Apr 16 2025
Inspired after seeing this on Soviet Visuals and Folklore Film Fest‘s #SovietFilmWednesday, this was the first Soviet film I shared a little over four years ago, and it is still one of my favorites. What can I say, I love rain and cats, and the illustrations are beautiful, so this seemed like the perfect starting place for …
Apr 08 2025
Richard Neutra helped create one of the defining images of modern California: a low horizontal house of glass and steel, apparently floating between a swimming pool, a garden, and an enormous landscape beyond. Born in Vienna on April 8, 1892, Neutra carried the radical ideas of European modernism to Southern California, where sunlight, hillsides, desert …
Apr 04 2025
Rain falls across an empty landscape. Water drips through the ruins of a building. Wind moves suddenly through a field of grass. A horse wanders into view. Fire burns slowly while someone watches in silence. A childhood memory appears without warning and then disappears again. In the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, moments like these can …
Apr 02 2025
Serge Gainsbourg spent much of his career changing shape. He began with smoky jazz-influenced chanson, wrote sophisticated pop songs for some of France’s most famous singers, embraced British rock and psychedelia, constructed ambitious concept albums, traveled to Jamaica to record reggae, experimented with funk in New York, composed music for films, acted, directed, painted, wrote, …
Mar 29 2025
Astrud Gilberto never intended to become one of the defining voices of bossa nova. She had no established recording career when she stepped up to a microphone in New York in 1963 and sang a few lines in English for a song called “The Girl from Ipanema.” Her delivery was quiet, direct, almost conversational. There …
Mar 26 2025
Norman Ackroyd spent much of his life traveling toward the edges of maps. He sought islands battered by Atlantic weather, distant cliffs, estuaries, remote headlands, rocky stacks, and stretches of sea where land seems almost temporary. He traveled by fishing boat to places many people would never see, made watercolors and drawings while the weather …
Mar 23 2025
“I can’t afford to hate anyone. I don’t have that kind of time.” -Akira Kurosawa Rain pours through a ruined gate. Seven warriors stand against an approaching band of horsemen. A dying bureaucrat sits alone on a playground swing. A samurai waits calmly while two rival gangs destroy one another. A wealthy executive looks down …
Mar 21 2025
A man meets a woman. He talks to her. Then he talks some more. He explains what he believes, what he wants, what he intends to do, and why his behavior is completely reasonable. The longer he speaks, the clearer it becomes that he may understand himself far less than he thinks. That deceptively simple …
Mar 19 2025
Poul Gernes believed that art could improve the places where people actually lived their lives. That conviction carried him far beyond the conventional boundaries of painting. He covered canvases and hardboard panels with circles, stripes, targets, grids, flowers, letters, and brilliantly contrasting colors, but he also transformed hospitals, schools, factories, cinemas, and other public buildings …
Mar 17 2025
Ken Anderson was difficult to fit into a single job description. He was trained as an architect, became an art director on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, helped shape the worlds of Pinocchio and Fantasia, experimented with new approaches to animated design, contributed to Disneyland, designed characters ranging from Shere Khan to Elliott the …
