5th April 2009 ; Robert Altman's The Player

The Player

A Film by Robert Altman

Country : USA

Year : 1992

Runtime : 124 mins

5th April 2009 ; 5.45 pm

Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

Call: 94430 39630

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

View trailer of The Player here

Griffin Mill, the back-stabbing Hollywood studio exec brought to definitive life by Tim Robbins in The Player, gets antsy with writers who can't describe a movie in twenty-five words or less. It would be hard to describe Griffin Mill's job in terms that would make sense to anyone who has had to work for a living. He's a vice president at a movie studio, which pays him enormous sums of money to listen to people describe movies to him. When he hears a pitch he likes, he passes it along. He doesn't have the authority to give a "go" signal himself, and yet for those who beseech him to approve their screenplays, he has a terrifying negative authority. He can turn them down. Griffin starts getting anonymous postcards from a writer who says he is going to kill him. Griffin's crime: He said he would call the writer back, and he never did. 

Robert Altman's "The Player," which tells Griffin's story with a cold sardonic glee, is a movie about today's Hollywood -- hilarious and heartless in about equal measure, and often at the same time. It is about an industry that is run like an exclusive rich boy's school, where all the kids are spoiled and most of them have ended up here because nobody else could stand them. Griffin is not capable of making a movie, but if a movie is going to be made, it has to get past him first. 

This is material Altman knows from the inside and the outside. "The Player" is a rare commodity. It's brilliant and a guilty pleasure. A subtle damning of things Hollywood, Robert Altman's seriocomedy slices its target with a thousand, imperceptible razor cuts. The bleeding comes almost subliminally, the pain disguised by the movie's soothing, L. A.-poolside manner.

Altman and screenwriter Michael Tolkin (adapting his novel of the same name) have brought "The Player" as up to date as last week's People magazine. In this satire-cum-star parade, no less than 65 celebrities appear as themselves -- and they're just the supporting cast. We're talking Cher, Nick Nolte, Anjelica Huston, John Cusack, Jeff Goldblum, Harry Belafonte, Andie MacDowell, Burt Reynolds, Lily Tomlin, Jack Lemmon . . .

There are several big others, but their appearances are part of the movie's endless bevy of surprises. Some are there for an instant. Others play larger parts. Everyone of them is making satirical light of themselves. This movie's the kamikaze version of "That's Entertainment."

Jean Lapine's camera gazes on the proceedings with the addled euphoria of someone who's been too long in the hot tub. This picturesque sterility is the movie's cutting edge -- an artistic, entertaining balm for the mediocrity it makes fun of. An ultimate irony presents itself: If this movie were pitched in the world it so handily satirizes, would it ever see the green light of production? Watch "The Player" and you'll get to find out.

(Source - Internet )

ROBERT ALTMAN

Robert Bernard Altman (20 February 1925 – 20 November 2006) was an American film director known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective.  

Click here to view  Robert Altman recieving honorary Oscar

Until 1956, Altman directed 60 to 65 industrial short films, earning $250 a month while simultaneously getting the necessary training and experience. The Delinquents became his first feature film. Altman wrote the script in one week and filmed it with a budget of $63,000 on location in Kansas City in two weeks.

Altman then struggled for several years after quarreling with Jack Warner, the head of Warner Brothers , and it was during this time that he first formed his "anti-Hollywood" opinions and entered a new stage of filmmaking. 

In 1969 Altman directed MASH and it was a huge success, both with critics and at the box office. It was given the Grand Prix for the Best Film at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. He followed it with other critical breakthroughs such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Thieves Like Us (1974) and Nashville (1975), which made the distinctive, experimental "Altman style" well known.

As a director, Altman favored stories showing the interrelationships between several characters; he stated that he was more interested in character motivation than in intricate plots. As such, he tended to sketch out only a basic plot for the film, referring to the screenplay as a "blueprint" for action, and allowed his actors to improvise dialogue. This is one of the reasons Altman was known as an "actor's director", a reputation that helped him work with large casts of well-known actors.

Altman made films that no other filmmaker and/or studio would. In 1975, Altman made Nashville, for which he was, awarded Best Director by the Cannes Film Festival, BAFTA, and the New York Film Critics Circle. After the success of his next film  The Player, Altman directed 1993's Short Cuts, an ambitious adaptation of several short stories by Raymond Carver, and won  the Golden Lion at the 1993 Venice International Film Festival and earned another Oscar nomination for Best Director. In 1998, Altman made The Gingerbread Man, and in 1999 Cookie's Fortune, another critical success.In 2001, Altman's film Gosford Park gained a spot on many critics' lists of the ten best films of that year. 

Altman's vision of society and film-making has been influenced by his leftist politics.Altman was one of several famous people (along with individuals as Noam Chomsky and Susan Sarandon) who signed the Not In My Name declaration opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.Altman died on November 20, 2006 at age 81.

22nd March 2009 ; Documentaries on Art

Documentaries on Art

22nd March 2009 ; 5.45 pm

Ashwin Hospital auditorium

Call :9443039630

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

What was it like to be an artist in centuries past? What makes a painting or an artist 'great'? Tim Marlow presents this fascinating introduction to the works of the Old Masters as displayed in museums, churches, and palaces throughout Europe. Tim Marlow takes a fresh look at the most important artworks of some of the greatest artists in history. Both intelligent and informative, the series aims to provide an uncomplicated and accessible analysis of the works and artists.

This is Konangal’s second segment on documentaries on art. Lat month Simon Schama took us through a breathtaking tour of the works of post renaissance masters Bernini and Caravaggio. We began that screening with Tim Marlow’s presentation of the pre renaissance master Giotto.

This week we will be screening documentaries about the life and works of two masters  Bruegel of Netherlands and Michelangelo of Italy. 

Michelangelo (1475-1564)

1

An introduction to Michelangelo

Presented by Tim Marlow 

Runtime :24 min

Works featured in this program include David (1501-04, Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence), Frescoes, Sistine Chapel, (1508-12, Vatican, Rome), Bacchus (1496-97, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence), Pieta (1499, St. Peter's, Vatican, Rome), Dying and Rebellious Slaves (1513-16, Louvre, Paris) and The Last Judgement, (1534-41, Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome ).

2

Michelangelo Drawings -Closer to the Master

Runtime: 40 min

A joint BBC/British Museum production about the drawings of Michelangelo and the way that they illuminate his life, his artistic development, his religion and his inner torments. The film is presented Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, and is filmed on location in Florence and in the Sistine Chapel. 

Michelangelo's drawings are some of the greatest of all time. Fragile survivals from over 500 years ago, they can be studied and admired as things of great technical skill and enormous beauty, but they show us something else as well: they show us Michelangelo thinking. Michelangelo would have felt exposed seeing us look at his drawings. And that's what makes them exciting: they give us a thrilling insight into how this genius sculptor, architect and painter worked: they bring us closer to the master. From pen studies made when he was in his early twenties to the visionary crucifixion scenes carried out six decades later, shortly before his death, this film illuminates the high points of Michelangelo's career. 

3

The Private Life of a Masterpiece- Michelangelo’s David

Runtime 48 Min

It is one of art's most noted pieces, but it took failures by two sculptors before Michelangelo Buonarroti completed the work in the early 16th century. This documentary reveals the techniques Michelangelo used to re-create the human body so accurately on such a vast scale, and how contrasting interpretations view it as a symbol of either military might or of freedom.

Bruegel 

c. 1525 – September 9, 1569

An introduction to Bruegel 

Presented by Tim Marlow 

Runtime :24 min

Pieter Bruegel  (c. 1525 – September 9, 1569) was a Netherlandish Renaissance painter and printmaker known for his landscapes and peasant scenes. 

Bruegel specialized in landscapes populated by peasants. He is often credited as being the first Western painter to paint landscapes for their own sake, rather than as a backdrop for history painting. Attention to the life and manners of peasants was rare in the arts in Brueghel's time. His earthy, unsentimental but vivid depiction of the rituals of village life—including agriculture, hunts, meals, festivals, dances, and games—are unique windows on a vanished folk culture and a prime source of iconographic evidence about both physical and social aspects of 16th century life.

15th March 2009 ; Wajda's DANTON

DANTON

A film by Andrzej  Wajda

Country : France

French with English sub titles

Runtime : 136 min

15th March 2009  ; 5.45 pm

Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

Call 94430 39630

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

The two poles of the French Revolution were the passionate idealism of the republic and the utter finality of the guillotine. Andrzej  Wajda opens with the prescient image of Danton, eyeing up the execution device and then throws us into the key events with which he concluded his life. George Jacques Danton was the French revolutionary leader who eventually found himself at odds with one time ally Maximilien Robespierre. 

It’s this relationship which Wajda focuses on most fully, thereby pitching Danton as a kind of battle between the two. On one side we have Robespierre (here played by Polish actor Wojciech Pszoniak), the man of the Revolution; on the other Danton, the man of the people. And so the film bounces back and forth between them as their rivalry is divulged and their hatred for/fear of each other is revealed. Danton is essentially a political thriller made up, as it is, from back room whispers and clandestine meetings, each of which tightens the screws a little further as Danton progresses ever closer to his death. Indeed, as we move from his return to his execution, via his imprisonment and trial, the intensity grows just as it would in any given example of the genre.

Danton is played by Gerard Depardieu, that large, proletarian French actor who is so useful in roles where high-flown emotions need some sort of grounding. Robespierre is played by a Polish actor, Wojciech Pszoniak, as a self-obsessed hypochondriac whose political strategy seems largely determined by his need to make his headaches go away. 

Wajda's camera moves through 18th century Paris with complete familiarity. He fills the city with the poor, with street people, with crooks and prostitutes and inflamed rabble, and there is always the sense of those crowds pressing outside as the senate meets. And then he shows Danton and Robespierre, each perfectly aware of the other's motives and of the possibility of the guillotine, conducting an intellectual duel. The scene of the great confrontation between the two of them is so well acted and directed that, for the first time in any movie about the French Revolution, one is  listening to people and not speeches.

(Source : Internet)

Andrzej Wajda

Andrzej Wajda (born March 6, 1926 in Suwałki) is a Polish film director. Laureate of an honorary Oscar, he is one of the most prominent members of the Polish Film School.

A major figure of world and Eastern European cinema after World War II, Wajda has made his reputation as a sensitive and uncompromising chronicler of his country's political and social evolution. The son of a Polish cavalry officer who was killed by the Soviets in 1940, Wajda fought in the Home Army against the Germans when he was still a teenager. After the war, he studied to be a painter at Kraków's Academy of Fine Arts before entering the Łódź Film School.

On the heels of his apprenticeship to director Aleksander Ford, Wajda was given the opportunity to direct his own film. With A Generation (1955), the first-time director poured out his disillusionment over jingoism, using as his alter ego a young, James Dean-style antihero played by Zbigniew Cybulski.Wajda went on to make two more increasingly accomplished films, which further developed the antiwar theme of A Generation: Kanal (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), also starring Cybulski.

Wajda was more interested in works of allegory and symbolism, and certain symbols (such as setting fire to a glass of liquor, representing the flame of youthful idealism that was extinguished by the war) recur often in his films Wajda's later devotion to Poland's burgeoning Solidarity movement was manifested in Man of Marble (1976) and Man of Iron (1981), with Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa appearing as himself in the latter film. The director's involvement in this movement would prompt the Polish government to force Wajda's production company out of business. In 1983 he directed Danton , a film set in 1794 (Year Two) dealing with the Post-Revolutionary Terror. The film carries sharp parallels with the Post-Revolutionary period in Russia as well as with fascist Germany.

At the 2000 Academy Awards, Wajda was presented with an honorary Oscar for his numerous contributions to cinema; he subsequently donated the award to Kraków's Jagiellonian University. In February 2006, Wajda received an honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement at the Berlin International Film Festival. Wajda , well past his 80th year, is still making films .

8th March 2009 ; Sidney Lumet's NETWORK

NETWORK

A film by Sydney Lumet

Written by Paddy Chayefsky

Year ; 1976

Runtime : 121 min

English with English sub titles

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Call 9443039630

Thirty three years ago, this movie would have seemed like a fantasy; now it's barely ahead of the facts.

"Network" will shake you up. Paddy Chayefsky's absurdly plausible and outrageously provocative original script concerns media running amok. Faye Dunaway and William Holden, each in two of their finest performances, plus Peter Finch and Robert Duvall star in this superbly cast and handsomely produced Howard Gottfried production. Sidney Lumet's direction is outstanding. The Metro picture, released by United Artists, is a potent commercial blend of artful tirade, visual excitement and sociological horror.

The movie caused a sensation in 1976.and stirred up much debate about the decaying values of television. Seen a quarter-century later, it is like prophecy. When Chayefsky created Howard Beale, could he have imagined Jerry Springer, Howard Stern and the World Wrestling Federation ?

The movie has been described as "outrageous satire" (Leonard Maltin) and "messianic farce" (Pauline Kael), and it is both, and more. What is fascinating about Paddy Chayefsky's Oscar-winning screenplay is how smoothly it shifts its gears. The scenes involving Beale and the revolutionary "liberation army" are cheerfully over the top. The scenes involving Diana and Max are quiet, tense, convincing drama. The action at the network executive level aims for behind-the-scenes realism; we may doubt that a Howard Beale could get on the air, but we have no doubt the idea would be discussed as the movie suggests. And then Chayefsky and the director, Sidney Lumet, edge the backstage network material over into satire, too--but subtly, so that in the final late-night meeting where the executives decide what to do about Howard Beale, we have entered the madhouse without noticing.

But then there are scenes in the movie that are absolutely chilling. We watch Peter Finch cracking up on the air, and we remind ourselves that this isn't satire, it was a style as long ago as Jack Paar. We can believe that audiences would tune in to a news program that's half happy talk and half freak show, because audiences are tuning in to programs like that. We can believe in the movie's "Ecumenical Liberation Army" because nothing along those lines will amaze us after Patty Hearst. And we can believe that the Faye Dunaway character could be totally cut off from her emotional and sexual roots, could be fanatically obsessed with her job, because jobs as competitive as hers almost require that. Thirty three years ago, this movie would have seemed like a fantasy; now it's barely ahead of the facts.

Sidney Lumet

Sidney Lumet is nevertheless a master of cinema. Known for his technical knowledge and his skill at getting first-rate performances from his actors--and for shooting most of his films in his beloved New York--Lumet has made over 40 movies, often emotional, but seldom overly sentimental. He often tells intelligent, complex stories. His politics are somewhat left-leaning and he often treats socially relevant themes in his films.

As social criticism, Sidney Lumet addresses throughout his long career on numerous issues related to American society - on corrupt police (Serpico, 1973, The Prince of New York, 1981 and in the Night Falls on Manhattan (1997)), on television (A Dog Day Afternoon, 1975 ), on Justice ( Twelve Angry Men In 1957, The Verdict, 1982 ) on MacCarthyism (Daniel, 1983), on alcoholism (Lendemain From Crime, 1986) and on racism (Counter-survey, 1990).

Born on June 25, 1924, in Philadelphia, the son of actor Baruch Lumet and dancer Eugenia Wermus Lumet, he made his stage debut at age four at the Yiddish Art Theater in New York. He played many roles on Broadway in the 1930s (such as "Dead End"), and his acting debut in films came in One Third of a Nation (1939). In 1947 he started an off-Broadway acting troupe that included such future stars as Yul Brynner and Eli Wallach, and other former members of Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio who had become unsatisfied with Strasberg's concepts.

Lumet made his stage directing debut in 1955. He made his feature film directing debut with the critical and financial hit 12 Angry Men (1957), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay, and is justly regarded as one of the most auspicious directorial debuts in film history.

Lumet has made over 40 movies, which earned nearly 50 Oscar nominations. In 1993 he received the D.W. Griffith Award of theDirectors Guild of America and in 2005 a well-deserved Honorary Academy Award.

1st March 2009 ; Kurosawa's IKURU

IKURU

Film by Akira Kurosawa

Year 1952

Country : Japan

Japanese with English subtitles

Run time :143 minutes

1st  March  2009 ; 5.45 pm

Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

Call : 94430 39630

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

This  is Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film about a bureaucrat who works for 30 years at Tokyo City Hall and never accomplishes anything. Mr. Watanabe has become the chief of his section, and sits with a pile of papers on either side of his desk, in front of shelves filled with countless more documents. Down a long table on either side of him, his assistants shuffle these papers back and forth. Nothing is ever decided. His job is to deal with citizen complaints, but his real job is to take a small rubber stamp and press it against each one of the documents, to show that he has handled it.

Half of the film is told in the third person and half is his sacrifice as seen through the eyes of guests at his funeral. Kurosawa performs a tour-de-force in keeping a dramatic thread throughout and avoiding the mawkish. It is technically excellent with a telling Occidental-type musical score. It is also the most expressive in its cinematic style, and  one of the major postwar films from Japan.

Ikiru scrutinizes what little use the postwar generation has for its elders (though far from villainous, Watanabe's son is a self-obsessed lout), but its largest target is Balkanized local government. The portrait of buck-passing mini-departments and administrative double-speak verges on satirical.

.

Kurosawa often flashes that cinematic style of sharp reportage and introspection of his characters that distinguishes his film. He patiently studies his people, gives them plenty of time to move and surrounds them with rich and meaningful details in composing the comment of a scene. As a consequence, you see more human nature and more Japanese customs in this film—more emotion, personality and ways of living—than in most of the others that have gone before.

(source : Internet)

Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa was the youngest of seven children, born in Tokyo on 23 March 1910. A talented painter, he enrolled in an art school that emphasized Western styles. Around this time he also joined an artists' group with a great enthusiasm for nineteenth-century Russian literature, with Dostoevsky a particular favourite. Another influence was Heigo, one of his brothers, who loved film and worked as a benshi, a film narrator/commentator for foreign silent films. 

Kurosawa’s early films were produced during the Second World War, so had to comply to themes prescribed by official state propaganda policy. It was Drunken Angel which was Kurosawa's first personally expressive work, made in 1948 and featuring Toshiro Mifune who became Kurosawa's favourite leading man.

Kurosawa  awakened the West to Japanese cinema with Rashomon, which won the top prize in the Venice Film Festival of 1951, and also a special Oscar for best foreign film. A golden period followed, with the West enthralled by his works. Seven Samurai, Yojimbo etc.

A true auteur, he supervised the editing of nearly all his films and wrote or collaborated on the scripts of most. His memoirs were published in 1982, titled Something like an Autobiography. In 1989 he won an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. Kurosawa died in 1998.

A R Rahman wins Oscar . We Salute our little maestro !

OSCAR FOR  A R RAHMAN

Click here for AR RAHMAN's OSCAR 2009 Speech

  A R Rahman won two Oscars, one each for the Best Original Score and the Best Original Song categories. 

Rahman and Gulzar shared the best Original Song honours for Jai Ho.

Indian sound engineer Resul Pokutty won the gold statue for along with Ian Tapp and Richard Pryke for best sound mixing for the same film.

Source : http://news.outlookindia.com

Rahman's Oscar nomination was  received with  lukewarm response here in Tamilnadu and no positive comments were heard from the so called maestros of ego ridden Tamil filmdom and the state government . Not even from the leading figures in the Tamil  film industry and it's superstar actors. A kind of  silence was being  felt here  regarding Rahman's entry into the Ocsar fray.  It is strange  to see  such reaction from those who were salivating just to hear the name of oscar being spellt. Now  that Rahman has won 2 Oscars, let us see what happens. The government as usual will celebrate this soon - it has to - as  a routine. 

Rahman has proved them all  wrong. This  quite, self made  genius of a musician has definitely got more laurels and accolades coming his way . We salute you, our little maestro !

22nd Feb 2009 : Power Of Art

Documentaries on Art

Konangal will be screening a series of documentaries introducing some of the  great masters of Art  and their works once every month from next Sunday , 22nd of Feb onwards.

Power of Art

by Simon Schama

BBC LONDON

English with English sub titles

22nd Feb 2009 ; 5.45pm

Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

The power of the greatest art is the power to shake us into revelation and rip us from our default mode of seeing. After an encounter with that force, we don't look at a face, a colour, a sky, a body, in quite the same way again. We get fitted with new sight: in-sight. Visions of beauty or a rush of intense pleasure are part of that process, but so too may be shock, pain, desire, pity, even revulsion. That kind of art seems to have rewired our senses. We apprehend the world differently.

Art that aims that high – whether by the hand of Caravaggio, Van Gogh or Picasso – was not made without trouble and strife. Of course there has been plenty of great art created in serenity, but the popular idea that some masterpieces were made under acute stress with the artist struggling for the integrity of the conception and its realisation is not a "romantic myth" at all. A glance at how some of the most transforming works got made by human hands is an encounter with "moments of commotion".

It's those hot spots in which great risks were taken that The Power of Art brings you. Instead of trying to reproduce the un-reproducible feeling you have when you are face to face with those works in the hush of the gallery or a church, the series (and the book) drops you instead into those difficult places and unforgiving dramas when the artists managed, against the odds, to astound. "Every artist thinks he's Rembrandt", Picasso once joked, but there would come a time when he thought so himself! 

Caravaggio

Full Name:Michelangelo Merisi di Caravaggio

Born: 1571

Died: 1610

Michelangelo Merisi left his birth town of Caravaggio in the north of Italy to study as an apprentice in nearby Milan. In 1593 he moved to Rome, impatient to use his talents on the biggest stage possible. 

Caravaggio's approach to painting was unconventional. He avoided the standard method of making copies of old sculptures and instead took the more direct approach of painting directly onto canvas

 without drawing first. He also used people from the street as his models. His dramatic painting was enhanced with intense and theatrical lighting. 

Caravaggio's fate was sealed when in 1606 he killed a man in a duel. He fled to Naples where he attempted to paint his way out of trouble, he became a Knight, but was then imprisoned in Malta and then finally he moved to Sicily. He was pardoned for murder in 1610, but he died of a fever attempting to return to Rome. 

Simon Schama on Caravaggio

"In Caravaggio's time it was believed that artists were given their talent by God to bring beauty to the world and to put mortal creatures in touch with their higher selves or souls. Caravaggio never did anything the way it was supposed to be done. 

In this painting of the victory of virtue over evil it's supposed to be David who is the centre of attention, but have you ever seen a less jubilant victory? On his sword is inscribed "Humilitus Occideit Superbium", that is, humility conquers pride. This is the battle that has been fought out inside Caravaggio's head between the two sides of the painter that are portrayed here. 

For me the power of Caravaggio's art is the power of truth, not least about ourselves. If we are ever to hope for redemption we have to begin with the recognition that in all of us the Goliath competes with the David."

Bernini

 Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Born: 1598

Died: 1680

Born in Naples, Bernini was an exceptional talent from an early age and went on to dominate the art world of 17th century Rome. His w

ork epitomised the Baroque style and his sculpture, church interiors and exteriors and town planning could be seen everywhere. He was also a painter, playwright, costume and theatre designer. 

Bernini worked under successive Popes; Pope Gregory XV made him a knight and Pope Urban VIII took him as his best friend. He was revered in his time until a jealous rage caused him to have the face of his mistress slashed after discovering her romance with his brother. His reputation fell further after his bell towers for the Cathedral of St Peter's started cracking in 1641. He redeemed himself and kick started his career again with arguably his most famous work, The Ecstasy of St Theresa, in 1652. 

Simon Schama on Bernini

"A century after the creation of The Ecstacy of St Theresa, a French art lover doing the Tour of Rome entered the Church of S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome, peered at the spectacle and said: "Well, if that's divine love, I know all about it". 

What Bernini's managed to make tangible is something that we all, if we're honest, know we hunger for, but before which we're properly tongue-tied. Something that has produced more bad writing, more excruciating moments of bad cinema, more appalling poems than anything else. No wonder when art historians look at this sculpture they tie themselves in knots to avoid saying the obvious, that is, that we're looking at the most intense convulsive drama of the body that any of us experience."

(Source : BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/powerofart/intro.shtml )

Simon Schama

 

Simon Michael Schama, CBE (born 13 February 1945) is a British professor of history and art history at Columbia University. His many works on history and art include Landscape and Memory, Dead Certainties, Rembrandt's Eyes, and his history of the French Revolution, Citizens. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain. He was an art and cultural critic for The New Yorker.

Schama was born in London. In the late 1940s, the family moved to Southend-on-Sea in Essex before moving back to London.He worked for short periods as a lecturer in history at Cambridge, where he became a Fellow and Director of Studies in History, and at Oxford where he was made a Fellow of Brasenose College in 1976, specialising in the French Revolution In 1980 Schama accepted a chair at Harvard. 

The year 2000 saw Schama return to the UK, having been commissioned by the BBC to produce a series of television documentary programmes on British history as part of their Millennium celebrations, under the title A History of Britain

In 2006 the BBC broadcast a new TV series, Simon Schama's Power of Art which, with an accompanying book, was presented and written by Schama. It marks a return to art history for him, treating eight artists through eight key works