Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Performance arts, music, film, drama and literature, creative expressions presented on the world stage seeking earth balance, harmony, dissonance, abstraction and concept.
Almost forty years after his violent death, Pier Paolo Pasolini, filmmaker, poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, painter, actor, and all-around intellectual public figure, remains a subject of passionate argument. Best known for a subversive and difficult body of film work, loaded with Renaissance and Baroque iconography, he championed the disinherited and damned of postwar Italy, mingling an intellectual leftism with a fierce Franciscan Catholicism.
Lou Harrison: A World of Music is an intimate portrait of an eclectic composer who traded a fast-paced New York career for a remote cabin in the woods. Harrison, a polymath, iconoclast, writer and activist, embraced artistic playfulness over the business of composing. Experimenting freely with western, eastern and custom made instruments, Harrison forged a new course for 20th century music.
Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece, “The Battle of Algiers,” as a study of the brutality of urban guerrilla warfare, serves an Arab-street-level counterpoint to Kathryn Bigelow’s US-imperialism-centered, torture-driven war propaganda film, “Zero Dark Thirty.”
The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet) is a 1957 Swedish film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set in Sweden during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval knight and a game of chess he plays with the personification of Death, who has come to take his life.
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Literary Gothic: Every New Year’s Eve the Devil keeps a special treat for me. He knows just the right moment to jam his claw into my heart, keeping up a fine mockery while he licks the blood that wells out.
Emily Dickinson was a great poet whose life has remained a mystery. The time has come to dispel the myth of a quaint and helpless creature, disappointed in love, who gave up on life. Unafraid of her own passions and talent, she embraced the world around her, yet faced a debilitating illness and family intrigue.
Suddenly, mice fill the room and the Christmas tree grows to dizzying heights. The Nutcracker also grows to life-size. Marie finds herself in the midst of a battle between an army of Gingerbread man soldiers and the mice, led by the fierce Mouse King. The mice begin to eat the gingerbread soldiers.