Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ...
Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits
This page features links to reviews of movies, documentaries and exhibits with a historical theme. Listings are in reverse chronological order. Descriptions are taken directly from the linked publication. If you have articles you think should be listed on the Pop Culture page, please send them to the editor editor@historynewsnetwork.org.
SOURCE: http://www.huliq.com (12-23-08)
His leadership during America’s most divisive crisis, the Civil War, was essential to the abolition of slavery and the preservation of the union. A continuation of the museum’s “One Life” series, “The Mask of Lincoln” is open, in anticipation of the celebration of the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, and will continue through July 5, 2009.
“The National Portrait Gallery is pleased to participate in the events surrounding the commemoration of Abraham Lincoln’s birth,” said Martin E. Sullivan, director of the National Portrait Gallery. “Lincoln’s role in shaping America cannot be understated, and this exhibition uses portraits from our collection to offer us insight into how he shaped his identity and personality.”
The exhibition includes...
SOURCE: AP (12-24-08)
At first glance the analogy between Roosevelt in 1933 and President-elect Barack Obama in 2009 seems almost too obvious.
But at the New-York Historical Society, a new exhibition titled "A New President Takes Command: FDR's First Hundred Days" avoids overly simplified comparisons between the early stages of the New Deal and the expectations surrounding the new administration.
Curator Stephen Edidin says the numerous comparisons between the two presidents taking office, one during the Great Depression, the other in the middle of the worst economic crisis since then, are complex.
"When it first came up in the press, people tried to make it a direct parallel, but Obama himself said that's not really the case," he said. (Obama has said he wants...
SOURCE: BBC (12-23-08)
Yet he was so much more, with a back catalogue in a career, tragically cut short by illness, which included poetry, children's books, travel writing, historical novels and literary essays.
Now, thanks to a grant of £34,500 from the Carnegie Trust, a project led by Napier University hopes to boost the writer's reputation at home and abroad.
Work on the website will begin next year and the project is expected to be live online in early 2010.
Dr Linda Dryden, a senior lecturer at the university, said:"He was a hugely important writer, and he was a close friend of Henry James and W E Henley.
"He influenced some of the foremost writers of our time and yet, in comparison to Conrad, Hardy or Kipling, his reputation has suffered and he's often reduced to this adventure story writer.
"We think this website will go some way towards reviving his reputation."
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (12-23-08)
A book dating back to 1801 shows that a game popular with families at Christmas 200 years ago involved placing your head in someone's lap while guessing who was hitting you from behind.
The game, called Hot Cockles, was a variation of the classic Blind Man's Buff, also a well-loved pastime with our Victorian ancestors.
The book"Sports and Pastimes", written by the author and artist Joseph Strutt, lifts the lid on the famous games of the day that families and friends would play at parties.
A copy of the book was recently found in a house in Staffordshire and is due to be auctioned next month.
SOURCE: MSNBC (12-22-08)
It is admittedly difficult, although not altogether impossible, to make a movie about a historical event where everyone already knows the ending. Still, “All the President’s Men” and “Apollo 13” both generate substantial suspense even though almost everyone who saw either film had a pretty good idea of the outcome.
Telling that kind of story when things end up less happily is even trickier, but still doable: The second half of Steven Soderbergh’s “Che,” for example, follows Dr. Guevara to a rather dismal end in Bolivia, but the mechanics of his failure remain compelling.
And then there’s “Valkyrie,” which Mark Twain might have subtitled “The Not-So-Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” Director Bryan Singer is a master of forward motion in his storytelling — I still think “X2” is one of the best superhero films ever made — but he never distracts us enough from the knowledge that doom is around...
SOURCE: MSNBC (12-22-08)
Only at the movies (and in old “Hogan’s Heroes” reruns) is it ever permissible to enjoy the company of a Nazi. To be sure, the real Nazis were horrifying death merchants responsible for igniting World War II. But at the movies they become complex psychological portraits or loony B-movie villains or, weirder still, comic relief.
You can talk to psychologists all day about that last one and why we need harmless fictional versions of real-life boogeymen in order to cope with a sort of evil that most people can’t wrap their brains around, but for Hollywood the answer is pretty simple: bad guys, the baddest guys, mean movies people will pay good money to see.
“Valkyrie” opens this week, starring Tom Cruise as a heroic German military officer who launches a failed coup to stop Hitler’s reign of terror and mass murder. And he’s doing his best to de-Tom-Cruise-ify himself for this one. But when your best...
SOURCE: Brent Staples in the NYT (12-22-08)
Black American lives were viewed as expendable in the pre-civil rights South. The murderers who hanged, dismembered or burned black victims alive — before crowds of cheering onlookers — knew well that the law would not act against them. These savage rituals were meant to keep the black community on its knees.
The white men and women who flocked to these carnivals of death sometimes brought along young children, who were photographed no more than an arm’s length away from a mutilated corpse. These photos were often turned into grisly postcards that continued to circulate even after Congress made it illegal to mail them.
A particularly vivid lynching...
SOURCE: Independent (UK) (12-23-08)
The priceless artefacts, about 230 of them, were saved as they were about to be smuggled abroad in a "sting" operation organised by investigators. Seven members of the gang, which is said to have specialised in trafficking the country's stolen antiquities, have been arrested and are being questioned. They are also suspected of being involved in the systematic stripping of archaeological sites.
During the investigation, conducted by Iraqi and British security forces, ancient items destined for private collectors in the Middle East and the West were found buried in gardens and hidden under floors in houses in the suburbs of Basra. According to Iraqi authorities they included Sumerian and Babylonian sculpture, intricate gold jewellery,...
SOURCE: NYT (11-22-08)
The 183-year-old academy, a museum and school that played a pathbreaking role in fostering a New York art scene in the 19th century, is in serious trouble. Having sold two important Hudson River School paintings from its collection this month to pay bills, the institution was recently branded a pariah by the Association of Art Museum Directors. That group views such stopgap measures as a breach of basic principles, stipulating that museums can sell art only to finance new acquisitions.
The association urged its members to cut off all loans to the academy and forgo any collaborations.
SOURCE: Independent (UK) (12-23-08)
The priceless artefacts, about 230 of them, were saved as they were about to be smuggled abroad in a "sting" operation organised by investigators. Seven members of the gang, which is said to have specialised in trafficking the country's stolen antiquities, have been arrested and are being questioned. They are also suspected of being involved in the systematic stripping of archaeological sites.
During the investigation, conducted by Iraqi and British security forces, ancient items destined for private collectors in the Middle East and the West were found buried in gardens and hidden under floors in houses in the suburbs of Basra. According to Iraqi authorities they included Sumerian and Babylonian sculpture, intricate gold jewellery...
SOURCE: Tehran Times (12-23-08)
TMCA curator’s advisor Gholam-Ali Taheri, German secretary of the exhibit Heike Stockhaus, and German cultural attaché in Tehran Filiz Durak attended a press conference on Sunday.
“Barlach and Kollwitz were selected for the show for their similarities to the Iranian artists that emerged after the (1979 Islamic) Revolution, as well as for their concerns for human agonies,” Taheri said.
A total of 25 sculptures and 167 drawings are on display at the showcase, which will run until January 24, 2009.
The organizers plan to screen a number of documentary films on Barlach and Kollwitz during the show.
Barlach and Kollwitz began their career during a period when the world was rapidly evolving into the modern era, Stockhaus said.
In 1940s, these...
SOURCE: Tehran Times (12-23-08)
Iran’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Mohammad-Hossein Saffar Harandi traveled to Syria on Friday and met with his Syrian counterpart Riyad Nassan Agha to discuss bilateral cooperation on the film.
The ministers also agreed to establish a joint committee to translate the two countries’ literary works into their respective languages.
Iran’s minister also held talks with Syrian Information Minister Mohsen Bilal and they both stressed the importance of developing bilateral ties and enhancing Iran-Syria multimedia relationships.
As a first step, Syrian journalists have been invited to Iran and in return, Iranian journalists will travel to Syria...
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (12-22-08)
But keeping the painting will also be a triumph for a certain idea of what "art" is. If a piece of our cultural heritage happens to be indoors, to be an oil painting, the money will be found to keep it in this country. And yet the very word "saved" is of course mere rhetoric in this case.
It would be a stupid nation that let something so marvellous leave its
shores. But what is it to be "saved" from? Its worst fate, in all probability, would be to end up hanging in Washington's National Gallery instead of ours. It would still be cared for and almost certainly still on public display – we'd just have to travel further to see it.
Yet in the very...
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (12-22-08)
This witness was genuine, magistrate Giovanni Falcone decided after listening to such insights into life in the Sicilian mafia. He considered Marino Mannoia an exceptionally bright and honest pentito - the Italian term for a mafioso who turns informant - whose evidence was highly revealing about the wars within the organisation, the methods of its new rulers from the town of Corleone, and - most provocatively - its connections in high-level politics. The mafia confirmed in its own way how seriously it took Marino Mannoia by murdering, in reprisal for his "betrayal", his mother, aunt and sister....
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (12-22-08)
But a series of exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London next year will make it available to a British audience for the first time.
One of the country's most important arts venues, the gallery has been undergoing a £13.5 million refit for the past two years after acquiring the former library building next door.
Following its reopening in April it will host five exhibitions to show the British Council's collection which includes works by the sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth and painters David Hockney and Lucian Freud which have not been shown in the UK before.
First established in the 1930s as a showcase for British talent, the collection has helped nurture once little-known names...
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (12-19-08)
"There have been so many reinventions of The 39 Steps," says Lydia Leonard, who plays the suffragette and Hannay's love interest, Victoria Sinclair. "It's a licence to have fun with the story."
All three prior film versions, including Alfred Hitchcock's from 1935, have meddled with Buchan's original too. With good reason, reckons Penry-Jones. "The book needs a bit of tweaking to be honest. It...
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (12-21-08)
The book, which contains guides to making such Victorian favourites as broiled mushrooms and Penally Pudding, is being marketed as the perfect resource for those planning a "credit crunch Christmas".
Traditionally festive recipes include baked apple pudding, cranberry sauce and compote of apples and Italian cream.
SOURCE: WaPo (12-21-08)
This World War II thriller isn't meant to amuse, of course. But what can the viewer do? Confronted by the piratical-looking Cruise, waxing faux-Teutonic, one is simply overcome by involuntary hysteria. Which inadvertently proves something that needn't be proved at all: Mel Brooks is a genius.
What Brooks has always known is that the only foolproof way to put Nazis on screen is as the butt of jokes. Laugh at them, and steal their power. He did it with the "Springtime" number in "The Producers" (the original of which featured Kenneth Mars's hilariously unrepentant Nazi playwright, Franz Liebkind). He...
SOURCE: International Herald Tribune (12-22-08)
But there is another aspect to this almost ascetic region. Stuttgart has a spectacular art museum, with a wonderful 20th-century collection. Paintings by the German modernists are here, including Franz Marc's "Kleine blaue Pferde" and Lyonel Feininger's "Barfüsserkirche."
These two paintings, however, are just some of the tens of thousands of art works in the country's museums that have become caught up in the seemingly never-ending consequences of Germany's Nazi past. Big galleries and museums are being inundated with claims by lawyers representing the descendants of persecuted and murdered German Jews.
SOURCE: Discovery News (12-22-08)
Consisting of more than 500 delicate miniature pots crafted about 2,600 years ago, the"treasure" was discovered during a police investigation in the countryside near the village of Campoverde di Aprilia, some 25 miles south of Rome.
The archaeological squad of the Carabinieri police noticed suspicious mounds, which are typical of a dig, near a small lake known as"Laghetto del Monsignore".
