Word: caravaggio
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...Blue" is not an anecdotal film, it is a disturbing experience. Jarman is a painter and director associated with the beautiful and strinking visual images in films like "The Last of England," "Caravaggio," and "Wittgenstein" (which was recently shown at the Harvard Film Archives). He has stripped his work to a bare minimum. "In the pandemonium of image," he states at one point, "I present you with the universal door of blue...
...fireball and blast killed five people, destroyed museum archives and an important library near the Uffizi, weakened some of its ancient structure, and destroyed or damaged a number of works of art. Luckily, none of them were Botticellis, Michelangelos, Leonardos or Titians. Paintings by 17th century followers of Caravaggio (two by Bartolommeo Manfredi and one by the Dutch artist Gerrit van Honthorst) were totally destroyed, and several others, including an important work by the Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo, were shredded by flying glass. No doubt the terrorists, whoever they were -- and Italian authorities seem to be in little doubt...
Graney claims that the paintings of Caravaggio and Michelangelo, as well as the writings of Roshi Jiyu-Kennett of Shasta Abbey, inspired her to choreograph "Faith." Perhaps because of these visual and intellectual sources of inspiration, "Faith" seems more like a procession of portraits and ideas than a display of physical ability. Ultimately, the mood of the piece is so stagnant that Graney's greater message is lost...
...then light from a storm, now and then the possible light from an explosion." One of them is an "English patient," tarred black by burns and lost now in his memories of map-making explorations in the deserts of North Africa. One is a morphine thief named Caravaggio. The third is an Indian Sikh, called Kip, working for the English as a bomb defuser. And the sun around which all these "planetary strangers" turn is a 20-year-old female nurse from Canada...
...Caravaggio was the first Italian painter to make still life an independent subject, and Ribera follows him. The still-life details of his paintings, the luscious precise fruit bowls and the piles of books whose every parchment page is given its own stiffness and weight -- even the yellowed skulls that remind his saints (and his audience) of their mortality -- are not so much rendered as embodied. Like Caravaggio's, his early St. Jeromes and St. Sebastians seem transfixed by light, which hits them from a single-point source. In the days before gaslight, this was known as "cellar painting" because...