Obituaries

STANISLAW LEM, 1921 – 2006

One of my favorite science fiction writers, Stanislaw Lem, died yesterday of a heart ailment. The Polish writer’s work incorporated everything from Kafkaesque humor to political allegory to phiosophical inquiry in novels such as The Futurological Congress, Cyberiad, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and Solaris, the latter of which was made into films by Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh. (All of the above are highly recommended.) Those who feel they’ve gotten their Lem through one of the two filmed versions of Solaris should pick up the late author’s novel, which is much less a romantic fable and much more a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 28, 2006
GORDON PARKS, 1912 – 2006

Multiple sources are reporting the sad news that pioneering black director and photojournalist Gordon Parks died today in New York. He was 93. In 1969, Parks completed his first film, The Learning Tree, based on his own novel about growing up in Kansas in the 1920s. In doing so, he became the first black American to write and direct a studio motion picture. Later he would go on to achieve commercial success with the seminal “blaxploitation” film Shaft. More recently he appeared in an HBO documentary on his work, Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks. His […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 7, 2006
Garrett Scott

I just arrived here in L.A. for the Spirit Awards and was stunned to hear that filmmaker Garrett Scott died yesterday. He was a great documentarian, a thoughtful colleague here in the NYC indie world, and a friend, and this is really an incredible loss. Scott was at the beginning of his career but on the basis of his two docs — Cul de Sac and Occupation: Dreamland, co-directed with Ian Olds — his was a great talent. He was able to synthesize an astutely critical take on contemporary society and politics with a real empathy for his subjects. Watch […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 3, 2006
NAM JUNE PAIK, 1932 – 2006

Yahoo News is reporting that pioneering video artist Nam June Paik has died at 73. The Koren born artist was known for his multi-monitor sculptural video pieces, his various video happenings, and collaborations with artists like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, among others. When I worked at The Kitchen Center right out of college, Paik was a grand master of the video art realm, someone whose belief in the untapped power of this new art form fueled both is pieces as well as the innovative manners in which they were presented.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 31, 2006
DEREK BAILEY, 1930 – 2005

According to various postings on the web, free-music guitarist Derek Bailey died on Christmas Day. I’ve seen Bailey a few times, all of them a long time ago when he’d periodically put together in New York one of his “Company Weeks” of group improvisation. I saw him play with folks like Bill Laswell, John Zorn and George Lewis, and to several musician friends of mine, like Donald Miller from Borbetomagus, he was a god. Certainly the most radical guitarist of his generation due to the simple fact that much of what he played didn’t sound like guitar, he was a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 28, 2005
RICHARD PRYOR, 1940 – 2005

Richard Pryor died today of a heart attack in California. To those old enough to remember his stand-up routines and many TV appearances preceding his string of hit movies, Pryor was both a cultural pioneer, the comedian who made so many other careers possible, as well as an entirely original and never imitated cultural voice. Even at his angriest and most sardonic, a vulnerability and hurt laced his stage persona, a pain that cut against his outrageous satire and made it all feel sometimes too real. Over at Firedoglake one linked commentator (I”m sorry, the blog doesn’t make clear who) […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 10, 2005
MARK LAPORE, 53

The Boston Globe ran today this obituary for experimental filmmaker, documentarian, and teacher Mark LaPore, who died September 11 in Boston. LaPore’s newest film (pictured at right), Kolkata, will premiere next week at the New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant Garde.” From the piece: “Mark McElhatten, cocurator of the Views from the Avant-Garde program of the New York Film Festival, described Mr. LaPore’s films as ”unique, a form of visual anthropology but equally about the mystery of being and film as consciousness. These uncompromising films have enormous integrity and deserve a very important place within the entire history […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 25, 2005
Artist and Filmmaker Gretchen Bender Dies at 53

I learned over the holidays that artist Gretchen Bender, whose intelligent, visually seductive work crossed lines between visual art and film, sculpture and video, died in New York on Sunday, December 18 of cancer. She was 53. Bender, who, early in her career exhibited at the East Village Nature Morte Gallery and later Metro Pictures, created conceptually concise and elegant work that often critiqued mainstream media and the power imbalances contained within its representations. And while many artists at this time were working with appropriation and engaging in similar sorts of critique, Bender’s work always cunningly embodied within itself a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 3, 2005
SUSAN SONTAG, 1933 – 2004

Susan Sontag, author, activist, and critic, died in New York today at 71. A tremendously influential figure in post-war American culture, and one of the last remaining people for whom the term “public intellectual” might apply, Sontag had a special relationship with cinema, occasionally directing experimental films but more often influencing films, filmmakers and other critics with her writing. Essays such as “Notes on Camp,” which found an alternative and politically transgressive means of valuing culture through gay aesthetics, “Against Interpretation,” which argued against the critical reduction of art to easily identifiable themes and messages, and “On Photography” which examined […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 28, 2004
RUSS MEYER, R.I.P.

While surfing Ain’t It Cool News I came across this sad news that the great exploitation and proto-independent filmmaker Russ Meyer has passed away at the age of 82. Known for outrageous, violent, and flamboyantly pop white-trash epics like Vixen, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (with a screenplay by Roger Ebert) and the impossibly great Faster Pussycast, Kill, Kill!, Meyer made films with lust-crazed guys, massively endowed women and a purely American mixture of sex, violence, and pop culture. Click the link above for Harry Knowles’ tribute to Meyer.
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 21, 2004

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