Bertolucci, back in Italy
Life and death live close together, room to room, in Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Stealing Beauty / Feeling and Seduction”, 1996 (DVD by Koch Films). A terminally ill poet, Alex, and a girl from America (Lucy in the sky, Alex calls her), who came to the country house near Siena to find out who fathered her, in that very house. Jeremy Irons, with lustful-weary chastity, and Liv Tyler, who celebrated her eighteenth birthday while filming. A fervent homecoming film by Bertolucci, who made great artificial Hollywood cinema in the eighties, nine Oscars for “The Last Emperor”, nature in a surreal light, interspersed with bold statues, the sounds of Nina Simone or Mozart’s clarinet concerto pull through the air, anarchy swirls like it did in Jean Renoir’s “Dejeuner sur l’herbe”. Fritz Goettler
Hidden objects of the 21st century, here a scene from Dhaka
(Photo: Peter Bialobrzeski)
Peter Bialobrzeski’s city diaries
Peter Bialobrzeski is one of the great urban researchers of our time. The Hamburg photographer has roamed the Asian megacities for years and has compiled artful and lavish illustrated books from his long exposures that look like they come from a strange future. For several years he has been publishing city diaries on the side. It started in 2015 with the “Cairo Diary”, since then books about Athens, Taipei, Budapest and ten other cities have followed. All appear in the same format, 14 x 21 centimeters, contain 51 double-sided photos and a brief diary text about the week he spent there. Now five volumes are appearing at once, Linz, Belfast, Dhaka, Minsk and Yangon (thevelvetcell.com). The whole thing is intended as a photographic archive of the city at the beginning of the 21st century. Pictures from Linz next to those from Dhaka, hard to believe that both are called “city”, so different the deserted, provincial concrete trystesse in winter-gray Austria next to the Asian circulation pump made of mud, concrete and life, yes the noise and the smells seem immediately on fire, while in the three European volumes you feel like you are in museums that have not been in operation for years.
Bialobrzeski hardly ever looks from a bird’s eye view of the cities, rather he works like a stroller who gets lost in the cluttered urban space and is amazed at how all of this can coexist. Although Flaneur sounds like idleness, Bialobrzeski is already diving in with skin and hair: “My moto rider calls himself Runner Runner Knight Rider,” he writes in the Dhaka diary. “The buses are not half an arm’s length away, while RRKR meanders through the rickshaws, SUVs and limousines. Airbags or seat belts seem like they are from another planet.” It is always worth leafing through the books twice. Much of “Belfast Diary” appears to be double-exposed, as if the state of war of earlier decades was shaped by the colorful walls of the present or as if the city behind all the walls that still exist today is just waiting for violence to break out again soon. Alex Rühle
The Chalik siblings. It is unclear whether they are currently playing the early or late Saint Saëns Quartet.
(Photo: Alkonost)
Very young, very old
The Frenchman Camille Saint-Saëns is hardly known as a composer of string quartets. But he had a charming and wise view of the genre: “You can only write a string quartet at twenty, in the naivety and recklessness of youth, or at sixty, if you have sufficient experience and no longer a secret of your art is alien to you . ” On the excellent CD (Alkonost) the young Quatuor Tschalik meets the two string quartets of the old master: clever music, always elegant, eloquent, form-conscious. The four Tschalik siblings play the pieces, one from 1899, the other from 1918, with that witty verve that music deserves in its typical lightness and compositional sovereignty. Harald Eggebrecht
Naguib Mahfus sang about it, Zizo Abdo deciphered it: the alleys of Cairo.
(Photo: facebook.com/cairoBiography)
“Cairo Biography”
Cairo is not a city that makes it easy for strollers, too many people, too many cars, too much dust. But if you know what to look for, she will reveal her treasures. Archaeologist Zizo Abdo knows what he’s looking for, and he’s generous enough to take the viewer with him. “Cairo Biography” is the name of his initiative, which started a year ago with a rubbish collection campaign in historic buildings. It now has a Facebook page, workshops, podcasts and a number of documentaries Videos to that, which plunges into the 1000-year history of “Al-Qahira”, the victorious. And behold, a new city sees the sun of Egypt, with caravanserais and mausoleums, mosques and mansions, and, well, still a lot of filth. Naguib Mahfus may have sung about the “sugar alley”, Abdo literally climbs over a pile of rubble in the narrow corners of Cairo to get to the magnificent palace of Al-Mosafer Chana from the 18th century. Once built by a wealthy trader with “good manners”, as the sources say, it later became a salon for diplomats, atelier buildings for artists and once almost a girls’ school. A fire destroyed the building, the carved doors and exquisite mashrabija windows, but in the ruins Abdo discovers an inscription above a door: “You who have seen this hall, remember the day. It is a hall of heaven.” Decades before Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” arie, this calligraphy praised the redeeming power of architecture. There is a lot of construction going on in Cairo again. President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi is building a new capital for ministries and authorities at the gates of the old, worn-out, difficult-to-control city. In any case, there is not one Cairo, but many, every few decades a new city was founded when the old one no longer seemed to be of use. And each time old Cairo willingly embraced its new, affluent neighbor and grew a little more as the old neglected neighborhoods fell into disrepair. Some things have since been carefully restored, but Zizo leads the audience into the forgotten corners, to Mameluke schools, the Fatimid mosques and the mausoleum of Sidi Abdallah Rihan, who, the keeper of the shrine swears, appears every day for his birthday. Cairo, every Cairo, remains a city of wonders. Sonja Zekri
The “Gesualdo Six” in the background are not, but the sound of the English vocal sextet has often been called angelic
(Photo: Arcana)
The great Renaissance musician Giosquino
On the 500th anniversary of his death at the end of August, people once again remembered this great Renaissance musician who was a celebrated artist in his time: Josquin Desprez, born in northern France in 1450, Franco-Flemish singer and composer, caused a sensation in Rome and is the most important Early Renaissance composer. The English singing group “Gesualdo Six”, named after the prince and composer Gesualdo da Venosa, who worked a hundred years later, creates an ideal sound space for the polyphonic, intricate music of Josquin, who is called Giosquino in Italy – as does the album (from Arcana via outhere music) with spiritual works. It is less the virtuosity of the individual singer than the homogeneous yet audible overall sound created from individual voices that inspires. Helmut Mauró