Word: portraits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first foray into popular fiction, Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and editor in chief of Connoisseur magazine, takes us into the international art arena, where a masterpiece has come up for auction. On the block is the Marchesa Odescalchi, a sexy full-length portrait by the 17th century Spanish master Diego Velasquez of his alleged mistress. Experts predict that the portrait will bring at least $11 million, an auction record for a single painting. Among the main competitors in the battle for the naked marchesa are two archrival museums, Washington's National Gallery...
...Harem paints a poignant picture of two boys, Pat and Madjid (Remi Martin and Kader Boukhanef), who commit aimless acts of delinquency, wandering through the streets of a French village with nothing to depend on except their friendship. Through this portrait, the film also addresses some essential questions in society, from racism to poverty to the meaning of life...
...opposite is the case with James Levine: The Life in Music, a portrait of the Metropolitan Opera's dynamic artistic director, scheduled to air in August. The tightly woven hour combines Levine's own reflections -- on choosing music as a career, his admiration for Toscanini -- with revealing views of him at work. Whether he is steering his orchestra through a demanding passage during rehearsal ("I need super concentration here . . . like you were driving in heavy traffic") or attending to business in his Lincoln Center office, every scene seems to define the man and command our respect...
...biographical approach is far more successful in The Long Night of Lady Day, a lovely portrait of the legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday. Using old film footage, stills, recordings and interviews with friends and colleagues, the documentary traces a tragic life, from Holiday's troubled childhood (at a girls' institution, she was once punished by being locked overnight in a room with a corpse) through her angry encounters with racism to the mounting drug problems that eventually killed her at age 44. The research is impressive; witnesses range from Bandleader Artie Shaw to the warden's secretary at the federal...
...burning temples in the background one might suppose the scene was a Baltic beach in August. And yet it has a strange, mocking intensity: despite his official position, the old dog could still bite when left to his own subjects, far from the civic view and the official portrait, in his own studio...