The Invisible Man, 1933
film The first time Claude Rains' daughter ever saw
her father in a movie was in 1950, when he took her to a showing of 'The
Invisible Man' in a small Pennsylvanian theater. While the film was playing, Rains was telling
his daughter all about how it was made. The other theater patrons stopped watching the
movie and instead listened to Rains' anecdotes.
In order to achieve the effect that Claude Rains wasn't there
when his character took off the bandages, James Whale had Rains
dressed completely in black velvet and filmed him in front of a black velvet
background. When
screenwriter R.C. Sherriff came
to Hollywood to write this film, he asked the staff at Universal for a copy of
the H.G. Wells novel
he was supposed to be adapting. They
didn't have one; all they had were 14 "treatments" done by previous
writers on the project, including one set in Czarist Russia and another set on
Mars. Sherriff eventually found a copy
of the novel in a secondhand bookstore, read it, thought it would make an
excellent picture as it stood, and wrote a script that, unlike
Universal's Dracula (1931)
and Frankenstein (1931),
was a closer adaptation of the book. This was fortunate, in that Wells had
negotiated script approval when he sold the rights. Boris
Karloff had been Universal's original choice for the role of the
Invisible Man. Said to have turned it
down because he would not be seen on screen until the end, in reality a quarrel
with director James Whale broke
up their relationship, and the director decided he wanted someone with more of
an "intellectual" voice than Karloff. All of a sudden, his marked lisp had become an
issue. Whale selected Claude Rains after
accidentally hearing Rains' screen test being played in another room--until
this film, Rains had primarily been a stage actor. Although he had appeared in one silent movie (Build Thy House (1920)),
this was his first sound film. Although he has the lead in the film and his character is
onscreen for 95% of the film, Claude
Rains never actually "appears" onscreen until the very last
moment. The basic
framework of the story and the characters' names are largely the same as
in H.G. Wells' novel,
but there are several great differences, including: The novel takes place in the 1890s; the film
takes place in 1933. In the novel,
Griffin remains almost a completely mysterious person, with no fiancée or
friends; in the film, he is engaged to a woman and has the support of her
father and his associate. In the novel,
Griffin is already insane before he makes himself invisible; in the film, it is
the invisibility drug that causes his madness.
In the novel, Kemp lives; in the film, Griffin kills him. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024184/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv
Stuart Davis (1894–1964), was an early American modernist
painter. He was well known for his jazz-influenced,
proto-pop art paintings
of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful, as well as his Ashcan School pictures
in the early years of the 20th century. With
the belief that his work could influence the sociopolitical environment of
America, Davis' political message was apparent in all of his pieces from the
most abstract to the clearest. By the
1930s, Davis was already a famous American painter, but that did not save him
from feeling the negative effects of the Great Depression, which led to his being one of the first artists to apply for the Federal Art Project. Stuart
Davis was born in Philadelphia to Edward Wyatt Davis, art editor
of The Philadelphia Press, and Helen Stuart
Davis, sculptor.
Starting in 1909, Davis began his formal art training under Robert
Henri, the leader of the Ashcan
School, at the Robert Henri School of Art in New York under 1912. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Davis_(painter) See artworks by Stuart Davis at https://www.theartstory.org/artist/davis-stuart/artworks/
The skyline at
night is so breathtaking and
yet you could spend a whole lifetime in Manhattan and
never see it. Like a mouse in
a maze. * Mrs. Christie doles out her little
surprises at the carefully calibrated pace of a
nanny dispensing sweets to the children in her care. * Rules of Civility, a novel by Amor Towles The Appendix is "The Young George
Washington's Rules of Civility &
Decent Behavior in Campany and Conversation." There are 101 rules, the first being Every
Action done in Company ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are
Present. The 110th rule is Labour to
keep alive in your Breast that Little Spark of Celestial Fire Called
Conscience.
The phrase, “A house is a
machine for living in,” rose to fame in the 1927 manifesto Vers Une Architecture (Towards An Architecture) by Le Corbusier.
Rather than suggesting we all live inside robots or printing presses, it
actually expresses that houses are tools we use to live and
we happen to live inside them: A
house is a machine for living in. Baths, sun, hot-water, cold-water,
warmth at will, conservation of food, hygiene, beauty in the sense of good
proportion. An armchair is a machine for sitting in and so on. By this definition, a house is an efficient
tool to help provide for the necessities of life and no more. Decoration and extra frills are not
necessary. He continues: A society
lives primarily by bread, by the sun and by its essential comforts.
Everything remains to be done! Immense task! And it is so imperative, so urgent that the
entire world is absorbed in this dominating necessity. Machines will lead
to a new order both of work and of leisure.
Corbusier argued that by living in efficient house-machines we
can be more productive and more comfortable. Greg Morse
Walker
Evans is one of the leading photographers in the history of American
documentary photography. Born in St.
Louis, Evans studied at Williams College and the Sorbonne in Paris. He returned to the United States in 1928, and
five years later, though self-taught in photography, was the subject of a solo
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and had his photographs published in
Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930) and in Lincoln Kirstein's Hound & Horn
(1931). Evans worked for the Farm
Security Administration from 1935 to 1937, during which time he made many of
the photographs for Walker Evans: American Photographs, an exhibition and
publication organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1938. In 1936 he took a leave from the FSA in order
to document the living conditions of Alabama sharecropper families as part of a
collaborative project with writer James Agee. The results were published in 1941 as Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men, with text by Agee and photographs by Evans. Another of Evans's many photographic series
was Many Are Called, comprised of images taken in the New York City subway
system using a hidden camera between 1938 and 1945. Evans received three Guggenheim Fellowships and
was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Between 1943 and 1965, he worked as a staff
photographer for Time and Fortune. After
retiring from professional photography in 1965, he taught graphic arts at Yale. Later in his career he often photographed
with the new Polaroid camera, which he used to depict street graffiti and
various detritus of the contemporary world.
Lisa Hostetler https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/walker-evans?all/all/all/all/0
A sanatorium is a facility where
people with chronic illnesses or a need to convalesce are treated. Sanatoriums were first
established in the 1800s, mostly to treat tuberculosis. The purposes of a sanatorium was to first, isolate the
afflicted from the healthy population and second, afford the patient a healthy
environment in which to heal. Before the
advent of antibiotics, tuberculosis was a scourge on the population. Tuberculosis was also known as the Great White
Plague because of the extreme paleness of people with the disease. The only treatment available was fresh air,
good food and the luxury to lie in bed and encourage the body to heal itself. With the invention of antibiotics, the sanatorium has for the most part, gone
by the wayside. However, some older
institutions still retain the name sanatorium.
The plural form of sanatorium may
be rendered as either sanatoriums or sanatoria. A sanitarium is
also a facility where people with chronic illnesses or a need to convalesce are
treated. The plural forms are sanitariums or sanitaria. The terms sanatorium and sanitarium are interchangeable,
however, sanitarium is
primarily a North American word. The
difference between the words is their origin, though it is not much of a
difference. The word sanitorium is derived from the Late
Latin word sanitorius, which
means health-giving. The word sanitarium is derived from the Latin
word sanitas, which means
health. https://grammarist.com/usage/sanatorium-vs-sanatarium/
Though it might have you think
otherwise, the epistolary Victorian monster novel Dracula is a detective
story. Written by Bram Stoker in 1897,
it tells the story of six middle-class professionals who track down an
out-of-touch Eastern-European vampire on his feeding frenzy throughout London. Though its story is mostly well-known
throughout the last century of pop culture via a host of watered-down adaptations, the
(long) novel itself is a transcontinental, multi-generational, polyphonic,
supernatural ensemble chase narrative built out of a collection of small
documents. https://crimereads.com/dracula-detective-novel/
Edna O’Brien
has been awarded a £40,000 lifetime achievement prize regarded as a precursor
to the Nobel, for having “moved mountains both politically and lyrically
through her writing” in a career spanning almost 60 years. The Irish author was presented with the
£40,000 David Cohen prize at a ceremony in London on November 26, 2019. Awarded every two years to a living writer
for their entire body of work, the prize was founded by the late cultural
philanthropist in 1993, in the hopes of starting an equivalent of the Nobel
prize for UK and Irish authors. Many
recipients, including VS Naipaul, Doris Lessing and Harold Pinter, went on to
become Nobel laureates. Sian Cain https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/26/irish-novelist-edna-obrien-wins-lifetime-achievement-award-country-girls-david-cohen-prize-nobel?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks
amaranth noun (dated, poetic) An imaginary flower that does not wither.
Any of various herbs of the genus Amaranthus. The characteristic purplish-red colour of the flowers or leaves of these plants. (chemistry) A red to purple azo dye used as a biological stain, and in some countries in cosmetics and as a food colouring. (cooking) The seed of these plants, used as a cereal.
See color and link to quotations at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/amaranth#English
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2191
December 2, 2019
No comments:
Post a Comment