Worldly actress Jacqueline Bisset honored at COLCOA
Apr
30
2017
A gorgeous crystal vase and heartfelt congratulations to the British-born actress Jacqueline Bisset, bilingual, bicultural, and in every way a screen stunner. Bisset was honored with the 2017 Prix Alliance Française presented by Christophe Lemoine Consul General of France in Los Angeles on April 27, 2017. The ceremony took place at the annual COLCOA French film ...
Primitive wonderment by Eleanor Swordy at Moskowitz Bayse
Apr
17
2017
I like these vivid oil paintings by French-born artist Eleanor Swordy soon to be showcased at Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles. And I admit being intrigued by the show’s title, “Who Died?” Both the title and the imagery on display in this female artist’s work — the geometric shapes, the primary colors, the bulky human ...
Sassy Chahine print enters life of arts·meme
Feb
15
2017
A Sunday visit to the Los Angeles Fine Print Fair — seeking respite from the onslaught of Donald Trump — to attend a public conversation between gallerist Jack Rutberg and artist Ruth Weisberg, spawned a new relationship! A fateful encounter with a wonderful teensy engraving, reproduced above. That in turn makes me the proud owner ...
Review: Jean Genet’s ‘The Maids’ @ A Noise Within
Jean Genet had a remarkable career – a thief, a jailbird, an internationally celebrated playwright whose work often embodied his compatriot’s Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous line, “Hell is other people.” That was from Sartre’s play “No Exit,” and Genet’s play “The Maids” (1947) depicts a particularly suffocating hell. Two sisters, maids in a bourgeois French household ...
Frolic the Hall of Mirrors with Louis XIV in “Versailles”
In the dance world, we know King Louis XIV for his balletomania, which led to the first formal classical ballet, “Le Ballet de la Nuit.” Louis himself danced the lead role, embodying a character modestly called ‘The Sun King.’ (As Mel Brooks sagely noted, it’s good to be king.) A reenactment of the performance appears ...
Armand & Henry & Vincent & friends have a play date
Jul
15
2016
Industrial tycoons Henry Huntington and Armand Hammer, two of Los Angeles’s most significant arts barons, ruled over great collections that form the core of major museums in Los Angeles. (Collectors respectively of the early and mid 20th century, Huntington and Hammer still pale by comparison, in their acquisitive nature, to L.A.’s tycoon-collector of the day, Eli ...
William Friedkin reveals his French Connection
Jun
21
2016
Reverence reigned in the room; it was a stirring evening of movie worship. An enthralled, somewhat dazed, audience emptied onto Wilshire Boulevard only at 11:30 pm, following the 45th anniversary screening of THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971) hosted by film critic Stephen Farber for Laemmle’s Anniversary Classics. In a post-screening Q & A, the movie’s director, ...
A visit with Anna Karina @ TCM Fest 2016
Apr
28
2016
Looking forward to hearing French New Wave film goddess, Anna Karina, introduce Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders at TCM Fest 2016 this weekend. Karina, a Danish-French actress, director and writer is known for roles in influential French New Wave films, including A Woman is a Woman (1961), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965) and Pierrot ...
Film maestro Claude Lelouch’s visual symphony, “Un + Une”
Director Claude Lelouch (far right) with his A-list cast of “Un + Une” — Jean Dujardin, Christophe Lambert, Elsa Zylberstein. The director of some fifty films brought his latest to COLCOA French film festival’s big screen last night. The film explores Lelouch’s central theme and his career concern: to plummet the love that exists between ...
French music hall revisited with “Monsieur Chocolat” @ COLCOA
“Monsieur Chocolat,” a biopic set in the fin-de-siècle world of French circus and music hall opened the 20th anniversary edition of COLCOA French Film Festival in Los Angeles last night, bringing exotica and rich visual zing to the big screen of the Director’s Guild of America. The film’s talented director Roschy Zem and its star, ...