Jafar Panahi, 52, is one of two winners of the 2012 Sakharov Prize For Freedom Of Thought. “[He] is well known for his humanist films on life in Iran [e.g., The White Balloon, The Circle], but in 2010 he was put under house arrest and banned from filmmaking for 20 years. His 2011 documentary This is Not a Film was smuggled out of the country on a USB stick hidden in a cake.”
Tag: 10.26.12
Spanish Novelist Javier Marías Turns Down €20,000 Government Prize
“[The author] said he had rejected the national narrative prize [Premio Nacional de Narrativa] for his novel The Infatuations because of a lifelong aversion to receiving public money. He is on record as a critic of the way Spain hands out state-backed literary prizes.”
Why The Short Story Fell Off The Zeitgeist’s Radar
Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, suggests that the answer lies with technology. It’s not just that the ways people consumed entertainment changed (“short stories [in popular magazines] lost out to M*A*S*H* and Banana Republic”); it’s that changes in the way we work (and think) tend to lead us to a related but rather different genre.
Faulkner Estate Sues Woody Allen For Unauthorized Use Of ‘Past Is Never Dead’ Line
“Faulkner Literary Rights, the company that controls works by that Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, has filed a lawsuit over Mr. Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris and what it says is that movie’s unauthorized use of a line from Faulkner’s book Requiem for a Nun.”
Wang Shu – Architecture That Can Only Be Built In China
“Knowing what Chinese builders can do, he is able to produce buildings that can only be built in China, and he makes his workers an integral part of the process.”
The Art Of Rehab/The Rehab Of Art
Theaster Gates says he’s trying to invent “the Main Street I want to hang out on,” but he is also pushing art beyond the sphere of social commentary into the arena of nitty-gritty do-gooding.”
Winter Monsters Run Riot In The Alps
Exotic monsters stalk children (and adults) at Christmastime in Europe, making Halloween in the U.S. look positively wholesome and gentle.
Print’s Final (News) Stand
“Porn used to account for about 35 percent of Ahmed’s supply; now it’s 10 percent. Ahmed reasons that porn, compared to fashion, is something people generally prefer to consume over the Internet.”
The U.S. Returns More Than 4,000 Looted Works To Mexico
“Seizures were made in El Paso, Phoenix, Chicago, Denver, San Diego and San Antonio by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, though most of the relics — including items traced to a 2008 theft of a museum in Mexico — turned up in Fort Stockton, a Texas town.”
Photographing Cinema’s Golden Age
“The whole process of film-making was recorded in exquisite black and white.”