Showing posts with label Win Wenders. Show all posts

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Harry Dean Stanton, cult American actor, dies aged 91

BIOGRAPHY

Prolific character actor, who appeared in scores of films including Paris, Texas, Alien, Repo Man and The Straight Story, died in an LA hospital on Friday

Andrew Pulver
Saturday 16 September 2017 10.25 BST

Harry Dean Stanton, the veteran American actor who ballasted generations of independent and cult films, has died aged 91. The subject of the late critic Roger Ebert’s “Stanton Walsh Rule” – “No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad” – Stanton was famed for his ability to project his hangdog, laconic charm into minor roles, which ensured he worked continuously for over six decades. Directors who cast him include David Lynch, Sam Peckinpah, Ridley Scott, Alex Cox and Wim Wenders, but he was never nominated for an Oscar or any of the other principal acting awards.

The 50 best films of 2015 / Salt of the Earth / No 19

The 50 best films

of 2015

in the US

No 19

The Salt of the Earth

The Salt of the Earth review – colourful portrait of visionary photographer Sebastião Salgado

4/5stars

This deeply considered documentary from Wim Wenders and the photographer’s son looks at the Brazilian artist behind monochrome images that transcend history itself

Peter Bradshaw
Thursday 16 July 2015 22.15 BST

he amazing monochrome images created by 71-year-old Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado are the subject of this deeply considered documentary study, co-directed by Wim Wenders and the photographer’s son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. The cinema screen is a good platform for work so passionately idealistic and, perhaps, grandiose. The pictures are the result of Salgado’s remarkable 40-year career as a photojournalist – although that word does not do justice to a vocation closer to artist, ethnographer and self-described “witness to the human condition”.

Salgado took stunning pictures in South America, Africa and central Europe, paying tribute to peoples who are dispossessed. He speaks to the camera here about his life and work, like a great big Buddha-like head looming out of the pictures’ glass frames. Wenders says that compassion fuels Salgado’s vision, humanity being the “salt of the earth”. I suspect there is also that Greeneian splinter of ice in his artist’s heart that allows him to capture unbearable images of human agony.

Sebastião Salgado gets his closeup … The Salt of the Earth co-director Wim Wenders, left, with his subject

Salgado has been accused of fetishising and beautifying suffering and pain: I don’t agree, although Salgado is not asked why he takes only black-and-white photographs, and this is a flaw in the film – as it goes to the heart of the artistry-over-authenticity debate. Cinematographers Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Hugo Barbier occasionally show their own black-and-white images bleeding into colour; I would have liked to hear from them directly about how their work was influenced by the subject. Finally, it seems as if Salgado has gone beyond humanity in depicting the natural world: landscapes without people. His best work seems to transcend history itself.

THE GUARDIAN