Folk devils and chandeliers, someone always disappears

[sovay]

For one thing, [the premise . . . that the private can account for the public, that the subject's accomplishments map onto his or her psychic history] leads biographers to invert the normal rules of evidence, on the Rosebud assumption that the real truth about a person involves the thing that is least known to others. A letter discovered in a trunk, or an entry in a personal notebook, trumps the public testimony of a hundred friends and colleagues. Biographers go into a professional swoon over stories that some famous person has made a bonfire of a portion of his or her correspondence, or that notebooks in an archive are embargoed until the year 2050. That stuff must explain everything! Why should we especially credit a remark made in a diary or a personal letter, though? The penalty for exaggeration and deception in those forms is virtually nonexistent. People lie in letters all the time, and they use diaries to moan and to vent. These are rarely sites for balanced and considered reflection. They are sites for gossip, flattery, and self-deception. But diaries and letters are the materials with which biographies are built, generally in the belief that the "real" person is the private person, and the public person is mostly a performance.
—Louis Menand, The New Yorker

And on the same day as Bergman, Antonioni. It's like losing architecture.

Comments

[sovay]

I'm going to throw some of his films on the old netflix queue, but it's annoying not to get a chance to know these creators' works while they're still around.

I'm seriously thinking that I should organize some kind of homemade film festival for him and Bergman in the upcoming weeks. Possibly with Gian Carlo Menotti thrown in, because he died in February and the 1951 adaptation of his opera The Medium (1946) is one of the eeriest things I have ever seen committed to film.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

This sounds like a Very Good Idea.