts beginning in the late 1940s, but Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us) was Rivette’s first feature. Like some of his later films, it can be accused of being too long, one of a number of reasons Rivette is often viewed as an acquired taste. (Celine and Julie Go Boating was well over three hours, L’Amour Fou was over four, and Out One: Spectre was cut to a similar length from its original 13 hours; Rivette’s second feature and most commercial project, La Religieuse, an adaptation of Diderot’s novel starring Anna Karina, ran a mere 135 minutes.) A few years after André Bazin’s death, Rivette replaced him as editor of Cahiers—Rohmer was Bazin’s immediate successor before leaving for political differences—and it is probably fair to say that Rivette’s films remained mostly loyal to Bazin’s original radical vision of what movies should be (although Rivette disparaged the concept of auteurism). This was something of a turnabout from the director’s early admiration for the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Robert Aldrich, and Fritz Lang (from whom Rivette borrows a sequence from Metropolis for Paris Belongs to Us), among others. Francois Truffaut, who mostly shed his radicalism for commercial respectability (albeit with more than a touch of genius) wrote to Jean Renoir, his mentor and that of Rivette, in 1960: “All of us at Cahiers…are so shocked by the gap between our ideas as cinephiles and our discoveries as film-makers that we don’t dare write anything any more.” Paris Belongs to Us. 1961. France. Directed by Jacques Rivette Like Claude Chabrol, Rivette was the product of a family of provincial pharmacists, and like so many of his New Wave colleagues, he moved to Paris and became a protégé of Henri Langois at the Cinematheque Francaise. He worked for Renoir on French Cancan (which we are screening once again on September 15), and 12 years later he made a lengthy television documentary on the master. Paris Belongs to Us was originally intended as a script for Roberto Rossellini, and it took Rivette four years to direct it himself and get it released. He was able to finish it with help from Truffaut and Chabrol, who attained acclaim at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. Upon viewing the film, one will certainly appreciate some of the complexities of getting it made—and of the director’s mind, as reflected in his subsequent work. In spite of intermittent raves from prominent critics, Rivette’s films have not had much international commercial success outside of occasional breakthroughs on the festival circuit. This has tended to blight his ability to finance his films (unlike Jean-Luc Godard, whose work has been similarly oblique since the heyday of the 1960s, when he seemed to make more of an effort to please audiences). Rivette was only able to make five features in the 1980s, seven in the 1990s, and four in the 21st century. In a sense, Rivette’s choices have sometimes seemed perverse. Paris Belongs to Us, for example, is based in an unsuccessful attempt to stage Shakespeare’s Pericles, hardly the Bard’s biggest box-office draw, presaging Rivette’s own future struggles to realize his projects, however visionary and unique. Yet the distinguished American critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, comparing the film with the first works of Chabrol, Truffaut, and Godard, calls it “the most intellectually and philosophically mature, and one of the most beautiful.”

The book London Bridge in America: The Tall Story of a Transatlantic Crossing was written by Travis Elborough and published by Jonathan Cape in Feb 2013. There are three separate themes in the book that come roughly in ch­ronological order: the C19th bridge built in London, its improb­ab­le sale to the USA and the movement of world power out of Britain and into the USA.The famous Medieval London Bridge, built in the late C12th, had to be replaced. In 1799 a competition for designs to replace the old bridge was held. The Scottish engineer John Rennie won the compet­ition with a classical design of five granite arches. It was built only 30 m from the site of the first London Bridge and was supervised by the engine­er’s own son. Work began in 1824. The old bridge continued to carry traffic in the meantime, and was not pulled down until the new bridge was opened.The official opening of the new 283 m long and 15 m wide London Bridge took place in August 1831, in front of King William IV. The total costs, which were huge, were shared by the British Government and the London city council.The book suggested that the bridge was somewhat inadequate for the traffic it needed to carry almost immediately and by the end of the C19th, it was totally inadequate. People were flooding into the City to work; trains transported commuters to London Bridge Station; carriages, bikes and later cars were everywhere.London Bridge over the ThamesLate 19th century, overloaded, brown, built upPhoto credit: transpress nzAnd there was a second dilemma. The bridge was sinking and the east side was sinking lower than the west side. Even though the bridge was widened and strengthened just after King Edward VII was crowned, it would eventually have to be removed and replaced.The stroke of genius was in not destroying the bridge, but in selling it on. One London City councillor, Ivan Luckin, was the brain in question. He marketed the bridge as a symbol of historic London, a feat of engineering that could trace its lineage back to its medieval ancestor and even earlier. Were the American buyers really conned into thinking the 1830s bridge was medieval? Did they believe they were actually buying the much more impressive and iconic Tower Bridge? Elborough says no to both questions. The American buyers of the rather boring London Bridge knew exactly what they were getting, but they were swayed along in a mist of history and symbolism.It was actually a meeting of the minds. Motor and aircraft entre­pren­eur Robert Paxton McCulloch (1911–1977) was the key man in the creation of a new city on Lake Havasu in the Arizonan desert in the early 1960s. And it was McCulloch who decided that his new city needed something significant to make people take notice. The Statue of Liberty was not going to be moved from New York and San Fran­cisco’s Golden Gate was firmly in place. But New London Bridge was actually available!People may well laugh at Robert McCulloch, but who would have heard of Lake Havasu City, had he not made the winning bid of $2,460,000 in April 1968? Each block was carefully numbered before the bridge was disassembled. The blocks were then shipped across the ocean via the Panama Canal to California, then packed into trucks and driven from California to Arizona. Following reconstruction of New London Bridge, Lake Havasu City re-d­edicated it in a lavish and well publicised ceremony in October 1971. London Bridge, Lake Havasu City, Arizonaleisurely, palm trees, blue1971The Guardian noted that the opening ceremony in Arizona was attended by London's lord mayor and local dignitaries, who feasted on American seafood and Cornish pasties, and were entertained in the sweltering desert heat by Pearly Kings and Queens and madrigal singers, with the recorded chimes of Big Ben in the background. London truly had arrived in the USA. Today visitors to Lake Havasu City (pop 53,000) can go to the London Bridge Resort, see the dragon symbol of the City of London, fly British fla