Paris
Sarah Kent
Isamu Noguchi may not be a household name, yet one strand of his work is incredibly familiar. In 1951 he visited a lamp factory in Gifu, a Japanese city famous for its paper lanterns. This prompted him to design the lampshades that, for decades, have adorned nearly every student’s bedsit.Strips of fine white paper made from mulberry tree bark are glued onto bamboo ribs to create a design that is amazingly versatile and comes in all shapes and sizes. Spheres are the most popular, but Noguchi also designed rectangles, cubes, pyramids, ellipses and columns alongside forms resembling pumpkins, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
This is the story of a boy and a building. Sixteen-year-old Youri (newcomer Alseni Bathily) lives, with his telescope, in Cité Gagarine, a vast red-brick Sixties apartment complex in Ivry-sur-Seine, an eastern suburb of Paris governed by the French Communist party.Named after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, it was once a showcase for the party, a modern, utopian, rent-subsidised setting for working-class supporters. But it mirrored the party’s decline and lapsed into disrepair – asbestos, rats, broken lifts, crime – and was, in reality, demolished in 2019.Directors Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Read more ...
mark.kidel
Joseph Losey’s career covered a great deal of ground, and several continents. From The Boy with the Green Hair, a noirish sci-fi film from 1948, through to his richly psychological collaborations with Harold Pinter, The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971), he navigated an outsider’s route, rooted in 1930s left-wing connections – after he had studied with Bertolt Brecht and worked extensively in the American theatre. He was also a master of the thriller, and some of his best (and under-rated) films include The Sleeping Tiger (1954) and The Criminal (1960), both made in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Louise Farrenc; Symphonies 1&3 Insula Orchestra/Laurence Equilbey (Erato)Louise Farrenc’s music is good as you’d expect from a precocious talent who’d studied piano with Hummel and composition with Reicha. Born in 1804, Farrenc’s misfortune was to be a female composer in 19th century Paris, a city with a highly progressive musical culture but antediluvian sexual politics. She was a renowned pianist and teacher, becoming a Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire in 1842 and having to fight to receive the same salary as her male colleagues. Farrenc’s three symphonies are Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Sophie Taeuber-Arp gave her work titles like Movement of Lines, yet there’s nothing dull about her drawings and paintings. In her hands, the simplest compositions sizzle with tension and dance with implied motion. Animated Circles 1934 (main picture), consists of blue, grey and black circles on a white ground. The off-kilter design makes them appear to shuffle, nudge, float or bounce; you feel light-hearted and light-headed just looking at them.Even in wartime she could make her work sing. In Geometric and Undulating Lines 1941 spaghetti-like strings rise flame-like over sharp triangles; the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Michelle Pfeiffer all but purrs her way through French Exit, as befits a splendid actress who cut a memorable Catwoman onscreen nearly thirty years ago. Playing a New York grande dame who deals with bankruptcy by decamping with her son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) to Paris, Pfeiffer informs the character of the mortality-obsessed Frances Price with an implicit "meow", as if forever finding fault with a world in which, short of funds, she is now surplus to requirements.Pfeiffer is the star attraction of Azazel Jacobs's film, which she powers her way through as if playing a longlost Tennessee Read more ...
Gaby Frost
To this day, if you take a stroll down Paris’ Boulevard de l’Hôpital, you’ll come across an imposing building: the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière. It’s one of Europe’s foremost hospitals. It’s the place where 20th-century icons Josephine Baker and Michel Foucault departed this world, and its halls buzz with budding young medical students from La Sorbonne. But this is only the most recent chapter in the Salpêtrière’s long history. Dig a little deeper, and it doesn’t take long to discover the building’s violently troubled past. In the 19th century, it served as an institution for mentally ill women Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Lupin isn’t really about the fictional character it’s named after (the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc), but about Assane Diop, who’s an obsessive fan of the Lupin novels. He’s also a gentleman thief and master of disguise himself, as he displays in multiple disappearing acts, sleights of hand and bewildering stunts in this French-made series.This five-episode Part 2 is really a season-ette, since it’s the second half of the first part which appeared in January. That left viewers dangling nervously, as it ended with the abduction of Assane’s son Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Loudly and painfully, the consumptive Violetta wheezes before we hear a single note. Her pitiful gasping for the breath that deserts her precedes the prelude to Opera Holland Park’s La traviata; the same effect ushers in Act Three. At first I assumed that director Rodula Gaitanou had tweaked her 2018 production for its post-lockdown comeback but, no – the original staging featured this device. That uncannily prescient stroke apart, Gaitanou lays a light but skilful hand on a work that, even in non-pandemic times, needs no fancy manipulation from concept merchants impatient of its power and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Paris in the summer: Charade was the last word in old Hollywood’s glamorous cool. It was almost the last word for Grant, feeling if not looking his age. Its tricksy, trapdoor plot, with a baffled Hepburn hunted for a MacGuffin of $250,000 in wartime bullion she doesn’t know she owns, was also a 1963 encore for Grant’s Fifties Hitchcock thrillers (sans Hitchcock), combining To Catch a Thief’s breezy French locations with North by Northwest’s innocent on the run. Released just after JFK’s assassination (requiring the word’s overdubbing with “elimination”, since Read more ...
joe.muggs
Somewhere in dance culture or other, the Eighties revival has now been going on more than twice as long as the actual Eighties did. Starting around 1998, it reached an initial peak in the early 2000s as the dayglo-fashion led electroclash, but though the eye of the press moved away, it never really died away. European or Europhile fusions of electropop and industrial, taking in more obscure styles like coldwave, new beat and EBM (electronic body music), have been current and fully functional on one dancefloor or another ever since. It’s squarely into this milieu that Louisa Pillott – “ Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Mathieu Boogaerts has been recording since the mid 1990s, emerging from the nouvelle chanson scene in Paris, a chansonnier who’s performed at the likes of Cafe Oto over here, while establishing himself as a star turn on the Tôt ou Tard label in France, mixing Afro-pop and reggae as well as indie electronica and folk into his chanson. He’s previously based himself in Paris, Brussels and Nairobi, and now, London, where he’s spent the past five years living in the hinterland between Clapham and Brixton. Out of that sterling cultural exchange experience comes his first English-language album, Read more ...