It’s the sort of leadership that the 19th-century French democrat Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin described: ”There go the people - I must follow them, for I am their leader.

Her or him, it’s time to choose

Posted 1 week ago

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Chaplin never spoke more than cursorily about his filmmaking methods, claiming such a thing would be tantamount to a magician spoiling his own illusion. In fact, until he began making spoken dialogue films with The Great Dictator in 1940, Chaplin never shot from a completed script. The method he developed, once his Essanay contract gave him the freedom to write for and direct himself, was to start from a vague premise—for example “Charlie enters a health spa” or “Charlie works in a pawn shop.” Chaplin then had sets constructed and worked with his stock company to improvise gags and “business” around them, almost always working the ideas out on film. As ideas were accepted and discarded, a narrative structure would emerge, frequently requiring Chaplin to reshoot an already-completed scene that might have otherwise contradicted the story.[42] Chaplin’s unique filmmaking techniques became known only after his death, when his rare surviving outtakes and cut sequences were carefully examined in the 1983 British documentary Unknown Chaplin.
This is one reason why Chaplin took so much longer to complete his films than those of his rivals. In addition, Chaplin was an incredibly exacting director, showing his actors exactly how he wanted them to perform and shooting scores of takes until he had the shot he wanted. (Animator Chuck Jones, who lived near Charlie Chaplin’s Lone Star studio as a boy, remembered his father saying he watched Chaplin shoot a scene more than a hundred times until he was satisfied with it.[43]) This combination of story improvisation and relentless perfectionism—which resulted in days of effort and thousands of feet of film being wasted, all at enormous expense—often proved very taxing for Chaplin, who in frustration would often lash out at his actors and crew, keep them waiting idly for hours or, in extreme cases, shutting down production altogether.[42]

Charlie Chaplin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted 2 weeks ago

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Peter had felt sick the evening before, and had a bad night of sleep, thinking he had acid reflux. Peter sipped tea at the breakfast table, and told Laszlo that he spent too many hours in the cinema munching on nuts, rushing between films, not dining properly. Laszlo: “He said he should start thinking about changing his way of life because at his age he can’t go on living this way.” Laszlo suggested he should eat fruit and vegetables, and Laszlo mentioned his own love of figs. Laszlo: “ ‘So, you’re a fig man?’ he said, amused, with a strange twinkle in his eyes as he gave me a very long, sort of philosophical look.” “So, you’re a fig man?” appears to have been Peter’s last sentence. After that, Peter closed his eyes, his breathing became heavier and, as Laszlo wondered if his breakfast companion was doing some kind of meditative exercise, Peter’s head turned slowly. Laszlo: “Then he did not move anymore. Nor did he breathe! That was when I realized he’d lost consciousness.

Peter Brunette: In Memory - indieWIRE

Posted 2 weeks ago

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Among other Nietzsche biographies available in English, Young’s biography improves hugely upon Safranski (2002) and Hollingdale (1965), and sizably upon both Kaufmann (1950) and Hayman (1980) in scope and detail. It is a difficult balance to achieve, but Young has a keen sense of exactly how much detail to relate without becoming tedious and tiresome. He vividly describes the particulars of Nietzsche’s very real “living concerns” — his fragile health, his financial limits, his changing relations with family and friends, and his constant quest to find the atmospheric conditions for his work — without reducing Nietzsche’s thoughts to these concerns. Young preserves this balance by alternating between sections of mainly biographical material and sections with more substantive philosophical analysis. He usefully enlists a wide array of materials, from Nietzsche’s notebooks to the correspondence of his various acquaintances (both with Nietzsche and with one another) in order to illuminate Nietzsche’s life and thought.

Julian Young - Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography - Reviewed by Charlie Huenemann, Utah State University

Posted 3 weeks ago

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