Friday, June 30, 2017

Rihanna Dazzles in Vogue´s April Cover Story

RIHANNA DAZZLES IN VOGUE’S APRIL COVER STORY

Published on March 17, 2016

Rihanna on VOGUE April 2016 Cover

Rihanna walks on water for the April 2016 cover of Vogue Magazine. The pop star glitters in a Tom Ford dress embellished with sequins and featuring sheer paneling. Photographed by Mert & Marcus and styled by Tonne Goodman, Rihanna dazzles for the accompanying spread featuring the designs of Saint Laurent, Givenchy and more.

Mario Sorrenti

Rihanna

Lui Magazine may 2014

Rihanna

Instagram

Jane Eyre by Jeanette Winterson

On the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth

Jane Eyre

by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson

Saturday 16 April 2016 08.00 BST

We didn’t have books at home except for the Bible and books about the Bible. But Mrs Winterson, my mother, must have been well read at one time because she decided to read Jane Eyre to me when I was seven. Jane Eyre was deemed suitable because it has a minister in it, St John Rivers, who is keen on missionary work. There is the terrible fire at Thornfield Hall and poor Mr Rochester goes blind, but Jane doesn’t bother about her now sightless paramour; she marries St John Rivers and they go off together to the mission field. My mother read out loud, turning the pages and inventing the text extempore in the style of Brontë. Only years later, reading it for myself, did I discover what she had done. It was an invaluable lesson for a writer; no story is the final one.

THE GUARDIAN

DRAGON

Jane Eyre by Sarah Waters
Jane Eyre by Teresa Hadley
Jane Eyre by Jeanette Winterson
Jane Eyre by Margaret Drabble
Jane Eyre by Esther Freud
Jane Eyre by Andrew Motion
Jane Eyre by O'Farrell
Jane Eyre by Polly Samson
Jane Eyre by Helen Dunmore
Jane Eyre by Blake Morrison
Jane Eyre by Julie Myerson
Jane Eyre by Cornelia Parker
Jane Eyre by John Mullan
Jane Eyre by Helen Simpson
Jane Eyre by Polly Teale
Jane Eyre by Samantha Ellis
Jane Eyre by Mick Jackson
Jane Eyre by Joanna Briscoe
Jane Eyre by Linda Grant
Jane Eyre by Sarah Perry

Jane Eyre by Teresa Hadley

On the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth

Jane Eyre

by Teresa Hadley

Tessa Hadley

Saturday 16 April 2016 08.00 BST

Jane Eyre is so built into the shape of my imagination that I can hardly think about it critically; I’m always in among its trees – the sturdy, northern, low-growing hawthorn and hazel bushes of its terrain – and can’t dispassionately estimate the size of the wood. The novel touches not one responsive note in me, but a whole sequence of them, each quite distinct. There’s the little girl Jane, reading and dreaming in her window seat behind the drawn curtain, looking through the glass at the dreary November afternoon outside. There’s Jane the governess at Thornfield, knowing she ought to be grateful because she is employed and fed and sheltered, yet still divinely discontented.“Anybody may blame me who likes … I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit.” There’s Jane after she has inherited her fortune, joyously and fervidly domestic, cleaning down Moor House from chamber to cellar, getting ready for Christmas. And then there’s the dreamlike reconciliation with Rochester at the end of the novel, dark with the “small, penetrating rain” of overgrown Ferndean.

I do have my reservations; I’ve never been able to believe in Mr Rochester and his ponderous teasing courtship, no matter how hard I try. I don’t think Charlotte Brontë had met enough worldly men – he sounds like an unworldly woman’s idea of one. But the novel entrances me, literally – there are any number of passages that induce a submission in me that goes beyond critical appreciation: they have a dream-like power. Its symbolism, woven into the textures of its realism, transports me each time to the familiar ritual place, with its secret life that doesn’t fail. The morning after Jane’s coming together with Rochester in the orchard at Thornfield, “the great horse chestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away”.

THE GUARDIAN

DRAGON

Jane Eyre by Sarah Waters

On the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth

Jane Eyre

by Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters

Saturday 16 April 2016 08.00 BST

I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager, but have returned to it many times since; it is one of those novels that, with each rereading, only seems to grow richer. My favourite lines come just over halfway through, when Jane is engaged in one of her many wrangles with the teasing Mr Rochester. “Do you think,” she asks him, “because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!” The lines capture part of the appeal that the book has always had for me: the small, unglamorous, passionate figure staking her claim to equality, insisting on her right to feel, to act, to matter. Meanwhile, however, up on “the fateful third storey” of Thornfield Hall, the inconvenient first wife gives her “goblin ha! ha!” … What I love most about Jane Eyre is the way it combines vastly different narrative registers, with mad Bertha Rochester prowling just below the realist surface and occasionally erupting though it to start a fire, bite a shoulder or rend a wedding veil. With her, Brontë created the sort of gothic icon – like Dracula or Mr Hyde – that it is now hard to imagine the world ever having been without. Just like Jane herself, Bertha lives on in many forms – and gets her own story, of course, in another inspiring novel, Jean Rhys’s prequel to Jane Eyre, a brilliant bit of post-colonial revisionism Wide Sargasso Sea.

THE GUARDIAN

DRAGON

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Charlotte Gainsbourg / Photos

Charlotte Gainsbourg by Satoshi Saikusa

Charlotte Gainsbourg

PHOTOS

Charlotte Gainbourg by Satoshi Saikusa

Charlotte Gainbourg by Satoshi Saikusa

Jane and Charlotte Forever

JANUARY 29 - FEBRUARY 07, 2016

Fascinating, fearless, fiercely committed actresses, Jane Birkin and her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg have been at the vanguard of international cinema for over five decades. Bursting onto the scene with a much-talked-about cameo in Michelangelo Antonioni’s seminal Blow-Up, the British-born Birkin went on to become an icon of cool through her association with legendary chanteur Serge Gainsbourg and one of France’s most in-demand actresses, conveying a soulful vulnerability in her collaborations with directors like Jacques Rivette, Agnès Varda, and Jacques Doillon. Like her mother, Charlotte Gainsbourg has built her career on adventurous roles for visionary auteurs, crafting a beguiling screen presence defined by an innate intelligence and a raw emotional intensity. Taken together, their body of work is an astonishing, often provocative, and always bold survey of the last half-century of European cinema.

Additionally, on display in the Film Society’s Furman Gallery throughout the retrospective will be “Actresses by Kate Barry,” an exhibition of photographs by the late Kate Barry—daughter of Jane, half-sister of Charlotte and formidable artist in her own right—presented in collaboration with the Institut Français.

Acknowledgments:Institut Français; Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York; Kristy Matheson, Australian Centre for the Moving Image; Leslie Ricci; Olivier Gluzman

Retrospective organized by Dennis Lim and Dan Sullivan; exhibition organized by Florence Almozini and Rufus de Rham.

FILM SOCIETY LINCOLN CENTER

Ida / The classic little knit dress

IDA

The classic little knit dress

A little black dress is a staple piece of a woman's wardrobe. Perfect for nearly every occasion and always in style, you can't go wrong with such a simple garment. Our version of a little black dress is truly a wardrobe must have, and even better, is a knit garment! Ida is a flattering, figure-hugging dress that hits just above your knee.

Book Review 070 / George Orwell's 1984 / Introduction by Robert Harris

GEORGE ORWELL’S ‘1984’

Introduction by Robert Harris

The 100 best novels / No 70 / Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in London on Wednesday, June 8, 1949, and in New York five days later. The world was eager for it.

Within 12 months, it had sold around 50,000 hardbacks in the UK; in the U.S. sales were more than one-third of a million. It became a phenomenon.

Sixty years later, no one can say how many millions of copies are in print, both in legitimate editions and samizdat versions. It has been adapted for radio, stage, television and cinema, has been studied, copied and parodied and, above all, ransacked for its ideas and images.

SERGE GAINSBOURG: HE’S NOT THE MESSIAH. HE’S A VERY, NAUGHTY BOY!

posted on 21st September 2016

He seemed to be absolutely soaked in sordid sex. The impression that you got from the guy was that he gloried in fetishism, kinks, blatant sexual innuendo and the open discussion and display of the same with a series of frankly gorgeous women who hung off the arm of this dishevelled, scruffily stylish, obviously charismatic, super talented tramp of a man. This is a guy who even made sexual advances toward Whitney Huston…live on TV! He was a scandalous individual. Hated and loved, both at the same time. Talented? Oh, absolutely. He sang, he wrote and arranged songs, directed and acted in film. Was a screenwriter, poet and much more. A terrible man. A wonderful man.

Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg

“Serge Let Me Be His Female Side”: Jane Birkin on Gainsbourg, Varda, Truffaut, and Her Iconic Career

Film | By Alison Nastasi | February 1, 2016

English actress and singer Jane Birkin beautifully shifts between breathy French and British accents. She speaks of her time with former partner Serge Gainsbourg, one of France’s most brilliant artists, with great fondness. It was a romance that unfolded in the public eye after they worked together on the 1969 film Slogan. The couple would go on to record the controversial, erotic duet “Je t’aime… moi non plus.”

Jane’s career in music and film would continue to blossom, as she worked with French cinema greats including Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, and Birkin’s third partner, Jacques Doillon. Daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg follows in her mother’s footsteps as an actress driven to complicated roles — and both women are now the subject of a retrospective at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center. Jane and Charlotte Forever runs through February 7.