Calendar: September 12

A Year: Day to Day Men: 12th of September

The Garden Wall

September 12, 1898 marks the birthdate of the social realist artist Ben Shahn.

Ben Shahn began his path to becoming an artist when his family left Lithuania and moved to Brooklyn, New York. He was trained in his early years as a lithographer and graphic designer; his experience in these fields would be apparent in his future works, combining text with images. Although Shahn attended New York University as a biology student in 1919, he left to pursue art at City College in 1921 and later at the National Academy of Design.

Ben Shahn’s twenty-three gouache paintings of the trials of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti communicated the political concerns of his time. Shahn followed the trial closely and believed, like many people worldwide, that the two men were not given a fair trial. Shahn participated in protests and made his gouache paintings in 1931 and 1932. Many were based on photographs appearing in the newspapers. “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti” was exhibited in 1932 and received acclaim for both the public and the critics.

Ben Shahn’s work came to the attention of Diego Rivera. In May and June of 1933, Shahn served as an assistant to Rivera while Rivera executed his New York Rockefeller Center mural. During the Depression years, Shahn worked for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration, photographing the American south; his social documentary style emphasized the people’s living and working conditions. Shahn also painted many fresco murals for schools, post offices, and government buildings; the art he made affirmed his social justice ideals and the legacy of the Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Shahn mixed different genres of art; however, his body of work is distinctive for its lack of traditional portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. He used both expressive and precise visual languages, which he united through the consistency of using a strong line in his work. Shahn’s background in lithography contributed to his devotion to detail; his work is also noted for his use of unique symbolism, often compared to the imagery in Paul Klee’s drawings.

Ben Shahn’s social-realist vision informed his approach to art; his examination of the status quo inspired his creative process. Although Shahn often explored contested themes of modern urban life, organized labor, immigration and injustice, he did so while maintaining a compassionate tone. Shahn identified himself as a communicative artist, challenging the esoteric pretensions of art, which he believed disconnect the artists and their work from the public.

Calendar: September 11

A Year: Day to Day Men: 11th of September

Packing Heat

September 11, 1972 marks the passing of Polish-American animator and film producer Max Fleischer.

By 1914 the first commercially produced animated cartoons started to appear in movie theaters. Max Fleischer devised an improvement in animation through a combined projector and easel for tracing images from live action film. This device, known as the Rotoscope, enabled Fleischer to produce the first realistic animation since the initial works of Winsor McCay. The patent to Fleischer and his two brothers was granted in 1917.

Max Fleischer started working with The Bray Studios, which had a contract with Paramount Pictures, after World War I. His initial series, the “Out of the Inkwell” films featuring “The Clown” character, was first produced at The Bray Studios. The films featured the novelty of combining live action and animation and served as semi-documentaries with the appearance of Max Fleischer as the artist who dipped his pen into the ink bottle to produce the clown figure on his drawing board. While the technique of combining animation with live action was already established by others at The Bray Studio, it was Fleischer’s clever use of the technique combined with Fleischer’s realistic animation that made his series unique.

It was during this time that Max Fleischer developed the Rotograph, a means of photographing live action film footage with animation cels for a composited image. This was an improvement over the method used by Bray Studios where a series of 8″ x 10″ stills were made from motion picture film and used as backgrounds behind animation cels. The Rotograph technique went into more general use known as “Aerial Image Photography” and was a main staple in animation and optical effects companies for making titles and various forms of matte composites.

In 1924, Fleischer partnered with Edwin Miles Fadiman, Hugo Riesenfeld and Lee DeForest to form Red Seal Pictures Corporation, which owned 36 theaters on the East Coast, extending as far west as Cleveland, Ohio. During this period, Fleischer invented the “Follow the Bouncing Ball” technique in his “Ko-Ko Car Tune” series of animated sing-along shorts. The series lasted until early 1927, becoming very popular with theater goers.

Max Fleischer’s most famous character was Betty Boop, born out of a cameo caricature in the early animated films. The “Betty Boop” series began in 1932, and became a huge success for him. However, Fleischer’s greatest business decision came with his licensing of the comic strip character Popeye the Sailor, who was introduced to audiences in the 1933 Betty Boop cartoon, “Popeye the Sailor”. Popeye became a box office hit and was one of the most successful screen adaptations of a comic strip in cinema history. Much of this success was due the perfect match of the Fleischer Studio style combined with its unique use of music. By the late 1930s a survey indicated that Popeye had eclipsed Mickey Mouse in popularity, challenging Disney’s presence in the market.

Calendar: September 10

A Year: Day to Day Men: 10th of September

Lost in Thought

September 10, 1914 was the birthdate of American film director Robert Wise.

Robert Wise initially sought a career in journalism and attended Franklin College, a small liberal arts college in Indiana, on a scholarship. In 1933 due to his family’s poor financial situation, he moved to Hollywood where his younger brother had gone several years earlier. His brother David found him a job at RKO Studios where he eventually became an editor.

Wise began his career at RKO as a sound and music editor. As he gained experience, he became more interested in editing film content, rather than sound, and started working for RKO film editor William Hamilton. Wise assisted Hamilton on Alfred Santell’s “Winterset” and later on the 1937 “Stage Door” and the 1939 “The Story of Vernon and Irene Castel”. Wise received his first screen credit for a feature film, shared with Hamilton, for editing on “Fifth Avenue Girl” released in 1939.

At RKO Robert Wise worked with Orson Welles on “Citizen Kane” and was nominated for the 1942 Academy Award for Film Editing. Orson Welles had used a deep-focus technique on his film, in which heavy lights are employed to achieve sharp focus for both foreground and background in the frame. Wise later use this technique in films he directed. Wise also worked as editor on Welles’ next film “The Magnificent Ambersons”, and shot additional scenes for the film.

At RKO, Wise got his first credited directing job in 1944 while working for Hollywood horror film producer Val Lewton. He replaced the original director on the horror film “The Curse of the Cat People”, when it fell behind schedule. The film was a well received horror film which made a departure from the genre at that time. Wise used, as in many of his future films, a vulnerable child or childlike character to challenge a dark, adult world. He began a collaboration with Lewton that led to the production of the 1945 horror film “The Body Snatcher” starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

In the 1950s Robert Wise proved adept in several genres, including melodrama in “So Big”; westerns in “Tribute to a Bad Man” starring James Cagney; epics in “Helen of Troy”; and science fiction in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” which became one of the most enduring sci-fi films ever made, and among the first produced by a major studio.

Robert Wise has been viewed as a craftsman, inclined to let the story concept set the style of the film. He meticulously prepared his films, putting an effort into the research and detail of his projects. While doing research, he would often scout background shot locations for his second-unit crews. Directing more than forty films in his career, Robert Wise won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture for both the 1961 “West Side Story” and the 1965 “The Sound of Music”. He also directed and produced “The Sand Pebbles” which was nominated for 1967 Best Picture.

Calendar: September 9

A Year: Day to Day Men: 9th of September

Summer Leisure

September 9, 1924 marks the day of the Battle of Hanapepe in Hawaii.

Sugarcane was introduced to Hawaii by its first inhabitants and was observed by British sailors upon arrival in 1841. Sugar quickly turned into a big business and generated rapid population growth in the islands with 337,000 people immigrating over the span of a century. By the 1840s, sugarcane plantations had a foothold in Hawaiian agriculture and market demand had increased.

By the 1920s sugarcane plantation owners had become disillusioned with both Japanese and Filipino workers and tried to get the U.S. Congress to relax restrictions of the Chinese Exclusion Act, hoping to bring in new Chinese workers. However, organized labor on the U.S. mainland supported the Exclusion act; so for a while militant unionism on the Hawaiian plantations was a not an issue. To oppose organized labor, the Hawaiian Territorial Legislature passed the 1919 Criminal Syndicalism Law, the Anarchistic Publication Law of 1921 and the 1923 Anti-Picketing Law.

These laws with penalties up to ten years in prison, increased the discontent of workers. The Filipinos, the dominant work force, had deep-seated grievances, being treated the most poorly. Planters claimed labor shortages but were actively seeking workers from the Philippines, only hiring illiterate workers and turning back any arrivals who could read or write, as many as one in six.

By 1922 Filipino labor activist Pablo Manlapit had organize a 13,000 member Filipino Higher Wage Movement. In 1924 it called for a strike on the island of Kaua’i demanding two dollars a day in wages and a reduction of the workday to eight hours. As previously done, the plantation owners used armed forces, the National Guard and strike-breakers to put down the strike. Workers were turned out of their homes; propaganda whipped up racism; and infiltration of the strikers’ ranks were done.

On September 9, 1924, outraged strikers seized two strike-breakers at Hanapepe and prevented them from working. The police, armed with clubs and guns, came to the union headquarters to rescue them. The Filipino strikers armed with homemade weapons and knives resisted the police. By the end of the Battle of Hanapepe, local police had shot dead nine strikers and fatally wounded seven; strikers had shot and stabbed three sheriffs to death and fatally wounded one. A total of twenty people had died in the battle.

After the battle, police rounded up all male protesters they could find; a total of 101 Filipino men were arrested. Seventy-six were brought to trial with sixty of these receiving four-year jail sentences. Pablo Manlapit was charged with subornation of perjury and was sentenced to two to ten years in prison. After a short term, he was paroled on condition that he leave Hawaii. After the 1924 strike, the labor movement in Hawaii dwindled but did not die. Manlapit returned in 1932 and started a new labor organization, including all ethnic groups. However, because of the Great Depression years, not much was accomplished besides small nuisance strikes in 1933.

Calendar: September 8

A Year: Day to Day Men: 8th of September

Journey to the Emerald City

September 8, 1504 was the unveiling date of sculptor Michelangelo’s “David”.

Prior to Michelangelo’s involvement, the Overseers of the Office of Works of Florence Cathedral, had plans to commission a series of twelve large Old Testament sculptures for the buttresses of the cathedral. Two statues were completed: the figure of Joseph in terracotta by sculptor Donatello in 1410 and the figure of Hercules, also in terracotta, by Agostino di Duccio in 1483.

Eager to continue their project, in 1464, the Operai contracted Agostino to create a sculpture of David. A block of marble was provided from a quarry in Carrara, a town in the Apuan Alps in northern Tuscany. Agostino di Duccio only got as far as beginning to shape the legs, feet, torso, and roughing out some drapery. His association with the project ceased, for reasons unknown, with the death of fellow sculptor Donatello in 1466.

The block of marble remained neglected for 26 years, all the while exposed to the elements in the yard of the cathedral workshop. This was of great concern to the authorities, as such a large piece of marble not only was costly but represented a large amount of labour and difficulty in its transportation to Florence. The Operai ordered the block of stone raised vertical so that a master experienced in this kind of work might examine it and express an opinion.

Though Leonardo da Vinci and others were consulted, it was Michelangelo, only 26 years old, who convinced the Operai that he deserved the commission. On August 16, 1501, Michelangelo was given the official contract to undertake this challenging task. He began carving the statue early in the morning on the 13th of September, a month after he was awarded the contract. Michaelangelo would work on the massive statue for more than two years.

On January 25, 1504, when the sculpture was nearing completion, Florentine authorities had to acknowledge there would be little possibility of raising the more than six-ton statue to the roof of the cathedral as previously conceived. They convened a committee of 30 Florentine citizens that comprised many artists to decide on an appropriate site for “David”. In June of 1504, “David” was installed next to the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio, replacing Donatello’s bronze “Judith and Holofernes”.

Michelangelo kept working on the finer finishing throughout the summer of 1504. The sling and tree-stump support were gilded, and the figure was given a gilded victory-garland. Sadly, all gilded surfaces have now been lost due to the long period of exposure to weathering agents. The unveiling of the finished work occurred on September 8th of that year. It became the symbol of liberty and freedom of the Republican ideals, showing Florence’s readiness to defend itself. In order to protect it from damage and further weathering, “David” was moved in 1873 to the Galleria del’ Accademia.

Calendar: September 7

A Year: Day to Day Men: 7th of September

Refrigerator Door Open

September 7, 1937 was the birthdate of American actor John Phillip Law.

John Phillip Law moved to New York after graduating from the University of Hawaii and studied with Elia Kazan’s Lincoln Center Repertory Theater. While there he had a small role in the 1962 comedy “Come on Strong”. Looking for another way to enter the movie business, Law moved to Italy, where he acted in several films. Director Norman Jewison, seeing one of these films, cast Law in the role of a young Soviet sailor in the 1966 comedy film “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming”.

Law next costarred with Michael Caine and Jane Fonda in the 1967 American drama “Hurry Sundown” produced and directed by Otto Preminger. Law then returned to Europe playing the lead in two films: “Spaghetti Western, Death Rides a Horse” and “Danger: Diebolik”, a crime action film based on the Italian comic book series “Diabolik”. Law’s best known role was his 1968 appearance in Roger Vadim’s comic book-based science fiction movie “Barbarella” , cast in the now famous role of Pygar, the blind angel who had lost the will to fly.

John Phillip Law costarred with Rod Steiger in the 1968 drama film “The Sergeant” directed by John Flynn. Law played Private First Class Swanson, the object of Steiger’s character’s, Sergeant Callan, secret sexual attraction. This film differs from the original book, becoming the Sargeant’s self-discovery instead of Private Swanson as was written. “The Sergeant” ends in defeat and suicide that once were so obligatory in popular, homosexual literature and films like “The Children’s Hour” and “The City and the Pillar”.

In 1971, Law co-starred in Roger Corman’s film “Richthofen and Brown, playing Manfred von Richthofen opposite actor Don Stoud’s Roy Brown. He was trained by Canadian pilot Lynn Garrison in the basics of flying to land and take off, making some of the movie footage more realistic. From the 1970s until the fall of 2003, the mult-lingual Law traveled and worked abroad appearing in films and television series.

John Phillip Law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December of 2007. He died five months later at his home in Los Angeles. Law’s body was cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea.

Some of John Phillip Law’s movies have become cult classics, including “The Love Machine”, “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad” and the World War ii drama “Attack Force Z”. Mystery Science Theater included in its series two of Law’s films: “Space Mutiny” and “Danger” Diabolik”.

Calendar: September 6

A Year: Day to Day Men: 6th of September

Crates of Lathe

September 6, 1642 was the day that theater experienced both a major closing and a major reopening 277 years apart.

The major closing was the banning of all theater at the start of the English Civil War. On September 6, 1642, by an act of Parliament, all theaters in England were closed. This meant specifically that the great playhouses and theatrical companies of London, many from the Elizabethan age, ceased operations for good. The reason given for the ordinance was that attending theater was “unseemly” during such turbulent times.

The real reason was that the playhouses had become meeting places for the Royalist opposition, a group against the Parliament. Their Puritan rivals, who controlled Parliament, understood this and closed the theaters. Within a few years most of the grand old structures, now abandoned, had decayed beyond use or were dismantled altogether, leaving no visible trace of the playhouses of Shakespeare’s day.

Theatre would remain illegal until the end of the Interregnum in 1660, when the Puritans lost power and the monarchy was restored. Almost immediately, playhouses reopened and theatrical entertainments resumed. Theatre returned full force with the Restoration of the English monarchy under Charles II, leading to a revival of English drama and performance that paved the way for the great age of acting and wit during the eighteenth century.

it was also on this day, September 6th, that theaters reopened. On September 6, 1919, the great Equity Strike in New York and Chicago by theater actors came to an end. Broadway producers had finally reached an agreement with the upstart actors’ union, the Actors’ Equity Association. The only exception was Broadway’s biggest star and largest employer George M, Cohen who was granted a singular exception to continue as before without unionization.

The strike lasted a month and had closed nearly 40 major productions across the city, with revenue loses in excess of three million dollars. The two sides reached a five-year deal that finally recognized Equity as the professional actors’ union. Over the next few years working conditions improved and Broadway flourished for nine years until the 1928 season. The advent of “talkies” caused a decline in the theater with a noticeable lack of attendance and thus profits. The stock market crash of 1929 reset the commercial theatre’s entire economic picture for the next several decades.

Calendar: September 5

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of September

Mystical Smoker

September 5, 1916 marks the film release of D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance”.

“Intolerance” is an epic silent film directed by D.W. Griffith and regarded as one of the great masterpieces of the silent era of film. The three and a half hour epic has four parallel story lines: a Modern melodrama of crime and redemption, a Judean story of Jesus’ mission and death, a French story of the 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and the story of the fall of the Babylonian Empire. In the original print, each story had its own distinctive color tint.

Breaks between the differing time periods are marked by the symbolic image of a mother rocking a cradle, representing the passing of generations. The film simultaneously cross-cuts back and forth and interweaves the segments over great gaps of space and time, with over 50 transitions between the segments. Director Griffith wanted his characters to be emblematic of human types; thus, in the film many of the characters do not have names. The central modern female character is called “The Dear One”, her young husband “The Boy”, and the leader of the local Mafia is “The Musketeer of the Slums”.

“Intolerance” was a colossal undertaking featuring monumental sets, lavish period costumes, and more than 3,000 extras. The lot on Sunset Boulevard featured a Babylon set with 300 feet walls as well as streets of Judea and medieval France. The extras were reported to have been paid a combined total of $12,000 a day. The cost of producing the film was almost $386,000, which was financed mostly by Griffith himself, contributing to Griffith’s financial ruin for the rest of his life.

“Intolerance” had enthusiastic reception from the film critics at its premiere. Even though the film was the most expensive American film made up to that point and it did far less business than Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”, it earned approximately $1 million for its backers, a respectable performance and enough to recoup its budget. In 1989, “Intolerance” was one of the first films to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

In 1989 “Intolerance” was given a formal restoration by film preservationists Kevin Brownlow and David Gill. This version, running 177 minutes, was prepared by Thames Television from original 35 millimeter material, and its tones and tints were restored per Griffith’s original intent. It also has a digitally recorded orchestral score by Carl Davis. This version is part of the Rohauer Collection who worked in association with Thames on the restoration. It was given a further digital restoration by Cohen Media Group and was reissued to select theaters, as well as on DVD and Blu-ray, in 2013. This print contains footage not found on other versions.

Calendar: September 4

A Year: Day to Day Men: 4th of September

Tactile Sensations

September 4, 1886 marks the surrender of Apache Chief Geronimo, ending the last major Indian- United States government war.

Chief Goyaałé (Geronimo) was a prominent leader and medicine man from the Bedonkohe band of the Apache tribe. From 1850 to 1886 Geronimo joined with members of three other Chiricahua Apache bands, the Tchihende, the Tsokanende and the Nednhi, to carry out numerous raids as well as resistance to US and Mexican military campaigns in the northern Mexico states of Chihuahua and Sonora, and in the southwestern American territories of New Mexico and Arizona. Geronimo’s raids and related combat actions started with American settlement in Apache lands following the end of the war with Mexico in 1848.

During Geronimo’s final period of conflict from 1876 to 1886 he “surrendered” three times and accepted life on the Apache reservations in Arizona. Reservation life was confining to the free-moving Apache people, and they resented restrictions on their customary way of life. In 1886, after an intense pursuit in Northern Mexico by U.S. forces that followed Geronimo’s third 1885 reservation “breakout”, Geronimo surrendered for the last time on September 4th in 1886 to Lt. Charles Bare Gatewood, an Apache-speaking West Point graduate who had earned Geronimo’s respect a few years before.

Geronimo was later transferred to General Nelson Miles at Skeleton Canyon, just north of the Mexican/American boundary. Miles treated Geronimo as a prisoner of war and acted promptly to remove Geronimo first to Fort Bowie, then to the railroad at Bowie Station, Arizona where he and 27 other Apaches were sent off to join the rest of the Chiricahua tribe which had been previously exiled to Florida.

In his old age, Geronimo became a celebrity. He appeared at fairs, including the 1904 Saint Louis World’s Fair, where he reportedly rode a ferris wheel and sold souvenirs and photographs of himself. In President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 Inaugural Parade Geronimo rode horseback down Pennsylvania Avenue with five real Indian chiefs, who wore full headgear and painted faces. Held captive far longer than his surrender agreement called for, the Apache warrior made his case directly to the president requesting that the Chiricahuas at Fort Sill be relieved of their status as prisoners of war, and allowed to return to their homeland in Arizona. President Roosevelt refused, referring to the continuing animosity in Arizona for the deaths of civilians associated with Geronimo’s raids

Geronimo died at the Fort Sill hospital in 1909 of pneumonia; he was still a prisoner of war. On his deathbed, he confessed to his nephew that he regretted his decision to surrender. His last words were reported to be said to his nephew, “I should have never surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive.” Geronimo is buried at Fort Sill in the Apache Indian Prisoner of War Cemetery. surrounded by the graves of relatives and other Apache prisoners of war.

Calendar: September 3

A Year: Day to Day Men: 3rd of September

Feet Off the Ground

September 3, 301 is the official founding date of the Republic of San Marino.

The Republic of San Marino is an enclave micro-state surrounded by Italy, situated on the northeastern side of Italy in the Apennine Mountains. Its size is just over 61 square kilometers or 24 square miles. San Marino has the smallest population, 33, 562 inhabitants, of all the Council of Europe’s forty-seven member states.

Saint Marius, a stonemason by trade who came from modern-day Croatia, fled persecution for his Christian beliefs during the Diocletianic Persecution, the last and most severe of the persecutions by the Roman Empire. He became a deacon and was ordained by Gaudentius, the Bishop of Rimini, a diocese in Italy. Saint Marius fled to Monte Titano and built a chapel and monastery there; its founding date was September 3rd in the year 301. After Marius’ canonization as a saint, the State of Marino grew from that monastery.

San Marino is governed by its constitution, the Leges Statutae Republicae Sanct Marini, a series of six books written in Latin in the late 16th century. These books dictate the country’s political system, among other matters. The country is considered to have the earliest written governing documents, still in effect. San Marino’s independence was recognized in 1631 by the Papacy.

Although traces of human presence from both prehistoric and Roman times exist in the territory, Mount Titano and its slopes are known to have been populated, with certainty, only after the arrival of St. Marinus and his followers. San Marino citizens, or Sammarinesi, make up more than four-fifths of the country’s population, with Italians composing most of the remainder. There is no official religion, although the majority are Roman Catholics, and the official language is Italian.

Because centuries-long quarrying has exhausted Mount Titano’s stone and ended the craft that depended upon it, the territory is now without mineral resources. All electrical power is transferred via electrical grid from Italy, San Marino’s main trading partner. The country’s principal resources are industry, tourism, commerce, agriculture, and crafts. Ceramic and wrought-iron articles, as well as modern and reproduction furniture, are among San Marino’s traditional craft products. Fine printing, particularly of collectible postage stamps, is a consistent source of revenues; and banking is a vital industry. San Marino adopted the euro as its national currency.

Calendar: September 2

A Year: Day to Day Men: 2nd of September

Watermelon

September 2, 1929 was the birthdate of American film director and editor Hal Ashby.

Hal Ashby’s career gained momentum when he served as the lead editor of the 1965 “The Loved One”, a black and white comedy film about a funeral business in Los Angeles, based on a satirical novel by Evelyn Waugh. He was nominated for the 1967 Academy Award for Film Editing for his work on “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming”, a Carl Reiner / Alan Arkin comedy spoof depicting the chaos following the grounding of a Soviet submarine off a small New England island during the Cold War.

Hal Ashby’s big break in his career was his winning the Academy Award for Best Editing for the Norman Jewison mystery drama film “In the Heat of the Night” starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. This tough, edgy major Hollywood film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning five, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Editing. At the urging of Norman Jewison, Ashby directed his first film, “The Landlord” in 1970. The film was an comedy drama starring Beau Bridges as a privileged and ignorant landlord of an inner-city tenement.

Hal Ashby directed his next film “Harold and Maude” in 1971, followed by “The Last Detail”, a comedy drama starring Jack Nicholson and Otis Young, assigned to the Navy Shore Patrol. escorting Randy Quaid to the Naval prison. Ashby directed the 1979 social satire cult film “Being There”, starring Peter Sellers. However, his greatest commercial success in films was the 1975 satire “Shampoo”, made on a budget of four million dollars and grossing worldwide over sixty million dollars, making it the fourth most successful film of 1975.

Because of his critical success and dependable profitability, Ashby was able to form a production company, Northstar, under the auspices of Lorimar Productions. After directing “Being There”, Ashby became more reclusive, often retreating to his home in Malibu Colony, a gated enclave in the city. Later, it was widely rumored in a whisper campaign that Ashby, a habitual marijuana smoker since the 1950s, had become dependent upon cocaine. As a consequence of these rumors, he slowly became unemployable.

Hal Ashby worked on several more productions; but the strained relationship between him and the Lorimar company increased. During this period, Lorimar executives grew less tolerant of his increasingly perfectionist production and editing techniques; a montage in the film “Lookin’ to Get Out” took six months to perfect but ultimately proved to be logistically unusable. After several commercial failures of his next films, Ashby’s post-production process was considered to be such a liability that he was fired by the production company.

Longtime friend Warren Beatty advised Hal Ashby to seek medical care after he complained of various ailments, including undiagnosed phlebitis; he was soon diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that rapidly spread to his lungs, colon, and liver. Hal Ashby died on December 27, 1988 at his home in Malibu, California.

Calendar: September 1

A Year: Day to Day Men: 1st of September

Vacation Spot

September 1, 1954 marks the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 ‘Rear Window’ is a film full of symbolism, narratives, voyeurism and characterization. Hitchcock, a strong filmmaker, used similiar themes and specific signature motifs, such as character parallels and heavy use of vertical lines, as well as a strong protagonist. Hitchcock made a career out of indulging our voyeuristic tendencies. “Rear Window” is perhaps his most skillful and gleefully self-aware production.

“Rear Window” focuses around the main protagonist Jefferies, a photographer who recently broke his leg and is restricted to a wheelchair. In the opening scene where the credits are shown, the forthcoming storyline is presented and Hitchcock has created an opportunity to set the tone of the film. He also creates a great ambience, as a bamboo curtain is raised and the courtyard is shown, around which the whole film revolves.

The audience is shown life through Jefferies’ eyes. His window looks out onto a courtyard and displays a number of different windows representative of different lives in America in the 1950s. Each window represents a different style of living; and snippets of these characters lives with their different backgrounds are presented to Jefferies’ viewing.

These characters of “Rear Window”, although living so close to each other, barely interact or ever meet. All the actions of these different people through the windows and their stories flow together seamlessly: the music proceeding each scene leads the viewer to what will happen next. The noises and sounds in the film are a narrative device: a radio blaring or playing music, an alarm clock ringing, which shift the attention of the viewer from one apartment to another. Shots of panning and zooming by the cameramen make it more realistic as Jefferies shifts his binoculars from each apartment scene to another.

“Rear Window”s audience is constantly shown natural framing, which is a well-known theme in Hitchcocks films and truly represents him as a master filmmaker. There are constantly shots which are framed by openings such as; window frames, door frames and hallways. The use of binoculars by Hitchcock is symbolic; they intensify what Jefferies is seeing and isolate him from the actions that he observes. The setting in the film is also symbolic; Jefferies’ apartment, the courtyard, and the small alleyway are the only areas he can see, ultimately confining and trapping him.

The whole film was shot inside a Hollywood studio: yet the sense of the city’s atmosphere, noisy and breathless with its humid air, still is conveyed strongly to the viewer. The everyday domestic dramas unfold and James Stewart is their captive audience. The intensity of Stewart’s helplessness is subtly shown in one small ominous film scene unfolding before his eyes: the tip of the wife-killer Lars Thorwald’s cigar glowing red in the darkness of his living room after the neighbors’ strangled dog is found in the garden.

Calendar: August 31

A Year: Day to Day Men: 31st of August

The Morning Pick-Up

August 31, 1963 marks the passing of French painter Georges Braque.

Georges Braque’s earliest works were impressionistic; however, he adopted a Fauvist style after seeing an exhibition by the “Fauves” group in 1905. The group which included Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, were using a palette of bold colors to represent their emotional responses to the subject of their paintings. Developing a friendship with Othon Friesz, Braque traveled with him in Europe gradually developing a more subdued palette for his work.

Braque had a successful first-time exhibition of his new work in May of 1907 at the Salon des Indépendants: six paintings were exhibited and sold. That same year, Braque’s style began a slow change to a more Cubist style influenced by an exhibition of the recently deceased Paul Cézanne. The year of 1907 was special to Braque: he was introduced to Pablo Picasso and first met notable French art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who became a supporter of Braque and Picasso and the Cubist movement in art.

Braque’s paintings of 1908–1912 reflected his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. He conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective, eventually rendering the shading of his subjects so that they looked both flat and three-dimensional by fragmenting the image. Beginning in 1909 Braque worked closely with Picasso, who had also been developing a proto-Cubist style. Together both artists produced paintings of monochromatic color and complex faceted forms, developing what is now known as Analytic Cubism.

Braque and Picasso’s collaboration continued and they worked closely together until the beginning of World War I in 1914, when Braque enlisted with the French Army. Braque received a severe head injury in May of 1915 in the battle at Carency, suffering temporary blindness. Braque recovered and resumed painting in late 1916. Working alone, he began to moderate the harsh abstraction of cubism. Braque developed a more personal style characterized by brilliant color, textured surfaces, and the reappearance of the human figure.

Georges Braque continued to work during the remainder of his life, producing a considerable number of paintings, graphics, and sculptures. In 1962 Braque worked with master printmaker Aldo Crommelynck to create his series of etchings and aquatints titled “L’Ordre des Oiseaux (The Order of Birds)”. He died on August 31st of 1963 in Paris. He is buried in the cemetery of the Church of Saint Valery in Varengeville-sur-Mer, Normandy, whose windows he had designed.

“By using a white paint applied to the canvas I make a napkin. But I am sure the white shape is something conceived before knowing what it was to become. This means that a certain transformation has taken place.. .In a painting, what counts is the unexpected.” – Georges Braque

Top Insert Image: Georges Braque, The Mouve Tablecloth, 1936, Oil on Canvas, 85 x 131 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Georges_Braque, “Maisons à l’Estaque”, 1908, Oil on Canvas, 73 x 59.5 cm, Kunst Murwum, Bern, Switzerland

Calendar: August 30

A Year: Day to Day Men: 30th of August

The One Budded Cross

August 30, 1797 was the birthdate of English author, Mary Shelley.

Writer Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30, 1797, in London, England. She was the daughter of philosopher and political writer William Godwin and famed feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. While Shelley didn’t have a formal education, she did make great use of her father’s extensive library. Shelley found a creative outlet in writing.

In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father’s political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, Mary and Shelley left for France and travelled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy’s child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley’s first wife, Harriet.

In 1816, Mary and Percy Shelley famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus”. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley.

In 1822, Percy Shelley drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio, in northern Tuscany, Italy. A year later, Mary Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, probably caused by the brain tumor that was to kill her at the age of 53 in February of 1851.

Until the 1970s, Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband’s works and for her 1818 anonymously published “Frankenstein” novel, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Mary Shelley’s achievements.

Studies of her lesser-known works support the growing view that Mary Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Mary Shelley’s works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practiced by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic-era ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.

Calendar: August 29

A Year: Day to Day Men: 29th of August

The Trenchcoat

August 29, 1900 was the birthdate of artist and architect Oscar Ernest Nitzchke.

Oscar Nitzchke entered the Ecole des Beauz-Arts in Geneva in 1917 and the Atelier Laloux-Lemaresquier in Paris in 1920. In the years 1921 and 1922 he studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and began working in the office of the Swiss-French architect and designer Le Corbusier. Nitzchke joined the Atelier du Palais de Bois in 1923 under Auguste Perret, the French architect who pioneered the use of reinforced concrete in architecture.

In 1936 Nitzchke made a set of presentation drawings for a building for a private client, Maison de la Publicite, that failed to reach completion. These drawings were later acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and displayed at the Pompidou Center in Paris.

In December of 1938, Oscar Nitzchke came to the United States to become Associate Professor at the School of Architecture at Yale University, and to work with the architecture firm of Harrison & Fouilhoux in New York as head of design research. While working with Harrison & Fouilhoux, Nitzchke took part in the design of the Alcoa Building in Pittsburgh and the Los Angeles Opera House projects. During the time he was with the firm, he also worked on the design for the Mellon National Bank and Trust Company in Pittsburgh, and the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.

Nitzchke worked with the firm Harrison & Abromovitz for fifteen years. He left to become the head of design for Jim Nash Associates in New York, a position he held from 1958 to 1961. Nitzchke retired in the early 1970s. In 1981 Nitzchke’s architecture designs were shown at the Paris Exposition at the Pompidou Center; in 1985 at the Institut Francais d’Architecture in Paris, and at New York’s Cooper Union in 1985.

Despite becoming deaf in 1951, Nitzchke continued to develop imaginative projects for competitions such as the San Salvador Cathedral in 1953-1954, with its soaring concrete shell vaults. In 1970, he retired to Paris, preparing drawings for exhibitions of his work, living with his family until his death in 1991.

Although he built little and seldom appears in standard histories of modern architecture, Oscar Nitzchke was much admired among avant-garde architects. During his fifty years in practice, he consistently produce innovative designs that remain surprisingly fresh. His later work articulated form and materials in their marked legibility of functions. An example of this were Nitzchke’s designs for prefabricated buildings with the use of external corrugated copper and steel cladding, which made no attempt to imitate traditional materials as earlier prefabricated buildings had.