Three weeks ago the movie “An Englishman In New York” about the life of writer Quentin Crisp had it’s New York premiere at the Tribeca Film festival (It was also shown at the Berlinale in February). The movie is a sequel to “The Naked Civil Servant” which was an adaptation of Crisps autobiography starring John Hurt who became famous for playing him. It was released in 1975. Now Hurt is playing Crisp again and it looks as if he’s doing his job really good. The movie is supposed to be shown on U.K. TV station ITV1 this year. On June 18th it will be the opening night feature for San Francisco’s Frameline gay and lesbian fim festival. If you want to know more about Crisp, here’s a nice website dedicated to him. You can also just type in his name in on youtube. Amongst other things you find the whole “Naked Civil Servant” movie there, unfortunately in a really bad quality.
I actually heard of this artist/film director the first time yesterday when a friend of mine told me about plans for a Smith-conference in Berlin in automn. I hope I’m not the only person here who’s not familiar with this guy who some people even call the most influencial US artist of the last fifty years. This is what I know now: Smith is a pioneer of the (queer) underground cinema and of performance art, combining early Hollywood/ B-Movie-kitsch and Orientalism with his own campy and abstract style. But I don’t wanna bore you with boring second-hand information, so I’ll just post you a link to UbuWeb here were you’ll find an article about Mr. Smith and three of his movies – his most famous one is “Flaming Creatures” from 1963. I also posted a youtube-trailer for a documentation about him. Thanks, Tim.
The Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York is showing an exhibition of John Waters at the moment and that’s getting quite a lot of publicity in the US (even Kanye West recommends it on his Blog). Here are two videos in which Waters talks about the exhibition himself. He’s working as a photographer since the Nineties mostly doing snapshots of his favourite movies from a TV. But at the exibition he also shows objects – I especially like the one with the Turners. I also found out that his movie “Fruitcake” starring Johnny Knoxville is supposed to be released this year. And to emphasize that blog is finally not much more than a mere extension of youtube, I’m also posting a hilarious scene from “Desperate Living” here.
In November 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered by being run over by his own car several times at a beach near Rome. Giuseppe Pelosi, a seventeen-year-old hustler was arrested for the murder and confessed. But until today the case remains unsolved, espacially since in 2005 Pelosi retracted his confession saying that he was forced to admit the murder by three people “with a southern accent” who called Pasolini a “dirty communist”. It’s also told that the Italian secret service did a strange intervention in the process of investigation. And there is also a theory that says Pasolini “organised” his death himself since there are parallels between motives of his movie and the way he died.
Update: There used to be a poll here so you could vote why Passolini dies but the link is a dead end now and it doesn’t make sense to start a new poll. Sorry.
Three weeks ago the movie “An Englishman In New York” about the life of writer Quentin Crisp had it’s New York premiere at the Tribeca Film festival (It was also shown at the Berlinale in February). The movie is a sequel to “The Naked Civil Servant” which was an adaptation of Crisps autobiography starring John Hurt who became famous for playing him. It was released in 1975. Now Hurt is playing Crisp again and it looks as if he’s doing his job really good. The movie is supposed to be shown on U.K. TV station ITV1 this year. On June 18th it will be the opening night feature for San Francisco’s Frameline gay and lesbian fim festival. If you want to know more about Crisp, here’s a nice website dedicated to him. You can also just type in his name in on youtube. Amongst other things you find the whole “Naked Civil Servant” movie there, unfortunately in a really bad quality.
