Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
I Pagliacci
and Cavalleria Rusticana (Filmed at the Met, Northern winter, 2015) (screened in Adelaide, 8 July 2015) It’s more (squalid, proletarian) potboiler than verismo, but this time-honoured double bill of adulterous, hypocritical, homicidal southern Italians is, pardon the expression, impervious to the knife. The Met, under baton of Fabio Luisi, is faultless, and the direction and cinéma vérité staging, after Sir David McVicar, is pretty good, albeit a little clunky (*QUIBBLE ALERT*). Appropriately, ’twas the Met that first combined these two hardy perennials in 1893; a good idea that seems obvious in hindsight. The pieces are worthy but slight, crisp wafers soaked…
Continue Reading →Watch on the Rhine
At the Movies, London, 1943
(Dir. Herman Shumlin) (1943) Nazis, ISIS, Port Adelaide Football Club…the forces of evil bring us together and so it proves here, in Warner Brothers’ film of Lillian Hellman’s play about a member of the resistance and his family, seeking refuge from the Nazis in his wife’s family dream house in Washington DC, some time before Pearl Harbour shook the American lethargy… Bette Davis and Paul Lukas are given some very snappy lines, but they rise above them and give us performances that convince us of a couple driven to poverty and danger, for a cause. Bette Davis is wonderful (some thought her role marginalised and consequently…
Continue Reading →The Masterpieces of the Early Flemish
Jerome Bosch
(F. Hanfstaengl) (1905) One of those great little guides, blocked in gold, crammed with plates and a table of particulars – no commentary required. The early Flemish painters were conventional in subject, usually involving Christian imagery, but were radical in their eclectic rendering. Some examples will illuminate:
Continue Reading →Paths of Glory
General, have you ever played Nectaris?
(Stanley Kubrick) (1957) The wise war-monger, Clausewitz, decreed that the objective should be relinquished when its value was not equal to the cost of its gain. There are many instances in human conflict where this seemingly trite point has been blanketed and lost in the fog, notably the struggle on the western front, 1914-1918. In Kubrick’s grey and gritty story, Kirk Douglas is given the ridiculous task of taking the ‘Ant-Hill’, a fortified patch of raised ground held by an enemy armed to the teeth. With the inevitable failure of this mission, the superior officer in charge needs a patsy, so three…
Continue Reading →Treasure Ships
4 frigates capturing Spanish Treasure Ships (Francis Sartorius, 1804) Not in this collection
(Art in the Age of Spices, Art Gallery of SA July 2015) P, liking ‘boaty’ paintings, was prompted to see this exhibition collecting some of the good things to come of the spice age and the tender mercies of the Dutch East Indies Company. Our favourite pieces: the sumptuous Scholar in his Studio c 1655 by Abraham Van Den Hecken;a glowing St Cecilia:an allegory of music, c. 1650 by Francesco Fieravino, some 15th C ‘pop-up’ books showing the world as known before they closed the circle on Terra Australis, a reliquary from Goa containing a thorn from the Crown of…
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