Thursday, February 5, 2015

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Tonight's picture was taken in March of 2003. This is another favorite photo of mine! What I love about it is the simple fact that neither Peter nor Mattie were paying attention to me. They just seem to be enjoying the moment at the Huntington Museum and Gardens in Pasadena, CA. Mattie was intrigued by the bamboo and Peter was just enjoying his surroundings and the moment. It was a beautiful moment in time between a father and a son. They weren't doing anything that was orchestrated! Nothing had to be said, and yet nothing really had to be said. To me so much can be deduced by the comfort in their body language between them. They were used to spending time together. 

Quote of the day: When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it. ~ Henry Ford

Today we went to visit the Skirball Cultural Center (one of the world's most dynamic Jewish cultural institutions, and among the leading cultural venues in Los Angeles) and saw an exhibit entitled, "Light & Noir." The birth of Hollywood is a Jewish and an American story alike. It is a story of immigration and innovation, beginning with the handful of visionary émigrés who founded the American film industry in the early twentieth century. Less widely known are the stories of the German-speaking actors, directors, writers, and composers—many of them Jewish—who fled Nazi persecution in Europe and went on to shape Hollywood’s “Golden Age.” The exhibition Light & Noir: Exiles and Émigrés in Hollywood, 1933–1950 pays tribute to their lives and work, revealing the profound ways that the émigré experience left a mark on American movie-making.

Among the many émigrés highlighted were luminary directors Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Fred Zinnemann; Oscar-winning composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Franz Waxman; and acclaimed writers Salka Viertel and Lion Feuchtwanger. Through a never-before-assembled selection of film footage, drawings, props, costumes, posters, photographs, and memorabilia, Light & Noir examine different genres in which the émigrés were especially productive: the exile film, the anti-Nazi film, film noir, and comedy. These include such classics as Ninotchka (1939), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Casablanca (1942). On view were costumes worn by Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Marlene Dietrich, and Joan Crawford, as well as one of Billy Wilder’s Academy Awards, Ernst Lubitsch’s twenty-five year anniversary album, the Max Factor Scroll of Fame, and furniture from the set of Rick’s Café in Casablanca.

Divided into eight sections, the exhibition's 370 items include footage, drawings, props, costumes, posters, photographs and memorabilia that illustrate how these emigres changed Hollywood by bringing their artistic sensibilities to such genres as comedy, the exile film, the anti-Nazi film and especially film noir, which came into being in the 1940s. "You see the German Expressionist influence in film noirs through the stark angles, the lighting methods," curator Doris Berger said. "There are so many parallels to what they did before, except for the stories are very American and, of course, the surroundings are Los Angeles or New York."

The exhibit was comprised of many little rooms, filled with all sorts of media. Including film, as you can see here! An example of the "exile film" style that the emigres applied their artistic talents to would be Casablanca. Doris Berger (the curator) said, the exhibition, casts "Casablanca" in a different light. The 1942 World War II romantic drama about refugees in Morocco attempting to get exit visas is the ultimate exile film. The cast features emigre actors including Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt and Helmut Dantine. The film's Hungarian-born director, Oscar winner Michael Curtiz, came to Hollywood in the 1920s. "It would look and sound so different if not for all the exiles and emigres that were cast in the film and the crew," Berger said. The Skirball exhibition has items from "Casablanca," including costumes worn by Ingrid Bergman and Henreid, film clips, props from Rick's cafe, lobby cards and reviews that were published when the film was released.

Light & Noir" explores how three key figures — Ernest Lubitsch (a director), Carl Laemmle (Universal Studios owner) and talent agent Paul Kohner — helped Jewish colleagues, family and friends out of Germany.  

Laemmle, who died in 1939, wanted to save his hometown of Laupheim, said one of his descendants, Rosemary Hilb. He wrote affidavits for "pretty much anybody who asked him," Hilb said. He put up money to assure the U.S. government that these people wouldn't be a burden. Paul Kohner's office on Sunset Boulevard was the home base for the European Film Fund, an organization founded in 1938 to support arriving exiles and emigres. "He would go to the studio heads and get them to commit to hire mostly writers and directors, so they would have guarantee of employment," said Kohner's son, Pancho Kohner. "Eventually there were 1,500 German Jewish refugees working for the American studios."