Nak's Nook

Yoko Ono

2016-10-03T12:27:00.002-03:00

‘Yoko Ono: Dream Come True’, now open at Malba, offers us a comprehensive retrospective of Ono’s artwork, laced with an anti-war message that remains just as pertinent today.

Gathering more than 80 artworks, the multimedia exhibition ‘Yoko Ono: Dream Come True’ features film footage, video, installations, and sound recordings tracing Ono’s concept of art as a permanently evolving piece de résistance. In Ono’s own words, and in her art pieces themselves, there’s a constant struggle between permanence and change. An artwork, the multifaceted Ono seems to be telling us, is there not just for contemplation, but rather as palpable testimony of humankind’s aspiration to transcend life as we know it, and to turn our existence into a blinding, cascade of light.

After her mammoth retrospectives in Mexico City and in Lyons earlier this year, Ono and curators Gunnar B. Kvaran (Iceland) and Agustín Pérez Rubio (Spain) have put together this majestic, one-of-a-kind retrospective rightly called ‘A Dream Come True’. Always true to herself and her search for answers for the materialisation of peace, Ono’s ‘A Dream Come True’ continues to spread Ono’s anti-war posture as though the late 60s and early 70s were not over. Arguably, they are not: armed struggle is still one of the evils plaguing planet Earth and peace remains an ever elusive dream.

But Ono, unabated, continues to dream, and to transmit her vision to audiences old and new, to baby boomers, hippies, yuppies, X-ers, and millennials alike.

‘Dream Come True’, as envisaged by Ono and the curators, features the entirety of the artist’s work: visuals, music, aggiornated by such stars as Moby and DJ Tenaglia, and that intangible element known as interaction, meaning that audiences actually get to participate in any Ono event. This, by the way, is how Ono and the late John Lennon met in 1966 at an art gallery. Lennon walked in and picked an apple on the base of an installation and grabbed a bite. Unexpected, perhaps, but true to the spirit of Ono’s art, made for a different kind of permanence.

In lieu of her physical presence at the retrospective preview, Ono sent a heartfelt message to her BA audience: “…have fun and remember that you and I are creating this together… I love you.” The audience quickly reciprocated, filling every inch of available space to follow, perhaps for one time only, the work of an avant garde artist, from 1955 to this day, whose work was and remains, by definition, always ahead of her time.

Dream on.

Yoko Ono: Dream Come True. Until 31st October at Malba, Figueroa Alcorta 3415.

Pictures of the Floating World

2016-10-03T12:12:00.001-03:00

Pictures of the Floating World:

Japanese Ukiyo-e at MNAD

Ukiyo-e exhibit at Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo.

By Julio Nakamurakare

For The Argentina Independent

A review of a rare exhibition of one of Buenos Aires’ cultural treasures: a 19th century Ukiyo-e Japanese print collection, currently on display at the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo.

Unbeknown to most – even the most seasoned experts – Buenos Aires is lined up with unimaginable cultural treasures. Well concealed or gathering dust in some derelict warehouse or public institution they may be, but it takes some digging, a lot of research, and patience to come up with things that amount to true discoveries.

Take, for instance, the fabulous Ukiyo-e (Japanese print) collection owned, but almost never displayed, by the Museo Nacional de Arte Oriental. Founded half a century ago, the museum has yet to find a home of its own – namely, a building to preserve and display its wealth of art pieces from Asia.

Though only a temporary solution, the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo has devoted a wing at its beautiful Beaux Arts premises to the Museo Nacional de Arte Oriental, which is now presenting the temporary exhibition ‘Aires de Kabuki: teatro popular y estampa del siglo XIX’ (Aires de Kabuki: popular theatre and stamps from the XIX century) until 24th July.

In order to fully grasp the importance of ‘Aires de Kabuki’, it must be considered that the exhibition is made up of the combination of two Japanese art forms: Kabuki theatre and the woodblock prints created to promote new plays and performances as well as souvenirs. Along with Noh, Bugaku, Kyogen, and Bunraku, Kabuki is one of Japan’s five most important theatre traditions. Even if dissimilar in content and style, they share an aesthetic relation derived from the convergence of sources from inside and outside Japan.

In contrast with the Aristotelian concept of mimesis, or the imitation of reality, which dominates Western theatre, Japanese theatre, regardless of genre, strives to induce moods and to create an aesthetic experience. Of all five theatre forms prevailing in Japan, Kabuki was the one that took even further the concept of combining speech, sound, movement and space, all deserving the same status.

Ukiyo-e, or “pictures from the floating world”, is an indigenous art form representing successive periods of political and social change in Japan. It was developed between the 17th and 19th centuries to complement Kabuki. If analogies are to be made, you may well say that Kabuki, was the sociocultural manifestation of that moment. While performance, of course, was the real thing, Ukiyo-e, produced by the publishing industry for Kabuki fans and followers of popular stars of the genre, took on a life all its own and became another narrative.

As Ukiyo-e started to become popular among Western artists in the 19th century, the Japanese woodblock prints somehow found their way into the homes and private collections of art lovers around the world. Some of them found a place of their own in private collections.

Enter Mexican Oriental and African art expert Amaury García Rodríguez, who travelled the world in search of these lost treasures. In early 2013, García Rodríguez landed in Buenos Aires because he had learnt that Ukiyo-e gems were to be found here. MostUkiyo-e prints were in the possession of the Museo Nacional de Arte Oriental, stacked in storage at the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo.

Selecting, classifying, and cataloguing the collection was a painstaking two-year job. “This is probably the largest and best-preserved Ukiyo-e collection in all of South America,” García Rodríguez proudly said of his curatorial work. “It consists of some 200 pieces with the highest standards of artistic excellence, and they are also remarkable in that they share a thematic unity. This allowed us to put together this exhibition.

“Although the prints were not clearly catalogued, we were eventually able to pinpoint the illustrator and the publisher, year of publication, the actor gracing the print, and the character he played in the Kabuki play in question,” he said.

García Rodríguez believes Aires de Kabuki will resonate strongly with local art lovers. “Buenos Aires has a very important, long-standing theatre and book publishing tradition. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Edo [the former name of Japan’s capital, Tokyo] was a vibrant, very intense cultural centre too. In this sense, (the two cities) have very interesting traits in common.”

‘Aires de Kabuki’, one of the hottest tickets in town right now, proves García Rodríguez right: this is a must-see in Buenos Aires’ ultrabusy cultural scene.

Torn between vocation and frustrating reality

2015-08-16T18:08:00.001-03:00

María Merlino explores a sensitive
character’s contradictions

María Merlino in ¿Cómo vuelvo? Leyenda campestre de una maestra errante.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

María Merlino stars in ¿Cómo vuelvo?, exploring a sensitive character’s contradictions

In Argentina, the word maestra (schoolteacher), from a diachronic approach, has widely differing class connotations.

In Manuel Puig’s Boquitas pintadas, set in a mid 20th century small town in Buenos Aires Province, maestra was endowed with social prestige and good marriage prospects to a wealthy professional and a promising future as housewife and mother.

In later decades, though still bearing traces of former social achievement and standing, maestra, perhaps partly due to a schoolteacher’s meager wages, lost much of its appeal as a vocation, a profession and a social mobility tool.

In the new stage production ¿Cómo vuelvo? Leyenda campestre de una maestra errante, celebrated fringe actress-singer María Merlino and filmmaker-theatre director Diego Lerman, after enjoying runaway success with Nada del amor me produce envidia and Qué me ha hecho, vida mía, explore recent history in a praiseworthy effort to explain Argentina’s present and to provide a glimpse into its near future, or simply an approximation to it.

“This is as good as it gets,” the señoritas maestras realistically had to tell themselves, confined as they were to the role of maestras de grado — teaching everything from language to maths, from geography to history.

Truth is, the maestras de grado, as anyone schooled in the state-run education system in Argentina, were key to providing literacy and a comprehensive preparation for higher studies. Often caring not only for the students’ learning needs but also for their integral formation as individuals, the maestras, as part of the country’s evolving social fabric, embodied everything synonymous with edifying, stoical permanence.

Breathing chalk dust, literally, the maestras of Argentina spent hours on end marking students’ works and seeing dozens of cohorts march off toward a brilliant future gilded with promises or, on the contrary, a string of broken dreams and unfulfilled hopes.

The maestras’ plight continues, almost unchanged, to this day, with thousands of escuelas normales (schoolteachers’ training schools) churning out graduates willing to burn out their brains, their entire lives, for the sake of... social improvement? Based on four short stories by Argentine writer Hebe Uhart, ¿Cómo vuelvo?, in spite of its limited scope, is full of epic grandeur, so imposing is the title character’s design to find out — and, if possible, implement — the real duties of her profession, which she has not quite come to terms with yet.

The teaching profession, we see in Merlino and Lerman’s production, was often a matter of destiny rather than volition. Indeed, the maestra in ¿Cómo vuelvo?, thrown into an escuela normal to get her diploma and a job, starts out, if not as an automaton, as something of a mechanical contraption standing in front of students unwilling to learn, fighting to get into their brains what syllabuses dictated on them as survival knowledge.

But this maestra errante, who gets posting around numerous schools (rural schools, we gather) at some point stops to ponder what her real vocation is. Her impassioned self-questioning comes across as an excruciatingly painful examination of the real purpose of her task.

Actress Merlino, the talk of the town when it comes to the fringe theatre circuit in Buenos Aires, is remarkably good in her own adaptation of Uhart’s stories, which she herself segued around the theme of individual identity to draw a bigger picture: a whole people’s quest for the meaning of existence.

Moving around alone on the enormous stage at Santos 4040 playhouse, Merlino feels as much as ease as though she were performing on the much smaller stage of La Carpintería theatre, where Nada del amor me produce envidia played for several consecutive seasons to packed houses.

While in Nada del amor... Merlino impersonated a woman of modest means and modest aspirations, in ¿Cómo vuelvo?, however unassuming the maestra she plays, the stakes are higher. The teacher in question, indeed, stands for everything anyone is entitled to question, from voluntary choice of profession to the make-or-break decision of humming her dissent with the establishment, with everything everyone seems to take for granted.

Alternately invigorated and weakened by her unending self-questioning, Merlino’s teacher brings to the fore, in natural prose or in sung lines, the inner process of revelation, silent acceptance or open refusal to go along with social and political dictums, so powerful is her (the teacher’s) determination to do as her conscience tells her to after painstaking soul-searching.

Merlino’s monologue, aided by cinematic props like rural scenes projections, courtesy of the talented filmmaker-director Lerman, is as pungent as anything she’s done before on stage, and ¿Cómo vuelvo? is a veritable tour de force, one of the season’s highlights, with no self-questioning or hesitation on the part of viewers as to this show’s remarkable quality.

when & where

¿Cómo vuelvo? Leyenda campestre de una maestra errante. Based on texts by Hebe Uhart, adapted by María Merlino. Produced by: Flor de un día. With: María Merlino. Music by: Carmen Baliero. Sets designed by: Diego Lerman. Costumes by: Valentina Bari. Lighting design: Iván Gierasinchuk and Miranda de Souza. Directed by: Diego Lerman. At Santos 4040, Santos Dumont 4040, Chacarita. Saturdays at 8pm and 10pm. Tickets $150 ($90 for seniors and students). Reservations: www.alternativateatral.com.ar.

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/196517/torn-between-vocation-and-frustrating-reality

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Torn between vocation and frustrating reality

A metaphor for a society thrown into an abyss and unable to crawl its way back up.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

María Merlino stars in ¿Cómo vuelvo?, exploring a sensitive character’s contradictions

In Argentina, the word maestra (schoolteacher), from a diachronic approach, has widely differing class connotations.

when & where

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The life aquatic of photographer Alberto Korda

2015-08-08T23:56:00.002-03:00

The biggest icon of the 20th Century: Alberto Korda'spicture of Che Guevara.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

Exhibition features work of artist famous for portrait of ‘Che’ Guevara and Cuban revolution

When you see the image of Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary “Che” Guevara reproduced on hundreds of thousands of posters, T-shirts and other ideologically-charged souvenirs, it’s sometimes hard to remember that it took a man and an unmissable (an unmissed) photo op to create one of the 20th Century’s most images. Legend has it that photographer Alberto Korda (1928-2001) was covering just another partisan event of the Cuban revolutionaries when he saw Che slowly turn his head back toward the place where Korda was standing. Korda’s reflexes were quick.

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara on a fishing boat, as photographed by Alberto Korda.

He shot, the shutter clicked, and he kept on shooting until Che faced the camera with a fierce look on his face,donning a beret on his dishevelled, shoulder-length manes of abundant black hair. Out of that shoot, an image emerged in the dark room that Korda chose as an emblematic depiction of everything the Che embodied. He was right: the world of publishing, the printed media, movies and television turned the photograph into an immortal iconic image, and Korda’s name, until that moment just a man with a camera, became synonym with a keen eye for opportunity and an enormous talent to match.

Now a massive exhibition of Korda’s oeuvre is on view in BA at the Centro Cultural Borges, featuring portraits of Fidel Castro on tour in Cuba and abroad, plus photos taken by Korda during a more glamorous, scarcely known phase of his career, that of female portraits not related to the revolution, and a series on the island nation’s aquatic life and popular festivities.

Korda, pasión e imagen (for such is the title of the retrospective housed at the Borges Centre) features 110 photographs plus a videotaped interview with Korda, Guerrillero heroico, with footage selected by his daughter, Diana Díaz López, and her husband Reinaldo Naranjo. The exhibition was curated jointly with Virginia Fabri.

Korda’s iconic photograph of Che (the world’s best-kwnon picture, courtesy of Italian publisher Giancomo Feltrinelli, who printed the first posters of the picture, taken in 1960 during the wake held for victims of the attack against the La Coubre ship), serves as prologue to the exhibit.

“I was lucky to take that picture and leave something to humanity. For what can a humble Cuban say about a photograph he took which (turned out to) surpass all other images? (This picture) belongs with others of the Che with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway and Gabriel García Márquez,” Korda is heard saying on the videotape.

La niña de la muñeca de palo, another asset in the show, was always known as “Paulita” to her father, according to Díaz López, curator of the archive housed at the Historical Affairs Board of Cuba, where some 55,000 negatives of Korda’s work with Castro are preserved. Sadly enough, the remainder of Korda’s work, nearly 80 percent, is lost.

The picture of the peasant girl, taken by Korda in 1959, at the start of the Cuban revolution, “makes you teary-eyed,” warns Díaz López. Wrote Korda a propos that picture: “This girl embracing a branch which (as a toy) she called “my boy,” convinced me that I should dedicate my work to a revolution (designed to) change those inequalities.”

“Dad was scouting locations for publicity in rural areas, and took several pictures of this girl, around two years old, who jumped with fright when she saw him,” Díaz López recalls. “(The girl) would tell a tree branch, ‘Please don’t cry, my baby.’ That same year the photograph was published in the newspaper Periódico Revolución on a full page, urging city dwellers to send clothes and toys to rural areas. It had a great impact,” she continues.

“Afterwards, from time to time, they would get in touch. He visited her for the second time when she was in primary school. Then she graduated as a nurse and, at age 20, she married and invited him to the wedding,” Díaz López says.

“Wearing a dressing gown and a very beautiful hat with multicoloured flowers, she posed with a tree branch instead of a bouquet of flowers, and when dad asked her to smile (for the camera) she refused, because she wanted (this photo) to be like the first one. A year and a half went by and her family phoned (my father) to let him know that she was dead. I keep that photo at home,” López Díaz says. In 1968, when Cuba nationalized the few remaining private businesses, Korda recovered the Fidel Castro and Che Guevara photos, but the negatives of relatives and models were lost, “They may be forgotten in some warehouse,” says Díaz López without rancour, because she keeps copies of them.

The fashion and aquatic photographs were never seen in Argentina, and so were some of the revolution, taken in China in 1961.

Among them, there’s one that catches the eye: the Che, his back to the camera, fishing with Fidel, by the side of a signboard reading, “Concurso de pesca de pez aguja Ernest Hemingway, 1960, La Habana” (Ernest Hemingway Fishing Contest, 1960, Havana).

With online media

When & where

Korda, pasión e imagen. Until September 13 at Centro Cultural Borges, Viamonte corner San Martín. Tel: 5555-5359. Email: info@ccborges.org.ar. On the Web: http://www.ccborges.org.ar/exposiciones/expoKorda.html.

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/195991/the-life-aquatic-of-photographer-alberto-korda

Alberto Korda's La niña de la muñeca de palo.

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Skeleton helps trace story of Welsh settlers in Patagonia

2015-08-07T21:07:00.002-03:00

Crew members and Nia Olsen Ritchie, in period costume, reenact the Mimosa mooring in Chubut.

By Julio Nakamurakare

Herald Staff

Discovery of 150 year-old human remains gives rise to unique TV documentary

The byways of historical developments are often exemplified by such evidence as linguistic traces of one language (the conquerors’) on the conquered people’s own.

Conquest entails violent confrontation over territorial domination and possession of other riches, but this is not always the case, as proved by the survival of the Welsh language (or the 19th Century Welsh spoken at the time) with scarce, or fossilized remnants still existing nearly 13,000 kilometres south of Cardiff, the capital city of Wales.

The story, as well known to Patagonians, the Welsh, historians and linguists dealing with the monumental achievement of the resurrection of a language on its dying phase, began in July, 1865, when the first wave of settlers sailed on the converted tea clipper Mimosa from Liverpool to Puerto Madryn, arriving on 28 July after a two-month journey that cost 12 pounds per head. It was the start of an epoch-making settlement of a people that chose the faraway, windswept Patagonia and its rough conditions to settle and make a new start in a place the language of which they did not speak and everything in it was foreign to them, as foreign as they were to the scarce local population of Patagonia, who began to refer to the Welsh migrants as the “gringos.”

Commemorating the 150th anniversary of that feat, the TV Pública Channel 7 will today at 6.30pm air the documentary entitled Los huesos de Catherine, directed by Argentine producer-filmmaker Ricardo Preve, narrating the story of the extraordinary finding of the remains of a Welsh migrant near the place where the Mimosa moored. Identified as the remains of Catherine Roberts, the bones remained under layers of mud for nearly 150 years when, in 1995, a building company working on a parking lot near the city of Puerto Madryn dug up some bones. The site was strikingly near to the shore where the Mimosa anchored in 1865.

Given the importance of the find, the Centro Nacional Patagónico (National Patagonian Centre, or CENPAT), and a team of specialists in skeletal remains, started to conduct research to identify the body.

The CENPAT team, led by Silvia Dahinten, soon established that those were the remains of a European woman aged around 40 at the time of death. A wedding ring and a button were found lying near the body, aiding the scientists’ research.

The tomb, the researchers found, was laid on an east-west orientation, as were other Welsh tombs from the 19th centure. There was an additional detail that provided more evidence: according to Dahinten, the body’s chin bone was slightly deformed, which coincided with a picture of Catherine Roberts, taken in 1865.

The archeological and anthropological circumstances were very telling, but further proof was needed to corroborate the deceased woman’s identity.

Twenty years after that finding, documentary-maker Ricardo Preve and a small technical crew resumed the research and came into contact with Nia Olsen Ritchie in Wales. Ritchie travelled to Patagonia in April this year to provide her DNA sample, which allowed scientists to come up with a positive match.

Filmed in Patagonia and Wales, the resulting documentary made by Preve, entitled Los huesos de Catherine, makes its début on La TV Pública. The documentary is presented by broadcaster Huw Edwards, who underlines that in the Chubut province of Patagonia in southern Argentina, around 5,000 people speak Welsh.

Apart from mate, asado, the tango and other staples of Argentine life being served in towns called Dolavon and Trevelin, and Argentine children reciting Welsh poetry, viewers will find a small recap of how this unusual story came to be.

In all, some 50,000 Argentine nationals can claim Welsh ancestry. But how did this remote and rugged land between the Andes and the South Atlantic become a distant outpost for a Welsh way of life?

The answer, and the epic story of the identification of the body of Catherine Roberts, are to be found in Preve’s historical-anthropological reconstruction.

Around the world in 40 Dutch films

2015-07-01T12:32:00.001-03:00

A scene from Rain, by Joris Ivens.

By Julio Nakamurakare

Herald Staff

Ivens, Verhoeven, Corbijn included in selection of BA festival kicking off today

For the next two weeks, BA audiences are getting another excellent opportunity to make the acquaintance of a selection of film gems, as the NL/FilmFest 2015 is scheduled to show more than 40 Dutch works from masters such as Joris Ivens to young talents like Jim Taihuttu, who share a love for light and photographic imagery, as does the famous documentary-maker Heddy Honigmann, whose Around the World in 50 Concerts will premiere in Argentina during the film feast (one of the Fest’s highlights, please take note).

From Honigmann’s tender look on The Netherlands’ most important orchestra, which performed in Argentina, to Taihuttu’s humorous take on immigrants from the outskirts of Amsterdam, NL/FilmFest is a true celebration of diversity in Dutch cinema.

Specifying its diversity, the organizing body, NIBA, has worked closely with the cinematheque at the Sala Lugones (Teatro San Martin), the Museo del Libro y de la Lengua (National Library), the newly-opened Cine de la Asociacion de Amigos del Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Centro Ana Frank and Club Cultural Matienzo. Each participating venue has its own profile and identity, and the films are programmed with specific viewers in mind.

The Netherlands has a great history in filmmaking, as in World War II. The Centro Ana Frank will show four of the best war-themed movies of the last 15 years, such as De Tweeling, based on the true story of twin sisters growing up on different sides of the border; Süskind, on a Jewish man working for the Nazis, showing the complexities of wartime Holland; and the famous Blackbook by Paul Verhoeven, easily approachable in his Hollywood phase, and quite elusive during his Netherlands years.

Verhoeven’s latest film, Tricked, will premiere at the Sala Lugones. Verhoeven, as an experiment, invited the audience to participate in writing the screenplay, making this film on a middle-aged-man a joint adventure. The Lugones will also show, for the first time in Argentina, a retrospective of the ideological adventure artist with a camera, the celebrated Joris Ivens.

The National Fine Arts Museum (MNBA) will screen films and documentaries on Vermeer, Van Gogh and the new documentary on Dutch star photographer Anton Corbijn. At the Museo del Libro y de la Lengua, films based on literary sources will be screened, such as Tirza, by infamous author Arnon Grunberg.

Club Cultural Matienzo, meanwhile, will show a programme of shorts and young talent, such as the abovementioned Taihuttu.

Apart from film screenings, the NL/Filmfest will also present a panorama of Dutch cinema through Skypemeetings with famous filmmakers, most of them before or right after the screenings.

Since name-dropping doesn’t make much sense when not accompanied by a succinct introduction, perhaps it is worth underlining, among all the remarkable material in this festival, the Joris Ivens Retrospective at the Sala Lugones. Under the title Joris Ivens, Filmmaker of the World, the Lugones will showcase 13 films by Ivens, the great Dutch documentary-maker, from his early years in silent movies to his last feature made in the late 1980s, shortly before his death. The programme was put together by Marceline Loridan Ivens, the filmmaker’s widow and long-time collaborator. The series includes the newly-restored print of the legendary Loin du Vietnam (1967), an omnibus movie with Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda showing their sympathy for the North-Vietnamese army during the Vietnam-war.

The Joris Ivens retrospective is complemented by another exceptional series, NL/FilmFest-Contemporary Dutch Auteurs, a selection of seven recent Dutch movies showcased at Dutch festivals. The series will be screened at the Lugones, the Museo del Libro y la Lengua, the MNBA, the Centro Ana Frank, and the Club Cultural Matienzo.

When and where

NL/Film Fest. Daily from July 1 to 15. Venues: NIBA (Netherlands Institute in BA. info@niba-argentina.org); MNBA, Av. del Libertador 1473 (www.mnba.gob.ar); Museo del Libro y de la Lengua, Las Heras 2555 (www.museo.bn.gov.ar), Sala Lugones / Teatro San Martín, Av. Corrientes 1530 (complejoteatral.gob.ar/ver/cine); Centro Ana Frank, Superí 2647 (www.centroanafrank.com.ar); Club Cultural Matienzo, Pringles 1249 (www.ccmatienzo.com.ar).

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/192908/nl-fest-around-the-world-in-40-dutch-films

Alejandro Romay dies

2015-06-29T04:19:00.001-03:00

Friday, June 26, 2015

Pioneer of popular TV Alejandro Romay dies

Argentine television Czar Alejandro Romay.

vBy Julio Nakamurakare

Herald Staff

Rose from humble childhood in Tucumán province to unchallenged king of the small screen

Argentine television mogul Alejandro Romay, former owner of Channel 9 and several radio stations as well as a handful of theatres where he staged his own productions, died yesterday from a pulmonary disease he had been struggling with for quite some time. The illness was further compounded by a severe case of pneumonia over the last few days and Romay, who also suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, died yesterday at his home in the Belgrano neighbourhood. He was 88.

Romay, perhaps the most iconic face in the history of Argentine television — he was rightly known as “The Czar” in the milieu — was born in the northern province of Tucumán in 1927 as Alejandro Argentino Saúl, and took on the stage name of Alejandro Romay after Juan Manuel Romay, a player of the Club Atlético Independiente. Romay was only 13 when he auditioned for LV7 Radio Tucumán, earning speaker bits while also running errands for the company’s execs. The boy proved so charming and endearing that he became a staple on the radio’s main shows.

At age 18, he was appointed director of Tucumán’s Radio Aconquija (today’s Independencia). In 1947, young and ambitious Romay moved to Buenos Aires, where he continued to work as radio host. In 1955, coinciding with the Revolución Libertadora military uprising that overthrew the government of President Juan Domingo Perón, Romay took over as programming director of the ex-Radio Belgrano, renamed as Radio Libertad after the military coup.

As majority shareholder of Channel 9, it was in 1963 that Romay started to devise the kind of popular programming that saw his shows soar to the top of viewership ratings.

Branching out into theatre production, he was about to premiere the local version of the Broadway musical Jesus Christ Superstar at the Teatro Argentino in 1973, but the opening never came about as a bomb razed the building the night before.

Romay’s Channel 9 broadcasting licence expired in 1974, and the company suffered the State’s intervention, as did Channels 11 and 13. In the threatening climate of the dictatorship, Romay exiled himself to Puerto Rico. He would only return to Argentina after the return of democracy in 1983.

Romancing the audience

Romay was a true pioneer of different formats in the early years of Argentine television, specializing in highly successful genres as telenovelas and lengthy entertainment shows (locally known as “programas ómnibus”). Romay’s omnibus show, the long-running Sábados de la bondad, was designed to compete in the same slot against Nicolás “Pipo” Mancera’s Sábados circulares, which aired on another channel. Viewed in retrospect, Sábados de la bondad may be regarded as the first “benefitxploitation” programme, as it pitted charities against one another vying for substantial cash prizes or equipment, in the case of institutions such as hospitals. But while Mancera’s Sábados circulares... consisted mostly of wholesome music, dance and humorous numbers, Romay was wise enough to add an extra element that helped draw viewers to his programme: solidarity. The cash prize of one million pesos was garnered by one out of two institutions. The money was donated by audiences who voted for one or the other.

At the helm of Channel 9, Romay was behind successful telenovelas that became a hallmark of Argentine TV, some of which were later remade for the same medium. Compared to today’s network television, which has a high percentage of fiction shows imported from Mexico, Brazil and lately from Turkey, Romay pioneered the craft of creating and producing entire shows locally. In later years, the Romay-owned Teatro Nacional burnt during a performance of a revista led by Susana Giménez, in which the comedians parodied the military dictatorship. The theatre was rebuilt and reopened in 2000, with My Fair Lady as the first production.

After returning to Argentina in 1983, Romay founded the production company Telearte S.A., and won the bid for the Channel 9 broadcast licence. Romay’s best-remembered productions also include Grandes valores del tango (1963) and Feliz domingo para la juventud (1970). He created Teatro como en el teatro, a comedy series with Darío Vittori, Titanes en el ring, Música en libertad, and Alta comedia, a Saturday night staple featuring leading theatre personalities. With Romay at the helm, Channel 9 dominated the viewership ratings with such telenovelas as Amo y señor, Cosecharás tu siembra, La extraña dama, Más allá del horizonte, Ricos y famosos, and Una voz en el teléfono. According to viewership rating companies Ibope and the now defunct Mercados y Tendencias, Romay’s telenovelas peaked at 60 points during the 9pm primetime slot.

In 1997, Romay decided to pull out of television and, refusing to sell the business to Telefónica, he sold it to Australia’s Prime Media. Shortly thereafter, Channel 9 was transferred to Telefónica, while his radio stations were purchased by the Mexican consortium CIE, which had recently purchased the leading Rock & Pop from showbiz impresario Daniel Grinbank.

All things considered, Romay was the unrivalled Czar of Argentine television and the creator of business models later imitated in successful if unoriginal spin-offs, not to say copycats.

/www.buenosairesherald.com/article/192515/pioneer-of-popular-tv-alejandro-romay-dies-

By Julio Nakamurakare

Herald Staff

As majority shareholder of Channel 9, it was in 1963 that Romay started to devise the kind of popular programming that saw his shows soar to the top of viewership ratings.

Romancing the audience

All things considered, Romay was the unrivalled Czar of Argentine television and the creator of business models later imitated in successful if unoriginal spin-offs, not to say copycats.

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Gustavo Cerati: the tremor is not over yet

2015-06-20T21:45:00.002-03:00

If you’re a Soda Stereo fan or simply like good music, outstanding artists hold a tribute today

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald staff

Lilian Clark was there and witnessed the moment when her son Gustavo improvised the first chords of what would become one of Soda Stereo’s biggest hits: Cuando pase el temblor. No-one is able to tell her, of all people, who the composer of Soda Stereo’s emblematic songs was, Clark assured in an interview earlier this year. The temblor anecdote is valid and very telling: a very young Cerati played the song’s infectious introduction in the family home in Villa Urquiza for her mother to listen. She did. She approved. Enthusiastically. The song, years later, became one of Soda’s best-loved rock-fusion songs.
Cerati, the former Soda Stereo frontman and solo artist hailed as the most influential artist in the so-called rock en español movement, will be given a most fitting tribute tomorrow at the Palermo Planetarium as part of the Ciudad Emergente 2015 arts festival segment honouring the late musician.
Held over four days at the Recoleta Cultural Centre, the Cerati tribute wraps up with outstanding artists like Richard Coleman, Leandro Fresco, Fernando Nalé, Gonzalo Córdoba and Martín Carrizo plus guest performers. Featured at the Planetario show will be Benito Cerati, Leo García, Miranda!, Banda de Turistas, Fernando Ruiz Díaz and Walas (Massacre), among others.
“We are not going to play Soda Stereo’s songs,” Coleman said in an interview, meaning that the original arrangements will be respected. “We will perform Gus’ songs from his last two tours, his phase as a solo artist. We intend to perform them as we did with him, there will be no adaptations, as much as this is possible,” he added.
In an interview with the Spanish-language version of Rolling Stone magazine, Cerati’s former touring musicians agreed not to go back to that painful moment — May 2010 in Venezuela — when Cerati suffered a massive CVA that left him into a four-year-long coma from which he never recovered.
“This is a positive moment, filled with happiness. Let’s not deal with the ugly, with the horrendous; it makes no sense,” Coleman said in the RS interview. Recalling the Cerati tribute inception, Coleman, in an emotion-filled statement, said that, “It was a huge responsibility for me. My intention was to take this opportunity to make a present to Gus, as the musicians who performed with him through all these years will be there.” Sunday’s show, then, rather than a recreation of Soda Stereo, will reflect the tribute performers’ work with Cerati, moving forward so that the late musician’s output reaches down to the audience, highlighting his presence rather than his absence, according to Coleman. “His presence gradually became stronger and stronger in our music,” Córdoba explained.

When and Where
Gustavo Cerati Tribute — Ciudad Emergente 2015 arts festival. On Sunday, June 21 at 7pm at Palermo’s Planetario. Tel: 4771-6629. On the Web: www.planetario.gov.ar. Earlier during the day, Cerati’s fans will be able to enjoy the Recoleta Cultural Centre’s exhibition on the musician’s life and legacy (Junín 1930). Free admission.

Spanish language academy nods coinages

2015-06-14T02:52:00.002-03:00

By Julio Nakamurakare

Herald Staff

Although the RAE is famous for being rather reticent to new words, some have found a spot

We all know that some new words — coinages — have an easy time finding their way in common folk’s everyday parlance, most in the technological field. Some institutions, like the French Academy, famously — and catastrophically — failed in their effort to impose a French version of the Anglicized Japanese word “Walkman.” Baladeur did not come as close to the concept was back then, nor would it sound appropriate for today’s “mp3 player” or whatever format techno gurus decide to adopt.

Japanese too is not immune to these gairago or loan words (borrowings), mostly from English but also from other Western languages and for more specific purposes (science, for example) to words phonetically “borrowed” from English but with a “made in Japan” meaning. Think “depãto” for “department store” (depãtomento stoa) and you find some kind of logic, even if the shopping experience is different in Japan and other countries.

Whatever the case, linguists observe, language changes according to needs (technological, societal, developmental), and so a descriptive approach to semantics and grammar is preferred over prescriptive notions.

Some languages and nations speaking and / or writing certaing languages do not have a ruling body dictating the proper use of nouns and collocations. Others do, like the Real Academia Española (RAE), which confers upon itself the right and the duty to rule, every couple of years, which words should enter the canonized lexicon, and which ones are mercilessly ruled out.

Coinciding with the appearance of Merriam Webster’s mammoth compilation of words in use in the English language, the RAE has established which words and coinages have made it to the Diccionario of the Real Academia Española (DRAE), launched on Thursday in most Spanish-speaking countries.

This new edition (the 23rd) includes new verbs like “escanear,” “tuitear,” “chatear” and femicidio, not to speak of that infamous borrowing, “drone,” unfortunaley seen and printed in every day news accounts.

The new edition — 2,376 pages — includes 93,111 words compared with the previous edition (2001), which amounted to just 88,431, with 140,000 amends and 8,000 Americanisms.

After intense debate and — one would presume — long hours of discussion among Academy members before each new edition, the linguistic experts include Americanisms such as the Argentinismo “tanguear,” “dni,” “agua viva” and “placar.”

“There are some exceptions which were proposed the success of which remains to be seen among speakers, such as “supermán,” “bungaló,” “hándicap,” “pimpón,” “baipás” and “espanglish,” Santiago Kalinowski, head of the Linguistic and Philological Research Department of the Academia Argentina de Letras told a local news agency.

Other words “which could be adapted were left as ‘extranjerismos,’ such as ‘baguette’ and ‘curry,” in this edition commemorating the 300th anniversary of the Real Academia Española,” Kalinowski said.

Apart from the technology-related terms such as “bajar” (literally, to download content, usually illegally, from the Internet), led, pin (as in “password”), chatear (which, before, only referred to ‘tomar chatos de vino,’ or, more appropriately, ‘to communicate with somebody via the Internet), and “tuitear,” the Academia also picked up terms tending not to reflect the sexist use of language from a social point of view.

The word “feminicidio” is now also correct to refer to what was previously (justifiably so?) the murder of a woman on account of her sex. The verb “feminizar” was added to strike a balance between the fact that “masculinizar” existed from the third edition of the Diccionario manual e ilustrado de la lengua española (1984),” but no in the RAE, Kalinowski claims.

One of the addenda is the noun “género” as defining “the group of people to which people of either sex belong to, understanding this from a sociocultural standpoint rather than exclusively biological.”

With the same consideration and so as to irk sexual political correctness adepts, the word “matrimonio” (marriage) now includes the meaning: “Under certain legislations, (it indicates) the union of two people of the same sex, arranged through certain rituals or formal legalities, to establish and maintain a community of life and (common) interests.”

Also under the same category fell the articles corresponding to “padre” and “madre,” which marked strong definitions in previous editions, whereas now “the first entry of ‘madre’ has gone from ‘female who has given birth’ to “Woman or female animal who has given birth to another of the same species,’ in accordance with the definition of “padre.”

However, another meaning of “padre” — a controversial one, at that — was maintained: “Head of a lineage, family or people,” Kalinowski said, adding that, “feminine forms were added to ‘soldador,’ ‘enterrador,’ ‘herrero,’ ‘costalero,’ and ‘alfarero.’”

Also, new compound nowns were added which reflect modern times: “demonizar,” “descontextualizar,” “coprotagonizar,” “antiarrugas,” “antidopaje” (not including “antidoping” because it entails that there is an adequate synonym in Spanish), “empoderar” (from the English “Empower”), “mundializar” and “versionar” (to perform a new version of a popular song).

The process of elaborations of the new editions “includes a natural process of continuous correction and amend, which is why it may be said that this edition started to be compiled the day after publication of the 2001 edition,” Kalinowski continued.

In the same vein, Kalinowski considered that, “The same thing will happen with the next edition,” and that, “the different editions of a dictionary may be regarded as periodical photographs of a continuous process.”

As for the terms emerging from Latin America, he said that, “progress has been made as regards registry, which is why the dictionary is surely morely complete than before, but the number of words with diatopic (equivalents) are phenomenons observed in a language on account of its geographical reach), which is always limited.”

For Kalinowski, a very “famous case is that of ‘tanguear,’ cited by all the press. It may be a case of a form originated in our River Plate variety which ends up being incorporated as a general term (that is, with no traces that it is used in a specific region.”

In this sense, he considered that, “it remains to be seen which is the real use of this word outside Argentina, even in our country it’s a word relatively used only occasionally.”

For Kalinowski, “a much more emblematic case is that of ‘papa,’ which, before, used to be used without regional markers, but referred to ‘patata’ (given as a primary and general term).”

“The new edition is completely the opposite: it defines ‘papa’ (word of quechua’ origin) as the primary form, and ‘patata’ has the marker that it ised solely in Spain and refers to ‘papa,’ which may ‘be cited as clear and concrete progress of the American vocabulary in the academic dictionary.”

One of the reasons behind this type of amend “is the intensification of the collaboration among all American academies with the DRAE in the framework of the Asociación de Academias de Lengua Española (ASAE).”

The Royal Academy also has the function of marking certain words as offensive or derogatory. This is the case of “zorra (for prostitute), which did not use to be marked and is now derogatory and does not sound right.”

In the case of “man,” which used to be used to refer to an “Individual having the qualities considered masculine par excellence, such as courage and firmness (of character). “Courage and Firmness” were supressed, and, in the case of the term “huérfano,” it was suppressed because (one) is considered to be more orphananed if the father, not the mother, is the parent who dies.”

Also left out of the new edition were the expressions “trabajar más que un negro, or “como un negro,” surely for being considered racist, even if, it occurs to me, there are still many speakers who do use it,” Kalinowski said

(With Télam and online media)

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/172480/spanish-language-academy-nods-coinages

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Spanish language academy nods coinages

The RAE’s linguist Santiago Kalinowski.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

The new edition — 2,376 pages — includes 93,111 words compared with the previous edition (2001), which amounted to just 88,431, with 140,000 amends and 8,000 Americanisms.

In this sense, he considered that, “it remains to be seen which is the real use of this word outside Argentina, even in our country it’s a word relatively used only occasionally.”

For Kalinowski, “a much more emblematic case is that of ‘papa,’ which, before, used to be used without regional markers, but referred to ‘patata’ (given as a primary and general term).”

(With Télam and online media)

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Madonna asks Marine Le Pen for a drink

2015-06-14T02:44:00.000-03:00

Rightwing politician vs progressive artist: Marine Le Pen and Madonna.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

The surprise move is that the rightwing National Front leader has accepted the pop star’s invite

It’s not like US singer-actress and overall media personality Madonna is averse to controversial statements and sudden declarations of religious or political postures. On the contrary, whenever the occasion arises, Madonna does what goes contrary to common sense or to what’s normally expected from a showbiz star who, however contentious, likes to make headline-grabbing proclamations.

The last you heard from Madonna this year was probably her notable wardrobe malfunction at the Brits Awards, when her Armani cape failed to be pulled off by her two “lovely Japanese dancers” and the star tripped and rolled down a few steps as everyone watched in horror. But Madonna was back on her feet in no time and continued performing as though nothing had happened. The wardrobe malfunction was unscripted, and so was Madonna’s reaction, but everything she does or happens to her makes cannon fodder for tabloids and more serious publications.

It will be girls’ night out, it seems, when Madonna and the leader of France’s National Front party Marine Le Pen sit down to have a drink to discuss her (the Material Girl’s) vision of human rights now and the way politicians and artists could or should coalesce so that their synergy could result in benefits for the world at karge,

“I accept Madonna’s invitation with pleasure, I appreciate people who have a good faith approach,” Le Pen was quoted as saying as she accepted Madonna’s offer for a diplomatic discussion. The gesture, let’s recall, comes after Madonna harshly criticized Le Pen’s party as “fascist.” Le Pen and her followers probably did not take well Madonna’s jab (but, truth be told, who knows, may be they take pride in the word “fascist”), but refusing to sit down to talk would not have been polite or strategic. Le Pen had to courteously accept, even knowing that the pop star’s agenda will not be to the NF’s liking.

Where or when the meeting will take place is still unknown, as both parties still have to agree on a date and venue. It will not be a debate, at least according to the tone of Madonna’s invitation, but rather an invitation to reflect on the human rights situation in Europe and the world at large.

While it is true that Madonna cannot claim to have first-hand knowledge of the state of things around the world, it is undeniable that she has led worthy causes and charities, that she is, apparently at least, fully aware that there’s one thing or two politicians and leaders may change to steer the world away from self-destruction due to overambition.

The invitation to Le Pen to have a drink together came up unexpectedly during a TV talk show on Monday.

It was a spontaneous thing, not a calculated move, even if Madonna could be seen as trying to assuage a confrontation with Le Pen, who had threatened to take Madonna to court over the demonstration of her photo with a Swastika on the forehead at Madonna’s Paris concert in 2012.

Europe “feels like Nazi Germany,” Madonna reportedly said, adding, “I want to understand where she (Marine Le Pen) is coming from. Maybe I misunderstood Marine Le Pen, I am not sure. I don’t want to start a war. I want peace in the world,” the pop queen was quoted as saying. A noble gesture, considering that political adversaries often refuse to talk to each other, sit down for a reasonable debate and try to find common ground, if any.

Sure enough, using a giant portrait of Le Pen with a Swastika on her forehead during her last concert tour was not a nice gesture, maybe just a provocative statement, but that’s the way Madonna surely felt, having the freedom, as a world-recognized diva, to speak her mind without further consequences other than all too-frequent criticism.

Madonna’s invitation to Le Pen to a drink came amidst a media furore as the diva, speaking on radio network Europe 1, pointed out growing antisemitism and far-right moods across Europe and, most especially, in France.

“It was a country that embraced everyone and encouraged freedom in every way, shape or form. Now that’s completely gone,” she said. January’s lethal attack against Charlie Hebdo is sound proof of Madonna’s anti-fundamentalist stance. She has openly blamed the National Front for growing racism, and mentioned that she received “a lot of criticism and threats” from its leader, whose name she pronounced incorrectly as “Marie” Le Pen.

Marine Le Pen’s decision to accept Madonna’s unusual, impromptu invitation to a friendly drink and chat may be a sign that the leader of the National Front, created by Jean-Marie Le Pen (Marine’s father) is working on softening the party’s ultra-rightwing image and hard stance on many hot issues.

In a most worrying outcome, according to opinion polls, the National Front outperforms its main rivals for the local elections to be held on March 22 and 29, gaining the support of almost 30 percent of respondents.

Given the less than friendly history between Madonna and Marine Le Pen, it stands to reason that, should the drink take place, it might not be the most comfortable of social occasions, but it will be an opportunity for both to show the world that sworn enemies can, indeed, sit amicably to discuss their differences and smooth their rough patches.

A toast to Madonna’s openness and, as she sang on Elliott Smith’s anthem, People: “Drink up, baby, stay up all night / With the things you could do, / you won't but you might. / The potential you'll be,/ that you'll never see / The promises you'll only make.”

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/183521/madonna-asks-marine-le-pen-for-a-drink

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Madonna asks Marine Le Pen for a drink

After threats with litigation, Madonna replaced the Swastika on Le Pen’s face with a question mark.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

The surprise move is that the rightwing National Front leader has accepted the pop star’s invite

The invitation to Le Pen to have a drink together came up unexpectedly during a TV talk show on Monday.

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Damián Szifrón living out his own wild tale

2015-06-14T02:37:00.001-03:00

Damián Szifrón:gauging his chances to clinch the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

After Best Foreign Language Picture nomination, director, cast and producers express their joy

After attracting a record 3.4 million viewers in Argentina alone and standing ovations at every festival where it was screened in competition or in parallel sections, there is no denying that Damián Szifrón’s six-episode movie Relatos salvajes (Wild Tales) has a very strong story to tell, and that it does so in a manner that fills viewers’ expectations from a cinematic viewpoint and a cathartic experience from the human side of things.

It was on Thursday that the Oscars nominations were announced, closely monitored by everyone in the industry and, most especially, by those tipped to win a distinction, since a nomination is an award in itself. Here in Buenos Aires, producers Kramer & Sigman, director Damián Szifrón, the cast and crew of Relatos salvajes and the Argentine public at large watched in awe as the film was mentioned among the roster of five nominees viying for the Best Foreign Language Picture Award.

And it was yesterday that K&G (Kramer & Sigman), Corner Producciones, Pedro Almodóvar’s El Deseo production company, the National Film Board (INCAA) and Telefé (Televisión Federal) gathered at K&G’s headquarters in BA to talk to the press about the repercussions and the personal impact the Oscar nomination produced on them, individually and as a team.

Wild Tales is made up of six independent but thematically related stories about people who lose control in stressful situations, from finding out about an infidelity to road rage, and feeling liberated afterward. The producers say the Argentine film aims to explore “the fuzzy boundary that separates civilization from barbarism.”

Sitting calmly but speaking excitedly about Relatos salvajes’ Best Foreign Picture nomination, producer Hugo Sigman was the first one to speak in a press conference that included his associate Kramer and director Szifrón, who towered above them all even when sitting, tall and lanky as he is.

“I feel immensely happy, as does the whole team, which proved exceptional all along, from preproduction to actual shooting,” Sigman said, adding that everyone’s sinergy was the key to the film’s exceptional outcome. “Making it to Cannes was really hard, Relatos salvajes was shifting between the official competition and the Un Certain Régard parallel section. It finally entered the competition and, even if it did not win the Palme d’Or, it was a fabulous launching pad for the movie,” Sigman said about the film’s exceptional reception, with audiences saluting it with standing ovations, not only for the entire feature, but also for each episode.

Praised for its narration and sense of humour, Relatos salvajes now hopes to bring home its third Oscar for Argentina, which already won in 1985 for The Official Story and in 2009 for The Secret In Their Eyes.

Szifrón’s Relatos salvajes is officially competing for the coveted Oscar against Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan, a tragic parable of small-town Russian corruption; Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, in which an aspiring Polish nun confronts dark truths about her family and her country; Tangerines, an Estonian-Georgian film by Zaza Urushadze set in post-Soviet Georgia of the early 1990s, and Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, a powerful film about the takeover of northern Mali by Islamic militants.

The Oscar nomination, Szifrón acknowledges, has opened impressive doors to him, and the distinction is a crowning achievement that makes him feel as though he were living out his own wild tale. In an interview in New York earlier this year, Szifrón described the circumstances under which the idea and script for the film came to be, and especially about the real-life anecdote that propelled things off. “It was an unexpectedly violent situation in my life: I was having dinner with my wife at a restaurant. As soon as we started eating our meal and drinking wine, (the owners and waiters) wanted to throw us out because they were about to close. They started to chase patrons out in a very violent manner, clapping as they shouted, “Alright, alright, come on, let’s go.” It was incredible. I started to argue, the expletives escalated and then I finally said that I was taking the wine bottle and the glasses to drink the wine in the park, after all, I had already paid for them, and I told them I would leave the glasses at the door. Then I saw the cook grab my wife brusquely, and so I punched him! I’m not that kind of person, but it came from deep inside of me. One of the glasses cracked in the waiter’s ear, he started bleeding, the police was called in. It was mayhem. I did not include this in the film, but I had to stand trial!,” Szifrón recalls.

With Télam, AP

http://buenosairesherald.com/article/179741/dami%C3%A1n-szifr%C3%B3n-living-out-his-own-wild-tale

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Damián Szifrón living out his own wild tale

Screenwriter-director Damián Szifrón poses for reporters at yesterday’s press conference.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

After Best Foreign Language Picture nomination, director, cast and producers express their joy

With Télam, AP

Susana Giménez: much more than a potiche

2015-06-14T02:26:00.002-03:00

Susana Giménez stages comeback in Peau de vache / Piel de Judas

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

Great diva stages comeback to Av. Corrientes in tailor-made, glittering comédie brillante

Model-turned-actress-TV host Susana Giménez (b. 1944) must have experienced all the transformations of the Argentine scene since her early screen début in the early 1960s (En mi casa mando yo, 1968) through her successful reinvention as a glittering stage musical star (Woman of the Year, Sugar, The Unsinkable Molly Brown) in the early to late 1980s, and her unstoppable turn as host of the Raffaella Carrá-inspired TV game and entertainment programme Hola, Susana!

Susana Giménez’s rise to stardom began on an epoch-making TV commercial for a soap brand and the Shock! she yelled turning her head back to the camera while douching in smooth lather.

The commercial, shot in Argentina and broadcast all over Latin America in 1972, forever sealed Ms. Giménez’s status as the ultimate pinup, so winsome and homely that her almost completely nude image was deemed chaste, unoffending, thus making it past the censors’ watchful eyes.

Maybe she was not aware of this there and then (how could she predict it?), but TV was to turn her into Argentina ’s biggest diva, a beautiful brunette turned platinum blonde whose touch sufficed to turn everything into gold.

After a 24-year-absence from the stage, Ms. Giménez made headline news in the entertainment biz late last year when she announced that, at age 71, she was willing to tackle the challenge of returning to the stage. Her comeback vehicle was Jean Pierre Gredy and Pierre Barillet’s comédie blanche Peau de vache, fittingly rendered in Spanish as Piel de Judas in Fernando Masllorens and Federico González del Pino’s translation-transposition.

The new version of Piel de Judas started to make waves here even before preproduction and rehearsals started. Only the cast surrounding Giménez was made known — subject to change, of course. The only category not subject to any last-minute replacement was actor-director Arturo Puig, Ms. Giménez’s partner on her glittering musicals on Av. Corrientes theatres, and now a respected director since manoeuvering the stage version of the French film Le prénom to unusual popular and critical acclaim.

Although, on the surface, Piel de Judas would seem to make no cultural, sociological or historical statement, one may just as well scratch beneath its glossy surface and surmise that it’s actually a loud pronouncement against social conformity and sexism. Pretentious? A bit. A truism? Self-evident, ain’t it?

Ever since she doubled as a TV sensation on the daily show Hola, Susana! and, from Tuesday to Sunday, in the musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown (with Ricardo Darín and Arturo Puig in two memorable turns), Ms. Giménez suffered from exhaustion, so much so that she promised herself (and her producer, Gustavo Yankelevich), that she would never again combine television and theatre.

Ms. Giménez made good on her promise. After 24 years as the undisputed diva of Argentina’s (and Latin America ’s) prime-time TV, she has made a tumultuous return on Piel de Judas, a comedy whose central character, Marion Bruke, suits her like a glove — a pair of ball gloves, that is.

Piel de Judas revolves around a possessive, domineering, filthy rich wife — a trophy wife — to an acclaimed violinist (Antonio Grimau, a leading man with the right physique du role) who has not resigned himself to the way things are in the bedroom. His hair maybe greying now, but he possesses an abundant mane of hair framing a ruggedly attractive face. The fact that he has many young students provides him with plenty of opportunities to cheat on Marion .

Marion, domineering and foul-mouthed to the point of defiantly describing herself as a truck driver, decides to look the other way. But when a glossy magazine reporter shows up at their door to interview not the musician, but his (socially) self-effacing wife for a feature on “The great woman behind every great man,” Marion is left with no option but to acknowledge that Noelle, the young lady (an excellent actress named Mónica Antonópulos) is not a reporter, but a violin student with a crush on her teacher. Marion feels like another potiche in her spectacular country home.

Full of rage and jealousy, Marion changes her ways and becomes a soft-spoken, sweet lady ready to forgive everyone’s flaws and sins, even at her own expense. Although Ms. Giménez grabs the spotlight the minute she comes on stage, descending the stairs perched on a pair of cheap but undoubtedly upscale stilettos, she proves that her magnetic charm remains intact. After all, most people in the audience come not to see the play but rather to materialize a dream: being close to the fabulous, unreachable persona of Ms. Giménez.

Ms. Giménez, an able comedian who has proved her mettle on the stage and on the big screen, feels quite at ease on the revolving stage designed by Alberto Negrín. Without uttering a single word, just raising her eyebrows or pouting her lips, Ms. Giménez gets an interminable round of affectionate applause from her adoring fans. Unlike other shows, the action continues unhinged, the actors drowning the audience’s clamour with the play’s lines.

Ms. Giménez is, no doubt about it, the centrepiece of a rather shallow and trite comedy, so stereotypically structured that one cannot help recalling the same authors’ stage play and movie Potiche (François Ozon, 2010), with Catherine Deneuve in the lead and Gérard Dépardieu as her cheating but endearing husband.

Other than women’s enpowerment, Peau de vache and Potiche have several other points in common: the two are perfect star vehicles for great divas, the two provide light entertainment, and the two are built on the comedic skills of the protagonist and the generous, confident spotlight moments bestowed on the supporting cast. Mónica Antonópulos, in a stunning feat of transformation from her police officer role in the thriller Muerte en Buenos Aires (Natalia Meta, 2014), becomes an overly sensitive, timid, but ultimately ambitious young woman bent on getting the biggest catch.

And, all in all, Ms. Giménez triumphantly makes the stage hers and only hers, moving around with the same ease and confidence she usually displays on television studios, blowing kisses to the camera as host of the TV game show through which she became Argentina’s prime-time queen. One thing transpires through the 90-minute-plus runtime of Piel de Judas: Susana Giménez is no potiche.

Where & when

Piel de Judas (Peau de vache), by Jean Pierre Gredy and Pierre Barillet. Translated and adapted by: Fernando Masllorens and Federico González’s del Pino. Directed by: Arturo Puig. Set design: Alberto Negrín. Lighting: Mariano de María. Costumes: Ximena Puig. Music: Eduardo Zvetelman. With: Susana Giménez, Antonio Grimau, Alberto Fernández de Rosa, David Masajnik, Goly Turilli, Marcelo Serre. Fridays 8pm, Saturdays 8pm and 10.30pm, Sundays 8.30pm. At Teatro Lola Membrives, Av. Corrientes 1280. Tel: 4381-0076. On the Web: www.lolamembrivesteatro.com.ar. Email: info@lolamembrivesteatro.com.ar.

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/185481/susana-gim%C3%A9nez-much-more-than-a-potiche

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Susana Giménez: much more than a potiche

Susana Giménez, centre, acknowledges her fans’ unflinching adoration during Piel de Judas’ curtain call.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

Great diva stages comeback to Av. Corrientes in tailor-made, glittering comédie brillante

Susana Giménez’s rise to stardom began on an epoch-making TV commercial for a soap brand and the Shock! she yelled turning her head back to the camera while douching in smooth lather.

Where & when

The commercial that shot her to unstoppable success.

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BAFICI 2015: so many films, so little time

2015-06-14T02:18:00.002-03:00

BAFICI festivalgoers snapping up tickets for the 2015 edition.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

An early autumn staple is back with a bag full of moviedom goodies

In three years’ time, when the by now ubiquitous BAFICI (Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Films) comes of age with a bang on its 20th anniversary, we cinephiles will probably look back on the good ol’ days (and nights) spent at the Abasto Shopping and smaller venues along Corrientes Avenue sifting through an interminable grid of resuscitated classics and a panorama of the latest wonders (remember the Iranian films craze?). Our dreams came true when we had Jim Jarmusch walking the streets of downtown BA and quietly sipped coffee at a window table, like any other Porteño, and the endearing Seymour Cassel nonchanlantly descending the stairs after a tribute showing of John Cassavettes’ legendary Minnie and Moskowitz (1971).

Although BAFICI is still three years short of the 20th anniversary mark, the 2015 edition (the 17th), running from April 15 through the 25, promises a moviedom paradise impossible to miss, and impossible to enjoy to the fullest given that, as usual, the programming grid includes more than 400 movies, many of them from rarely heard-of-cinematographies, premieres, films that will never see the light in the commercial circuit here, and auteurs many filmgoers will be making the acquaintance of before becoming obsessive, possessive favourite campaigners.

Beginning and end

One of this year’s highlights is the premiere of Hugo Santiago’s El cielo del centauro, the return to Argentina of the filmmaker exiled in France. Santiago’s first and only movie made in Argentina was Invasión, a sci-fi rarity written in collaboration with Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. After that, he fled the country, and Invasión became a cult classic few had actually seen. In those days, you must remember, the only chance to catch these gems were the minifestivals and retrospectives at the few arthouses scattered along Corrientes, such as the Lorca, the Lorraine, the Sala Leopoldo Lugones, the Cosmos, and not many more.

The good news, then, is that Santiago will be back with El cielo del centauro as the Opening Night Feature.

At the other end of the spectrum (as regards generation and experience) is first-time director Mariano Nante, whose La calle de los pianistas will be the Closing Night feature. La calle de los pianistas is a documentary about the Tiempo family, the female members of which became master piano performers. Fittingly enough, the screening will be held at the Teatro Colón opera house.

Main lineup

BAFICI’s official competition will this year comprise 18 movies from all over the world, but Argentina will prevail with three entries. The countries featured in the festival’s main section are Brazil, Jordan, Switzerland, Korea, Spain, and India.

Since one of the requirements for admission in the official competition is that the film should be, at most, the third opus in the director’s career, the names in it are not that well-known here.

Argentina’s most intriguing entries are La mujer de los perros, by Laura Citarella and Verónica Llinás, produced and distributed by Pampero Films indie movie company. The official competition will feature not only fiction works but also documentaries, such as Songs, by North Korean director Soon Mi-Yoon.

There’s not much to go by to glee with anticipation, except that the movie, about the complex sociopolitical situation in North Korea, contains autobiographical elements, and that it was awarded the Best Opera Prima Prize at the Locarno Festival, Switzerland.

Argentine Competition

One of BAFICI’s highlights, the Argentine Official Competition boasts a plethora of entries directed by heavy-weight directors like Luis Ortega (Lulú), Juan Villegas (Victoria), Matías Piñeiro (La princesa de Francia), and Daniel Rosenfeld (Al centro de la tierra).

José Celestino Campusano, who made a name for himself as an enfant térrible shooting outside the commercial and even the traditional indie scene (remember the swampy gay drama Vil romance?) is back with Placer y martirio, another piece of shocking, raw, in-your-face sample of true-to-life story. It’s all staged and stagey, but nonetheless off the beaten track.

Avant garde and Genre

This is the third section (out of four) with feature-length movies in competition. Inagurated three years back under the tenure of film critic Marcelo Panozzo as BAFICI programmer, its content was already present in previous editions (out of competition, though). Back then, it was known as Cine del futuro, and its reincarnation is more about experimental work (as regards theme and aesthetics) than conventional filmmaking.

There’s much to look forward to in this year’s “Avant garde and Genre,” such as France’s Near Death Experience, with controversial writer Michel Houellebecq (The Elementary Particles) making a star turn as an actor. Produced by Argentina, 35 y soltera, by P. Schargorodsky, was built around a video that went viral on YouTube, and Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is billed as a vampire western with Iranian aesthetics.

Nocturna and Restored Classics

Nightime still has that magic power to set people in a movie-watching mood. True, now you may come home and Netflix a movie or two to satiate your cinematic hunger, but nothing compares to the BAFICI offerings. Yes, it’s that section you had to queue for hours to get your tickets for and to get in the screening room. Unusual, weird fare, the stuff offered by Nocturna. Remember Bruce LaBruce or John Cameron Mitchell’s scandalous but true-to-life Shortbus?

Well, this year there’s Everything That Rises Must Converge, an unusual examination of human relations in the porn business; and Summer of Blood, a comedy about modern-day vampires.

The number and quality of restored classics is remarkable this year: Tony Scott’s modern vampire story The Hunger; David Lynch’s Blue Velvet; Billy Wilder’s The Seven-Year Itch; Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai; David Cronenberg’s gynaecological nightmare Dead Ringers; the screen version of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood; and three Argentine classics: Alambrado, Marco Bechis’ opera prima; El acto en cuestión, by Alejandro Agresti; and Sergio Renán’s La tregua, which turned 40 last year.

If your New Year’s resolutions included filling in the gaps in your cinematic culture, here’s your chance to see all those films in restored, glorious prints.

http://buenosairesherald.com/article/186541/bafici-2015-so-many-films-so-little-time

Sunday, April 12, 2015

BAFICI 2015: so many films, so little time

Verónica Llinás in a scene from the enigmatic La mujer de los perros.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

An early autumn staple is back with a bag full of moviedom goodies

Beginning and end

The good news, then, is that Santiago will be back with El cielo del centauro as the Opening Night Feature.

Main lineup

Since one of the requirements for admission in the official competition is that the film should be, at most, the third opus in the director’s career, the names in it are not that well-known here.

Argentine Competition

Avant garde and Genre

Nocturna and Restored Classics

Well, this year there’s Everything That Rises Must Converge, an unusual examination of human relations in the porn business; and Summer of Blood, a comedy about modern-day vampires.

If your New Year’s resolutions included filling in the gaps in your cinematic culture, here’s your chance to see all those films in restored, glorious prints.

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Kierkegaard Festival: through a film darkly

2015-06-14T02:05:00.001-03:00

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

The bicentennial of the Danish philosopher’s birth brings a film fest to BA

As part of the global celebrations of the bicentennial of Søren Kierkegaard’s birth, the Danish Embassy is hosting an eponymous film festival, to be held October 15-17 at the Village Recoleta multiplex.

The festival, curated by scripwriter-director Guido Kaldwill, features three Scandinavian masterpieces centring on or somehow discussing the themes present in Kierkegaard’s most relevant works.

The programme includes Roy Anderson’s En kärlekshistoria (A Swedish Love Story, 1970); Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Ordet (The Word, 1955); and Ingmar Bergman’s Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957).

Funded with the support of the Danish Culture Ministry, the Søren Kierkegaard Council 2013, Copenhagen’s Golden Days Festival, the Fundación Cinemateca Argentina and the Danish Film Board, proceeds of the Kierkegaard Film Festival will be earmarked for the creation of a Kierkegaard section for children and youth at the Martín del Barco Centenera Library in BA.

“While developing a feature on Søren Kierkegaard, I thought one of the best ways to celebrate his bicentennial would be a festival highlighting his relevance today,” says curator Guido Kalwdwill.

The idea sounds perfect, bearing in mind Kierkegaard’s direct and indirect influence on a vast proportion of modern cinema, from Dreyer and Bergman and, through Existentialism, to the “Nuevo Cine Argentino” (in its first incarnation, in the 1960s, led by non-conformist youths). In more than one way, a connection can be easily made, for example, between Bergman’s ascetic ideas and some of the first “Nuevo Cine Argentino” directors, such as Rodolfo Kuhn, who made Los jóvenes viejos (1962), the emblematic piece of this movement.

“The movies in this series reflect Kierkegaard’s existential dilemmas from a contemporary standpoint, whether in their themes or explicit references,” Kaldwill enthuses. “These movies explore these issues through Greek philosophy and mythology, Nordic, Viking and pagan traditions, the Old and the New Testament, and universal art and literature,” Kaldwill continues.

“They are concerned with aesthetic and ethical issues, decisions, anguish, love, faith and finding your true self, among other points. In this regard, we would have loved to include other movies which reflect upon these ideas, such as Woody Allen’s Manhattan or Annie Hall, but the festival’s limited duration prevented us from doing so,” Kaldwill says.

“Following the structure of Kierkegaard’s seminal Enter-Eller (Either/Or), part narrative, part philosophical reflection by a fictional alter ego, we can clearly discern three voices debating the cycle of life: youth, adolescence and old age. The movies in the Kierkegaard Festival follow this pattern.”

Where & When

Søren Kierkegaard Film Festival. October 15-17 at 8.30pm at Village Recoleta multiplex, Vicente López 2050. 0810-0810-CINE (2463). www.villagecines.com. Tickets $60.

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/142896/kierkegaard-festival-through-a-film-darkly

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Kierkegaard Festival: through a film darkly

A scene from Roy Anderson’s A Swedish Love Story.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

The bicentennial of the Danish philosopher’s birth brings a film fest to BA

The festival, curated by scripwriter-director Guido Kaldwill, features three Scandinavian masterpieces centring on or somehow discussing the themes present in Kierkegaard’s most relevant works.

Where & When

Søren Kierkegaard Film Festival. October 15-17 at 8.30pm at Village Recoleta multiplex, Vicente López 2050. 0810-0810-CINE (2463). www.villagecines.com. Tickets $60.

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The other heaven: Julio Cortázar revisited

2015-06-14T01:57:00.004-03:00

Julio Cortázar in the streets of Paris.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

Institutions commemorate writer’s life, legacy

One hundred years after his birth (August 26, 1914) Argentina and the world continue to celebrate Julio Cortázar’s literary legacy, his life, his passions, his political affiliation, his role in the Latin American literary “boom” of the 1960s, jazz (the music he so much loved), the objects he liked to pick at random and find unusual use for, the thousands of books and records in his Paris home, the way he articulated literary innovation with tradition.

One of the most important attractions in Cortázar’s commemoration will be Los otros cielos, a monumental exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA). Running July 26 to September 28, Los otros cielos, named after one of Cortázar’s most famous short stories, will allow visitors to take a peek into the writer’s personal collection of original photographs dating back to his childhood and formative years, correspondence, documents, objects and home-made 8mm films, an integral part of Cortázar’s life story.

Curators organized the exhibit around a series of accompanying texts — a random yet meticulous parcours of sorts, as Cortázar would have loved — not unlike the writer’s own 1977 opus Territorios, about his favourite visual artworks. This part of the Cortázar exhibit will be housed in the temporary exhibitions hall of the MNBA, divided into 12 themes to be toured in linear fashion or at random, as, once again, the author of the “follow your own route” novel, Rayuela (Hopscotch), would have preferred.

The MNBA’s main hall will feature a projection of 11 rectangles in chalk — a hopscotch — with easily recognizable, iconic images from his life. Overlapping with the main hall’s exhibit, the second floor will house the show Los fotógrafos: ventanas a Julio Cortázar (The Photographers: Windows to Julio Cortázar), featuring the writer’s most iconic images as captured by some of the world’s top photographers, like Antonio Gálvez, Sara Facio, Alicia D’Amico, Carlos Burri and René Burri.

The outstanding work of Facio, D’Amico, Dani Yaho, Manja Offerhaus and other photographers will also be on view at the Casa del Bicentenario through September 28. The Casa del Bicentenario’s Cortázar show is complemented by audio material from old vinyl records and tapes with Cortázar reading from his own texts, first edition book covers and manuscripts.

The Cortázar itinerary continues at the nearby Museo del Libro y de la lengua, with an exhibition ingeniously entitled Rayuela. Una muestra para armar (Hopscotch. A Set Kit), the aegis of which will be the homo ludens so present in Cortázar’s persona and in the emblematic Rayuela. Mirroring the novel’s choose-your-route-as-you-read style, visitors to Rayuela. Una muestra para armar will also be able to walk around at will, never following a rigid pattern set by exhibition curators at conventional shows. The Museo del libro y de la lengua exhibit runs through late October for any “Cronopios” and “Famas” who are late on catching up with the news about their creator.

A few steps away, as in a hopscotch game, the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library) will host one of the most important events in the “Calendario Cortázar”: the series of conferences titled Lecturas y relecturas de Julio Cortázar (Reading and Re-reading Julio Cortázar), with more than 40 Argentine and foreign literary personalities performing an in-depth examination (an innovative one, hopefully) of Cortázar’s legacy and the meaning of his oeuvre for the new generations. Héctor Schmucler, Néstor García Canclini, Roberto Fernández, Horacio González, Oliverio Coelho, Carlos Gamerro, Martín Kohan, Carlos Alvarez Garriga, Américo Cristófalo and Damián López Tabarovsky, among many others, will tackle the close links between Cortázar’s literary production, his life story and the evolution of his ideology. August 25 through 27.

At the Palais de Glace in nearby Recoleta, writer Juan Sasturain teams up with other narrators and visual artists in a show titled Rompe-cortázar, once again with a puzzle-like structure to be assembled by the visitors themselves.

One of the most striking tributes has been organized by the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes: an installation, documentary-style, following Cortázar’s life as child, student, teacher, husband, friend and writer, with quite a few winks for Cortázar connoisseurs who will surely spot quite a few details that may go unnoticed to visitors not very familiar with his work or life in visual terms.

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/167722/the-other-heaven-julio

Friday, August 22, 2014

The other heaven: Julio Cortázar revisited

Archive photo of Julio Cortázar.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

Institutions commemorate writer’s life, legacy

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Casa FOA: living in 22 square metres

2015-06-14T01:29:00.002-03:00

Decolook stand at Casa FOA's22 m2 living space challenge.

By Julio Nakamurakare

Herald Staff

It’s not just minimalist: it’s also about keeping late hours, for night owls may visit it until midnight

The new edition of the interior design fair Casa FOA, which runs through November 16 at the Abadía de San Benito in the Palermo / Belgrano neighbourhood, will this year present viewers with a surprising choice (though not mandates) encouraging designers and architects to turn minimalist spaces (as small as 22-m2 rooms) into living / work spaces complete with kitchen, dining area, desktop, sitting room and what have you. Striking? Think Ikea and you’ll get the idea.

Also, this new edition of Casa FOA will give night owls — of which there’s plenty in Buenos Aires, whose inhabitants and visitors are known for their love of late night life — an opportunity to take a peek at the new trends in Argentine and foreign design. During its entire run at the Abadía de San Benito, Casa FOA will on Fridays be open from 8pm till midnight so that home improvement enthusiasts may catch the new work of renowned architects and designers. In line with the nighttime visiting hours, Casa FOA will feature entertainment shows and music performances.

Located on Gorostiaga 1908, the abbey was chosen “for its beauty, simplicity and unequalled design,” bound to mesmerize visitors, according to Casa FOA organizers.

Walking up an ample staircase on the Abadía de San Benito (built in 1924), visitors will first get to see the landscape work of Desirée de Rider, whose “intervention” of the abbey space consisted in filling the garden with bird sculptures matching the colours of the building’s facade.

The garden tour includes a bed made from grass, wire roses planted in red vases, and relaxation areas designed by Marta Carena. The latter are accessed through the Pasillo de Artes, which welcomes visitors with an exhibition of paintings by Amalia Moedo.

The number of decorated rooms is tantalizing: 45, most of them around 20m2, functional and colourful in most cases, as in the space “Studio,” by architects Lorena Spínola, Marcela Rodríguez and María Ponce Quintero, who had the infrequent idea of devising a space for just one person.

“We designed a 20-m2 room with all the amenities for living (an ample desk, a living room / bedroom, a kitchen overlooking the gardens and a closet) because living in small spaces is the world trend now. This scale seems suitable for living, for us,” Spínola says.

“We’ve stuck to furniture against the walls and incorporated a pullout lighting system functioning as a remote control for all the areas,” she adds.

Another attractive setup is the “Youngster’s Bedroom,” by Sergio Muchnik, who designed a bedroom around the theme “Bullying not cool.” There’s also a kitchen, designed by Gabriela López, for people who like to entertain wine drinkers. Most rooms are painted and decorated in colours that blend harmoniously with the architectural style created in early 20th century by Father Eleuterio González.

Exiting the hallways and stepping into the abbey’s gardens, visitors find a swimming pool very different from the one at the entrance, because this one was decked out in wood to function as a solarium. A few steps away, in what used to be the abbey’s kitchen, Adriano Randazzo set up the Library, one of the rooms that will remain the same after Casa FOA closes.

“This space was conceived for public use as a cultural centre, this is why we set up a modern library where silence does not prevail. On the contrary, it’s a meeting point for reunions, a place to hang out together and download information,” Randazzo says.

Stepping into the Library, visitors first stumble on a modern office with a desk and PC, with a wall-to-wall bookcase combining elements new and old, perfect and imperfect, a harmonious blend of glass panels and wood beams; the wall painting, on the other hand, has been peeled off “as some sort of reminder of what this building used to look like,” Randazzo adds, pointing to the bare brick walls domination the space and giving it the unfinished yet glamorous looks of modern setups.

A living room set in light hues provides a space for relaxation, and a projector screens writers’ phrases on the walls that bespeak the need “to reassess the value of the written word,” he explains.

The abbey’s auditorium, meanwhile, decorated by Jorge Muradas and Eliana Elesgaray, will maintain its looks after Casa FOA closes, thus benefiting the abbey with ultramodern, ultraminimalist and eye-popping spaces. The walls, previously in dark hues, were painted white to illuminate the surrounding arches.

“We were drawn by the architectural features of this sacred space, and what we found most fascinating was its eclectic style,” Muradas says, explaining that their work is aimed at elevating the soul, like humankind does when looking for answers to the great riddles of existence. It’s not that Casa FOA will preach to converts of a certain religion. Religion, rather, it is intended to pave the way for spirituality through an innovative approach — the contemplation of our daily surroundings under new eyes, through the eyes of day-to-day life.

WHERE & WHEN

Casa FOA 2014. At Abadía de San Benito, Gorostiaga 1908 at the intersection of Luis María Campos. Tel: 4773-8626 / 4776-1055. Daily from 12 noon to 8pm. Fridays from 12 noon to midnight. Fridays from 8pm 2x1 for all. Tickets $90. Twenty percent discount for seniors and students.

http://buenosairesherald.com/article/172370/casa-foa-living-in-22-square-metres-

Friday, October 17, 2014

Casa FOA: living in 22 square metres

Espacio No. 1: a loft designed by architect Viviana Melamed. A dream-like room with all the trimmings of a standard house albeit constructed on a minimalist space.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

It’s not just minimalist: it’s also about keeping late hours, for night owls may visit it until midnight

Located on Gorostiaga 1908, the abbey was chosen “for its beauty, simplicity and unequalled design,” bound to mesmerize visitors, according to Casa FOA organizers.

“We’ve stuck to furniture against the walls and incorporated a pullout lighting system functioning as a remote control for all the areas,” she adds.

WHERE & WHEN

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Iconic man of the arts Sergio Renán dies, 82

2015-06-13T22:59:00.002-03:00

A lauded actor, he directed the first Argentine movie vying for a Hollywood Academy Oscar

Sergio Renán was a man for all seasons: actor, screenwriter, director, régisseur.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald staff

Sergio Renán, the first Argentine filmmaker nominated for an Oscar (La tregua, 1974), died yesterday after struggling with health problems that had been plaguing him for decades, even falling into a coma from which he miraculously recovered. He was 82.
Renán, born Samuel Cohan in a Jewish colony in the litoral province of Entre Ríos, migrated to Buenos Aires and took on the name of Sergio Renán for his stage début, becoming an actor in demand and honing in his directorial skills until earning the Best Foreign Picture nomination for La tregua, based on Mario Benedetti’s novel of the same title.
In addition to acting and directing, Renán was also an opera régisseur and director of the Teatro Colón from 1989 to 1996, a post he held to critical praise and administrative controversy. It was precisely at the Teatro Colón were Renán’s remains were held in wake yesterday until burial today.
Born on January 30, 1933, Renán maintained, even in his late years and in spite of his frail health, the elegance of his leading man phase in the movies. From the Entre Ríos colony in Entre Ríos, the Cohans moved to Buenos Aires to the Once neighbourhood where they thrived financially. His family thought the young Samuel was destined to become a violinist of renown, never imagining that the young man would abandon his music studies to devote all his efforts to acting.
Although Samuel Cohan, now known as Sergio Renán, was always a very private man who seldom if ever spoke about his family life, he was given to comment enthusiastically about his passion for music, admitting to being a frustrated musician. This became evident in each of his opera productions, or even in his films. However, at some point during his career, he was drawn to screen writing and directing.
Renán was proud of his multifaceted artistic profile: movie and theatre actor, cinema and television director, and opera régisseur, here and in Spain. Four decades ago, Renán’s crowning achievement was his darkly minimalistic version of the Benedetti novel La tregua, with a cast picked mainly from the world of theatre and with little or no experience in the movies. La tregua, starring Héctor Alterio and Ana María Picchio as two despondent office workers who, in spite of their circumstances, still think they have a chance to attain happiness, which has been elusive to them, was a box office and critical hit, breaking new ground in family portraiture. Indeed, La tregua focused on the dark aspects of routine and absence, daring to hint that one of the male characters had a different sexual orientation and questioning traditional family values that stood for “normalcy.” What mainly attracted audiences at the time was La tregua’s audacity in conveying the message that people could expect to be happy in spite of personal losses and middle-class conformity. When La tregua was picked by the Hollywood Academy as a candidate for Best Foreign Language Picture, Renán became a cult director in Argentine cinema, with the handicap that, from then on, only superlative pieces were expected from him.

Héctor Alterio and Ana María Picchio in La tregua.

It was no easy task, because Renán, as a filmmaker, was rather uneven. In 1976, his screen version of the Haroldo Conti novel Alrededor de la jaula, starring Ubaldo Martínez, was launched right after the March 24 coup d’état, which industry insiders and colleagues perceived either as a hint of complicity or a gesture of denunciation, because many artists at the time had to flee the country and go into exile due to political persecution. Two years later, the suspicion was somehow confirmed when Renán accepted to shoot the World Cup 78 demagogic documentary-fictional celebration La fiesta de todos (see box).
In 1980, Renán tapped into literature once again for his new outing Sentimental (Réquiem para un amigo), adapted from a Geno Díaz novel. Sentimental starred Renán himself alongside Pepe Soriano. The film had a cold reception, after which Renán decided to adapt another Benedetti novel, Gracias por el fuego, his fourth cinematic outing. Literature, definitely, was a field he could tap into, directing Tacos altos in 1985, based on two short stories by Bernardo Kordon. Tacos altos was regarded as a rather unusual exploration of life in the fringe of society.
Another literary challenge was his adaptation of Adolfo Bioy Casares’ novel El sueño de los héroes, with an all-star cast and a mise en scene somehow related to the aesthetics of opera, which increased the film’s budget and created problems for its commercial release. El sueño de los héroes, starring Soledad Villamil and Germán Palacios, provided Renán with an extraordinary opportunity to travel through time, like Gauna, the novel’s hero.
It was also a nightmarish world, set in BA in the 1930s during a carnival night and describing a phantasmagorical horse-ridden carriage trip from Barracas to the then far-off neighbourhood of Saavedra.
El sueño de los héroes, in Renán’s own words, was his second-best favourite movie. It was also ignored or panned by critics, and its ballooning budget sparked commercial release problems that prompted Renán to make a U-turn.
This was when fate striked, affecting Renán’s health severely and putting him in a coma from which he miraculously recovered. After making a full recovery, Renán went on to hold public office positions, from the Foreign Ministry to his beloved Teatro Colón. From that moment on, Renán was able to delve into theatre, movies and opera. After turning down an offer to direct the film version of Juan José Millás’ novel La soledad era esto?, Renán eventually returned to the cinema with Tres de corazones (2007), based on texts by Juan José Saer. It was Renán’s last movie. Other projects were shelved, either because producers were not interested, or because Renán himself felt he was not up to them due to his health problems.
Indeed, it was around this time that he was diagnosed with vocal chords cancer, for which he had to undergo surgery a couple of times. Surgery affected his voice, until then easily recognizable in any medium. In spite of his medical woes, Renán returned to the stage and to the opera, receiving the Cóndor de Plata Award Life Achievement Award in 2014. He was also honoured at the BAFICI (Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Films), which he used to sneer at, with very few exceptions. But BAFICI was the showcase for the relaunch of the digitally remastered print of La tregua, which, in writer José Pablo Feinman’s words, “Tells the story of a simple yet extraordinary love affair. We were once happy. At some point (in life) we can (all) be. At some point, pain gives us a truce.”
“It will always be possible,” Feinmann continued, “(...) to open a door and find a girl like Laura Avellaneda (played by Ana María Picchio in the movie), her hair wet after a downpour, a towel wrapped around her young body, a face like that of a gracious doll, staring at us, waiting for us like she would wait for Martín Santomé (her office co-worker, played by Alterio), and say, like he would: ‘Like this, precisely like this, that’s what happiness is like.’ And cinema too is exactly like that.”
A perfect epigram for one of Argentina’s best-loved movies ever.

Not everybody’s party

National Team captain Daniel Passarella in La fiesta de todos.

His name was on it, he signed up a contract to direct it, in his own words, “falling into vile monetary temptation.” It was in 1979, amid the murder-stained 1976-1983 military dictatorship, that Sergio Renán made La fiesta de todos, a montage film with a few snippets of fiction about the infamous 1978 World Cup held in Argentina for demagogic reasons.
Paradoxically enough, Renán himself had at some point been blacklisted by the military.

Shen Yun bring exquisite Monkey King to life

2015-06-13T22:47:00.001-03:00

The Monkey King descends on Earth in Shen Yun’s fascinating dance production.

By Julio Nakamurakare

Herald Staff

New York-based performing arts company shines in millennial fable reenactment

The legend of the Monkey King, which originated in ancient China as an enlightening fable illustrating the might of celestial divinities over mortals and the latter’s useless attempts to usurp ill-begotten positions, has been brought back to life by Shen Yun, the New York-based dance, acrobatics, theatre and music company currently in BA for a brief engagement at the Opera Allianz.

Drawing on a trove of 5,000 years of civilization and culture, Shen Yun’s wide-ranging repertoire goes from ancient stories to contemporary tales, from ethnic dances to brief dramas, all within reach of Western audiences, in line with the company’s goal of bringing Eastern traditions West.

Shen Yun’s production of The Monkey King is mostly based on classical Chinese dance, acrobatics and theatre, all set to matching music played on traditional Chinese as well as western instruments.

The fusion is magical and suits to dazzling perfection the acrobatic movements and balletic steps and jumps through which the Monkey King fable is told, as a blend of cautionary tale and, in the end, an ode to the joy of living under the blessing of the Gods.

Highly politicized by the Shen Yun company as a take on the Chinese government, The Monkey King, however, is rich in the type of metaphor and allusion that works in multifaceted ways: as a universal reflexion on the relation between humankind’s aspiration to immortality and the Gods’ design, which are often at odds and provoke cataclysmic mayhem on Earth.

As told in Shen Yun’s reading of The Monkey King, the legend begins in the Eastern Continent, on top of the Flower Fruit Montain where a magical rock stands for the liaison between Heaven and Earth. The balance of power is uneven, though, with the rock, since time immemorial, epitomizes the essence of Heaven, Earth, and the stars. The rock, gifted with supernatural powers, grows a stone egg from which, upon bursting open, is hatched a monkey.

The newly-born creature spends his early years among other apes on Flower Fruit Mountain, but there comes a fateful day when, unexpected to all, he starts to display his unusual courage and wisdom. He becomes the leader of the pack and takes them to a waterfall where they discover a cave in which they take shelter. The journey has begun, and the rock-borne creature is crowned the Monkey King by the other apes.

After days frolicking and feasting, Monkey King discovers mortality and realizes that a luxurious lifestyle will lead nowhere as he, too, will die one day, and the inevitable process of transformation begins. Monkey King leaves the mountain disguised in human attire in bright yellow to stand out from the rest of mortals and the monsters he must confront on his quest for eternal life.

As enacted by Shen Yun, The Monkey King story, danced in front of a back projection that becomes an amazing technical gimmick, is an eloquent illustration of ambition and the lesson in humility to be learned by all: divinities, royalty, demigods and mere mortals. But it’s the latter, of course, who must be punished for their aspiration to immortality, which they try to achieve by defying the gods in dazzling balletic confrontation full of acrobatics, twisting their bodies into impossible shapes and marching on, not to eternity but toward the path to wisdom and illumination, provided they behave accordingly.

Even if all art could be rightly considered political in nature, what Shen Yun do is emphasize the beauty of transitions, of transformations as we march toward a place called destiny.

Whether or not this message may rightly apply to the current state of affairs in China, Shen Yun’s message is only for viewers to discern. As a dazzling display of the whole troupe’s dance and performing arts qualities, The Monkey King, though, is a stand-alone sample — a very good one, at that — of what power and ambition, when unrestrained, may lead to, regardless of geographical location and position in the universal order.

Which can be easily transposed, most certainly, to current political issues. But art, in spite of the creators’ and performers’ intentions, transcends all boundaries, sweeping them all with one single message that can never be expressed assertively enough: beauty is all there is to humankind’s artistic endeavours.

Shen Yun’s art is an unequivocal example of this.

When and where

The Monkey King, by Shen Yun Company. Teatro Opera Allianz, Av. Corrientes 860. Today at 9pm, tomorrow at 5.30pm. Tickets (from $250 to $950 plus service charge) available at the venue and from Ticketek.com.

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/191485/shen-yun-bring-exquisite-monkey-king-to-life

Saturday, June 13, 2015

Shen Yun bring exquisite Monkey King to life

The Monkey King descends on Earth in Shen Yun’s fascinating dance production.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

New York-based performing arts company shines in millennial fable reenactment

Shen Yun’s production of The Monkey King is mostly based on classical Chinese dance, acrobatics and theatre, all set to matching music played on traditional Chinese as well as western instruments.

Even if all art could be rightly considered political in nature, what Shen Yun do is emphasize the beauty of transitions, of transformations as we march toward a place called destiny.

Shen Yun’s art is an unequivocal example of this.

When and where

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Fans go crazy for international YouTube stars

2015-06-13T02:55:00.002-03:00

YouTube Conference Buenos Aires 2015: fans waiting for YouTuber star Rubius

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

Spain’s online phenomenon Rubius expresses shock at overwhelming reception

Launched in 2005 as a small Internet application carrying, mostly, homemade video content of no interest to people outside the family group of the nerd who uploaded the inane material, YouTube, thirteen yers later, is the platform of choice for anything from cuddly kittens, videoclips, movie trailers, and countless audiovisual pieces that would otherwise get no exposure. Things may be ignored when first uploaded on YouTube, success is never guaranteed in spite of the quality of the uploaded material. The weirdest video, though, may go viral (a term probably coined by YouTubers or other social media platforms) and attract thousands, even millions of followers around the globe, prompting tecchies to kickstart their own attempts at advertising-beacon videos that will land them a fortune.

Now it seems decades-long news when we first heard about “floggers” (photo bloggers) catching the attention of multinational companies which vied for an advertising spot on the most popular flogs. That era is long gone.

You’re either a YouTuber or you have no material, even less virtual, presence in the cyberworld of social-media savvy surfers.

In the YouTubers’ universe, the most glittering star, however ephemeral, is Spain’s Rubius, a 24-year-old who has more than 10 million followers on Google’s YouTube. Traditional media seem to play no role in this Brave New World of sorts: YouTubers learnt about the conference and showed up en masse at Ezeiza Airport to give Rubius a hero’s welcome. They were all eager to see him, the headliner of the Club Media Fest held until tomorrow at the Rural Palermo showgrounds.

Of course we’ve all, at some point, shared in the YouTube experience, visiting the site out of our own volition or being redirected by a commercial site or a friend’s email or whatsapp. This does not make us YouTubers, for it seems that full membership requires not just a passive attitude, watching other people’s posts, commercials, even full feature films. YouTuber membership requires that you too make your small contribution to the online audiovisual content platform and follow at least a couple or a horde of YouTube stars. Click “like,” please.

At age 24, Rubius is a young person, and a very young millionaire, but for YouTubers (most of them kids or teens) he’s graduated past undergrad status to full professional online celebrity, with more star power than pop acts. You only had to pass by the Panamericano Hotel in downtown BA yesterday to see Rubius fans hoping to catch a glimpse of him. They waited long hours, for the Internet content developer-manipulator slept past noon and had yet to shower and have breakfast before meeting his loyal subjects.

Rubius’ first tweet on arrival in Argentina read: “Arrived in Argentina. Holy s***. Almost impossible to breathe.” The accompanying image saw him struggling to get past a crowd of cheering under 20s.

This is how intense YouTube fever can get. Rubius (born Rubén Douglas Gundersen in Malaga to a Norwegian mother and Spanish father), with more than 10 million YouTube subscribers, 3 million Twitter followers and four million on the social/gossip platform Facebook, is no instant celebrity: he spent several years shooting funny, amusing, weird videos that do not fail to catch the attention of the YouTube generation every night.

They’re normally referred to as millennials or, more specifically, as the 2.0 generation, and they have long crashed the gates of music, movie or television superstar seekers to become members of a fraternity that, though not undercover, is still something akin to an underground movement.

Rubius will not be the only headliner in this weekend’s Club Media Fest, other celebrity YouTubers include Spain’s Mangel Rogel, Mexico’s Werevertumorrow, Chile’s Xoda, and Argentina’s own Vedito, Marito Baracus, Locos x el Asado, and Alejo Valentina, among countless others. Never heard of them? Just Google or YouTube them and you’ll be showered with videos by and about them. They’re the stars behind their own videos, the subject of self-referential discussions and forums, the visible heads of a cryptic world alien to previous generations who grew up when personal computers were just becoming familiar in businesses and homes, courtesy of IBM, Radio Shack, Texas Instruments and other IT pioneers.

However innovative and creative, the YouTube event shares at least one thing in common with other conferences: it’s live, the lectures will not be broadcast on the Internet, YouTube artists will make live appearances, and YouTubers will have to make it in person to the gates of the Rural Showgrounds. The YouTube conference started yesterday and continues today and tomorrow from 2pm to 12 midnight, with tickets ranging from $350 to a $1,550 subscription for the three-day event. VIP Pass, they call it, proving that there’s no such thing as cyberdemocracy, or that there is, but it comes at a cost.

YouTubers number around 50 million around the world. The Buenos Aires conference has, thus far, attracted more than 20,000 of them, some flying in from Spain, Peru, Chile, Colombia and Mexico.

Says Club Media Fest founder José Luis Massa: “This is still a very avant garde affair. It will be fully developed in two or more years, when commercial brands fully realize the value of YouTube” as an advertising platform. The producer’s words are an open statement about online advertising that inevitably accompanies the most viral videos. “There’s 440 million people in the Hispanic world, and this business is growing at a 166 percent rate yearly,” Massa continued.

“The entertainment world is fast changing,” Massa said, adding that, “It’s a more collective experience because it runs on the social networks. Young kids no longer watch television, they watch short videos on their smartphones or tablets. They become an artist’s fans without the need of a programming director, as is the case in television. This universe is more chaotic, sincere, visceral, creative, powerful, without conditions.”

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/186463/fans-go-crazy-for-international-youtube-stars

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Josip Broz Tito - Los grandes lideres del siglo XX

2015-06-13T02:34:00.003-03:00

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Vista normal Vista MARC Vista ISBD

Josip Broz Tito

por Schiffman, Ruth; Nakamurakare, Julio, trad. \ Costantini, Pablo, coord. \ Castillo, Ofeliz, editor.

Tipo de material: LibroSeries Los Grandes Líderes del Siglo XX; Tiempo Cultural.Editor: Buenos Aires : HyspaméricaDescripción: 104 págs.ISBN: 950-785-003-1.Clasificación CDD: JB 923.29497 S333jRecursos en línea: Archivo Digital Biblioteca Nacional | Haga clic para acceso en línea

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Libros	Biblioteca Publica de Villa Duarte "Juan Sanchez Lamouth"	JB 923.29497 S333j (Navegar estantería)

http://biblio.bnphu.gob.do/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=4494

Anticlerical, irrevent artist León Ferrari dies

2015-06-13T02:20:00.001-03:00

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

Painter-sculptor’s trademark themes were referred to as ‘political and religious heresy’

Argentine visual artist León Ferrari, who shook the arts scene’s foundations with his expressionist yet ironic takes on everything from religious dogma to social manipulation to the point of even raising the ire of then BA Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio — enthroned as Pope Francis earlier this year — died yesterday in Buenos Aires, sources from arteUna reported. ArteUna is a cultural resources network promoted by Ferrari and other leading artists.

Ferrari, known for his human rights stance and his well-known antibellicist position, founded the “Club de impíos, herejes, apóstatas, blasfemos, ateos, paganos, agnósticos e infieles” (CIHABAPAI, or Club of Impious, heretics, apostates, blasphemous, atheists, pagans, agnostics and infidels).

As chance would have it, Ferrari’s death coincides with the former Cardinal Bergoglio’s visit to Brazil, which seems to herald a new sociopolitical era for the region. As Pope Francis yesterday addressed a crowd of 1.5 million religious devotees on Rio’s Copacabana Beach, news broke out about the death of Ferrari, a staunch anticlerical artist who materialized his convictions through artworks deemed “heretic” by the Catholic community.

A CHORUS OF DISAPPROVAL. In 2004, a Ferrari retrospective at the Recoleta Cultural Centre (CCR), featuring a series of religious-themed sculptures and installations, caused controversy and discomfort among Catholics, with Cardinal Bergoglio joining the chorus of complaint through a pastoral letter.

“For some time now, the City (of BA) has been witnessing some public expressions of mockery and offence to Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary” the then Cardinal Bergoglio and current Pope Francis wrote.

A group of Catholic activists were more vocal in their criticism. Chanting “Long Live Christ the King!” they vandalized some of the artworks, leading up to a gathering of artists in support of Ferrari. The Christ crucifixion mounted on a fighter plane was originally made as an entry for the legendary Instituto Di Tella’s Prize in 1965. The controversial work, titled La Civilización Occidental y Cristiana, perfectly reflected and condensed Ferrari’s credo: a tenacious, ferocious critique of established social institutions, religion, war and intolerance.

SON OF THE CHURCH BUILDER. One of the most remarkable paradoxes in León Ferrari’s life and artistic career was that his father, Augusto Ferrari, was an Italian artist who painted religious frescos in a temple in the city of Turin. In addition, Augusto Ferrari helped restore the Iglesia de San Miguel in a western Buenos Aires suburb, where he painted 120 works. He also worked as an assistant to architects and engineers who built several churches.

Ferrari Jr. graduated as an engineer in 1947 but his profession increasingly veered toward the arts. In the early 50s he made his first trip to Italy, where he held his first solo exhibition. He came back to Argentina in 1955. In the years 1959 and 1960, he started to make sculptures on wood and wire structures, interlaced at first, and then welded.

In 1962, during his second trip to Italy, he made his first abstract work, an almost unintelligible piece in the style that became his trademark with several variations. During that decade he turned to political art, participated in collective exhibitions such as Homenaje a Vietnam (Homage to Vietnam,

1966), Tucumán arde (1968), and Malvenido Rockefeller (1969), all of them bearing the trait of temporality but leaving a strong imprint on posterity.

In 2007, Ferrari received the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the prestigious Venice Biennial. In 2012 he received the Platinum Konex Award for Best Conceptual Artist 2002-2006, and the Brilliants Konex for Artist of the Decade. He had previously received two Konex distinctions in 1992 and 2002. Fe-rrari was also the recipient of a Guggenheim grant.

Ferrari’s works feature in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), and the Modern Art Museum (Sao Paulo), among others.

Ferrari’s unflinching anti-clerical stance was accompanied by his message against war and intolerance, which he reflected in a realistic sculpture work representing the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on a US bomber plane sent to Vietnam.

As a man and artist who refused to self-censor his thoughts, Ferrari was forced into exile in Brazil during the last Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983). Ferrari’s son Gabriel was abducted by the military and remains one of the thousands of people “disappeared” during that period.

One of Ferrari’s most-talked about works, precisely, was an installation titled Nosotros no sabíamos (We Knew Nothing About It), made up of newspaper clippings mentioning, under different formats and from different viewpoints, the appearance of charred bodies during the military rule. The work was a clear allusion to the so-called “prensa canalla” which, after Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983, publicly manifested that they failed to report on the Junta’s human rights crimes because “we knew nothing about it.”

The exhibiton’s phrase, “Nosotros no sabíamos nada,” was also an extended critique of a portion of Argentine society, who claimed ignorance in the face of evidence of torture and murder that emerged during the first years of President Raúl Alfonsín’s government.

During his exile in Brazil, Ferrari resumed the political-religious themes which had dominated a previous phase of his work, now adding illustrations inspired by the Bible and Catholic iconography, oriental erotica and contemporary images. Just as an example of the kind of Ferrari’s profoundly anti-clerical stance, he made a provocative installation/collage with a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Final Judgement in a cage smeared with pidgeon faeces.

The piece, exhibited at Sao Paulo’s MAM, consisted of a cage with two pidgeons defecating on a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Final Judgement. The artwork, apart from “blasphemous,” was uncannily self-replicating, for the bird excrement would create a string of new artworks.

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/136925/anticlerical-irrevent-artist-le%C3%B3n-ferrari-dies

Friday, July 26, 2013

Anticlerical, irrevent artist León Ferrari dies

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

Painter-sculptor’s trademark themes were referred to as ‘political and religious heresy’

1966), Tucumán arde (1968), and Malvenido Rockefeller (1969), all of them bearing the trait of temporality but leaving a strong imprint on posterity.

Ferrari’s works feature in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), and the Modern Art Museum (Sao Paulo), among others.

Julio Cortázar: an unfinished roadmap

2015-06-13T01:59:00.004-03:00

Julio Cortázar with one of his passions: cats.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

Nearing the writer’s centennial, a look at how he divested narrative of literary etiquette

Attempting to chart a roadmap of the late writer Julio Cortázar — whose 100th birthday anniversary is commemorated on August 26 — is not unlike a children’s game, meaning, of course, that tracing his life is following the parcours of a life in permanent motion — and not a small-scale reproduction of an adult world in which convention reigns supreme.

Born in Belgium (by chance, as he liked to say, or “a mixture of tourism and diplomacy,” because his father was the commercial attaché at the Argentine Embassy) Cortázar spent his early years in the southern BA province suburb of Bánfield. The young Cortázar, given to reading with voracious appetite, must have spent long hours working on his literary formation as he commuted from Bánfield to the BA city downtown premises of the Normal Mariano Acosta, where he graduated as a school-teacher and then as a literature teacher. It must have been a continuum with his introverted childhood, which he did not recall as happy, his health weak and often bedridden, which prompted his mother to feed the child the books she deemed suitable for a boy his age: Salgari, Verne, adventure sagas.

This bit of information, however, does not suffice to trace the literary evolution of a young man who would, after strenuous work and years of toiling as a schoolteacher in several towns in the BA province and in Mendoza, come to literary promise. It was in this northwestern province where, perhaps for the first time, he was able to truly combine work and intellectual proclivities as a teacher of French literature.

He was already busy at work on what would become his oeuvre majeure — a monumental, convention-shattering novel like Rayuela (Hopscotch), 1963; and two impressive sets of short story collections like Bestiario (The Bestiary), 1951, and Todos los fuegos el fuego (All Fires the Fire), 1966. In spite of Rayuela’s undeniable impact on Latin America’s and the world’s literature, it is arguably on account of his short stories that Cortázar started a literary revolution. True, it was a revolution of lesser impact than Rayuela’s, perhaps, but Cortázar’s true genius lay, in many regards, in the way his prose divested short stories, as a genre, of their rigid structure and etiquette. “Like writers who dress up before putting pen to paper,” as Cortázar himself would quip.

Rayuela shared these same qualities with Cortázar’s short-story output, but this was due, to a large extent, to the random, contingent nature that pushed its characters — mainly Olivera and La Maga — through the meandering streets of Paris, playfully resorting to a game of chance, of happy or fateful encounters, always unplanned; a world that could no longer contain the happy-go-lucky nature of a man like Olivera, whose playful nature would have led him to insanity in a more realistic, less permissive world.

In Cortázar’s world, a man like Olivera, or the men and women who inhabit his dislocated yet unified universe, would have been labelled a non-conformist at the political and existential levels, and a madman by psychological and sociological standards. As another example, how to account for, in a different, “normal” context, the randomly irreverent acts of people who need a detailed manual to successfully achieve the task of climbing up a stair, a set of instructions to wind up a clock, an exemplary lesson on how to weep?

The homo ludens so deeply ingrained in Cortázar’s individualist nature made it look as though all of these instruction manuals and how-to books were there for an ancestral reason which no one before him had dared acknowledge.

It was on account of the precarious, weird mental state and social conduct of many characters in his novels and short stories that Cortázar, for literary study purposes, had to be showcased as either a “fantasy” or “experimental” author, or both types. But Cortázar, at his very best, never tampered with “fantasy,” a genre for which he had much too respect to ever attempt it, “only” accepting a commission from the Universidad de Puerto Rico to translate the whole of fantasy literature meister Edgar Allan Poe, a loving piece of work that, to this day, remains the canonical Spanish-language version of Poe.

The “experimental” label, on the other hand, gets a straightforward blow in the face when one reads such masterly, linear narratives like Torito, a first person account of a boxer’s decadence; or the visual continuum of a story like El perseguidor (The Pursuer), a subliminal evocation of the disintegration of a celebrated jazz performer.

Categorization, then, is a notion that collides with Cortázar’s perception of his own body of work, and this is how most of us — cronopios and famas* alike — would love to remember him: immersed in situations and thoughts which, like a beacon, guide us through an endearingly dark but seemingly impenetrable world.

Cortázar’s own.

* In Cortázar’s universe, mainly in his shorty-story collection De Cronopios y de Famas (1962), “Cronopios” are presented as naive, idealist, disorderly and sensitive creatures. In contrast, the “Famas” are rigid, well-organized and sanctimonious.

http://buenosairesherald.com/article/167606/julio-cort%C3%A1zar-an-unfinished-roadmap

Thursday, August 21, 2014

Julio Cortázar: an unfinished roadmap

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

Nearing the writer’s centennial, a look at how he divested narrative of literary etiquette

Cortázar’s own.

Your View - Updating human rights

2015-06-11T05:58:00.001-03:00

UPDATING HUMAN RIGHTS

Julio Nakamurakare has recently referred to three films centred on the 1976-1983 military dictatorship. On the one hand, he correctly points out (April 5) that Oscar-winning The Official Story”, needs to be reconsidered in the light of later events, now that 30 years have gone by since its first presentation. He also refers to two ground-breaking documentaries regarding foreigners who suffered persecution under the de facto regime. Still in the making is Messenger On A White Horse, a documentary written and directed by former Herald staffer Jayson McNamara, that charts this newspaper’s editorial policy during those turbulent years (March 28). Now showing at the Gaumont Theatre is Silencio Roto, a documentary focused on the little-known story of the disappeared of Japanese stock (April 1).

It must be noted that until now, the suffering of foreigners under the dictatorship has not received the well-deserved attention it deserves. Robert Cox is the leader of the pack. He had to flee with his family alter saving the life of Spaniard Maria Consuelo Castaño Blanco (see: Michael Soltys. “Long night’s journey into day,” April 26, 2013). Thousands of Spaniards who fled Franco’s Spain to later suffer persecution during Argentina’s military dictatorship have still not received due recognition either from the Spanish government or our country’s human rights organizations. Neither have Spanish consuls Vicente Ramírez Montesinos and José Luis Dicenta Ballester, who stuck their necks out to save the lives of both Spanish nationals and their descendants. Relatives of Europeans detained-disappeared in Argentina have long been seeking (to no avail) that the European Parliament pay due homage to their loved ones victim to repression in Argentina. It’s high time we do the same.

City

Ildefonso M. Thomsen

Dance Away

2015-06-11T05:50:00.000-03:00

A scene from Mabel Dai’s otherworldly piece Orquideana.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

Fourth edition of International Independent Dance Festival starts today in BA

If you ever pondered the question of what an independent dance company is about and found no proper answer, this week BA hosts the fourth edition of the International Independent Dance Festival Cocoa (FIDIC) — quite a good opportunity to see for yourself what the main independent ensembles from Argentina and the world have been working on for the last couple of years.

Independent dance, as opposed to institutionalized companies funded by cultural organizations and sponsors, lacks such support and must therefore cope with the challenges generally associated with often-underrated art forms that still haven’t found the proper stage to channel their production.

Like all live acts, independent dance must also deal with the problem of getting audiences closer to their work or, conversely, making their production more readily available to general audiences, who are not always acquainted with the language of dance — according to some critics and observers, one of the most difficult art forms to decode.

Some others contend that you’d need to be a specialist to enjoy the art of movement and the meaning the choreographers intend to convey.

One very good example of the latter posture is the work of DV8, the outstanding physical theatre company from the UK whose video The Cost of Living, among many others, has become a runaway hit even with audiences who wouldn’t normally think of themselves as dance or physical theatre devotees. Thanks to cutting-edge digital technology, DV8’s groundbreaking work is synonymous with a celebration of dance and movement as liberating experiences.

Launched on DVD or easily available on YouTube, DV8 has pushed down all boundaries and become the example to follow in the exacting job of finding a showcase — an audience of millions in the case of this highly innovative company.

The International Independent Dance Festival Cocoa and the Third Ibero American Dance Encounter, running in BA from today through September 28, does not fall short of the standards first set by DV8 when they made an inroad in the world of physical theatre: creativity and originality are at the forefront, with mostly young dancers grabbing the spotlight if only for a few cherished moments. And, who knows, in a not so distant future you may find yourself thinking that you were lucky enough to witness the first performances of international stars.

As in previous editions, FIDIC brings together a carefully curated selection of Argentine, regional and international dance in live performances at several venues across town, screenings, Video Dance and Workshops of Dance Theory and Performance.

Theory and actual performance and how they relate to one another are at the core of this year’s focus of debate.

The international guests feature the renowned Danza Común company from Spain, directed by Bellaluz Gutiérrez de la Torre, and Spain’s Lowland, directed and choreographed by Roser López Espinosa.

“The contemporary dance scene in Buenos Aires has consolidated and expanded its position on the strength of the three previous editions,” festival organizers say. “Both at local and international level, FIDIC has bet on collaboration among independent dance companies for a more effective promotion and professionalization of the activity,” they add. The aim, they say, is to reach out to more diverse and, if possible, larger audiences.

Cocoa Datei (“Coreógrafos contemporáneos asociados y afines Danza teatro independiente / Contemporary Choreographers’ Association and related organizations — Independent Dance-theatre) is subsidized by the Instituto PRODANCE Iberescena. On the web: www.iberescena.org

Production notes

The venues of FIDIC are as diverse and strategically located as they come: Centro Cultural San Martín, Casa Nacional de la Música, Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti, CELCIT (Latin American Centre for Theatre Creation and Research), El Portón de Sánchez, El camarín de las musas, Belisario Club de Cultura, Teatro del Abasto and Teatro Pan y Arte.

Admission is free at the Centro Haroldo Conti, Centro Nacional de la Música and Teatro del Abasto. An entrance fee of 80 pesos is charged at the remaining venues, with tickets at 50 pesos for students and seniors. For information on performances, dates and venues: www.cocoadatei.com.ar

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/169859/dance-away-the-tears-dance-away-the-fears

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Dance away the tears, dance away the fears

A scene from Mabel Dai’s otherworldly piece Orquideana.

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

Fourth edition of International Independent Dance Festival starts today in BA

Some others contend that you’d need to be a specialist to enjoy the art of movement and the meaning the choreographers intend to convey.

Theory and actual performance and how they relate to one another are at the core of this year’s focus of debate.

The international guests feature the renowned Danza Común company from Spain, directed by Bellaluz Gutiérrez de la Torre, and Spain’s Lowland, directed and choreographed by Roser López Espinosa.

Production notes

How will Szifrón’s Wild Tales resonate with Academy voters?

2015-06-11T05:44:00.001-03:00

Leonardo Sbaraglia, right, in a scene from Relatos salvajes (Wild Tales).

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff

Wherever Wild Tales was shown — at festivals and on commercial release — audiences received it with a humanly understandable sense of relief and catharsis after so many moments filled with nerve-racking tension. Wild Tales, indeed, appeals to the viewers’ most profound — and forcibly concealed and repressed — feelings of vexation at the world’s injustices, which is often not the world’s, but someone else’s doing, at least in the victims’ perception.

Although history, literature and all arts cognoscenti proclaim that all works of art have a universal reach regardless of culture, time and place, it is also true that, history-wise, an ignored or reviled work will decades later be rediscovered and found to be a masterpiece light years ahead of its time.

In this sense, Wild Tales plays out the game of action-reaction and anger-release in a timely manner, but it must also be acknowledged that the six stories packed in the film are timeless, that humanity, to the best of our knowledge, has almost always been subjected to some kind of unfair repression, mistreatment, malice and the ensuing need for revenge or at least some form of satisfactory retaliation.

But one of the questions lingering in viewers’ mind, whether or not they stop to ponder the extent of human foibles as masterly depicted in Wild Tales, is inexorably related to context, both historical and geographical. That is to say, is Wild Tales irremediably culture-bound?

The answer, most likely, is an unhesitant “Yes,” but the reactions of the infuriated “wild,” “savage” people in the film is not solely restricted to Argentina and the overwhelmingly unrestrained, furious, condition-reflexed rebuke and tendency to reciprocate, if not verbally at least with a barrage of expletives few other languages and cultures would find acceptable.

As said before, reactions to the same incident will vary depending on the nature of each culture. Does this mean that the fate of Wild Tales will largely depend on the cultural component present in every intellectual product? The most likely scenario is that culture will heavily influence viewers’ reaction to the wide-ranging emotions presented by Wild Tales and the irrepressible need for catharsis.

Of course, the sense of liberation alone does not suffice to make a film like Wild Tales as strongly provocative as it has proved so far, but truth is, if you’ve never been caught in the infuriating, Kafkaesque bureaucracy as Simón (Ricardo Darín) is subjected to in Bombita you’ll never relate to this poor guy’s desperation.

The remaining five episodes, though, culture-bound to a higher or lesser degree, will make an impact on everyone who hasn’t led a life of seclusion, cocooned from the world’s evils and unreasonable practices.

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/179654/how-will-szifr%C3%B3n%E2%80%99s-wild-tales-resonate-with-academy-voters

Friday, January 16, 2015

How will Szifrón’s Wild Tales resonate with Academy voters?

By Julio Nakamurakare
Herald Staff