Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

French cuisine, exalted by chefs as a world heritage treasure

Their battlefield is filled, they know, with hidden land mines and cunning enemies. So around a half-dozen French chefs and culinary experts from the ad hoc "French Mission for Food Heritage and Cultures" are preparing for war with weapons they know best. They ate and drank their way through a three-hour strategy session recently to help their country face the daunting task before it: to persuade the United Nations to declare French gastronomy a world treasure

Guggenheim chooses a curator, not a showman

After a seven-month search, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation on Tuesday named Richard Armstrong of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh as its next director. Armstrong, 59, who has been director of the Carnegie for 12 years, succeeds Thomas Krens, who announced in February that he was stepping down after nearly 20 years. In a decision that was widely reported in the art world, Guggenheim trustees settled on Armstrong in late August but did not vote formally unti

Is Baader Meinhof film a 'tasteless action movie'?

For a blockbuster movie that claims to be the first to show the warts-and-all horror of what has been described as Germany's biggest post-war tragedy, the beginning of The Baader Meinhof Complex is disarmingly innocuous. The film opens with shots of the idyllic playground of Germany's rich and famous, the North Sea holiday island of Sylt. It is the late 1960s and a newly married couple from a wealthy Hamburg background are shown cavorting about on the lawn of a luxury seaside home.

History repeats itself: a 100-year-old play about a very modern political crisis

Like a theatrical equivalent of David Dimbleby, Harley Granville-Barker's play Waste has a habit of popping up at times of great political importance. The last major British revival of the 1907 drama - in which a party leader's attempt to form a government is thwarted by factionalism and scandal - took place in 1997, as the collapsing Major adminstration was replaced by Blair. A Broadway production in 2000 coincided with the disputed Bush-Gore election. And now, confirming the work's record as h

Sinaii receives Polish Order of Merit

Iranian filmmaker Khosro Sinaii received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for his documentary “The Lost Requiem”. President Lech Kaczynski presented the medal to director Sinaii in a ceremony held on the sidelines of the Polish Film Festival in the city of Gdynia last Saturday. “The Lost Requiem” tells the story of the wartime exodus to Iran by thousands of Polish citizens after being released from the Soviet labor camps of Siberia du

Too much for the Nazis: Munch's 'Vampire' comes out of the dark after 70 years

One of the most sensational and shocking images in European art, Edvard Munch's painting of a man locked in a vampire's tortured embrace – her molten-red hair running along his soft bare skin – created an instant outcry when unveiled a century ago. Some believed the Norwegian artist's anguished 1894 masterpiece, Love and Pain – since known as Vampire – to be a reference to his illicit visits to prostitutes; others interpreted it as a macabre fantasy about the death of his favourite

Van Gogh painting uncovered by new Xray machine

A new technique promises to reveal hundreds of masterpieces hidden beneath later works. Harry de Quetteville reports It amounts to the biggest single art find: a host of unseen works by masters old and new, from Rembrandt to Van Gogh and Picasso. But these works can't be seen on the walls of any gallery or museum. And they are hidden not in a safe or bank vault, but on canvases which the artists themselves painted over. Now, however, scientists are employing a revolutio

Council sells Constable sketch for 17,400 pounds

The charcoal drawing, commissioned in the early 1800s, has been sitting in storage at Solihull Council since it bought it in the early 1990s. Council chiefs refused to put it on public view in case it got damaged. With mounting debts they put the drawing, a sketch of Malvern Hall, near Solihull, West Mids, up for auction. The drawing was commissioned by the then owner of the hall, Henry Greswolde. A priceless oil painting based on the sketch ha

Library brings medieval classics into digital age

Literary treasures written in Middle English are to be put into a digital archive by John Rylands Library in Manchester. A major element of the In the Bigynning project will reunite a leaf from Chaucer's The Miller's Tale with a matching piece at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia from which it has been separated for more than a century. Carol Burrows, assistant librarian, said: "It will act as a pilot for an ambitious Manchester Medieval Digital Library which will contain dig

Farewell! Photo exhibtion commorates 28th anniversary of Iran-Iraq war

An Iranian combatant bids farewell to his martyred fellows in an undated photo taken at a frontline in western Iran during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. An exhibition of photos commemorating the 28th anniversary of the war is currently underway at Tehran’s Palestine Museum of Contemporary Art.

Power of the rouble lures RSC

The Royal Shakespeare Company is to launch a series of four specially-commissioned plays about Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union in Stratford-upon-Avon next year, in a move it is hoped will attract international billionaire investment. Michael Boyd, the RSC's artistic director who trained in Moscow early in his career, told The Independent yesterday that he wants Russian money to flow into theatre in the way that it has helped the visual arts to prosper. Lo

Munch's 'Vampire' comes out of the dark after 70 years

One of the most sensational and shocking images in European art, Edvard Munch's painting of a man locked in a vampire's tortured embrace – her molten-red hair running along his soft bare skin – created an instant outcry when unveiled a century ago. Some believed the Norwegian artist's anguished 1894 masterpiece, Love and Pain – since known as Vampire – to be a reference to his illicit visits to prostitutes; others interpreted it as a macabre fantasy about the death of his favourite

Princess Diana's dance with John Travolta made her feel like elephant, letters show

She famously twirled around the dancefloor with John Travolta, but Diana, Princess of Wales confided in a letter: "Watching me dance is like watching an elephant." Previously unseen correspondence between Diana and her former nanny, Mary Clarke, provides a fascinating insight into the young princess's life. She writes guilelessly of her love for the Prince of Wales, the frantic preparations for their wedding day and her happiness in the early years of marriage

Cold War Modern: superpowers slugging it out (Exhibit)

Alastair Sooke finds great art and design being created in the shadow of nuclear annihilation at the V&A's new show Cold War Modern: Design 1945-70 When the V&A decided to mount its big new autumn exhibition, Cold War Modern, four years ago, the museum could scarcely have anticipated how relevant it would seem by the time that it opened. After Russia's tanks rolled into Georgia last month, relations between Moscow and the West feel sub-zero once again.

Collins dictionary asks public to rescue outdated words

Collins dictionary has given the public the chance to save some of the English language's more obscure and antiquated words such as fusby, vilipend and embrangle. The introduction of 2,000 new words into the forthcoming edition of the dictionary has meant that some of the lesser known and used words have become endangered and face being lost from the publication. A list of 24-threatened words has been drawn up and some celebrities have taken up the challenge of rescuing a wor

Da-da-da-dum! Beethoven sales soar

When Beethoven stood up to conduct the first performance of his Fifth Symphony in 1808, he did little to encourage its popularity. While an under-rehearsed orchestra struggled to play the music, the audience, sat in a freezing concert hall, was too cold to care. But 200 years on, the work is enjoying a revival after an unlikely pair of celebrity conductors directed Ludwig van Beethoven's masterpiece during the BBC's reality television series, Maestro. Sales of Sym

Truth after 42 years: Beatles banned for fear of influence on youth

Forty-two years after Israel banned John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr from playing to the nation, the truth about its Beatlephobia has finally been revealed. Still reeling from the sight of Israeli teenagers swooning to the tunes of Cliff Richard in 1963, Israel's publicly appointed guardians of good taste and morality, the interdepartmental committee for authorising the importation of foreign artists, refused their entry. Determined to preven

British actor: 'I've fallen in love with Aristotle Onassis'

Nobody panics quite like Robert Lindsay. For more than 30 years he has portrayed men with less grip on things than they choose to believe. Wolfie, his gobby Tooting Trot in Citizen Smith, was a forerunner of Michael Murray, the manic Labour militant he played in Alan Bleasdale's GBH. Even the paterfamilias in My Family, the sitcom role to which he has been largely confined in recent years, has ceded control of his own home. Lindsay's Fagin has met his comeuppance both

War and Japan: The Non-Fiction Manga of Mizuki Shigeru

Many Japanese neonationalists contend that it is “masochistic” to look critically at the nation’s wars of the 1930s and 1940s. They assume that criticism of Japanese militarism and love of the country and its traditions are somehow mutually exclusive. In place of an honest look at past crimes, revisionists present Japan as a victim, originally of Western imperialism, and now of a conspiracy of defamation by its neighbors. Manga artist Mizuki Shigeru (b. 1922), creator of the famous

John Adams: The short ugly hero of America

John Adams is the Pete Best of American history,” Tom Hanks says, a rich, rolling chuckle hovering in his warm, familiar voice. “You’ve got all these famous names - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alex-ander Hamilton - but it’s Adams who triangulates the founding of America. He was the last person to speak before they signed the Declaration of Independence. He was the second president. He fought the first true election. The reason he’s unknown - even in America - is the g