The 2012 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[Grandpa Troll]

(CNN) -- Saudi Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, a hard-ine conservative who is credited with pushing back al Qaeda, has died, Saudi state TV said on Saturday.

Nayef, who had been named crown prince in October by his brother the king, was heir to the Saudi throne. State TV is broadcasting Quran readings as an expression of mourning for the prince, who died in Geneva, Switzerland.

"It is a shock. We are knew his health was frail but his death is a shock," Saudi Foreign Ministry spokesman Osama Nogali told CNN. "We still don't know the reason behind his death."

The Saudi Press Agency published a statement from the Royal Court, saying it "condoles the Saudi people on the deceased prince pray to God to bless his soul and to reward him for his services to his religion and homeland."



Biden meets Prince Nayef bin Abdelaziz

Saudi Arabia pumping out too much oil?

Saudi Arabia: Paving the way for change Nayef's body will arrive in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Sunday and will be buried after afternoon prayer in Mecca, Nogali said.

After the funeral, a period of mourning -- most likely for three days -- will be announced, a Saudi official told CNN. The official asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

It is expected that authorities selected by the king to choose a successor will meet as soon as the mourning period is over, the official said. A new crown prince could be named with next three to four days, the source said.

Nayef served as Saudi interior minister since 1975, having overseen the kingdom's counterterrorism efforts.

He also served as deputy premier.

A classified U.S. Embassy cable leaked by the website WikiLeaks described Nayef as a hard-line conservative who was lukewarm to King Abdullah's reform initiatives.

Nayef led the crack down against hard-ine Islamists who took control of Mecca in 1979, and also oversaw the smashing of Saudi-based al Qaeda cells in the mid-2000s.

In recent years, his son, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef has led the Kingdom's fight against al Qaeda as the elder Nayef seemed to have taken more of back seat.

On Saturday, the Bahrain state-run news agency announced three days of mourning in that country and ordered flags to be lowered to half-staff there and at its embassies abroad.

Years after 9/11, Saudi Arabia slowly modernizing

[DaShi]

Glad that guy is still on my ignore list.

[Grandpa Troll]

Glad that guy is still on my ignore list.

You can take me off ignore if you like, I wont steal your lunch,or pee on your parade or whatever internet unforgiveable sin I committed,of which I apologize sir!

[SlowwHand]

Count your blessings, GT.

[molly bloom]

He was big in Japan... and elsewhere:

Japanese director Shindo Kaneto, famed for ghost classic Onibaba, died on 29 May at the age of 100 – three days before the start of a BFI season dedicated to his career and that of long-term collaborator Yoshimura Kozaburo. Alexander Jacoby pays tribute to the last active link to the filmmaking generation of Kurosawa



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


From our July 2012 issue, published online 31 May 2012



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Japanese director Shindo Kaneto celebrated his 100th birthday in April 2012, an occasion heralded by last year’s touring retrospective in the United States, and celebrated with tributes in his hometown of Hiroshima and a two-month retrospective at BFI Southbank in London. At work in the industry since the 1930s and a director since the 1950s, Shindo made his final film Postcard (Ichimai no hagaki) only two years ago, by which time he was among the last living links – and certainly the last active one – to the filmmaking generation of Kurosawa. With an honourable place in the history of Japanese horror on account of his two most widely admired films Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968), and with several key works available on DVD, Shindo’s international fame seems secure.

But a few months before Shindo turned 100, another centenary had passed almost unnoticed on the international scene. Yoshimura Kozaburo (1911-2000) was not only Shindo’s contemporary but also his close collaborator, yet he remains barely known in the West.

When the two men first worked together in 1947, both were already established in the film industry. Shindo had been an art director, screenwriter and assistant director, most notably to Mizoguchi, with whom he worked on The Straits of Love and Hate (1937) and The Loyal 47 Ronin of the Genroku Era (1941-2). At Shochiku, meanwhile, Yoshimura had been assistant director to Shimazu Yasujiro, pioneer of the shomin-geki (films about the lower middle classes). Having directed his first film in 1934, he achieved a major commercial hit with the melodrama Warm Current (Danryu, 1939), which won him his first mention in Kinema Junpo magazine’s annual Best Ten critics’ poll.

But it was from Shindo’s script that Yoshimura directed his first genuine masterpiece, The Ball at the Anjo House (Anjo-ke no butokai, 1947), which scooped the no. 1 slot in the Kinema Junpo poll. The story of a once wealthy house in decline echoes Chekhov and prefigures the sombre mood of Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room (1958).

Despite these parallels, however, the film is urgently engaged with social issues directly confronting a defeated Japan under US occupation. Its subject is the decline of the pre-war upper class, and its context is the policy of land reform and redistribution implemented by the new regime. Also central is the generation gap: while the father of the house tries vainly to preserve the past, it is his daughter Atsuko (Hara Setsuko) who represents hope for the future – and suggests possible ways forward for post-war Japan.

Shindo’s concise, intelligent script was as vital to the film as Yoshimura’s uncharacteristically flamboyant direction. Shindo went on to script most of Yoshimura’s major films, and is unarguably responsible for many of their narrative virtues. Yoshimura gratefully acknowledged Shindo’s contribution, modestly observing: “Because I understand my limitations, it is necessary for me to rely on outside help.”

The collaboration between the two men deepened when they left Shochiku to set up an independent production company, Kindai Eiga Kyokai. Here, with Yoshimura sometimes serving as his producer, Shindo himself began to direct, making his debut with a semi-autobiographical story about a screenwriter, Story of a Beloved Wife (Aisai monagatari, 1951).

In their different ways, both Yoshimura and Shindo were to explore the social and political issues confronting Japan at a time of dramatic change, when the nation was obliged to take stock of its recent history. The trauma and tragedy of the Pacific War had particular relevance for Shindo. Conscripted as part of a unit of 100 men, he had been one of only six of these not to see active service; the other 94 were all killed.

As a native of Hiroshima, moreover, he had a particular personal investment in the subject matter of Children of Hiroshima (Genbaku no ko, 1952), the first film to dramatise the atomic bombing of the city. This pacifist work was commissioned by the left-wing Japan Teachers’ Union, which later condemned the director for having made it “a tearjerker and destroyed its political orientation”. But it remains one of Shindo’s most moving films, and a testament to the anti-war spirit that took root in Japan after its defeat.

Shindo continued with explicit socio-political commentary in Epitome (Shukuzu, 1953), a grim geisha story; The Gutter (Dobu, 1954), a searing account of urban poverty; and Lucky Dragon No. 5 (Daigo fukuryu maru, 1959), a sombre account of the sufferings of a crew of tuna fisherman afflicted by radioactive contamination in the aftermath of US nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll.

Although these films were well received by many critics, they made little money, and Kindai Eiga Kyokai was facing bankruptcy by the time Shindo made – on a minimal budget – the film that restored its fortunes: The Island (Hadaka no shima, 1960). With its sympathetic chronicle of peasant life, beautiful locations in Japan’s Inland Sea and a plaintive score by Hayashi Hikaru, the film won fans both at home and abroad, scooping the Grand Prize at the Moscow Film Festival. It enabled Shindo to sustain his career as an independent filmmaker, and he went on to make Mother (Haha, 1963), another story about the legacy of Hiroshima.

Yoshimura also directed on occasion for Kindai Eiga Kyokai. Cape Ashizuri (Ashizuri misaki, 1954) is a trenchant account of the repression of liberals in the era of pre-war militarism. In its explicitly political theme and forceful style, it seems closer to Shindo’s own directorial work than to the majority of Yoshimura’s films, which emerged from within the studio system.

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=onibaba+obituary&source=web&cd=10&ved=0CHoQFjAJ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fold.bfi.org.uk%2Fsightandsound%2Ffeaturesandinterviews%2Ffeatures%2Fshindo-kaneto-yoshimura-kozaburo.php&ei=NeHdT9O8GtCg8gOKkMyUCw&usg=AFQjCNGJ6pWXL0u233lDzDNimXfjF9D0tw

&

A socialist by conviction, he specialised in stories about the underclass — poor fishermen, prostitutes and other victims of society. Born in Hiroshima, he identified especially with the fate of that city and first came to international attention with a film about the legacy of the atom bomb: Children of Hiroshima (1952).

Unlike many Japanese directors, Shindo rarely ventured into period subjects. When he did, in Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968), he made a brace of virtuoso horror pictures, demonstrating a masterly use of the CinemaScope screen. Both were widely seen in the West and are now regarded as his most accomplished works. As with his contemporary subjects, they focused not on the nobility but on poor people scratching a living on the fringes of a chaotic world.

Shindo admired the strength and endurance of Japanese women . His first film, The Story of My Beloved Wife (1951), was a portrait of his first wife. Others with a strong feminist flavour included The Life of a Woman (1953) and Sorrow Is Only for Women (1958) .

That Shindo never attained the stature of his mentor Kenji Mizoguchi was due to a streak of sentimentality in his work. Even Children of Hiroshima was dismissed in Japan as a tear-jerker, though in the light of its patent sincerity that was a harsh verdict.

He was also prone to pretension. The Naked Island (1960) was a prime example. The story of a poor couple living on a remote, arid island with their two small children, it depicts their daily ritual of descending a huge flight of stone steps, crossing the sea to the mainland to fetch water and carrying it painfully back up the steps on their shoulders, spilling much en route. Throughout the ordeal not a word is exchanged. The film is silent except for natural sounds and a lachrymose score. Though it won first prize at the Moscow Film Festival, there were many dissenters. The absence of speech was particularly criticised; far from reinforcing the impression of a dour environment where there is no time to talk, it struck many as absurd, at odds with any likely reality.

Stylistically, Shindo favoured ostentation. Onibaba and Kuroneko embrace several shock effects and frenzied action as lurid as anything in a Hammer horror film, though in the context this is appropriate.

The atom bomb scene in Children of Hiroshima was constructed in the same vein as such Soviet silent films as The Battleship Potemkin. The last minutes before the bomb drops and its immediate aftermath are edited in an accelerating montage of individual shots, emphasising the metronomic countdown to detonation.

There were several phases in Shindo’s career. The early realist films were in keeping with his professed socialism. But in the mid-Sixties, at the same time that he was experimenting with historical themes seen through peasant eyes, he took a sudden detour into sex comedies. Nothing very raunchy happens in them, since their recurring theme is impotence; but Lost Sex (1966), The Origin of Sex (1967) and Operation Négligé (1968) seemed so far in spirit from the man who had made Children of Hiroshima that they left Western critics baffled.

Kaneto Shindo was born in Hiroshima on April 28 1912, the son of impoverished farmers; the family had once been affluent landowners . In 1934 he left home and joined a small film production company called Shinko as a laboratory apprentice. Rising to the post of art director and eventually scriptwriter, he acted as an assistant to several established film-makers, including Mizoguchi.

In 1942 he joined another small unit, Koa Films, which was taken over the following year by the Shochiku studio, one of the giants of the Japanese film industry. Between 1942 and 1951, when Shindo made his directorial debut, he wrote scripts for some of the foremost film-makers in Japanese cinema. For Mizoguchi, whom he acknowledged as the greatest influence on his work, he wrote two feminist pictures, Women’s Victory (1946) and My Love Is Burning (1949); and for Kimisaburo Yoshimura, he produced a stream of outstanding screenplays that made them one of the most successful screen partnerships in post-war Japanese cinema. The finest of their collaborations were A Ball at the Anjo Family (1947) and two elegant costume pictures, The Tale of Genji (1951) and The Beauty and the Dragon (1955).

Neither Shindo nor Yoshimura was popular with the Shochiku management, which continually upbraided them for their “dark outlook”. They walked out in 1950 and established their own independent company, known as Kindai Eiga Kyokai (Modern Film Association), enabling Shindo in 1951 to make his directorial debut with the very personal Story of My Beloved Wife. She had died in 1940, and Shindo was criticised for wallowing in an excess of pathos and sentimentality. An unusual feature of the film is that the role of Shindo’s first wife was played by his second, the actress Nobuko Otowa, who regularly appeared in his subsequent movies. She played a key role in Children of Hiroshima as a young teacher who returns to Hiroshima seven years after the dropping of the atom bomb to seek out survivors among the pupils she had taught at that time.

The film was commissioned by the Japan Teachers’ Union and for the most part used non-professional actors, some of whom had been injured in the blast or lost loved ones. The sponsors, however, were dissatisfied with it. They had looked for a political tract laying the blame squarely on American shoulders. Shindo, however, implied that Japanese militarism bore equal responsibility for the catastrophe.

The Union insisted that he had “reduced the story to a tear-jerker and destroyed its political orientation”. They preferred another film on the same subject made by Hideo Sekigawa, in which America was condemned for dropping the bomb on the Japanese people in a spirit of scientific experimentation, using them as “laboratory animals”.

Though reservations about his handling of the theme persisted, Shindo’s integrity was never in doubt. As a Hiroshima citizen, he identified strongly with the subject. Indeed, he returned to the nuclear debate in 1959 with Lucky Dragon No 5, an account of the Japanese fishermen who were contaminated by fallout from the atomic tests in the Bikini islands.

Through the 1950s, Shindo concentrated principally on social themes in such films as Epitome (1953), about a woman driven to prostitution, and Gutter (1954), a Zolaesque study of low life. None of his later films made much impact in or out of Japan until Onibaba in 1964.

His first period film, Onibaba embraced an earthy sexuality unusual in the cinema of the time . A 16th-century saga set in an era of brutal clan warfare, it shows how two women strive to stay alive by murdering samurai and selling their armour to the highest bidder. In its later stages, the film plunges into horror. The older woman dons a mask, stolen from a dead samurai, who wore it to conceal a ghastly skin affliction. But once assumed, it will not come off and has to be forcibly removed to reveal the hideous reality beneath.

Shindo came close to matching this tour de force in another fable, Kuroneko, made in 1968. Like Onibaba, it was a historical film, centred on two women who are raped and left to die and turn into avenging cats preying on wandering samurai. There is a strong Freudian element in this film since the ghosts seduce their victims before tearing them apart, and one of them turns out to be the demon-woman’s son.

Shindo’s 1966-68 sex trilogy (Lost Sex, The Origin of Sex and Operation Négligé) was more enjoyed than admired, but there was general agreement that the thrillers Heat-Wave Island and Live Today, Die Tomorrow (both 1970) were superior genre pieces.

In 1975, under the title Life of a Film Director, he made an engrossing documentary about Kenji Mizoguchi, the long-dead director from whom he claimed to have learnt most. Though Mizoguchi was gone, those who worked with him and acted for him were still alive. By interviewing them and interspersing their comments with well-chosen film clips, Shindo constructed a model biopic.

Shindo’s later films were eclectic. In 1982 he made a historical biopic of the woodblock artist Hokusai (Hokusai Manga) which focused more on his highly-charged sex life than on his art . The Horizon (1984) was based on his sister’s life as a mail-order bride sold to a Japanese-American . He continued to make films into his late nineties.

Kaneto Shindo’s second wife, Nobuko Otowa, died in 1994.


Kaneto Shindo, born April 28 1912, died May 29 2012

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9301022/Kaneto-Shindo.html

[molly bloom]

He was big in Japan... and elsewhere:

Japanese director Shindo Kaneto, famed for ghost classic Onibaba, died on 29 May at the age of 100 – three days before the start of a BFI season dedicated to his career and that of long-term collaborator Yoshimura Kozaburo. Alexander Jacoby pays tribute to the last active link to the filmmaking generation of Kurosawa



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


From our July 2012 issue, published online 31 May 2012



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Japanese director Shindo Kaneto celebrated his 100th birthday in April 2012, an occasion heralded by last year’s touring retrospective in the United States, and celebrated with tributes in his hometown of Hiroshima and a two-month retrospective at BFI Southbank in London. At work in the industry since the 1930s and a director since the 1950s, Shindo made his final film Postcard (Ichimai no hagaki) only two years ago, by which time he was among the last living links – and certainly the last active one – to the filmmaking generation of Kurosawa. With an honourable place in the history of Japanese horror on account of his two most widely admired films Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968), and with several key works available on DVD, Shindo’s international fame seems secure.

But a few months before Shindo turned 100, another centenary had passed almost unnoticed on the international scene. Yoshimura Kozaburo (1911-2000) was not only Shindo’s contemporary but also his close collaborator, yet he remains barely known in the West.

When the two men first worked together in 1947, both were already established in the film industry. Shindo had been an art director, screenwriter and assistant director, most notably to Mizoguchi, with whom he worked on The Straits of Love and Hate (1937) and The Loyal 47 Ronin of the Genroku Era (1941-2). At Shochiku, meanwhile, Yoshimura had been assistant director to Shimazu Yasujiro, pioneer of the shomin-geki (films about the lower middle classes). Having directed his first film in 1934, he achieved a major commercial hit with the melodrama Warm Current (Danryu, 1939), which won him his first mention in Kinema Junpo magazine’s annual Best Ten critics’ poll.

But it was from Shindo’s script that Yoshimura directed his first genuine masterpiece, The Ball at the Anjo House (Anjo-ke no butokai, 1947), which scooped the no. 1 slot in the Kinema Junpo poll. The story of a once wealthy house in decline echoes Chekhov and prefigures the sombre mood of Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room (1958).

Despite these parallels, however, the film is urgently engaged with social issues directly confronting a defeated Japan under US occupation. Its subject is the decline of the pre-war upper class, and its context is the policy of land reform and redistribution implemented by the new regime. Also central is the generation gap: while the father of the house tries vainly to preserve the past, it is his daughter Atsuko (Hara Setsuko) who represents hope for the future – and suggests possible ways forward for post-war Japan.

Shindo’s concise, intelligent script was as vital to the film as Yoshimura’s uncharacteristically flamboyant direction. Shindo went on to script most of Yoshimura’s major films, and is unarguably responsible for many of their narrative virtues. Yoshimura gratefully acknowledged Shindo’s contribution, modestly observing: “Because I understand my limitations, it is necessary for me to rely on outside help.”

The collaboration between the two men deepened when they left Shochiku to set up an independent production company, Kindai Eiga Kyokai. Here, with Yoshimura sometimes serving as his producer, Shindo himself began to direct, making his debut with a semi-autobiographical story about a screenwriter, Story of a Beloved Wife (Aisai monagatari, 1951).

In their different ways, both Yoshimura and Shindo were to explore the social and political issues confronting Japan at a time of dramatic change, when the nation was obliged to take stock of its recent history. The trauma and tragedy of the Pacific War had particular relevance for Shindo. Conscripted as part of a unit of 100 men, he had been one of only six of these not to see active service; the other 94 were all killed.

As a native of Hiroshima, moreover, he had a particular personal investment in the subject matter of Children of Hiroshima (Genbaku no ko, 1952), the first film to dramatise the atomic bombing of the city. This pacifist work was commissioned by the left-wing Japan Teachers’ Union, which later condemned the director for having made it “a tearjerker and destroyed its political orientation”. But it remains one of Shindo’s most moving films, and a testament to the anti-war spirit that took root in Japan after its defeat.

Shindo continued with explicit socio-political commentary in Epitome (Shukuzu, 1953), a grim geisha story; The Gutter (Dobu, 1954), a searing account of urban poverty; and Lucky Dragon No. 5 (Daigo fukuryu maru, 1959), a sombre account of the sufferings of a crew of tuna fisherman afflicted by radioactive contamination in the aftermath of US nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll.

Although these films were well received by many critics, they made little money, and Kindai Eiga Kyokai was facing bankruptcy by the time Shindo made – on a minimal budget – the film that restored its fortunes: The Island (Hadaka no shima, 1960). With its sympathetic chronicle of peasant life, beautiful locations in Japan’s Inland Sea and a plaintive score by Hayashi Hikaru, the film won fans both at home and abroad, scooping the Grand Prize at the Moscow Film Festival. It enabled Shindo to sustain his career as an independent filmmaker, and he went on to make Mother (Haha, 1963), another story about the legacy of Hiroshima.

Yoshimura also directed on occasion for Kindai Eiga Kyokai. Cape Ashizuri (Ashizuri misaki, 1954) is a trenchant account of the repression of liberals in the era of pre-war militarism. In its explicitly political theme and forceful style, it seems closer to Shindo’s own directorial work than to the majority of Yoshimura’s films, which emerged from within the studio system.

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=onibaba+obituary&source=web&cd=10&ved=0CHoQFjAJ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fold.bfi.org.uk%2Fsightandsound%2Ffeaturesandinterviews%2Ffeatures%2Fshindo-kaneto-yoshimura-kozaburo.php&ei=NeHdT9O8GtCg8gOKkMyUCw&usg=AFQjCNGJ6pWXL0u233lDzDNimXfjF9D0tw

&

A socialist by conviction, he specialised in stories about the underclass — poor fishermen, prostitutes and other victims of society. Born in Hiroshima, he identified especially with the fate of that city and first came to international attention with a film about the legacy of the atom bomb: Children of Hiroshima (1952).

Unlike many Japanese directors, Shindo rarely ventured into period subjects. When he did, in Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968), he made a brace of virtuoso horror pictures, demonstrating a masterly use of the CinemaScope screen. Both were widely seen in the West and are now regarded as his most accomplished works. As with his contemporary subjects, they focused not on the nobility but on poor people scratching a living on the fringes of a chaotic world.

Shindo admired the strength and endurance of Japanese women . His first film, The Story of My Beloved Wife (1951), was a portrait of his first wife. Others with a strong feminist flavour included The Life of a Woman (1953) and Sorrow Is Only for Women (1958) .

That Shindo never attained the stature of his mentor Kenji Mizoguchi was due to a streak of sentimentality in his work. Even Children of Hiroshima was dismissed in Japan as a tear-jerker, though in the light of its patent sincerity that was a harsh verdict.

He was also prone to pretension. The Naked Island (1960) was a prime example. The story of a poor couple living on a remote, arid island with their two small children, it depicts their daily ritual of descending a huge flight of stone steps, crossing the sea to the mainland to fetch water and carrying it painfully back up the steps on their shoulders, spilling much en route. Throughout the ordeal not a word is exchanged. The film is silent except for natural sounds and a lachrymose score. Though it won first prize at the Moscow Film Festival, there were many dissenters. The absence of speech was particularly criticised; far from reinforcing the impression of a dour environment where there is no time to talk, it struck many as absurd, at odds with any likely reality.

Stylistically, Shindo favoured ostentation. Onibaba and Kuroneko embrace several shock effects and frenzied action as lurid as anything in a Hammer horror film, though in the context this is appropriate.

The atom bomb scene in Children of Hiroshima was constructed in the same vein as such Soviet silent films as The Battleship Potemkin. The last minutes before the bomb drops and its immediate aftermath are edited in an accelerating montage of individual shots, emphasising the metronomic countdown to detonation.

There were several phases in Shindo’s career. The early realist films were in keeping with his professed socialism. But in the mid-Sixties, at the same time that he was experimenting with historical themes seen through peasant eyes, he took a sudden detour into sex comedies. Nothing very raunchy happens in them, since their recurring theme is impotence; but Lost Sex (1966), The Origin of Sex (1967) and Operation Négligé (1968) seemed so far in spirit from the man who had made Children of Hiroshima that they left Western critics baffled.

Kaneto Shindo was born in Hiroshima on April 28 1912, the son of impoverished farmers; the family had once been affluent landowners . In 1934 he left home and joined a small film production company called Shinko as a laboratory apprentice. Rising to the post of art director and eventually scriptwriter, he acted as an assistant to several established film-makers, including Mizoguchi.

In 1942 he joined another small unit, Koa Films, which was taken over the following year by the Shochiku studio, one of the giants of the Japanese film industry. Between 1942 and 1951, when Shindo made his directorial debut, he wrote scripts for some of the foremost film-makers in Japanese cinema. For Mizoguchi, whom he acknowledged as the greatest influence on his work, he wrote two feminist pictures, Women’s Victory (1946) and My Love Is Burning (1949); and for Kimisaburo Yoshimura, he produced a stream of outstanding screenplays that made them one of the most successful screen partnerships in post-war Japanese cinema. The finest of their collaborations were A Ball at the Anjo Family (1947) and two elegant costume pictures, The Tale of Genji (1951) and The Beauty and the Dragon (1955).

Neither Shindo nor Yoshimura was popular with the Shochiku management, which continually upbraided them for their “dark outlook”. They walked out in 1950 and established their own independent company, known as Kindai Eiga Kyokai (Modern Film Association), enabling Shindo in 1951 to make his directorial debut with the very personal Story of My Beloved Wife. She had died in 1940, and Shindo was criticised for wallowing in an excess of pathos and sentimentality. An unusual feature of the film is that the role of Shindo’s first wife was played by his second, the actress Nobuko Otowa, who regularly appeared in his subsequent movies. She played a key role in Children of Hiroshima as a young teacher who returns to Hiroshima seven years after the dropping of the atom bomb to seek out survivors among the pupils she had taught at that time.

The film was commissioned by the Japan Teachers’ Union and for the most part used non-professional actors, some of whom had been injured in the blast or lost loved ones. The sponsors, however, were dissatisfied with it. They had looked for a political tract laying the blame squarely on American shoulders. Shindo, however, implied that Japanese militarism bore equal responsibility for the catastrophe.

The Union insisted that he had “reduced the story to a tear-jerker and destroyed its political orientation”. They preferred another film on the same subject made by Hideo Sekigawa, in which America was condemned for dropping the bomb on the Japanese people in a spirit of scientific experimentation, using them as “laboratory animals”.

Though reservations about his handling of the theme persisted, Shindo’s integrity was never in doubt. As a Hiroshima citizen, he identified strongly with the subject. Indeed, he returned to the nuclear debate in 1959 with Lucky Dragon No 5, an account of the Japanese fishermen who were contaminated by fallout from the atomic tests in the Bikini islands.

Through the 1950s, Shindo concentrated principally on social themes in such films as Epitome (1953), about a woman driven to prostitution, and Gutter (1954), a Zolaesque study of low life. None of his later films made much impact in or out of Japan until Onibaba in 1964.

His first period film, Onibaba embraced an earthy sexuality unusual in the cinema of the time . A 16th-century saga set in an era of brutal clan warfare, it shows how two women strive to stay alive by murdering samurai and selling their armour to the highest bidder. In its later stages, the film plunges into horror. The older woman dons a mask, stolen from a dead samurai, who wore it to conceal a ghastly skin affliction. But once assumed, it will not come off and has to be forcibly removed to reveal the hideous reality beneath.

Shindo came close to matching this tour de force in another fable, Kuroneko, made in 1968. Like Onibaba, it was a historical film, centred on two women who are raped and left to die and turn into avenging cats preying on wandering samurai. There is a strong Freudian element in this film since the ghosts seduce their victims before tearing them apart, and one of them turns out to be the demon-woman’s son.

Shindo’s 1966-68 sex trilogy (Lost Sex, The Origin of Sex and Operation Négligé) was more enjoyed than admired, but there was general agreement that the thrillers Heat-Wave Island and Live Today, Die Tomorrow (both 1970) were superior genre pieces.

In 1975, under the title Life of a Film Director, he made an engrossing documentary about Kenji Mizoguchi, the long-dead director from whom he claimed to have learnt most. Though Mizoguchi was gone, those who worked with him and acted for him were still alive. By interviewing them and interspersing their comments with well-chosen film clips, Shindo constructed a model biopic.

Shindo’s later films were eclectic. In 1982 he made a historical biopic of the woodblock artist Hokusai (Hokusai Manga) which focused more on his highly-charged sex life than on his art . The Horizon (1984) was based on his sister’s life as a mail-order bride sold to a Japanese-American . He continued to make films into his late nineties.

Kaneto Shindo’s second wife, Nobuko Otowa, died in 1994.


Kaneto Shindo, born April 28 1912, died May 29 2012

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9301022/Kaneto-Shindo.html

[molly bloom]

Historian and illustrator Peter Connolly has gone to praise the Caesars...

Published on Wednesday 13 June 2012 06:30


History in school is often written off by young people as ‘boring’ and the love of history in later life leads to people to regret not ‘getting into it earlier’ – Peter Connolly was a solution to this. When he arrived in your school, in the local library or indeed in Spalding’s bookshop Bookmark he took it back in time.


His beard, bright eyes, tall demeanour and the passion in his voice gave him an amazing presence. Put into that mix the shields, the helmets, the swords and the chain mail and it was a childhood wonder.

And all of this in the unlikely setting of South Lincolnshire – I first met Peter when I was very young – 5 or 6 years old I guess and his library, workshop and garden became frequent places to visit. He was incredibly patient with my childhood enquiries and questions but he loved developing the answers – ensuring you learnt something on every visit. When he came to Gosberton Clough Primary School the day was a special one, when you knew he was going to be in Spalding Library on a Saturday morning you made a special trip – and the newest book was always worth purchasing.

Whilst Russell Crowe made Roman history fashionable through Gladiator, Peter achieved it through good old fashioned research, study and graphic and accurate illustrations. He was an author, historian, illustrator and experimental archaeologist and most of all he was an inspiration for many people not otherwise motivated by history.

Born in 1935, he studied at Brighton College of Arts and Crafts and his illustrator craft came together to bring out The Roman Army in 1975. This partnership with Macdonald Educational Press led to further successes on The Greeks (1977) and then Hannibal and the Enemies of Rome (1978). The three titles were later brought together into a single volume: Greece and Rome at War (1981 and again in 1998) – perhaps his best work. I remember clearly his passion as he asked if I had read the Bible as it contained great clues to historic realities – that I realise now was as he was bringing out ‘Living in the Time of Jesus of Nazareth’ (1983 - by then he was working with Oxford University Press).

Peter loved the inquisitive – not content with the sources, he walked the Alps to check Hannibal’s route and proved that certain towns could not be seen from previously cited locations, he proved endless facts on how swords and saddles were made and used – his method was to re-enact as near to reality as possible. His reconstruction of the Roman saddle was ground breaking and he demonstrated that horse-riding and warfare was possible without stirrups.

Peter introduced me to Herodotus and Ammianus Marcellinus – each writing centuries apart - but pointing out their similarities and I recall well – “why read novels when you can read Suetonius?”. As a child it worked for me and my own love of Ancient Rome was sealed.

The academic world was slow to recognise his gift, but he was awarded an honorary research fellow at University College London in 1985. He moved from Spridgen’s Corner, Quadring Fen to Spalding in 1988 and continued his prodigious output: The Roman Fort (1991), Greek Legends (1993), Ancient Greece (2001), Ancient Rome (2001) and Colosseum (2003). It’s an amazing string of titles and so many of them (and so many others) all illustrated by him. Those who knew Peter and his family could often find their faces in the books in a military formation or a shop in Pompeii or the like. He brought the history of ancient times past alive and that is his incredible legacy.

Anyone wanting to see the brilliance of Peter’s work should look to The Legend of Odysseus (1986) for which he won the Times Education Supplement Senior Information Book Award – myth and history brought to life with facts, illumination and a real sense of pace and excitement. Much like Peter himself.


Peter William Connolly – author, historian, illustrator and experimental archaeologist. Born 8th May 1935; died 2nd May 2012


• Ed Fordham read Ancient History at the University of Nottingham and lives in north London. He works for RLM Finsbury and Local Partnerships

http://www.spaldingtoday.co.uk/community/community-news/obituary-the-historian-who-brought-ancient-times-to-life-1-3941793

[molly bloom]

Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize winner in Economics:

Elinor Ostrom, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 78, was the first and only woman to win the Nobel prize for economics. She received the award, shared with Oliver E Williamson, in 2009 for her analyses of how individuals and communities can often manage common resources – ranging from irrigation and fisheries to information systems – as well or better than markets, companies or the state. Earlier this year, she appeared on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Lin, as she was known to friends, family and colleagues – of whom I was one – was born in Los Angeles and attended Beverly Hills high school. After completing her doctorate in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1965 – a time when it was still rare for women to hold advanced degrees, let alone tenured positions, in the social sciences – she moved, with her husband, the political theorist Vincent Ostrom, to Bloomington, Indiana, where Lin was initially hired as a visiting assistant professor at Indiana University. The couple remained at the university for the rest of their long and productive careers. Her work was for a long time considered far outside the mainstream of American political science.

In 1973 the Ostroms co-founded a research and teaching centre, the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, where academics could engage in collaborative and interdisciplinary learning and scholarship. The couple evolved a distinct "Bloomington school" of political economy, premised on notions of polycentric governance that Vincent had pioneered in the early 1960s. Polycentric systems involve resource management at multiple levels. The notion remained a constant feature of Lin's work throughout her career, including recent contributions to climate change literature.

Having started her career by focusing on groundwater resources in the Los Angeles basin, then studying neighbourhood policing in Indianapolis, Lin turned her attention to the subject that gained her worldwide recognition: how the overexploitation of unowned or commonly owned resources could be averted by collective action by local users.

Her hugely influential 1990 book, Governing the Commons, examined numerous local management regimes for common resources and established a set of principles for predicting success and failure. It was this work, challenging the conventional wisdom of resource management, which the Nobel committee cited as her primary contribution to economics. But it was far from her only major contribution.

The Ostrom name will for ever be associated with two related frameworks for social-scientific analysis: the institutional analysis and design (IAD) framework and the still-evolving social-ecological systems (SES) framework. The former received its most comprehensive treatment in her 2005 book, Understanding Institutional Diversity, and has become one of the leading analytical tools in the study of public policy. While IAD focused on social rules governing resource use, the SES framework, which pays equal attention to ecological features, will be among Lin's legacies to social science. She also provided a model for breaking down disciplinary boundaries so that researchers from diverse fields could collaborate. In her 2010 book, Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice, Lin and her co-authors offered concrete ideas to make collaboration more successful.

Throughout her work, Lin made it clear that complex and combined social and ecological problems defied simple (or simplistic) institutional solutions. At the biweekly Bloomington Workshop seminars, over which she presided for many years, she would often deny the existence of panaceas. To her, the combined social and ecological world was a highly complex place in which different circumstances favoured different approaches to problem-solving.

Lin received a dozen honorary doctorates from universities from Harvard to Uppsala, and more than two dozen awards and prizes from academic and professional organisations. She served as president of the American Political Science Association, the International Association for the Study of Common Property, and the Public Choice Society, and on the executive boards or committees of dozens of professional organisations, including the National Science Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, the National Research Council, the MacArthur Foundation and the Stockholm Resilience Centre. She sat on editorial boards of nearly two dozen journals.

Lin was an intensely private and modest person who was taken aback and sometimes embarrassed by the attention she received towards the end of her career. To her, accolades took a back seat to the work, which was always, in her mind, a collaborative enterprise. It was not out of false modesty that she often referred to her Nobel prize as the Workshop's prize.

Her legacy is contained not only in the nearly three dozen books and more than 300 articles and chapters she published, but also in the approximately 80 students whose dissertations she supervised (she sat on the dissertation committees of approximately 50 others) and who now are scholars in social science departments at colleges and universities throughout the world.

Lin was diagnosed with cancer in October 2011 but maintained for as long as possible her demanding work and travel schedule. Even after surgery in May 2012, she completed work on several papers and continued to talk about future projects.

She is survived by Vincent.

• Elinor Ostrom, economist, born 7 August 1933; died 12 June 2012

[embalmer42]

Apparently Rodney King is no more.

http://www.cnn.com/

[Uncle Sparky]

Oscar-nominated actress Susan Tyrrell, known for roles in offbeat films, dies in Texas at 67

DALLAS - Oscar-nominated actress Susan Tyrrell, known for roles in offbeat films including John Waters' "Cry-Baby," has died. She was 67.

Tyrrell died Saturday in her sleep at home in Austin, her niece told The Associated Press on Tuesday. Tyrrell, who received a best supporting actress Oscar nomination for her role as barfly Oma in John Huston's 1972 boxing movie "Fat City," appeared in more than 75 movies and television shows.

"She had a larger than life personality," said David Zellner, who directed Tyrrell in the movie "Kid-Thing," which is currently making the rounds at film festivals. "She had more adventures and experiences in her life than most anyone I know."

The movie is about a 10-year-old delinquent girl who lives in the Texas countryside and happens across a mysterious woman, played by Tyrrell, in a well, said Zellner.

Her niece, Amy Sweet, said her aunt moved to Austin to live near her. She said Tyrrell's legs were amputated below the knee 12 years ago as a result of complications from a blood clotting disorder.

Sweet said her aunt's passions ranged from rap music to animals, and that she even had a bug collection.

"On the night she died, she'd found a dragonfly she was excited about. Everything was a huge deal," Sweet said.

A Travis County Medical Examiner's Office official said a cause of death was pending.

[Alexander's Horse]

can I post Mubarak yet?

[-Jrabbit]

We prefer that they be actually deceased before awarding points.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

That's 3 in favour so far. Still waiting on SlowwHand and OFITG.

DaShi's Motion is not faring well at committee.

I am in the top 5... ... In disputes such as these I am always for more players so even if Ozzie ordered it, I am for keeping him on the team, in the name of keeping the game alive, everything for the greater good

[DaShi]

Alright, we'll consider Sloww's no show as a no. That still puts points for Ozzy in the majority. So I withdraw my complaint at this time. However, I would like this rule clarified for future versions of the game.

[SlowwHand]

I don't even know what you're talking about. I didn't scroll through endless trivia to try and find out.