Adam

In relation to the new releases - might already be in those threads, but I thought I'd put it here as well. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/arts/mus...nted=1&_r=2 Still Married to the Music Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Sue Graham Mingus, above, and Laurie Pepper have preserved the legacies of their husbands. Article Tools Sponsored By By FRED KAPLAN Published: July 29, 2007 IT’S a happy accident that two of the most self-absorbed legends in the history of jazz — the bassist Charles Mingus and the alto saxophonist Art Pepper — married women who wound up equally absorbed in the preservation of their legacies. The men have been dead now for a quarter-century, yet their widows, Sue Graham Mingus and Laurie Pepper, keep unveiling major discoveries. Their latest finds are three previously unreleased live recordings. “Cornell 1964” (Blue Note) captures Mingus’s most adventurous sextet (including Eric Dolphy on reeds and Jaki Byard on piano) playing at Cornell University in a concert that, until now, no jazz historian even knew about. Volumes 1 and 2 of “Unreleased Art” (Widow’s Taste) feature Pepper’s most lyrical quartet, the first volume at a concert in Abashiri, Japan, in 1981, the second at the 1982 Kool Jazz Festival in Washington, which was his final performance. All three albums capture the musicians at mesmerizing peaks: Mingus plucking his bass with ferocious merriment, Pepper blowing blues and ballads with a shivering intensity, as if each song recounted his own dreams and disappointments. “I’ve been itching to get the Cornell concert out for years,” Ms. Mingus said. “There’s more tapes where that came from, and I plan to release them soon too.” Artists’ widows have long been keepers of the flame. John Coltrane’s final works were assiduously controlled by his wife, Alice (who died this year). Jackson Pollock’s posthumous image was heavily shaped by his wife, the artist Lee Krasner. Ernest Hemingway’s widow, Mary, released unfinished works and sued those who tried to publish others. But few widows have devoted themselves as persistently as Ms. Mingus and Ms. Pepper. “It takes an obsessive personality to do this, and that’s what I am,” Ms. Pepper said with a laugh. Ms. Mingus admits to a passion for “the value of excess, of being blinded by something that matters.” Sue Graham was a model, indie-film actress and Italian translator when a friend took her to see Mingus play at the Five Spot, a Bowery jazz club, in July 1964 (a few months after the Cornell concert). “I knew nothing about jazz at the time,” she said, sitting in the Midtown apartment that she and Mingus shared toward the end of his life. His piano (which she plays) takes up much of the living room. His bass leans in a corner. Framed sheets of his handwritten scores adorn several walls. Through most of their 15 years together she published an alternative newspaper and only occasionally got involved in his career. That changed in 1979, after Mingus died of Lou Gehrig’s disease at 56. “Somebody was planning a Mingus tribute concert at Carnegie Hall,” she recalled. “I put together a band called Mingus Dynasty by looking on the back of his albums and calling people who had played on them. I had no idea what I was doing.” The group went over well, and she took it on the road. She expanded it to the 14-piece Mingus Big Band, which the manager of Fez — a club in the basement of Time Cafe in Greenwich Village — hired to play every Tuesday night. When Fez closed, she moved the band uptown to Iridium, where it still alternates with a revamped 7-piece Mingus Dynasty and a 10-piece Mingus Orchestra, all devoted to playing her husband’s compositions. Ms. Mingus commissions arrangements, produces the bands’ CDs (10 so far), manages their tours, picks the musicians for each gig (rotating among 100, many of whom were in grade school when Mingus lived) and often selects which songs they play. It took her a while to grow into her part. During an early road trip a few months after Mingus died, she overheard band members making fun of her inexperience. “It hurt, but I was an outsider,” she said. “I’m not a jazz musician, yet here I was telling seasoned jazz musicians things like, ‘Please make your solo shorter.’ But I soon realized that I did have one power — I paid the checks. And there was the power of Charles’s music, which has an openness that forces musicians to free themselves, and they appreciated that.” The Cornell tapes were discovered 20 years ago by Ed Michel, then a producer at Fantasy Records, who while putting together a 12-CD box set of Mingus recordings from the 1950s came across the reels in the Fantasy vaults. He urged Ralph Kaffel, Fantasy’s president at the time, to release the tapes as a separate CD. “I said: ‘This is the real deal. There’s nothing better,’ ” Mr. Michel recalled in a phone interview. “But Ralph waved me off.” Mr. Kaffel, reached by phone in California, explained, “I’d been trying unsuccessfully to get Sue to sell me the rights to the tapes of a Mingus concert at Monterey, so I didn’t want to waste my time trying again with the Cornell tapes.” Mr. Michel sent the tapes to Ms. Mingus. At the time she was busy producing the concert tour for “Epitaph,” a 500-page Mingus jazz symphony that had recently been unearthed, so she stored them with Nesuhi Ertegun, an old friend and a top executive at Atlantic Records. He died soon after, and the tapes couldn’t be found. After a frantic search, an assistant of Mr. Ertegun’s located them in a mislabeled box. Then Ms. Mingus lost them again, found them again, and finally arranged for Blue Note to release them as a two-CD set to coincide with what would have been Mingus’s 85th birthday. “It’s all been serendipitous,” she said. “Not just the tapes but everything that’s happened. Either that or it’s all been orchestrated by Charles from the beyond.” She laughed. “He was prescient. He’d say he was receiving messages from the spheres, that the music was waiting for his fingers when he went to the piano.” Now 77 Ms. Mingus is gradually turning over direction of the bands to selected musicians. Recently she signed with Ted Kurland Associates, a major booking firm, to take control of their tours. “The shame is, you finally learn everything, then you die,” she said with a shrug. “The important thing is, if I walked away today, all of this would survive.” Laurie Miller grew up listening to her uncle’s collection of jazz records. She briefly studied jazz singing at Westlake College (she dropped out, she said, after realizing she wasn’t the next Billie Holiday) and of course had heard of Art Pepper, who in the early 1950s consistently placed second to Charlie Parker in the polls for best alto saxophonist. She was a newspaper photographer when they met in 1969 at Synanon, the drug treatment center in Santa Monica, Calif. She had checked in to get off pills and alcohol; he entered to avoid getting sent back to San Quentin prison, where he had spent years locked up on drug charges. While at Synanon, Pepper entertained her with wild stories about his life. “I became obsessed with the idea of turning these stories into a book,” Ms. Pepper recalled over brunch at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant during a recent visit from her home in Los Angeles. “At the time he had no career. I had no interest in helping him restart one.” They left Synanon and moved in together in 1972. For the next several years she cajoled him into speaking into her tape recorder and then pieced together his stories. The result was the harrowing autobiography “Straight Life,” published in 1979. During the process, in 1976, they were married, and Pepper returned to playing jazz after a 15-year absence. “Only then did I get caught up in the music,” Ms. Pepper said. “Every time he did a gig, I would sit there in the audience or at the sound board and say, ‘This is why I’m doing this.’ The glory of the music was overwhelming. It was like a religious experience. I looked at the band on the stage, these guys that I knew, and realized they’d become gods.” Pepper remained an unrepentant addict, no longer shooting heroin but snorting cocaine on top of his methadone. Yet for the last six years of his life he toured almost constantly and recorded more than 40 albums. His wife booked the gigs, negotiated contracts, handled the money and went with him everywhere. “Art couldn’t organize anything except a drug buy,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Even that he did awkwardly.” At one point he made her buy a tape-recorder and told her, “Record me every chance you get, so you’ll have something after I’m gone.” He died in 1982 — like Mingus at 56 — from liver disease and a slew of other ailments. “After Art died, I was completely broke,” Ms. Pepper said. She published his music, produced a major box set of reissues, sold some of the tapes she had made — and made a living.) Last fall, at 66, she started her own label, Widow’s Taste, after an editor from Travel & Leisure magazine called. He was writing an article about Abashiri and had heard that Pepper once played there. “Yes,” she replied, “I’m about to release a recording of that concert.” In fact she wasn’t. “At least I wasn’t until that moment,” she recalled, laughing. “But I figured if I did, that magazine would give it good publicity.” She never heard from the editor again but went ahead with the CD. She followed up with the Washington concert — she obtained those tapes from Voice of America, which had recorded it — and plans to release many more from her vast archive. “It sounds kind of woo-woo,” Ms. Pepper said, “but there’s a part of me that’s forever connected to Art. He’s my muse. He made me feel like somebody, and he still does.”

And yet another passing, on Sunday 22 July 2007: Laszlo Kovacs, Cinematographer, Dies at 74 By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: July 26, 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/26/arts/26k...70&emc=eta1 Correction Appended Laszlo Kovacs, a Hungarian cinematographer who fell in love with the American landscape on a cross-country bus ride and then used light, shadow and imagination to give visual shape to seminal films like “Easy Rider,” died on Sunday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 74. In films like “Easy Rider” (1969), Laszlo Kovacs blended a love of landscape with an innovative filming style. His death was announced by the International Cinematographers Guild. James Chressanthis, a cinematographer who is preparing a documentary on Mr. Kovacs and his friend and fellow cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, said that the cause was not known but that Mr. Kovacs had earlier had cancer. Mr. Kovacs came along in the 1960s when the old studio system was sputtering and a new independent cinema was rising. Filmmakers emerged from film schools and work on B movies to challenge traditional themes and techniques and create what has been called “the new Hollywood,” or “the American new wave.” Production moved from the studios to the streets, and the new breed used small crews, lightweight equipment and innovative means of coping with low budgets. Improvisation was both artistic goal and hard necessity. In “Easy Rider” (1969), Mr. Kovacs used a 1968 Chevrolet convertible as his camera car, making the platform for his camera from a piece of plywood on the trunk held in place by a sandbag. In that movie, he wanted to portray something hopeful after the fiery demise of the character played by Peter Fonda. A rising helicopter delivered a panoramic view of the horizon, but only after Mr. Kovacs balanced a camera on one skid and counterweights on the other to keep the helicopter from tipping over. In “Five Easy Pieces” (1970), Mr. Kovacs memorably matched the color of Susan Anspach’s blue eyes and the sky. In another scene, he shot Ms. Anspach and then let his camera drift elsewhere; she scurried behind the camera and he arrived back at her face, giving the illusion that the shot had gone all the way around the room. His tricks included using flashing lights and other techniques to create the impression of psychedelic hallucinations. His goal was to let the environment make statements about the characters. He intended for the foggy islands of the Pacific Northwest to explain the tight little family in “Five Easy Pieces.” Most of his major works are clustered at the start of the 1970s, including “That Cold Day in the Park” (1969), Robert Altman’s third feature as a director, and “The King of Marvin Gardens” (1972), which, like “Five Easy Pieces,” was directed by Bob Rafelson. He did six pictures with the director Peter Bogdanovich, including “Targets” (1968), “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972) and “Paper Moon” (1973). His range grew wider, with credits including Martin Scorsese’s movies “New York, New York” (1977) and “The Last Waltz” (1978) and Hal Ashby’s “Shampoo” (1975). Other movies included “Ghost Busters” (1984) and “My Best Friend’s Wedding” (1997). Mr. Kovacs was born on May 14, 1933, in Cece, a farming village about 60 miles west of Budapest. During the Nazi occupation, he distributed flyers for the propaganda movies shown each week in a school auditorium. His pay was a free seat, and he was fascinated by the flickering images. In 1945, he was accepted into the Academy of Drama and Film Art in Budapest, where students watched Western films surreptitiously. He was swept off his feet by “Citizen Kane,” saying it “changed my visual vocabulary.” In the uprising against the Communist regime in 1956, he and Mr. Zsigmond shot 30,000 feet of film at great risk to themselves. They escaped with the film, and some of it eventually became part of a documentary a few years later. They both bounced among odd jobs. Around 1957, Mr. Kovacs, who had arrived in the United States speaking no English, moved from New Jersey to Seattle, taking the memorable bus ride that found echoes later in “Easy Rider.” In 1959, he took another bus to Los Angeles, where he reunited with Mr. Zsigmond. Mr. Kovacs did movies like “The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill” (1966), often working with the B movie producer Roger Corman. After he shot eight biker movies in one year, Dennis Hopper asked him to do another. Mr. Kovacs’s reluctance to repeat himself vanished after Mr. Hopper acted out the script. “Easy Rider,” with a budget of $340,000, was a sensation at Cannes and made $60 million. Mr. Kovacs is survived by his wife, Audrey, and his daughters Julianna and Nadia. He prided himself on spontaneity. He and the other crew members had no preconceived idea where they would shoot the classic scene in “Five Easy Pieces” in which Jack Nicholson orders a chicken salad sandwich without the chicken salad just to get the toast he wants. “Approaching the freeway, we saw a little rise, and there was the cafe,” he said in an interview with American Cinematographer magazine in 2005. “I think we shot that scene in two hours, and then we moved on.” Correction: July 28, 2007 An obituary on Thursday about the cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs misspelled the surname of a fellow Hungarian cinematographer at two points. As noted elsewhere in the obituary, he is Vilmos Zsigmond, not Szigmond. The obituary also misstated the date of the Robert Altman film “That Cold Day in the Park,” on which Mr. Kovacs worked, and referred incorrectly to it. It was released in 1969, not 1970, and it was Mr. Altman’s third feature as a director, not his “first venture into longer narrative filmmaking.” From imdB: Cinematographer: 1. Torn from the Flag (2006) (director of photography) 2. Two Weeks Notice (2002) 3. Miss Congeniality (2000) (director of photography) (as Laszlo Kovacs) ... aka Miss Undercover (Europe: DVD title) 4. Return to Me (2000) (director of photography) 5. Jack Frost (1998) (as Laszlo Kovacs) ... aka Frost 6. My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) (director of photography) (as Laszlo Kovacs) 7. Multiplicity (1996) 8. Copycat (1995) 9. Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home (1995) ... aka Sauvez Willy 2 (France) 10. The Scout (1994) (as Laszlo Kovacs) 11. The Next Karate Kid (1994) (director of photography) (as Laszlo Kovacs) 12. Cyndi Lauper: 12 Deadly Cyns... and Then Some (1994) (V) (video "I'm Gonna Be Strong") 13. Ruby Cairo (1993) ... aka Deception (USA: video title (recut version)) ... aka The Missing Link: Ruby Cairo 14. Radio Flyer (1992) 15. Shattered (1991) 16. Say Anything... (1989) (as Laszlo Kovacs) ... aka ...Say Anything... (USA: promotional title) 17. Little Nikita (1988) ... aka The Sleepers 18. Predator: The Concert (1987) 19. Legal Eagles (1986) (director of photography) (as Laszlo Kovacs) 20. Mask (1985) (director of photography) (as Laszlo Kovacs) ... aka Peter Bogdanovich's Mask (USA: complete title) 21. Ghost Busters (1984) (director of photography) (as Laszlo Kovacs) 22. Crackers (1984) 23. The Toy (1982) 24. Frances (1982) 25. The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981) 26. Inside Moves (1980) (as Lazlo Kovacs) 27. Heart Beat (1980) 28. The Runner Stumbles (1979) 29. Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (1979) (director of photography) (as Laszlo Kovacs) 30. Paradise Alley (1978) 31. F.I.S.T (1978) 32. New York, New York (1977) (as Laszlo Kovacs) 33. Nickelodeon (1976) 34. Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976) 35. Baby Blue Marine (1976) 36. Shampoo (1975) 37. At Long Last Love (1975) 38. Freebie and the Bean (1974) 39. For Pete's Sake (1974) (director of photography) ... aka July Pork Bellies 40. Huckleberry Finn (1974) ... aka Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn: A Musical Adaptation (USA: promotional title) 41. Paper Moon (1973) (director of photography) (as Laszlo Kovacs) 42. Slither (1973) 43. A Reflection of Fear (1973) ... aka Autumn Child ... aka Labyrinth 44. Steelyard Blues (1973) ... aka The Final Crash (USA: TV title) 45. The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) 46. What's Up, Doc? (1972) (director of photography) 47. Pocket Money (1972) 48. The Last Movie (1971) ... aka Chinchero 49. The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (1971) 50. Alex in Wonderland (1970) 51. Five Easy Pieces (1970) (director of photography) (as Laszlo Kovacs) 52. Getting Straight (1970) 53. The Rebel Rousers (1970) 54. Hell's Bloody Devils (1970) ... aka Operation M. ... aka Smashing the Crime Syndicate (UK) ... aka Swastika Savages ... aka The Fakers (USA: TV title) 55. Blood of Dracula's Castle (1969) (as Leslie Kovacs) ... aka Castle of Dracula ... aka Dracula's Castle (USA: TV title) 56. That Cold Day in the Park (1969) 57. Easy Rider (1969) 58. Los Angeles: Where It's At (1969) (TV) (as Leslie Kovacs) 59. A Day with the Boys (1969) 60. Making of the President 1968 (1969) (TV) 61. Single Room Furnished (1968) (director of photography) (as Leslie Kovacs) 62. The Savage Seven (1968) 63. Targets (1968) (as Laszlo Kovacs) ... aka Before I Die 64. Psych-Out (1968) 65. Mantis in Lace (1968) (as Leslie Kovacks) ... aka Lila ... aka Lila: Mantis in Lace (USA) 66. Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) (as Leslie Kovacs) 67. Mondo Mod (1967) (as Leslie Kovacks) 68. A Man Called Dagger (1967) 69. A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine (1966) (as Art Radford) 70. The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966) 71. "Time-Life Specials: The March of Time" (1965) TV Series (unknown episodes) 72. Kiss Me Quick! (1964) (as Lester Kovacs) ... aka Dr. Breedlove ... aka Dr. Breedlove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 73. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964) ... aka Diabolical Dr. Voodoo ... aka The Incredibly Mixed Up Zombie ... aka The Incredibly Strange Creature: Or Why I Stopped Living and Became a Mixed-up Zombie (USA) ... aka The Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary 74. "National Geographic Specials" (1964) TV Series (unknown episodes) Camera and Electrical Department: 1. Wayne's World 2 (1993) (additional photographer) (as Laszlo Kovacs) 2. Sliver (1993) (additional photographer) (as Laszlo Kovacs) ... aka Sliver - Gier der Augen 3. Elvis Presley's Graceland (1984) (V) (additional photographer) 4. Blow Out (1981) (additional photographer) (uncredited) 5. The Rose (1979) (additional photographer: concert scenes) (as Laszlo Kovaks) 6. The Last Waltz (1978) (additional director of photography) (as Laszlo Kovacs) 7. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) (additional director of photography) (as Laszlo Kovacs) ... aka CE3K (USA: informal short title) ... aka Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Special Edition (USA: reissue title) 8. Directed by John Ford (1971) (camera operator: interviews) (as Laszlo Kovacs)

Not so well known in the USA, but a very significant filmmaker and writer who died on 9 June 2007. http://web.mac.com/chambanotes/iWeb/Site/B...8A717D52C6.html OBITUARY: Ousmane Sembene IN RESPONSE TO MANY REQUESTS, YOU CAN SEND A MESSAGE OF CONDOLENCE TO OUSMANE SEMBENE’S ASSISTANT CLARENCE DELGADO (cineas@yahoo.fr OR cineseas@sentoo.sn) HERE IS SOME MORE INFORMATION COMPILED FROM SEVERAL OBITUARIES. THE WORK OF OUSMANE SEMBENE STANDS AS AN EXAMPLE FOR US ALL. -- ST.CLAIR BOURNE Born into a fisherman's family in the southern region of Casamance in 1923, Ousmane Sembene is one of the foremost filmmakers in world cinema. He is also a prominent African novelist. Prior to entering the arts, Sembene did a stint in the French army, and worked on the construction of the Dakar-Niger railway where he took part in the great strike that inspired him to write his 1960 novel God's Bits of Wood. He became a writer after joining Presence Africaine, a Parisian literary society. His subsequent literary works were done in French. Sembene, realizing that relatively few Africans would be able to read his books in that language, decided that he would be able to reach a wider audience if he made films. He studied film at Gorky Studio in Moscow, turning to the medium because, as he put it in 2005, “everything can be filmed and transported to the most remote village in Africa.” In 1963, he made his directorial debut with Borom Sarret, which chronicles a day in the life of an impoverished cart driver. Set over the basic story is another theme that allows the audience to see that the real cause of his poverty are the corrupt politicians heavily involved with neo-colonialism who strive to deliberately prevent the poor from improving their lifes' lot. After making three short films, he submitted the script for “Black Girl” to the Film Bureau of the French Ministry of Cooperation, an agency set up by the government of Charles de Gaulle to assist African filmmakers. The script was rejected, and while Mr. Sembène was able to complete the film independently, some of his later films would run into trouble with both French and Senegalese authorities. “Mandabi” (“The Money Order,” 1968), was attacked in Africa for its portrayal of political corruption and economic devastation, and “Emitai” (1972) was suppressed in France for five years because of its harsh depiction of colonialism. “Black Girl” (1965), his debut feature, is commonly referred to as the first African film. Combining realistic narrative techniques with elements of traditional African storytelling, it tells of a young woman named Diouana who commits suicide after traveling to Europe with her French employers. Diouana’s identity crisis foretold some of the central themes of Mr. Sembène’s later work — he directed 10 features and numerous shorts — and of the nascent African cinema more generally. The tensions between tradition and modernity and between newly independent African nations and their erstwhile colonial masters are sources of drama and comedy in his films, which are nonetheless focused on the lives of ordinary people, frequently women. “Xala” (1974), which many critics consider his finest film, takes a humorous look at polygamy, traditional African medicine and the contrasts between urban and rural life. Neither mocking nor nostalgic in its treatment of traditions, it is as much driven by the personalities of its characters as by its ideas about African life. At the same time, the characters’ foibles are clearly symbols of political and social dysfunction. A similar logic obtains in later films like “Guelwaar” (1993) and “Faat-Kiné” (2001). Writing about the latter movie in The New York Times, Elvis Mitchell noted that some of its scenes could have been “whipped up into a tempest of tear-jerking” but that Mr. Sembène’s “trademark empathy” and sense of detail served as antidotes to melodrama. Even when he addressed painful and controversial subjects — as in “Moolaadé” (2004) which chronicles a middle-aged woman’s campaign to halt the practice of female genital cutting in her village — Mr. Sembène tempered moral fervor with warmth and humor. “He could criticize Africa, he could criticize racism and he could criticize colonialism,” said Manthia Diawara, professor of comparative literature and Africana studies at New York University, in a telephone interview on Sunday. “He never spared anybody.” In spite of occasional controversy, Mr. Sembène’s mastery and originality were celebrated both in Africa, where he served as an inspiration for later filmmakers, and internationally. He won prizes at the Venice Film Festival in 1968 (for “Mandabi”) and 1988 (for “Camp de Thiaroye”), and at Cannes in 2004 (for “Moolaadé”). He was a founder, in 1969 of FESPACO, the biennial festival of film and television held in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Cheick Oumar Sissoko, a fellow filmmaker and the Malian minister of culture, said that with Mr. Sembène’s death, “African cinema has lost one of its lighthouses.” Mr. Diawara added: “He really is the most important African filmmaker. The one that all subsequent filmmakers have to be measured against”. New York Times; June 12, 2007 AN APPRAISAL A Filmmaker Who Found Africa’s Voice By A. O. SCOTT Ousmane Sembène, by consensus the father of African cinema, was nearly 40 when he started making films. (He was 84 when he died over the weekend at his home in Dakar). By 1960, the year that Senegal, his native country, won its independence from France, he was already a novelist of some reputation in Francophone African circles. He had also played a significant role in political and aesthetic debates that had gathered force as the postwar movement toward African decolonization accelerated. He took a radical, pro-independence line against what he took to be the assimilationist tendencies of proponents of Négritude, the more established literary movement associated with writers like Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor. Senghor, a poet and scholar (and the first African elected to the Académie Française), went on to become Senegal’s first president. (He died in 2001.) Mr. Sembène, in his role as Africa’s leading filmmaker, would remain a thorn in Senghor’s side, as uncompromising a critic of Africa’s post-liberation regimes as he had been of French colonial domination. In a 2004 interview with “L’Humanité,” the daily newspaper of the French Communist Party (which Mr. Sembène joined as a dockworker in Marseilles in the 1940s), he noted that “in more than 40 years since Senegal’s liberation we have killed more Africans than died from the start of the slave trade.” In films like “Ceddo” and “Xala” he pointed an angry, often satirical finger at the failures and excesses of modern African governments, Senghor’s in particular, and his unsparing criticism made him a controversial figure. Nonetheless, it is hard to overstate his importance, or his influence on African film and also, more generally, on African intellectual and cultural self-perception. Mr. Sembène was in many ways not only Senghor’s political and aesthetic antagonist but also his biographical and temperamental opposite. Senghor, who had received an elite education in metropolitan France, believed, at least in the 1950s, that Africans in territories ruled by France could carve out an identity for themselves within the larger cosmos of French language and civilization. Mr. Sembène, whose formal schooling ended in the sixth grade, received his French education not at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, but rather on the Marseilles docks and in the radical trade union movement. Like Sékou Touré and Frantz Fanon, his allies in the radical wing of the anti-colonialist movement, he believed that Africans would experience true liberation when they threw off European models and discovered their own, homegrown versions of modernity. “What was unique about Sembène was he began to challenge the dominant figure, Senghor,” recalled Manthia Diawara, a professor of Africana studies at New York University who grew up in Mali in the 1960s. “He valorized African languages over French. He began to say that independence had failed. He celebrated the equality of Africa with Europe. And it was very good for us to see a man who was self-taught, who did not come out of the French educational system, who went on to write these books.” The books were quickly superseded by his films. “I came back to Dakar, and I made a tour of Africa,” Mr. Sembène told L’Humanité, reflecting on his return home in 1960 after nearly 20 years in France. “I wanted to know my own continent. I went everywhere, getting to know people, tribes, cultures. I was 40 years old, and I wanted to make movies. I wanted to give another impression of Africa. Since our culture is primarily oral, I wanted to depict reality through ritual, dance and performance.” And so he developed a filmmaking style that was populist, didactic and sometimes propagandistic, at once modern in its techniques and accessible, at least in principle, to everyone. He frequently made use of nonprofessional actors and wrote dialogue in various African languages. “The publication of a book written in French would only reach a minority,” he said. In contrast, he envisioned a “fairground cinema that allows you to argue with people.” The arguments take place within his films as well as around them. In “Moolaadé” (2004), one of his last movies, a group of women rises up against the traditional practice of female genital mutilation, challenging the authority of the village elders as well as of the priestesses who perform the ritual. The film’s structure is antiphonal (given Mr. Sembène’s Marxist background, you might say dialectical), allowing the defenders and opponents of tradition to have their say before justice and enlightenment prevail. Like all of Mr. Sembène’s films — he made 10 features in all — “Moolaadé” is grounded in African daily life. And yet, to a non-African viewer, it rarely feels exotic or strange. As an artist, Mr. Sembène was both a populist and a universalist. “He showed us a way out of tribalism,” said Mr. Diawara, an expert on African cinema (and the co-director of a 1994 documentary about Mr. Sembène) in a recent telephone interview. “Sembène’s films are translatable. They’re never going to be blockbusters, but you can show one of them in China, in France, in Africa, in the United States, and people will know what it’s about.” Mr. Sembène was thus a thoroughly African artist, one who achieved global stature by virtue of his concentration on local matters. He may, indeed, have found a bigger audience at international festivals outside Africa than he did at home. But that may have more to do with global conditions of distribution than with the movies themselves, which are lively, funny, pointed and true. Mr. Diawara recalled a story that Mr. Sembène liked to tell about his travels across Africa in the ’60s. Mr. Sembene had finished showing his film “Money Order” in a small town in Cameroon when he was approached by a local policeman, whose attention made him a little nervous. “Where did you get that story?” the officer wanted to know. Mr. Sembène replied that the plot, which chronicles the chaotic and corrupting effects of money from France on a Senegalese family, was his own invention. “But it happened to me,” the policeman said. http://africanaffairs.suite101.com/blog.cf..._ousmane_sembne Obituary: Ousmane Sembène Africa's "Father of Cinema" Dies at 84 © Sean Sinclair-Day Jun 13, 2007 Sembène will be remembered as a seminal master of African filmmaking but his literary talents were also highly remarkable and influential. On June 9, 2007, Ousmane Sembène, one of Africa's filmmaking pioneers died at his home in Senegal at the age of 84. Many even referred to him as the "father" of African cinema. As a writer, he was also influential attaining the same recognition as Africa's giants of literature, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. Expelled from school at an early age, Sembène still developed a love for reading that would turn him into a self-educated writer. Sembène collected material for his stories through his diverse experiences working in France and Africa as, among other things, an apprentice mechanic, plumber, carpenter, docker and bricklayer. In 1944, he was drafted by the French Army in World War II. By the 1960s Sembène had realized the potential for film to reach wider audiences than literature and traveled to Moscow to study filmmaking. His first feature-length film, "La Noire de..." (1966) is commonly referred to as the first African film. Former Senegalese president, Abdlu Diouf, saw Sembène as a "fervent defender of liberty and social justice." While his cinematic endeavours would occasionally cause controversy with French and Senegalese authorities for his representations of French colonialism and African corruption, he was celebrated internationally and inspired many African directors. Ousmane Sembène will be remembered by his peers as a man who encouraged Africa to realize its identity and confront its cultural destiny during the continent's postcolonial emergence. His impressive oeuvre consists of five novels, five collections of short stories, four short films, nine features, and four documentaries Quotes from Ousmane Sembène: "The development of Africa will not happen without the effective participation of women. Our forefathers' image of women must be buried once for all." "At a moral level, I don't think we have any lesson to learn from Europe." "I benefited from a synthesis of values - in the house, the compound, the country and Koranic and French schools. We conserved our own culture; we had nightly gatherings with tales. Now I call it my own theater." "Bread came wrapped in French newspapers. Each time my father unwrapped a baguette, he asked me to read to him."

"Persona" is my favorite film of all time. This is a devastating loss, but he had a long and amazing life, and has left us art of the highest caliber that will last forever. NY Times Obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/movies/3...gWDpYTw6u6Lfq1Q Ingmar Bergman, Famed Director, Dies at 89 By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN Published: July 30, 2007 Ingmar Bergman, the “poet with the camera” who is considered one of the greatest directors in motion picture history, died today on the small island of Faro where he lived on the Baltic coast of Sweden, Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, said. Bergman was 89. Critics called Mr. Bergman one of the directors — the others being Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa — who dominated the world of serious film making in the second half of the 20th century. He moved from the comic romp of lovers in “Smiles of a Summer Night” to the Crusader’s search for God in “The Seventh Seal,” and from the gripping portrayal of fatal illness in “Cries and Whispers” to the alternately humorous and horrifying depiction of family life in “Fanny and Alexander.” Mr. Bergman dealt with pain and torment, desire and religion, evil and love; in Mr. Bergman’s films, “this world is a place where faith is tenuous; communication, elusive; and self-knowledge, illusory,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times Magazine in a profile of the director. God is either silent or malevolent; men and women are creatures and prisoners of their desires. For many filmgoers and critics, it was Mr. Bergman more than any other director who in the 1950s brought a new seriousness to film making. “Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics — religion, death, existentialism — to the screen,” Bertrand Tavernier, the French film director, once said. “But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He’s like a miner digging in search of purity.” He influenced many other film makers, including Woody Allen, who according to The Associated Press said in a tribute in 1988 that Mr. Bergman was “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.” In his more than 40 years in the cinema, Mr. Bergman made about 50 films, often focusing on two themes — the relationship between the sexes, and the relationship between mankind and God. Mr. Bergman found in cinema, he wrote in a 1965 essay, “a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect.” In Bergman, the mind is constantly seeking, constantly inquiring, constantly puzzled. Mr. Bergman often acknowledged that his work was autobiographical, but only “in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.” He carried out a simultaneous career in the theater, becoming a director of Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater. He married multiple times and had highly publicized and passionate liaisons with his leading ladies. Mr. Bergman broke upon the international film scene in the mid-1950s with four films that shook the movie world, films that became identified with him and symbols of his career — “Smiles of a Summer Night,” “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries” and “The Magician.” He had been a director for 10 years, but was little known outside Sweden. Then, in 1956, “Smiles” won a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The next year, the haunting and eloquent “Seventh Seal,” with its memorable medieval visions of a knight (Max von Sydow) playing chess with death in a world terrorized by the plague, won another special prize at Cannes. And in 1959, “The Magician” took the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival. Audiences flocked to art cinemas all over the world to see his films. Then, in 1960, “The Virgin Spring”, told of a rape and its mysterious aftermath in medieval Scandinavia; it won the Academy Award as best foreign film. In a few years, he had become both a cult figure and a box-office success. Throughout his career, Mr. Bergman often talked about what he considered the dual nature of his creative and private personalities. “I am very much aware of my own double self,” he once said. “The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work — he is in touch with the child. He is not rational, he is impulsive and extremely emotional.” Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14, 1918, in the university town of Uppsala, Sweden. His father, Erik, a Lutheran clergyman who later became chaplain to the Swedish royal family, believed in strict discipline, including caning and locking his children in closets. His mother, Karin, was moody and unpredictable. “I was very much in love with my mother,” he told Alan Riding of The New York Times in a 1995 interview. “She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting.” The young Mr. Bergman accompanied his father on preaching rounds of small country churches near Stockholm. “While father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang or listened,” he once recalled, “I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire — angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans.” His earliest memories, he once said, were of light and death:“I remember how the sunlight hit the edge of my dish when I was eating spinach and, by moving the dish slightly from side to side, I was able to make different figures out of the light. I also remember sitting with my brother, in the backyard of my flat, aiming with slingshots at enormous black rats scurrying around. And I also remember being forced to sit in church, listening to a very boring sermon, but it was a very beautiful church, and I loved the music and the light streaming through the windows. I used to sit up in the loft beside the organ, and when there were funerals, I had this marvelous long-shot view of the proceedings, with the coffin and the black drapes, and then later at the graveyard, watching the coffin lowered into the ground. I was never frightened by these sights. I was fascinated.” Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Swedish Television SVT Mr. Bergman was the subject of the 2006 documentary “Bergman Island.” Related A Profile of Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face With a Life of Creation (April 30, 1995) Times Topics: Ingmar Bergman Agence France-Presse — Getty Images An undated photograph of Ingmar Bergman from the 1970s. At the age of 9, he traded a set of tin soldiers for a battered magic lantern, a possession that altered the course of his life. Within a year, he had created, by playing with this toy, a private world, he later recalled, in which he felt completely at home. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes and lighting effects and gave puppet productions of Strindberg plays in which he spoke all the parts. He entered the University of Stockholm in 1937, nominally to study the history of literature but actually to spend most of his time working in amateur theater. He soon left home and university for a career in the theater and the movies. He split his time between film and theater beginning in the early 1940s, when he first was taken into the script department of Svensk Filmindustri — a youth, as his first boss described him, “shabby, rude and scampish with a laugh born out of the darkest depths of the inferno.” In his theater career, he became head of the municipal theater in the southern Swedish city of Halsingborg in 1944; in 1946, he switched to Goteborg for four years, then spent two years as a guest producer in a couple of cities before going to Malmo in 1952 to become associated with the municipal theater there. In films, he wrote many scenarios as well as directed. His name first appeared on the screen in 1944 in “Torment,” which he wrote and Alf Sjoberg, one of the dominant figures in Swedish film, directed. The film, based on a story Bergman wrote about his final, torturous year at school, won eight Swedish awards as well as the Grand Prix du Cinema at Cannes. It made an international star of its leading performer, Mai Zetterling, who portrayed a shop girl loved by a young student and shadowed by the student’s sadistic teacher. Mr. Bergman got his first chance to direct the next year. His early films were essentially training films — basically soap operas that enabled him to experiment with directorial style. Most experts agree that his first film of note was “Prison,” his sixth movie and the first all-Bergman production. The film is the story of a prostitute who committed suicide. He made it in 18 days, and while critics have called it cruel, disjointed and in many ways sophomoric, it was an early favorite of his. In the next few years, he made “Summer Interlude” (1950), a tragedy of teen-age lovers; “Waiting Women” (1952), his first successful comedy; “Sawdust and Tinsel” set in a traveling circus and originally released in the United States as “The Naked Night”; “A Lesson in Love” (1953), a witty comedy of marital infidelity, and, finally, “Smiles of a Summer Night” and “The Seventh Seal,” his breakthroughs to fame. In 1957, the same year as “Seventh Seal,” Mr. Bergman also directed “Wild Strawberries,” his acclaimed study of old age. In the film, the 78-year-old Isak Borg (played by the silent-film director and actor Victor Sjostrom), drives through the countryside, stops at his childhood home, relives the memory of his first love and comes to terms with his emotional isolation. “I had created a figure who, on the outside, looked like my father but was me, through and through,” Mr. Bergman has said. “I was then 37, cut off from all human emotions.” Mr. Bergman won his second Academy Award in 1961 for “Through a Glass Darkly,” and then came the turning point in his career — “Winter Light,” which he made in 1963, the second of his trilogy of the early 60s that ended with “The Silence” and portrayed the loneliness and vulnerability of modern man, without faith or love. Many of his earlier films had been animated by an anguished search for belief, Ms. Kakutani wrote, but “Winter Light” — which shows a minister’s own loss of faith — implies that whatever answers there are are to be found on earth. Mr. Bergman explained that the philosophical shift occurred during a brief hospital stay. Awakening from the anesthesia, he realized that he was no longer scared of death, and that the question of death had suddenly disappeared. Since then, many critics feel, his films have contained a kind of humanism in which human love is the only hope of salvation. Some critics lashed at individual films as obscure, pretentious and meaningless. But every time he made a failure, he managed to win back critics and audiences quickly with such films as “Persona” — in which the personalities of two women break down and merge — “The Passion of Anna,” “Cries and Whispers” — a stark portrait of three sisters — and “Fanny and Alexander.” Mr. Bergman often used what amounted to a repertory company — a group of actors who appeared in many of his films. They included Mr. von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson and, above all, Liv Ullmann, with whom he had a long personal relationship and with whom he had a child. He also for many years used the same cinematographer, Sven Nykvist. The ideas for his films, he said, came to him in many ways. “Persona,” the study of two women in neurotic intimacy, came to life, he said, when one day he saw two women sitting together comparing hands. “I thought to myself,” he said, “that one of them is mute and the other speaks.” Skip to next paragraph Related A Profile of Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face With a Life of Creation (April 30, 1995) Times Topics: Ingmar Bergman The germ for “The Silence” — in which a dying woman and her sister are in a foreign country with no means of communication — came from a hospital visit, he said, where “I noticed from a window a very old man, enormously fat and paralyzed, sitting in a chair under a tree in the park.” “As I watched,” he said, “four jolly, good-natured nurses came marching out, lifted him up, chair and all, and carried him back into the hospital. The image of being carried away like a dummy stayed in my mind.” In other cases, films were suggested by essays, novels, pieces of music. In every case, he said, some outside event had turned the key on some deep-seated memory — each film was a projection of some past experience. “I have maintained open channels with my childhood,” he told Ms. Kakutani. “I think it may be that way with many artists. Sometimes in the night, when I am on the limit between sleeping and being awake, I can just go through a door into my childhood and everything is as it was — with lights, smells, sounds and people . . . I remember the silent street where my grandmother lived, the sudden aggressivity of the grown-up world, the terror of the unknown and the fear from the tension between my father and mother.” Mr. Bergman used his memories in many other films: “Scenes From a Marriage” (which was originally done for television), “Autumn Sonata,” “From the Life of the Marionettes,” “Hour of the Wolf,” “Shame,” “Face to Face” and his version of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” considered by many to be the most successful film ever made of an opera. From the 1950s through the 1990s, Mr. Bergman maintained his successful theatrical career in Sweden. It was while rehearsing Strindberg’s “Dance of Death” at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm in 1976 that he was arrested for tax evasion. The incident received a great deal of publicity, and while the charges were later dropped and the Swedish Government issued a formal apology, Mr. Bergman exiled himself from Sweden to West Germany, where he made “The Serpent’s Egg.” He had a nervous breakdown over the incident and was hospitalized for a time. The exile lasted for a number of years and he only returned permanently to his native country in the mid-80s. In 1982, Mr. Bergman announced that he had just made his last theatrical film — it was “Fanny and Alexander,” a look at high society in a Swedish town early in the last century that was in part inspired by his own childhood. “Making ‘Fanny and Alexander’ was such a joy that I thought that feeling will never come back,” he told Ms. Kakutani. “I will try to explain: When I was at university many years ago, we were all in love with this extremely beautiful girl. She said no to all of us, and we didn’t understand. She had had a love affair with a prince from Egypt and, for her, everything after this love affair had to be a failure. So she rejected all our proposals. I would like to say the same thing. The time with ‘Fanny and Alexander’ was so wonderful that I decided it was time to stop. I have had my prince of Egypt.” “Fanny and Alexander” won four Oscars, including the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1984. Mr. Bergman did not, however, leave the world of film altogether. He spent much of his time on Faro, a sparsely populated island that visitors described as chilly and desolate but that he considered the one place he felt safe, secure and at home. And he would devote his mornings to working on his plays, novels and television scripts. He made a television film, “After the Rehearsal” — about three actors working on a production of Strindberg’s “Dream Play” — which was released theatrically in the United States. He wrote “The Best Intentions,” first as a novel and then in 1991 as an eloquent six-hour film directed by Billie August about Mr. Bergman’s parents’ troubled marriage just before his birth. “The slightly fictional Anna and Henrik Bergman are complex, stubborn, well-meaning people who share a heartbreaking inability to be happy no matter what they try,” Ms. James wrote, and Mr. Bergman “is a benevolent ghost hovering over the film.” Mr. Bergman said in an interview in Sweden that the act of writing the film had changed his attitude toward his parents. “After this,” he said, “every form of reproach, blame, bitterness or even vague feeling that they have messed up my life is gone forever from my mind.” “The Best Intentions” was one of three novels he wrote in the 80s and 90s about his parents. The second, “Sunday’s Children,” was made into a film and directed by his son Daniel. The third, “Private Confessions,” about his mother, became a film directed by Ms. Ullmann. In 1997, he directed a two-hour made-for-television movie, “In the Presence of Clowns,” set in the 1920s and based on a story he discovered among the papers left by an uncle who appeared as a main character in “Fanny and Alexander” and “Best Intentions” and was played in all three films by Borje Ahlstedt. He directed two plays every year at the Royal Dramatic Theater. In May 1995 the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of a New York Bergman Festival that included retrospectives by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Television and Radio, presented the Royal Theater in two plays Mr. Bergman directed, Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale” and Yukio Mishima’s “Madame de Sade.” He also directed operas, and wrote many plays and television dramas, several novels and a 1987 memoir, “The Magic Lantern.” [in the fall of 2002, Bergman, at age 84, started production on “Saraband,” a 120-minute television movie based on the two main characters in “Scenes From a Marriage,” The Associated Press reported. In a news conference, the director said he wrote the story after realizing he was “pregnant with a play.” “At first I felt sick, very sick,” he said. “It was strange. Like Abraham and Sarah, who suddenly realized she was pregnant,” he said, referring to biblical characters. “It was lots of fun, suddenly to feel this urge returning.”] Skip to next paragraph Related A Profile of Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face With a Life of Creation (April 30, 1995) Times Topics: Ingmar Bergman In addition to Oscars and prizes at film festivals, Mr. Bergman’s films won many awards from the New York Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics, among others. In 1977, he was given the Swedish Academy of Letters’ Great Gold Medal, one of only 17 people to have received it in this century. Mr. Bergman’s fifth wife, Ingrid Karlebo Bergman, died in 1995. He had many children from his marriages and relationships. Once, when asked by the critic Andrew Sarris why he did what he did, Mr. Bergman told the story of the rebuilding of Chartres Cathedral in the Middle Ages by thousands of anonymous artisans. “I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain,” he said. “I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!” Mr. Bergman’s celluloid carvings often revealed an obsession with death. But in later life he said that the obsession had abated. “When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying,” he said. “But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It’s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.” According to The A.P., which cited TT, the Swedish news agency, the date of Mr. Bergman’s funeral has not been set but will be attended by a close group of his friends and family. ------------ AP Obituary: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070730/ap_on_re_eu/obit_bergman Film great Ingmar Bergman dies at 89 By LOUISE NORDSTROM, Associated Press Writer 53 minutes ago STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Master filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, one of the greatest artists in cinema history, died Monday at his home on an island off the coast of Sweden. He was 89. ADVERTISEMENT Bergman's dozens of works combined deep seriousness, indelible imagery and unexpected flashes of humor in finely written, inventively shot explorations of difficult subjects such as plague and madness. His vision encompassed the extremes of his beloved Sweden: the claustrophobic gloom of unending winter nights, its glowing summer evenings and the bleak magnificence of the Baltic islet of Faro, where the reclusive artist spent his last years. Once described by Woody Allen as "probably the greatest film artist ... since the invention of the motion picture camera," Bergman first gained international attention with 1955's "Smiles of a Summer Night," a romantic comedy that inspired the Stephen Sondheim musical "A Little Night Music." His last work, of about 60, was "Saraband," a made-for-television movie that aired on Swedish public television in December 2003, the year he retired. "Sixty years have passed, nothing has changed, it's still the same fever," he wrote of his passion for film in an 1987 autobiography. "Saraband" starred Liv Ullmann, the Norwegian actress and director who appeared in nine Bergman films and had a five-year affair, and a daughter, with the director. The other actor most closely associated with Bergman was Max von Sydow, who appeared in 1957's "The Seventh Seal," an allegorical tale of the Black Plague years as a knight playing chess with the shrouded figure of Death, one of cinema's most famous scenes. His 1982 film "Fanny and Alexander" won an Oscar for best foreign film. "The world has lost one of its very greatest filmmakers. He taught us all so much throughout his life," said British actor and director Richard Attenborough. Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, confirmed the death to The Associated Press, and Swedish journalist Marie Nyrerod said the director died peacefully during his sleep. Bergman never fully recovered after a hip surgery in October last year, Nyrerod told Swedish broadcaster SVT. "He was one of the world's biggest personalities. There were (Japanese film director Akira) Kurosawa, (Italy's Federico) Fellini and then Bergman. Now he is also gone," Danish director Bille August told The Associated Press. "It is a great loss. I am in shock," August said. Cannes Film Festival director Gilles Jacob called Bergman the "last of the greats, because he proved that cinema can be as profound as literature." The son of a Lutheran clergyman and a housewife, Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala, Sweden on July 14, 1918, and grew up with a brother and sister in a household of severe discipline that he described in painful detail in the autobiography "The Magic Lantern." The title comes from his childhood, when his brother got a "magic lantern" — a precursor of the slide-projector — for Christmas. Ingmar was consumed with jealousy, and he managed to acquire the object of his desire by trading it for a hundred tin soldiers. The apparatus was a spot of joy in an often-cruel young life. Bergman recounted the horror of being locked in a closet and the humiliation of being made to wear a skirt as punishment for wetting his pants. He broke with his parents at 19 and remained aloof from them, but later in life sought to understand them. The story of their lives was told in the television film "Sunday's Child," directed by his own son Daniel. The director said he had coped with the authoritarian environment of his childhood by living in a world of fantasy. When he first saw a movie he was greatly moved. But he said the escape into another world went so far that it took him years to tell reality from fantasy, and Bergman repeatedly described his life as a constant fight against demons, also reflected in his work. The demons sometimes drove him to great art — as in "Cries and Whispers," the deathbed drama that climaxes when a dying woman cries "I am dead, but I can't leave you." Sometimes they drove him over the top, as in "Hour of the Wolf," where a nightmare-plagued artist meets real-life demons on a lonely island. It was in the Swedish capital that Bergman broke into the world of drama, starting with a menial job at the Royal Opera House after dropping out of college. Bergman was hired by the script department of Swedish Film Industry, the country's main production company, as an assistant script writer in 1942. In 1944, his first original screenplay was filmed by Alf Sjoeberg, the dominant Swedish film director of the time. "Torment" won several awards including the Grand Prize of the 1946 Cannes Film Festival, and soon Bergman was directing an average of two films a year as well as working with stage production. After the acclaimed "The Seventh Seal," he quickly came up with another success in "Wild Strawberries," in which an elderly professor's car trip to pick up an award is interspersed with dreams. Other noted films include "Persona," about an actress and her nurse whose identities seem to merge, and "The Autumn Sonata," about a concert pianist and her two daughters, one severely handicapped and the other burdened by her child's drowning. Though best known internationally for his films, Bergman was also a prominent stage director. He worked at several playhouses in Sweden from the mid-1940s, including the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm which he headed from 1963 to 1966. He staged many plays by the Swedish author August Strindberg, whom he cited as an inspiration. The influence of Strindberg's grueling and precise psychological dissections could be seen in "Scenes From a Marriage," an intense detailing of the disintegration of a marriage that was released as a feature film in 1974. Bergman showed his lighter side in the following year's "The Magic Flute," again first produced for TV. It is a fairly straight production of the Mozart opera, enlivened by touches such as repeatedly showing the face of a young girl watching the opera and comically clumsy props and costumes. Bergman remained active later in life with stage productions and occasional TV shows. He said he still felt a need to direct, although he had no plans to make another feature film. Bergman, at age 84, started production on "Saraband" — based on the two main characters from "Scenes From a Marriage" — in the fall of 2002. In a rare news conference, he said he wrote the story after realizing he was "pregnant with a play." "At first I felt sick, very sick. It was strange. Like Abraham and Sarah, who suddenly realized she was pregnant," he said, referring to biblical characters. "It was lots of fun, suddenly to feel this urge returning." Bergman waged a fight against real-life tormentors: Sweden's powerful tax authorities. In 1976, during a rehearsal at the Royal Dramatic Theater, police came to take Bergman away for interrogation about tax evasion. The director, who had left all finances to be handled by a lawyer, was questioned for hours while his home was searched. When released, he was forbidden to leave the country. The case caused an enormous uproar in the media and Bergman had a mental breakdown that sent him to hospital for over a month. He later was absolved of all accusations and in the end only had to pay some extra taxes. In his autobiography he admitted to guilt in only one aspect: "I signed papers that I didn't read, even less understood." The experience made him go into voluntary exile in Germany, to the embarrassment of the Swedish authorities. After nine years, he returned to Stockholm. The date of Bergman's funeral has not been set, but will be attended by a close group of friends and family, the TT news agency reported.

It doesn't annoy me because I never watch it.

Well, move. :-)

Beat me to it - I just read that - yes, that's a pretty amusing piece.

Any recommended vendors besides the Cuneiform site? Cuneiform is charging less than Amazon.

Thank you for the suggestion. That's been reissued more recently as "Pre-Bird." It has "Mingus Fingus No. 2." I'll get that CD. But I'm also looking for the original "Mingus Fingus" (Mingus Fingers) made by the Hampton band. It was on "Hamp: The Legendary Decca Recordings" but that is no longer in print. Wow, anyone work with this web page: http://www.song-list.net/ Well, it is on the Proper Box "The Lionel Hampton Story" I just realized that it is in one of Allen Lowe's "That Devilin' Tune" boxes as well!

I saw that quartet once at McCabe's. Gotta get that set

Thank you for the suggestion. That's been reissued more recently as "Pre-Bird." It has "Mingus Fingus No. 2." I'll get that CD. But I'm also looking for the original "Mingus Fingus" (Mingus Fingers) made by the Hampton band. It was on "Hamp: The Legendary Decca Recordings" but that is no longer in print. Wow, anyone work with this web page: http://www.song-list.net/ Well, it is on the Proper Box "The Lionel Hampton Story"

Fantastic! Thank you for posting. Was the Johnny Cash Show the best musical TV show ever? Too bad it's not out on DVD. I was trying to hunt down the rights for it 3 years ago, and I couldn't find a rights holder.

So what might people recommend as a good in-print CD that includes "Mingus Fingus?" I just heard it last night at a friend's on his OOP LP, and would like to get it.

Yep, I remember that. Is that place gone too (damn)? No, the book store in question is Book Soup, and it's still there. http://www.booksoup.com/

Correction. It's called Record Surplus, on Pico Blvd. http://www.recordsurplusla.com/

All Towers are gone gone gone. RDK lists most. there are a couple of used LP stores on Pico near Barrington, especially, uh, Record trader, or Record Shopper. West LA. Amoeba has killed most of the retailers. Poo-Bah is still around, and although I also haven't been there in years, I saw a film the other night at the Egyptian Theatre ("Brasilintime"), and the people next to me were giving plaudits to Poo-Bah, and Poo-Bah was also given a shout out in the credits (as was Amoeba).

It's a pretty interesting lyric in some ways, with a song within a song and so forth. To me, it reads to be akin to Fats Waller's "Your Feet's Too Big" or any number of songs that I know of performed by Louis Jordan that I can best describe as "insult" songs. For our non-American friends, the references to "ape" "barefoot" and "nappy hair" are coded references to stereotypical put-downs of African Americans. One could argue that the singer might be White (poor white trash?), and his date is insulting him with these references to those stereotypes, or the narrator could be Black, and is being insulted with whatever standard terms might apply. For me the point is that those dreamy love songs are false idyllic, and reality is much harsher, while also being, as said above, self-deprecating humor. The song was probably understood by the audience as being humorous, when sung by, as was probably the case, the good-looking lead singer of whatever band. It's a humorous take on growing up and being confronted with realities that aren't reflected in the songs & stories given us as children.

For me, clapping in the middle bugs me when we are clearly in a quiet passage, or solo, or tune, and the applause disrupts the mood of the piece and the room. If it's a rowdy song and a mediocre solo an people want to applaud, I don't care, even if I might not. But sometimes solos, and songs, just need room to breathe when they are done, and people should wait.

Someone put this in a lecture recently that I attended, and I agree with it, but I'm blanking on the person who said it. The idea is that if we agree to live in a land with free speech, then we essentially have to agree to accept that we will be offended by someone or something. Just because something offends us does not provide a reason to ban it. In this particular case, I don't see it so much as a disclaimer. Instead, thorough notes for the song should discuss the nature of the lyrics, because that's what good notes should do. No need to apologize for including it, but the notes should acknowledge the dated & racist nature of teh lyrics, identify the source, and identify why the song is being included. But I am also white, so can't fully feel what any African-American might from a reading of those lyrics.

It doesn't list the city as Detroit. The AP story was filed in Detroit, but it never identifies him running in Detroit. That's all the city label before AP means at the start - that the story was filed there. That said, I'm surprised more people don't jog nude.

I don't think it's hard to track down. I think Jazz Loft had it.

Wow, you found over 400 foundations that support Arts & Culture? Well done! We've swapped emails about the music, but perhaps we can talk? I'm a documentary producer as my livelihood, and would be interested in working on your film if you need people. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0405152/ Best, Adam

If true, that is really egregious, as they clearly went way out of their way to make it look legit. You've talked me out of the box, but how is the sound on the individual jewel case versions vs. the mini-lps? Yeah, I saw it last night at Amoeba, and it looks like a legit ESP release. Anyone have a link to where Bernard (Stollman?) says that it is unauthorized, please?

I believe so - Free at Last. Looking forward to teh Maupin & Redman - again, I know them both only by reputation.

I was just given that for my birthday, but my SACD player is in teh shop. Well, of course I can listen to the CD layer, but I want the first time to be SACD. Today I just bought the Onzy Mathews Mosaic Select at Amoeba in Hollywood. They had 2 copies for $29.99 each. Strange, since all teh other Selects that they are selling are $45-50. I also bought a Perez Prado Mambo LP that looks like a fun time. Has a nice cover at least.