Nazism
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Five Questions with Wagner & Me Director Patrick McGrady
Early in Wagner & Me, a new documentary about the music and legacy of Richard Wagner, English actor and writer Stephen Fry says he’d like to time travel to the 19th century. Once there, Fry continues, he would start a letter-writing campaign, urging the composer to rethink his infamously anti-Semitic essay Jewishness in Music: “I say to him, ‘Listen, you’re on the brink of becoming the greatest artist of the 19th century, and future generations will forget that, simply because of this nasty little essay that you’re writing, and because of the effect it’ll have.” Wagner, of course, did not […]
by Kevin Canfield on Nov 26, 2012 -
VON TRIER AT CANNES: FRENCH HYPOCRISY AT ITS WORST
The controversy that has resulted in the Cannes Film Festival — which shows itself to be the spineless tool of a government uniquely, like many of its citizens, obsessed with self-image — declaring Lars von Trier persona non grata on account of his comments that began with his upbringing as a Jew is a despicable, hypocritical mountain made from a molehill. (Would The Producers be banned here? Hardly. Will I lose my accreditation in the future for writing this? I would not put it past them.) Laws about expressing antisemitism are strict here (six months in prison, clearly related to […]
by Howard Feinstein on May 20, 2011 -
LARS VON TRIER IS CANNES’ “PERSONA NON GRATA”
I missed the Wednesday morning Melancholia screening, having to moderate a table at the Producers Network breakfast the same time, but afterwards I happened to catch a snippet of the press conference. I tweeted a few comments, namely ones in which the director talked about this relationship with the film’s d.p., who started the project by telling him not to behave like so many “old or middle-aged directors and make [his actresses] younger and more naked.” “Don’t tell me that,” Von Trier said he told the cinematographer. Watching press conferences on those little TVs in the basement of the Palais […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 20, 2011
