Deborah Kerr, 1921–2007

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The Innocents.

A great British actress died this week. She was also something of a movie star in the Fifties, rolling in the surf with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity (1953) and standing up to Yul Brynner in The King and I (1956). Prior to that she starred in two films for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) (where she played three roles) and Black Narcissus (1947). But for me she’ll always be the (literally) haunted Miss Giddens in The Innocents (1961), Jack Clayton’s superb adaptation of The Turn of the Screw. Still one of the most effective screen ghost stories; try and see it this Halloween.

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Freddie Francis, 1917–2007

James Bidgood

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Bobby Looking Out Shuttered Window from Pink Narcissus, mid- to late 1960s.

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Blue Boy from Pink Narcissus (Bobby Kendall), mid- to late 1960s.

James Bidgood’s deliriously rich photographs are currently on exhibition at Clampart in New York, and the show includes stills from his classic film Pink Narcissus. Bidgood discusses his work here. And for those of us not in NYC, there’s a Taschen collection available.

James Bidgood: Photographs from the 1960s
January 4th–February 17th, 2007
Clampart
521–531 West 25th Street
Ground Floor
New York City 10001

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Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
Un Chant d’Amour by Jean Genet

The art of Yayoi Kusama

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Infinity Mirror Room—Love Forever (1966/1994).
Mirror, light bulbs, stainless steel, wood.

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Narcissus Garden (1966/2002).
Watermall, 2000 mirror balls.

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Fireflies on the Water (2002).
150 lights, mirrors and water.

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Infinity Mirror Room, Rain in Early Spring (2002).

Since the late 1950s, Yayoi Kusama has used painting, performance, sculpture, and installation to develop a highly personal formal vocabulary that combines repetitive elements such as net and dot patterns with organic and often eroticized sculptural forms. Her early paintings and collages extend the language of Abstract Expressionism and its concern for allover compositions into an intimate form of gridded space.

By the early 1960s Kusama had begun to produce her Accumulations, everyday objects such as chairs, tables, and clothes densely covered with hand-sewn, phallic protrusions. Around the same time, Kusama began to paint net and dot patterns onto household items, and in 1965 she combined all these elements in the installation Infinity Mirror Room Phalli’s Field (or Floor Show). In Infinity Mirror Room a dense field of polka-dotted phallic protrusions extended from the floor of an enclosed space. The walls of the environment were lined with mirrors, leaving only a small passageway into the center of the installation empty.

For the installation Kusama’s Peep Show (1966), the artist constructed a room whose walls and ceiling were covered with mirrors, while the floor was densely filled with glowing electric lightbulbs in different colors. Two small windows allowed the viewer and Kusama to peer inside.

Continuing her obsessive, almost psychedelic approach, the installations suggest a kaleidoscopic mode of perception, in which interior rooms contain unbound, seemingly endless spaces. By the late 1960s, Kusama began to stage performances, sometimes covering her naked body, or others’ bodies, with patterns.

In the early 1970s, Kusama returned to Tokyo; she voluntarily entered a clinic for the mentally ill, where she has remained ever since. She has continued to produce work at a prolific rate, remarkable in its consistency. Her obsessive arrangements, her often radically eroticized alterations of everyday objects, her fascination with infinity, and the all-encompassing nature of her work have remained at the core of her production.

In her most recent works Kusama continues to create reflective interior environments. Fireflies on the Water (2002) consists of a small room lined with mirrors on all sides, a pool in the center of the space, and 150 small lights hanging from the ceiling, creating a dazzling effect of direct and reflected light, emanating from both the mirrors and the water’s surface. Fireflies embodies an almost hallucinatory approach to reality, while shifting the mood from her earlier, more unsettling installations toward a more ethereal, almost spiritual experience.

More information and pictures at her site.

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Atomix by Nike Savvas