The Dawn of Color Film

Here's the Chicago Reader's capsule review of the 1926 silent The Black Pirate (to be screened with live piano accompaniment at Page Hall this Friday, 10/15):

"Two-strip Technicolor—in which red orange and blue green exposures of the same action were fused into a single length of celluloid—was being used in silent films as early as 1922, but this rousing 1926 swashbuckler was the first full-length two-strip feature." More.

You can also read about the rocky beginnings of color film on the website of The American Widescreen Museum:

"Since the print was actually two strips cemented back to back, the side facing the projector's arc lamp would heat up and expand more than the side towards the lens. This caused the film to 'cup' and replacement reels were constantly being supplied while the folks back in the lab 'ironed' the cupped reels flat."

Also, its nice to know that the Fairbanks family is still in the business of swashbuckling three generations on....

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The Nobel Peace Prize

Kwame Anthony Appiah, who will visit the New York State Writers Institute on Thursday, November 11, successfully nominated Chinese author Liu Xiaobo of China for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize last week. The text of Appiah's letter of nomination may be found here.

The President of the PEN American Center, the American branch of the world's oldest human rights organization, Appiah was one of several thousand individuals privileged to submit nominations worldwide. Qualifications for nominators are posted on the website of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Appiah will speak in Albany about his new book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2010).

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The Women behind "The Woman Behind Little Women"

The American Library Association's Booklist magazine named Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, the "Best Video of 2009." The film also took "Best Documentary" at the Reel Women Festival in Los Angeles.

Mary McNamara of the L. A. Times said, "[The] documentary gives life and texture to a woman of extraordinary talent and determination who became as great a celebrity in her day as J.K. Rowling is in ours.... More than that, the film captures the intellectual foment of the time, which, though revolutionary in many ways, did not extend to a woman becoming a novelist or essayist under her own name unless she was writing for children."

Harriet Reisen and Nancy Porter-- the women behind The Woman Behind Little Women-- will be making public presentations on Thursday, October 14th and Friday, October 15th (the latter will be a 3 hour long seminar on historical writing and filmmaking for general audiences, 9AM-12PM, entirely FREE and open to the public.

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Sartre in the Age of Obama

Acclaimed Jean-Paul Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal-- who speaks today at the University Art Museum about her book on Leo Castelli-- delivered the Sartre Society's keynote address last November, with a paper entitled "Sartre Reconsidered in Light of the Obama Era."

"Why did I submit a paper to the North American Sartre Society this year?... I did it because of Memphis and Martin Luther King, Jr. I did it because of Barack Obama. Then, I did it because of my own debt to Sartre, as being someone educated as a colonized Jew in Algeria, who managed to decipher my own cultural identity through Franz Fanon and Sartre. Finally, I did it because of the links that I always felt existed between African American leaders or intellectuals and Sartre. Because I decided it was now time for me to proceed in that direction."

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Annie Cohen Solal on Charlie Rose, Sept. 15, 2010

Charlie Rose interviews Annie Cohen Solal, French author who will be visiting the University Art Museum this coming Tuesday, October 12, about her new biography of her friend Leo Castelli, the New York art dealer who helped to create and shape the Pop and Minimalist movements in American art.

View the interview here.

Rose previously interviewed Cohen Solal in 2001 about Painting American, her book on the rise of American art in New York City, and how it came to displace Paris as the center of the art world. Cohen Solal conducted much of her research for that book as cultural attache of the French Embassy under the tutelage of Leo Castelli.

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Paul Grondahl on Hugo Perez in the TU

Paul Grondahl contributes a profile of Hugo Perez in yesterday's Times Union, featuring photos of Hugo with Hunter Thompson and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (pictured here)....

"You may not have known his name, but you couldn't have missed Hugo Perez at Writers Institute readings at the University at Albany between the mid- to late-1990s.

He was the dark-haired, bespectacled and stylishly dressed young man, often sporting a vest and fedora. He stood silently behind a video camera, hour after hour, still as a statue. He focused, zoomed and panned on Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood and a parade of literary luminaries."

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NOT Science Fiction

Among other things, Sigrid Nunez talks in the Times Union about the absence of futuristic technology in her novel.

"Be forewarned; Nunez does not consider her tale to be science fiction. 'Because I'm not interested in changes in technology, I didn't see it as a futuristic novel. Political polarizations, extreme weather changes -- we have all of that now,' she says in a phone interview, adding of her fictional near-apocalypse: 'It was a What if?.'"

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