chunks
stringlengths 1
1.02k
|
|---|
's brothers took his body back to Pittsburgh, where an opencoffin wake was held at the Thomas P. Kunsak Funeral Home. The solid bronze casket had goldplated rails and white upholstery. Warhol was dressed in a black cashmere suit, a paisley tie, a platinum wig, and sunglasses. He was laid out holding a small prayer book and a red rose. The funeral liturgy was held at the Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church on Pittsburgh's North Side. The eulogy was given by Monsignor Peter Tay. Yoko Ono and John Richardson were speakers. The coffin was covered with white roses and asparagus ferns. After the liturgy, the coffin was driven to St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Bethel Park, a south suburb of Pittsburgh.
At the grave, the priest said a brief prayer and sprinkled holy water on the casket. Before the coffin was lowered, Warhol's friend and advertising director of Interview Paige Powell dropped a copy of the magazine, an Interview Tshirt, and a bottle of the Este Lauder perfume "Beautiful" into the
|
grave. Warhol was buried next to his mother and father. A memorial service was held in Manhattan for Warhol at St. Patrick's Cathedral on April 1, 1987.
Art works
Paintings
By the beginning of the 1960s, pop art was an experimental form that several artists were independently adopting; some of these pioneers, such as Roy Lichtenstein, would later become synonymous with the movement. Warhol, who would become famous as the "Pope of Pop", turned to this new style, where popular subjects could be part of the artist's palette. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, handpainted with paint drips. Marilyn Monroe was a pop art painting that Warhol had done and it was very popular. Those drips emulated the style of successful abstract expressionists such as Willem de Kooning. Warhol's first pop art paintings were displayed in April 1961, serving as the backdrop for New York Department Store Bonwit Teller's window display. This was the same stage his Pop Art contemporaries Jasper Joh
|
ns, James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg had also once graced.
It was the gallerist Muriel Latow who came up with the ideas for both the soup cans and Warhol's dollar paintings. On November 23, 1961, Warhol wrote Latow a check for 50 which, according to the 2009 Warhol biography, Pop, The Genius of Warhol, was payment for coming up with the idea of the soup cans as subject matter. For his first major exhibition, Warhol painted his famous cans of Campbell's soup, which he claimed to have had for lunch for most of his life.
From these beginnings, he developed his later style and subjects. Instead of working on a signature subject matter, as he started out to do, he worked more and more on a signature style, slowly eliminating the handmade from the artistic process. Warhol frequently used silkscreening; his later drawings were traced from slide projections. At the height of his fame as a painter, Warhol had several assistants who produced his silkscreen multiples, following his directions to make different
|
versions and variations.
Warhol produced both comic and serious works; his subject could be a soup can or an electric chair. Warhol used the same techniquessilkscreens, reproduced serially, and often painted with bright colorswhether he painted celebrities, everyday objects, or images of suicide, car crashes, and disasters, as in the 196263 Death and Disaster series.
In 1979, Warhol was commissioned to paint a BMW M1 Group 4 racing version for the fourth installment of the BMW Art Car project. He was initially asked to paint a BMW 320i in 1978, but the car model was changed and it didn't qualify for the race that year. Warhol was the first artist to paint directly onto the automobile himself instead of letting technicians transfer a scalemodel design to the car. Reportedly, it took him only 23 minutes to paint the entire car. Racecar drivers Herv Poulain, Manfred Winkelhock and Marcel Mignot drove the car at the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Some of Warhol's work, as well as his own personality, has been desc
|
ribed as being Keatonesque. Warhol has been described as playing dumb to the media. He sometimes refused to explain his work. He has suggested that all one needs to know about his work is "already there 'on the surface.
His Rorschach inkblots are intended as pop comments on art and what art could be. His cow wallpaper literally, wallpaper with a cow motif and his oxidation paintings canvases prepared with copper paint that was then oxidized with urine are also noteworthy in this context. Equally noteworthy is the way these worksand their means of productionmirrored the atmosphere at Andy's New York "Factory". Biographer Bob Colacello provides some details on Andy's "piss paintings"
Warhol's 1982 portrait of Basquiat, JeanMichel Basquiat, is a silkscreen over an oxidized copper "piss painting." After many years of silkscreen, oxidation, photography, etc., Warhol returned to painting with a brush in hand. In 1983, Warhol began collaborating with Basquiat and Clemente. Warhol and Basquiat created a series of m
|
ore than 50 large collaborative works between 1984 and 1985. Despite criticism when these were first shown, Warhol called some of them "masterpieces," and they were influential for his later work.
In 1984, Warhol was commissioned by collector and gallerist Alexander Iolas to produce work based on Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper for an exhibition at the old refectory of the Palazzo delle Stelline in Milan, opposite from the Santa Maria delle Grazie where Leonardo da Vinci's mural can be seen. Warhol exceeded the demands of the commission and produced nearly 100 variations on the theme, mostly silkscreens and paintings, and among them a collaborative sculpture with Basquiat, the Ten Punching Bags Last Supper.
The Milan exhibition that opened in January 1987 with a set of 22 silkscreens, was the last exhibition for both the artist and the gallerist. The series of The Last Supper was seen by some as "arguably his greatest," but by others as "wishywashy, religiose" and "spiritless". It is the largest series o
|
f religiousthemed works by any U.S. artist.
Artist Maurizio Cattelan describes that it is difficult to separate daily encounters from the art of Andy Warhol "That's probably the greatest thing about Warhol the way he penetrated and summarized our world, to the point that distinguishing between him and our everyday life is basically impossible, and in any case useless." Warhol was an inspiration towards Cattelan's magazine and photography compilations, such as Permanent Food, Charley, and Toilet Paper.
In the period just before his death, Warhol was working on Cars, a series of paintings for MercedesBenz.
Art market
The value of Andy Warhol's work has been on an endless upward trajectory since his death in 1987. In 2014, his works accumulated 569 million at auction, which accounted for more than a sixth of the global art market. However, there have been some dips. According to art dealer Dominique Lvy, "The Warhol trade moves something like a seesaw being pulled uphill it rises and falls, but each new hig
|
h and low is above the last one." She attributes this to the consistent influx of new collectors intrigued by Warhol. "At different moments, you've had different groups of collectors entering the Warhol market, and that resulted in peaks in demand, then satisfaction and a slow down," before the process repeats another demographic or the next generation.
In 1998, Orange Marilyn 1964, a depiction of Marilyn Monroe, sold for 17.3 million, which at the time set a new record as the highest price paid for a Warhol artwork. In 2007, one of Warhol's 1963 paintings of Elizabeth Taylor, Liz Colored Liz, which was owned by actor Hugh Grant, sold for 23.7 million at Christie's.
In 2007, Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson sold Warhol's Turquoise Marilyn 1964 to financier Steven A. Cohen for 80 million. In May 2007, Green Car Crash 1963 sold for 71.1 million and Lemon Marilyn 1962 sold for 28 million at Christie's postwar and contemporary art auction. In 2007, Large Campbell's Soup Can 1964 was sold at a Sotheby's auction to a
|
South American collector for 7.4 million. In November 2009, 200 One Dollar Bills 1962 at Sotheby's for 43.8 million.
In 2008, Eight Elvises 1963 was sold by Annibale Berlingieri for 100 million to a private buyer. The work depicts Elvis Presley in a gunslinger pose. It was first exhibited in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Warhol made 22 versions of the Double Elvis, nine of which are held in museums. In May 2012, Double Elvis Ferus Type sold at auction at Sotheby's for 37 million. In November 2014, Triple Elvis Ferus Type sold for 81.9 million at Christie's.
In May 2010, a purple selfportrait of Warhol from 1986 that was owned by fashion designer Tom Ford sold for 32.6 million at Sotheby's. In November 2010, Men in Her Life 1962, based on Elizabeth Taylor, sold for 63.4 million at Phillips de Pury and CocaCola 4 1962 sold for 35.3 million at Sotheby's. In May 2011, Warhol's first selfportrait from 196364 sold for 38.4 million and a red selfportrait from 1986 sold for 27.5 million at Christie's.
|
In May 2011, Liz 5 Early Colored Liz sold for 26.9 million at Phillips.
In November 2013, Warhol's rarely seen 1963 diptych, Silver Car Crash Double Disaster, sold at Sotheby's for 105.4 million, a new record for the artist. In November 2013, CocaCola 3 1962 sold for 57.3 million at Christie's. In May 2014, White Marilyn 1962 sold for 41 million at Christie's. In November 2014, Four Marlons 1964, which depicts Marlon Brando, sold for 69.6 million at Christie's. In May 2015, Silver Liz diptych, painted in 196365, sold for 28 million and Colored Mona Lisa 1963 sold for 56.2 million at Christie's. In May 2017, Warhol's 1962 painting Big Campbell's Soup Can With Can Opener Vegetable sold for 27.5 million at Christie's.
Collectors
Among Warhol's early collectors and influential supporters were Emily and Burton Tremaine. Among the over 15 artworks purchased, Marilyn Diptych now at Tate Modern, London and A boy for Meg now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, were purchased directly out of Warhol's
|
studio in 1962. One Christmas, Warhol left a small Head of Marilyn Monroe by the Tremaine's door at their New York apartment in gratitude for their support and encouragement.
Works
Filmography
Warhol attended the 1962 premiere of the static composition by La Monte Young called Trio for Strings and subsequently created his famous series of static films. Filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who accompanied Warhol to the Trio premiere, claims Warhol's static films were directly inspired by the performance. Between 1963 and 1968, he made more than 60 films, plus some 500 short blackandwhite "screen test" portraits of Factory visitors. One of his most famous films, Sleep, monitors poet John Giorno sleeping for six hours. The 35minute film Blow Job is one continuous shot of the face of DeVeren Bookwalter supposedly receiving oral sex from filmmaker Willard Maas, although the camera never tilts down to see this. Another, Empire 1964, consists of eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building in New York City at dusk. The
|
film Eat consists of a man eating a mushroom for 45 minutes.
Batman Dracula is a 1964 film that was produced and directed by Warhol, without the permission of DC Comics. It was screened only at his art exhibits. A fan of the Batman series, Warhol's movie was an "homage" to the series, and is considered the first appearance of a blatantly campy Batman. The film was until recently thought to have been lost, until scenes from the picture were shown at some length in the 2006 documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis.
Warhol's 1965 film Vinyl is an adaptation of Anthony Burgess' popular dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. Others record improvised encounters between Factory regulars such as Brigid Berlin, Viva, Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Ondine, Nico, and Jackie Curtis. Legendary underground artist Jack Smith appears in the film Camp.
His most popular and critically successful film was Chelsea Girls 1966. The film was highly innovative in that it consisted of two 16 mmfilms bein
|
g projected simultaneously, with two different stories being shown in tandem. From the projection booth, the sound would be raised for one film to elucidate that "story" while it was lowered for the other. The multiplication of images evoked Warhol's seminal silkscreen works of the early 1960s.
Warhol was a fan of filmmaker Radley Metzger film work and commented that Metzger's film, The Lickerish Quartet, was "an outrageously kinky masterpiece". Blue Moviea film in which Warhol superstar Viva makes love in bed with Louis Waldon, another Warhol superstarwas Warhol's last film as director. The film, a seminal film in the Golden Age of Porn, was, at the time, controversial for its frank approach to a sexual encounter. Blue Movie was publicly screened in New York City in 2005, for the first time in more than 30 years.
In the wake of the 1968 shooting, a reclusive Warhol relinquished his personal involvement in filmmaking. His acolyte and assistant director, Paul Morrissey, took over the filmmaking chores for th
|
e Factory collective, steering Warholbranded cinema towards more mainstream, narrativebased, Bmovie exploitation fare with Flesh, Trash, and Heat. All of these films, including the later Andy Warhol's Dracula and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, were far more mainstream than anything Warhol as a director had attempted. These latter "Warhol" films starred Joe Dallesandromore of a Morrissey star than a true Warhol superstar.
In the early 1970s, most of the films directed by Warhol were pulled out of circulation by Warhol and the people around him who ran his business. After Warhol's death, the films were slowly restored by the Whitney Museum and are occasionally projected at museums and film festivals. Few of the Warholdirected films are available on video or DVD.
Music
In the mid1960s, Warhol adopted the band the Velvet Underground, making them a crucial element of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia performance art show. Warhol, with Paul Morrissey, acted as the band's manager, introducing them to Nico w
|
ho would perform with the band at Warhol's request. While managing The Velvet Underground, Andy would have them dressed in all black to perform in front of movies that he was also presenting. In 1966, he "produced" their first album The Velvet Underground Nico, as well as providing its album art. His actual participation in the album's production amounted to simply paying for the studio time. After the band's first album, Warhol and band leader Lou Reed started to disagree more about the direction the band should take, and their artistic friendship ended. In 1989, after Warhol's death, Reed and John Cale reunited for the first time since 1972 to write, perform, record and release the concept album Songs for Drella, a tribute to Warhol. In October 2019, an audio tape of publicly unknown music by Reed, based on Warhols' 1975 book, "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again", was reported to have been discovered in an archive at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Warhol designed many album co
|
vers for various artists starting with the photographic cover of John Wallowitch's debut album, This Is John Wallowitch!!! 1964. He designed the cover art for The Rolling Stones' albums Sticky Fingers 1971 and Love You Live 1977, and the John Cale albums The Academy in Peril 1972 and Honi Soit in 1981. One of Warhol's last works was a portrait of Aretha Franklin for the cover of her 1986 gold album Aretha.
Warhol strongly influenced the new wavepunk rock band Devo, as well as David Bowie. Bowie recorded a song called "Andy Warhol" for his 1971 album Hunky Dory. Lou Reed wrote the song "Andy's Chest", about Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Warhol, in 1968. He recorded it with the Velvet Underground, and this version was released on the VU album in 1985. Bowie would later play Warhol in the 1996 movie, Basquiat. Bowie recalled how meeting Warhol in real life helped him in the role, and recounted his early meetings with him
The band Triumph also wrote a song about Andy Warhol, "Stranger In A Strange Land" o
|
ff their 1984 album Thunder Seven.
Books and print
Beginning in the early 1950s, Warhol produced several unbound portfolios of his work.
The first of several bound selfpublished books by Warhol was 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, printed in 1954 by Seymour Berlin on Arches brand watermarked paper using his blotted line technique for the lithographs. The original edition was limited to 190 numbered, handcolored copies, using Dr. Martin's ink washes. Most of these were given by Warhol as gifts to clients and friends. Copy No. 4, inscribed "Jerry" on the front cover and given to Geraldine Stutz, was used for a facsimile printing in 1987, and the original was auctioned in May 2006 for US35,000 by Doyle New York.
Other selfpublished books by Warhol include
A Gold Book
Wild Raspberries
Holy Cats
Warhol's book A La Recherche du Shoe Perdu 1955 marked his "transition from commercial to gallery artist". The title is a play on words by Warhol on the title of French author Marcel Proust's la recherche du t
|
emps perdu.
After gaining fame, Warhol "wrote" several books that were commercially published
a, A Novel 1968, is a literal transcriptioncontaining spelling errors and phonetically written background noise and mumblingof audio recordings of Ondine and several of Andy Warhol's friends hanging out at the Factory, talking, going out.
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol From A to B Back Again 1975, according to Pat Hackett's introduction to The Andy Warhol Diaries, Pat Hackett did the transcriptions and text for the book based on daily phone conversations, sometimes when Warhol was traveling using audio cassettes that Andy Warhol gave her. Said cassettes contained conversations with Brigid Berlin also known as Brigid Polk and former Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello.
Popism The Warhol Sixties 1980, , authored by Warhol and Pat Hackett, is a retrospective view of the 1960s and the role of pop art.
The Andy Warhol Diaries 1989, , edited by Pat Hackett, is a diary dictated by Warhol to Hackett in daily phone
|
conversations. Warhol started the diary to keep track of his expenses after being audited, although it soon evolved to include his personal and cultural observations.
Warhol created the fashion magazine Interview that is still published today. The loopy title script on the cover is thought to be either his own handwriting or that of his mother, Julia Warhola, who would often do text work for his early commercial pieces.
Other media
Although Andy Warhol is most known for his paintings and films, he authored works in many different media.
Drawing Warhol started his career as a commercial illustrator, producing drawings in "blottedink" style for advertisements and magazine articles. Best known of these early works are his drawings of shoes. Some of his personal drawings were selfpublished in small booklets, such as Yum, Yum, Yum about food, Ho, Ho, Ho about Christmas and Shoes, Shoes, Shoes. His most artistically acclaimed book of drawings is probably A Gold Book, compiled of sensitive drawings of young men.
|
A Gold Book is so named because of the gold leaf that decorates its pages. In April 2012 a sketch of 1930s singer Rudy Vallee claimed to have been drawn by Andy Warhol was found at a Las Vegas garage sale. The image was said to have been drawn when Andy was nine or 10. Various authorities have challenged the image's authenticity.
Sculpture Warhol's most famous sculpture is probably his Brillo Boxes, silkscreened ink on wood replicas of the large, branded cardboard boxes used to hold 24 packages of Brillo soap pads. The original Brillo design was by commercial artist James Harvey. Warhol's sculpture was part of a series of "grocery carton" works that also included Heinz ketchup and Campbell's tomato juice cases. Other famous works include the Silver Cloudshelium filled, silver mylar, pillowshaped balloons. A Silver Cloud was included in the traveling exhibition Air Art 19681969 curated by Willoughby Sharp. Clouds was also adapted by Warhol for avantgarde choreographer Merce Cunningham's dance piece RainFores
|
t 1968.
Audio At one point Warhol carried a portable recorder with him wherever he went, taping everything everybody said and did. He referred to this device as his "wife". Some of these tapes were the basis for his literary work. Another audiowork of Warhol's was his Invisible Sculpture, a presentation in which burglar alarms would go off when entering the room. Warhol's cooperation with the musicians of The Velvet Underground was driven by an expressed desire to become a music producer.
Time Capsules In 1973, Warhol began saving ephemera from his daily lifecorrespondence, newspapers, souvenirs, childhood objects, even used plane tickets and foodwhich was sealed in plain cardboard boxes dubbed Time Capsules. By the time of his death, the collection grew to include 600, individually dated "capsules". The boxes are now housed at the Andy Warhol Museum.
Television Andy Warhol dreamed of a television special about a favorite subject of hisNothingthat he would call The Nothing Special. Later in his career he d
|
id create two cable television shows, Andy Warhol's TV in 1982 and Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes based on his famous "fifteen minutes of fame" quotation for MTV in 1986. Besides his own shows he regularly made guest appearances on other programs, including The Love Boat wherein a Midwestern wife Marion Ross fears Andy Warhol will reveal to her husband Tom Bosley, who starred alongside Ross in sitcom Happy Days her secret past as a Warhol superstar named Marina del Rey. Warhol also produced a TV commercial for Schrafft's Restaurants in New York City, for an ice cream dessert appropriately titled the "Underground Sundae".
Fashion Warhol is quoted for having said "I'd rather buy a dress and put it up on the wall, than put a painting, wouldn't you?" One of his bestknown superstars, Edie Sedgwick, aspired to be a fashion designer, and his good friend Halston was a famous one. Warhol's work in fashion includes silkscreened dresses, a short subcareer as a catwalkmodel and books on fashion as well as paintings with
|
fashion shoes as a subject. Warhol himself has been described as a modern dandy, whose authority "rested more on presence than on words".
Performance Art Warhol and his friends staged theatrical multimedia happenings at parties and public venues, combining music, film, slide projections and even Gerard Malanga in an SM outfit cracking a whip. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable in 1966 was the culmination of this area of his work.
Theater Warhol's play Andy Warhol's Pork opened on May 5, 1971, at LaMama theater in New York for a twoweek run and was brought to the Roundhouse in London for a longer run in August 1971. Pork was based on taperecorded conversations between Brigid Berlin and Andy during which Brigid would play for Andy tapes she had made of phone conversations between herself and her mother, socialite Honey Berlin. The play featured Jayne County as "Vulva" and Cherry Vanilla as "Amanda Pork". In 1974, Andy Warhol also produced the stage musical Man on the Moon, which was written by John Phillips of t
|
he Mamas and the Papas.
Photography To produce his silkscreens, Warhol made photographs or had them made by his friends and assistants. These pictures were mostly taken with a specific model of Polaroid camera, The Big Shot, that Polaroid kept in production especially for Warhol. This photographic approach to painting and his snapshot method of taking pictures has had a great effect on artistic photography. Warhol was an accomplished photographer, and took an enormous number of photographs of Factory visitors, friends, acquired by Stanford University.
Music In 1963, Warhol founded The Druds, a shortlived avantgarde noise music band that featured prominent members of the New York protoconceptual art and minimal art community.
Computer Warhol used Amiga computers to generate digital art, including You Are the One, which he helped design and build with Amiga, Inc. He also displayed the difference between slow fill and fast fill on live TV with Debbie Harry as a model.
Personal life
Sexuality
Warhol was hom
|
osexual. In 1980, he told an interviewer that he was still a virgin. Biographer Bob Colacello, who was present at the interview, felt it was probably true and that what little sex he had was probably "a mixture of voyeurism and masturbationto use Andy's word abstract". Warhol's assertion of virginity would seem to be contradicted by his hospital treatment in 1960 for condylomata, a sexually transmitted disease. It has also been contradicted by his lovers, including Warhol muse BillyBoy, who has said they had sex to orgasm "When he wasn't being Andy Warhol and when you were just alone with him he was an incredibly generous and very kind person. What seduced me was the Andy Warhol who I saw alone. In fact when I was with him in public he kind of got on my nerves....I'd say 'You're just obnoxious, I can't bear you.'" Billy Name also denied that Warhol was only a voyeur, saying "He was the essence of sexuality. It permeated everything. Andy exuded it, along with his great artistic creativity....It brought a joy t
|
o the whole art world in New York." "But his personality was so vulnerable that it became a defense to put up the blank front." Warhol's lovers included John Giorno, Billy Name, Charles Lisanby, and Jon Gould. His boyfriend of 12 years was Jed Johnson, whom he met in 1968, and who later achieved fame as an interior designer.
The fact that Warhol's homosexuality influenced his work and shaped his relationship to the art world is a major subject of scholarship on the artist and is an issue that Warhol himself addressed in interviews, in conversation with his contemporaries, and in his publications e.g., Popism The Warhol 1960s. Throughout his career, Warhol produced erotic photography and drawings of male nudes. Many of his most famous works portraits of Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor, and films such as Blow Job, My Hustler and Lonesome Cowboys draw from gay underground culture or openly explore the complexity of sexuality and desire. As has been addressed by a range of scholars, many of his
|
films premiered in gay porn theaters, including the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre and 55th Street Playhouse, in the late 1960s.
The first works that Warhol submitted to a fine art gallery, homoerotic drawings of male nudes, were rejected for being too openly gay. In Popism, furthermore, the artist recalls a conversation with the filmmaker Emile de Antonio about the difficulty Warhol had being accepted socially by the thenmorefamous but closeted gay artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. De Antonio explained that Warhol was "too swish and that upsets them". In response to this, Warhol writes, "There was nothing I could say to that. It was all too true. So I decided I just wasn't going to care, because those were all the things that I didn't want to change anyway, that I didn't think I 'should' want to change ... Other people could change their attitudes but not me". In exploring Warhol's biography, many turn to this periodthe late 1950s and early 1960sas a key moment in the development of his person
|
a. Some have suggested that his frequent refusal to comment on his work, to speak about himself confining himself in interviews to responses like "Um, no" and "Um, yes", and often allowing others to speak for himand even the evolution of his pop stylecan be traced to the years when Warhol was first dismissed by the inner circles of the New York art world.
Religious beliefs
Warhol was a practicing Ruthenian Catholic. He regularly volunteered at homeless shelters in New York City, particularly during the busier times of the year, and described himself as a religious person. Many of Warhol's later works depicted religious subjects, including two series, Details of Renaissance Paintings 1984 and The Last Supper 1986. In addition, a body of religiousthemed works was found posthumously in his estate.
During his life, Warhol regularly attended Liturgy, and the priest at Warhol's church, Saint Vincent Ferrer, said that the artist went there almost daily, although he was not observed taking Communion or going to Co
|
nfession and sat or knelt in the pews at the back. The priest thought he was afraid of being recognized; Warhol said he was selfconscious about being seen in a Roman Rite church crossing himself "in the Orthodox way" right to left instead of the reverse.
His art is noticeably influenced by the Eastern Christian tradition which was so evident in his places of worship.
Warhol's brother has described the artist as "really religious, but he didn't want people to know about that because it was private". Despite the private nature of his faith, in Warhol's eulogy John Richardson depicted it as devout "To my certain knowledge, he was responsible for at least one conversion. He took considerable pride in financing his nephew's studies for the priesthood".
Collections
Warhol was an avid collector. His friends referred to his numerous collections, which filled not only his fourstory townhouse, but also a nearby storage unit, as "Andy's Stuff". The true extent of his collections was not discovered until after his dea
|
th, when The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh took in 641 boxes of his "Stuff".
Warhol's collections included a CocaCola memorabilia sign, and 19th century paintings along with airplane menus, unpaid invoices, pizza dough, pornographic pulp novels, newspapers, stamps, supermarket flyers, and cookie jars, among other eccentricities. It also included significant works of art, such as George Bellows's Miss Bentham. One of his main collections was his wigs. Warhol owned more than 40 and felt very protective of his hairpieces, which were sewn by a New York wigmaker from hair imported from Italy. In 1985, a girl snatched Warhol's wig off his head. It was later discovered in Warhol's diary entry for that day that he wrote "I don't know what held me back from pushing her over the balcony."
In 1960, he had bought a drawing of a light bulb by Jasper Johns.
Another item found in Warhol's boxes at the museum in Pittsburgh was a mummified human foot from Ancient Egypt. The curator of anthropology at Carnegie Museum of
|
Natural History felt that Warhol most likely found it at a flea market.
Andy Warhol also collected many books, with more than 1200 titles in his personal collection. Of these, 139 titles have been publicly identified through a 1988 Sotheby's Auction catalog, The Andy Warhol Collection and can be viewed online. His book collection reflects his eclectic taste and interests, and includes books written by and about some of his acquaintances and friends. Some of the titles in his collection include The Two Mrs. Grenvilles A Novel by Dominick Dunne, Artists in Uniform by Max Eastman, Andrews' Diseases of the Skin Clinical Dermatology by George Clinton Andrews, D.V. by Diana Vreeland, Blood of a Poet by Jean Cocteau, Watercolours by Francesco Clemente, Little World, Hello! by Jimmy Savo, Hidden Faces by Salvador Dal, and The Dinah Shore Cookbook by Dinah Shore.
Legacy
In 2002, the U.S. Postal Service issued an 18cent stamp commemorating Warhol. Designed by Richard Sheaff of Scottsdale, Arizona, the stamp was unve
|
iled at a ceremony at The Andy Warhol Museum and features Warhol's painting "SelfPortrait, 1964". In March 2011, a chrome statue of Andy Warhol and his Polaroid camera was revealed at Union Square in New York City.
A crater on Mercury was named after Warhol in 2012.
Warhol Foundation
Warhol's will dictated that his entire estatewith the exception of a few modest legacies to family memberswould go to create a foundation dedicated to the "advancement of the visual arts". Warhol had so many possessions that it took Sotheby's nine days to auction his estate after his death; the auction grossed more than US20 million.
In 1987, in accordance with Warhol's will, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts began. The foundation serves as the estate of Andy Warhol, but also has a mission "to foster innovative artistic expression and the creative process" and is "focused primarily on supporting work of a challenging and often experimental nature".
The Artists Rights Society is the U.S. copyright representative f
|
or the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for all Warhol works with the exception of Warhol film stills. The U.S. copyright representative for Warhol film stills is the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Additionally, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has agreements in place for its image archive. All digital images of Warhol are exclusively managed by Corbis, while all transparency images of Warhol are managed by Art Resource.
The Andy Warhol Foundation released its 20th Anniversary Annual Report as a threevolume set in 2007 Vol. I, 19872007; Vol. II, Grants Exhibitions; and Vol. III, Legacy Program.
The Foundation is in the process of compiling its catalogue raisonn of paintings and sculptures in volumes covering blocks of years of the artist's career. Volumes IV and V were released in 2019. The subsequent volumes are still in the process of being compiled.
The Foundation remains one of the largest grantgiving organizations for the visual arts in the U.S.
Many of Warhol's works and posse
|
ssions are on display at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. The foundation donated more than 3,000 works of art to the museum.
In pop culture
Warhol founded Interview magazine, a stage for celebrities he "endorsed" and a business staffed by his friends. He collaborated with others on all of his books some of which were written with Pat Hackett. One might even say that he produced people as in the Warholian "Superstar" and the Warholian portrait. Warhol endorsed products, appeared in commercials, and made frequent celebrity guest appearances on television shows and in films he appeared in everything from Love Boat to Saturday Night Live and the Richard Pryor movie Dynamite Chicken.
In this respect Warhol was a fan of "Art Business" and "Business Art"he, in fact, wrote about his interest in thinking about art as business in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again.
Films
Warhol appeared as himself in the film Cocaine Cowboys 1979 and in the film Tootsie 1982.
After his death, Warhol was
|
portrayed by Crispin Glover in Oliver Stone's film The Doors 1991, by David Bowie in Julian Schnabel's film Basquiat 1996, and by Jared Harris in Mary Harron's film I Shot Andy Warhol 1996. Warhol appears as a character in Michael Daugherty's opera Jackie O 1997. Actor Mark Bringleson makes a brief cameo as Warhol in Austin Powers International Man of Mystery 1997. Many films by avantgarde cineast Jonas Mekas have caught the moments of Warhol's life. Sean Gregory Sullivan depicted Warhol in the film 54 1998. Guy Pearce portrayed Warhol in the film Factory Girl 2007 about Edie Sedgwick's life. Actor Greg Travis portrays Warhol in a brief scene from the film Watchmen 2009.
In the movie Highway to Hell a group of Andy Warhols are part of the Good Intentions Paving Company where goodintentioned souls are ground into pavement. In the film Men in Black 3 2012 Andy Warhol turns out to really be undercover MIB Agent W played by Bill Hader. Warhol is throwing a party at The Factory in 1969, where he is looked up by
|
MIB Agents K and J J from the future. Agent W is desperate to end his undercover job "I'm so out of ideas I'm painting soup cans and bananas, for Christ sakes!", "You gotta fake my death, okay? I can't listen to sitar music anymore." and "I can't tell the women from the men.".
Andy Warhol portrayed by Tom Meeten is one of main characters of the 2012 British television show Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy. The character is portrayed as having robotlike mannerisms. In the 2017 feature The Billionaire Boys Club Cary Elwes portrays Warhol in a film based on the true story about Ron Levin portrayed by Kevin Spacey a friend of Warhol's who was murdered in 1986. In September 2016, it was announced that Jared Leto would portray the title character in Warhol, an upcoming American biographical drama film produced by Michael De Luca and written by Terence Winter, based on the book Warhol The Biography by Victor Bockris.
Documentaries
The documentary Absolut Warhola 2001 was produced by Polish director Stanislaw Mucha, f
|
eaturing Warhol's parents' family and hometown in Slovakia.
Andy Warhol A Documentary Film 2006 is a reverential, fourhour movie by Ric Burns that won a Peabody Award in 2006.
Andy Warhol Double Denied 2006 is a 52minute movie by Ian Yentob about the difficulties authenticating Warhol's work.
Andy Warhol's People Factory 2008, a threepart television documentary directed by Catherine Shorr, features interviews with several of Warhol's associates.
Television
Warhol appeared as a recurring character in TV series Vinyl, played by John Cameron Mitchell. Warhol was portrayed by Evan Peters in the American Horror Story Cult episode "Valerie Solanas Died for Your Sins Scumbag". The episode depicts the attempted assassination of Warhol by Valerie Solanas Lena Dunham.
In early 1969, Andy Warhol was commissioned by Braniff International to appear in two television commercials to promote the luxury airline's "When You Got It Flaunt It" campaign. The campaign was created by the advertising agency Lois Holland Callow
|
ay, which was led by George Lois, creator of a famed series of Esquire Magazine covers. The first commercial series involved pairing unlikely people who shared the fact that they both flew Braniff Airways. Warhol was paired with boxing legend Sonny Liston. The odd commercial worked as did the others that featured unlikely fellow travelers such as painter Salvador Dal and baseball legend Whitey Ford.
Two additional commercials for Braniff were created that featured famous persons entering a Braniff jet and being greeted by a Braniff hostess while espousing their like for flying Braniff. Warhol was also featured in the first of these commercials that were also produced by Lois and were released in the summer of 1969. Lois has incorrectly stated that he was commissioned by Braniff in 1967 for representation during that year, but at that time Madison Avenue advertising doyenne Mary Wells Lawrence, who was married to Braniff's chairman and president Harding Lawrence, was representing the Dallasbased carrier at th
|
at time. Lois succeeded Wells Rich Greene Agency on December 1, 1968. The rights to Warhol's films for Braniff and his signed contracts are owned by a private trust and are administered by Braniff Airways Foundation in Dallas, Texas.
Books
A biography of Andy Warhol written by art critic Blake Gopnik was published in 2020 under the title Warhol.
See also
Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board
Andy Warhol Bridge, Pittsburgh, PA
LGBT culture in New York City
List of LGBT people from New York City
Moon Museum
Painting the Century 101 Portrait Masterpieces 19002000
References
Further reading
"A symposium on Pop Art". Arts Magazine, April 1963, pp. 3645. The symposium was held in 1962, at The Museum of Modern Art, and published in this issue the following year.
Celant, Germano. Andy Warhol A Factory. Kunstmuseum Wolfsbug, 1999.
Doyle, Jennifer, Jonathan Flatley, and Jos Esteban Muoz, eds 1996. Pop Out Queer Warhol. Durham Duke University Press.
Duncan Fallowell, 20th Century Characters, ch.
|
Andy Lives London, Vintage, 1994
James, James, "Andy Warhol The Producer as Author", in Allegories of Cinema American Film in the 1960s 1989, pp. 5884. Princeton Princeton University Press.
Krauss, Rosalind E. "Warhol's Abstract Spectacle". In Abstraction, Gesture, Ecriture Paintings from the Daros Collection. New York Scalo, 1999, pp. 12333.
Lippard, Lucy R., Pop Art, Thames and Hudson, 1970 1985 reprint,
Scherman, Tony, David Dalton, POP The Genius of Andy Warhol, New York, NY HarperCollins, 2009
Suarez, Juan Antonio 1996. Bike Boys, Drag Queens, Superstars AvantGarde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema. Indianapolis Indiana University Press.
External links
Andy Warhol at the National Gallery of Art
Warhol Foundation in New York City
Andy Warhol Collection in Pittsburgh
The work of Andy Warhol spoken about by David Cronenberg
Warholstars Andy Warhol Films, Art and Superstars
Warhol The Computer
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol at the Jewish Museum
A Piece
|
of Work podcast, WNYC StudiosMoMA, Tavi Gevinson and Abbi Jacobson discuss Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans
Andy Warhol's Personal Book Shelf
1928 births
1987 deaths
20thcentury American musicians
20thcentury American painters
American male painters
20thcentury American photographers
20thcentury American writers
Albumcover and concertposter artists
American cinematographers
American contemporary artists
American Eastern Catholics
American experimental filmmakers
American film producers
American portrait painters
American people of Lemko descent
American pop artists
American printmakers
American male screenwriters
American shooting survivors
American socialites
Artists from New York state
Artists from Pittsburgh
Burials in Pennsylvania
Carnegie Mellon University College of Fine Arts alumni
Catholics from Pennsylvania
Censorship in the arts
Fashion illustrators
Film directors from New York state
Film directors from Pennsylvania
Gay artists
American gay writers
Hypochondriacs
LGBT photographers from the Un
|
ited States
LGBT Roman Catholics
LGBT people from New York state
LGBT people from Pennsylvania
LGBT producers
Photographers from New York state
American portrait photographers
Postmodern artists
Ruthenian Greek Catholics
Schenley High School alumni
The Velvet Underground
Warhola family
Writers from New York state
Writers from Pittsburgh
Experiments in Art and Technology collaborating artists
People associated with The Factory
20thcentury American male writers
20thcentury American screenwriters
Google Doodles
LGBT film directors
|
Alp Arslan honorific in Turkic meaning "Heroic or Great Lion"; in ; Arabic epithet Diy adDuny wa adDn Adud adDawlah Abu Shuj' Muhammad lp rslan ibn Dawd, ; 20 January 1029 24 November 1072, real name Muhammad bin Dawud Chaghri, was the second Sultan of the Seljuk Empire and greatgrandson of Seljuk, the eponymous founder of the dynasty. He greatly expanded the Seljuk territory and consolidated his power, defeating rivals to south and northwest and his victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert, in 1071, ushered in the Turkoman settlement of Anatolia. For his military prowess and fighting skills, he obtained the name Alp Arslan, which means "Heroic Lion" in Turkish.
Early life
Alp Arslan was the son of Chaghri and nephew of Tughril, the founding Sultans of the Seljuk Empire. His grandfather was Mikail, who in turn was the son of the warlord Seljuk. He was the father of numerous children, including MalikShah I and Tutush I. It is unclear who the mother or mothers of his children were. He was known
|
to have been married at least twice. His wives included the widow of his uncle Tughril, a KaraKhanid princess known as Aka Khatun, and the daughter or niece of Bagrat IV of Georgia who would later marry his vizier, Nizam alMulk. One of Seljuk's other sons was the Turkic chieftain Arslan Isra'il, whose son, Kutalmish, contested his nephew's succession to the sultanate. Alp Arslan's younger brothers Suleiman ibn Chaghri and Qavurt were his rivals. Kilij Arslan, the son and successor of Suleiman ibn Kutalmish Kutalmish's son, who would later become Sultan of Rm, was a major opponent of the Franks during the First Crusade and the Crusade of 1101.
Early career
Alp Arslan accompanied his uncle Tughril on campaigns in the south against the Fatimids while his father Chaghri remained in Khorasan. Upon Alp Arslan's return to Khorasan, he began his work in administration at his father's suggestion. While there, his father introduced him to Nizam alMulk, one of the most eminent statesmen in early Muslim history and A
|
lp Arslan's future vizier.
After the death of his father, Alp Arslan succeeded him as governor of Khorasan in 1059. His uncle Tughril died in 1063 and had designated his successor as Suleiman, Arslan's infant brother. Arslan and his uncle Kutalmish both contested this succession which was resolved at the battle of Damghan in 1063. Arslan defeated Kutalmish for the throne and succeeded on 27 April 1064 as sultan of the Seljuk Empire, thus becoming sole monarch of Persia from the river Oxus to the Tigris.
In consolidating his empire and subduing contending factions, Arslan was ably assisted by Nizam alMulk, and the two are credited with helping to stabilize the empire after the death of Tughril. With peace and security established in his dominions, Arslan convoked an assembly of the states and in 1066, he declared his son Malik Shah I his heir and successor. With the hope of capturing Caesarea Mazaca, the capital of Cappadocia, he placed himself at the head of the Turkoman cavalry, crossed the Euphrates, and
|
entered and invaded the city. Along with Nizam alMulk, he then marched into Armenia and Georgia, which he conquered in 1064. After a siege of 25 days, the Seljuks captured Ani, the capital city of Armenia. An account of the sack and massacres in Ani is given by the historian Sibt ibn alJawzi, who quotes an eyewitness saying
Byzantine struggle
In route to fight the Fatimids in Syria in 1068, Alp Arslan invaded the Byzantine Empire. The Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes, assuming command in person, met the invaders in Cilicia. In three arduous campaigns, the Turks were defeated in detail and driven across the Euphrates in 1070. The first two campaigns were conducted by the emperor himself, while the third was directed by Manuel Comnenos, greatuncle of Emperor Manuel Comnenos. During this time, Arslan gained the allegiance of Rashid alDawla Mahmud, the Mirdasid emir of Aleppo.
In 1071, Romanos again took the field and advanced into Armenia with possibly 30,000 men, including a contingent of Cuman Turks as well as c
|
ontingents of Franks and Normans, under Ursel de Baieul. Alp Arslan, who had moved his troops south to fight the Fatimids, quickly reversed to meet the Byzantines. At Manzikert, on the Murat River, north of Lake Van, the two forces waged the Battle of Manzikert. The Cuman mercenaries among the Byzantine forces immediately defected to the Turkic side. Seeing this, "the Western mercenaries rode off and took no part in the battle." To be exact, Romanos was betrayed by general Andronikos Doukas, son of the Caesar Romanos's stepson, who pronounced him dead and rode off with a large part of the Byzantine forces at a critical moment. The Byzantines were totally routed.
Emperor Romanos IV was himself taken prisoner and conducted into the presence of Alp Arslan. After a ritual humiliation, Arslan treated him with generosity. After peace terms were agreed to, Arslan dismissed the Emperor, loaded with presents and respectfully attended by a military guard. The following conversation is said to have taken place after Ro
|
manos was brought as a prisoner before the Sultan
Alp Arslan's victories changed the balance in near Asia completely in favour of the Seljuq Turks and Sunni Muslims. While the Byzantine Empire was to continue for nearly four more centuries, the victory at Manzikert signalled the beginning of Turkmen ascendancy in Anatolia. The victory at Manzikert became so popular among the Turks that later every noble family in Anatolia claimed to have had an ancestor who had fought on that day.
Most historians, including Edward Gibbon, date the defeat at Manzikert as the beginning of the end of the Eastern Roman Empire.
State organization
Alp Arslan's strength lay in the military realm. Domestic affairs were handled by his able vizier, Nizam alMulk, the founder of the administrative organization that characterized and strengthened the sultanate during the reigns of Alp Arslan and his son, Malik Shah. Military fiefs, governed by Seljuq princes, were established to provide support for the soldiery and to accommodate the
|
nomadic Turks to the established Anatolian agricultural scene. This type of military fiefdom enabled the nomadic Turks to draw on the resources of the sedentary Persians, Turks, and other established cultures within the Seljuq realm, and allowed Alp Arslan to field a huge standing army without depending on tribute from conquest to pay his soldiers. He not only had enough food from his subjects to maintain his military, but the taxes collected from traders and merchants added to his coffers sufficiently to fund his continuous wars.
Suleiman ibn Qutalmish was the son of the contender for Arslan's throne; he was appointed governor of the northwestern provinces and assigned to completing the invasion of Anatolia. An explanation for this choice can only be conjectured from Ibn alAthir's account of the battle between AlpArslan and Kutalmish, in which he writes that AlpArslan wept for the latter's death and greatly mourned the loss of his kinsman.
Death
After Manzikert, the dominion of Alp Arslan extended over m
|
uch of western Asia. He soon prepared to march for the conquest of Turkestan, the original seat of his ancestors. With a powerful army he advanced to the banks of the Oxus. Before he could pass the river with safety, however, it was necessary to subdue certain fortresses, one of which was for several days vigorously defended by the Kurdish rebel, Yusuf alKharezmi or Yusuf alHarani. Perhaps overeager to press on against his Qarakhanid enemy, Alp Arslan gained the governor's submission by promising the rebel perpetual ownership of his lands. When Yusuf alHarani was brought before him, the Sultan ordered that he be shot, but before the archers could raise their bows Yusuf seized a knife and threw himself at Alp Arslan, striking three blows before being slain. Four days later on 24 November 1072, Alp Arslan died and was buried at Merv, having designated his 18yearold son Malik Shah as his successor.
Family
One of his wives was Safariyya Khatun. She had a daughter, Sifri Khatun, who in 107172, married Abbasid Cal
|
iph AlMuqtadi. Safariyya died in Isfahan in 10734. Another of his wives was Akka Khatun. She had been formerly the wife of Sultan Tughril. Alp Arslan married her after Tughril's death in 1063. Another of his wives was Shah Khatun. She was the daughter of Qadir Khan Yusuf, and had been formerly married to Ghaznavid Mas'ud. Another of his wives was the daughter of the Georgian king Bagrat. They married in 106768. He divorced her soon after, and married her to Fadlun. His sons were MalikShah I, Tutush I, Tekish, and Arslan Arghun. One of his daughters, married the son of Kurd Surkhab, son of Bard in 1068. Another daughter, Zulaikha Khatun, was married to Muslim, son of Quraish in 10867. Another daughter, Aisha Khatun married Shams alMulk Nasr, son of Ibrahim Khan Tamghach.
Legacy
Alp Arslan's conquest of Anatolia from the Byzantines is also seen as one of the pivotal precursors to the launch of the Crusades.
From 2002 to July 2008 under Turkmen calendar reform, the month of August was named after Alp Arslan.
|
The 2nd Training Motorized Rifle Division of the Turkmen Ground Forces is named in his honour.
References
Sources
oban, R. V. 2020. The Manzikert Battle and Sultan Alp Arslan with European Perspective in the 15st Century in the Miniatures of Giovanni Boccaccio's "De Casibus Virorum Illustrium"s 226 and 232. French Manuscripts in Bibliothque Nationale de France. S. Karakaya ve V. Baydar Ed., in 2nd International Mu Symposium Articles Book pp. 4864. Mu Mu Alparslan University. Source
11thcentury births
1072 deaths
Seljuk rulers
ByzantineSeljuk wars
11thcentury murdered monarchs
11thcentury Turkic people
Deaths by stabbing
Shahanshahs
|
The American Film Institute AFI is an American film organization that educates filmmakers and honors the heritage of the motion picture arts in the United States. AFI is supported by private funding and public membership fees.
Leadership
The institute is composed of leaders from the film, entertainment, business, and academic communities. The board of trustees is chaired by Kathleen Kennedy and the board of directors chaired by Robert A. Daly guide the organization, which is led by President and CEO, film historian Bob Gazzale. Prior leaders were founding director George Stevens, Jr. from the organization's inception in 1967 until 1980 and Jean Picker Firstenberg from 1980 to 2007.
History
The American Film Institute was founded by a 1965 presidential mandate announced in the Rose Garden of the White House by Lyndon B. Johnsonto establish a national arts organization to preserve the legacy of American film heritage, educate the next generation of filmmakers, and honor the artists and their work. Two years l
|
ater, in 1967, AFI was established, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Ford Foundation.
The original 22member Board of Trustees included actor Gregory Peck as chairman and actor Sidney Poitier as vicechairman, as well as director Francis Ford Coppola, film historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., lobbyist Jack Valenti, and other representatives from the arts and academia.
The institute established a training program for filmmakers known then as the Center for Advanced Film Studies. Also created in the early years were a repertory film exhibition program at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the AFI Catalog of Feature Films a scholarly source for American film history. The institute moved to its current eightacre Hollywood campus in 1981. The film training program grew into the AFI Conservatory, an accredited graduate school.
AFI moved its presentation of firstrun and auteur films from the Kennedy Center to the historic AFI Silver Theat
|
re and Cultural Center, which hosts the AFI DOCS film festival, making AFI the largest nonprofit film exhibitor in the world. AFI educates audiences and recognizes artistic excellence through its awards programs and 10 Top 10 Lists.
List of programs in brief
AFI educational and cultural programs include
AFI Awards an honor celebrating the creative ensembles of the most outstanding motion picture and television programs of the year
AFI Catalog of Feature Films and AFI Archive the written history of all feature films during the first 100 years of the art form accessible free online
AFI Conservatory a film school led by master filmmakers in a graduatelevel program
AFI Directing Workshop for Women a productionbased training program committed to increasing the number of women working professionally in screen directing
AFI Life Achievement Award a tradition since 1973, a high honor for a career in film
AFI 100 Years... series television events and movie reference lists
AFI's two film festivals AFI
|
Fest in Los Angeles and AFI Docs in Washington, D.C. and Silver Spring, Maryland
AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center a historic theater with yearround art house, firstrun and classic film programming in Silver Spring, Maryland
American Film a magazine that explores the art of new and historic film classics, now a blog on AFI.com
AFI Conservatory
In 1969, the institute established the AFI Conservatory for Advanced Film Studies at Greystone, the Doheny Mansion in Beverly Hills, California. The first class included filmmakers Terrence Malick, Caleb Deschanel, and Paul Schrader. That program grew into the AFI Conservatory, an accredited graduate film school located in the hills above Hollywood, California, providing training in six filmmaking disciplines cinematography, directing, editing, producing, production design, and screenwriting. Mirroring a professional production environment, Fellows collaborate to make more films than any other graduate level program. Admission to AFI Conservatory is highly sel
|
ective, with a maximum of 140 graduates per year.
In 2013, Emmy and Oscarwinning director, producer, and screenwriter James L. Brooks As Good as It Gets, Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment joined as the artistic director of the AFI Conservatory where he provides leadership for the film program. Brooks' artistic role at the AFI Conservatory has a rich legacy that includes Daniel Petrie, Jr., Robert Wise, and Frank Pierson. Awardwinning director Bob Mandel served as dean of the AFI Conservatory for nine years. Jan Schuette took over as dean in 2014 and served until 2017. Film producer Richard Gladstein was dean from 2017 until 2019, when Susan Ruskin was appointed.
Notable alumni
AFI Conservatory's alumni have careers in film, television and on the web. They have been recognized with all of the major industry awardsAcademy Award, Emmy Award, guild awards, and the Tony Award.
Among the alumni of AFI are Andrea Arnold Red Road, Fish Tank, Darren Aronofsky Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, Carl Colpaert Gas Foo
|
d Lodging, Hurlyburly, Swimming with Sharks, Doug Ellin Entourage, Todd Field In the Bedroom, Little Children, Jack Fisk Badlands, Days of Heaven, There Will Be Blood, Carl Franklin One False Move, Devil in a Blue Dress, House of Cards, Patty Jenkins Monster, Wonder Woman, Janusz Kamiski Lincoln, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Matthew Libatique Noah, Black Swan, David Lynch Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, Terrence Malick Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life, Victor Nuez, Ruby in Paradise, Ulee's Gold, Wally Pfister Memento, The Dark Knight, Inception, Robert Richardson Platoon, JFK, Django Unchained, Ari Aster Hereditary, Midsommar, and many others.
AFI programs
AFI Catalog of Feature Films
The AFI Catalog, started in 1968, is a webbased filmographic database. A research tool for film historians, the catalog consists of entries on more than 60,000 feature films and 17,000 short films produced from 1893 to 2011, as well as AFI Awards Outstanding Movies of the Year from 2000 through 20
|
10. Early print copies of this catalog may also be found at local libraries.
AFI Life Achievement Award
AFI Awards
Created in 2000, the AFI Awards honor the ten outstanding films "Movies of the Year" and ten outstanding television programs "TV Programs of the Year". The awards are a noncompetitive acknowledgment of excellence.
The awards are announced in December, and a private luncheon for award honorees takes place the following January.
AFI Maya Deren Award
AFI 100 Years... series
The AFI 100 Years... series, which ran from 1998 to 2008 and created juryselected lists of America's best movies in categories such as Musicals, Laughs and Thrills, prompted new generations to experience classic American films. The juries consisted of over 1,500 artists, scholars, critics, and historians. Citizen Kane was voted the greatest American film twice.
AFI film festivals
AFI operates two film festivals AFI Fest in Los Angeles, and AFI Docs formally known as Silverdocs in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Washington, D.
|
C.
AFI Fest
AFI Fest is the American Film Institute's annual celebration of artistic excellence. It is a showcase for the best festival films of the year and an opportunity for master filmmakers and emerging artists to come together with audiences in the movie capital of the world. It is the only festival of its stature that is free to the public. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognizes AFI Fest as a qualifying festival for the Short Films category for the annual Academy Awards.
The festival has paid tribute to numerous influential filmmakers and artists over the years, including Agns Varda, Pedro Almodvar and David Lynch as guest artistic directors, and has screened scores of films that have produced Oscar nominations and wins.
AFI Docs
Held annually in June, AFI Docs formerly Silverdocs is a documentary festival in Washington, D.C. The festival attracts over 27,000 documentary enthusiasts.
AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center
The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center is a moving im
|
age exhibition, education and cultural center located in Silver Spring, Maryland. Anchored by the restoration of noted architect John Eberson's historic 1938 Silver Theatre, it features 32,000 square feet of new construction housing two stadium theatres, office and meeting space, and reception and exhibit areas.
The AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center presents film and video programming, augmented by filmmaker interviews, panels, discussions, and musical performances.
The AFI Directing Workshop for Women
The Directing Workshop for Women is a training program committed to educating and mentoring participants in an effort to increase the number of women working professionally in screen directing. In this tuitionfree program, each participant is required to complete a short film by the end of the yearlong program.
Alumnae of the program include Maya Angelou, Anne Bancroft, Dyan Cannon, Ellen Burstyn, Jennifer Getzinger, Lesli Linka Glatter, Lily Tomlin, Susan Oliver and Nancy Malone.
AFI Directors Series
|
AFI released a set of hourlong programs reviewing the career of acclaimed directors. The Directors Series content was copyrighted in 1997 by Media Entertainment Inc and The American Film Institute, and the VHS and DVDs were released between 1999 and 2001 on Winstar TV and Video.
Directors featured included
John McTiernan WHE73067
Ron Howard WHE73068
Sydney Pollack WHE73071
Norman Jewison WHE73076
Lawrence Kasdan WHE73088
Terry Gilliam WHE73089
Spike Lee WHE73090
Barry Levinson WHE73093
Milo Forman WHE73094
Martin Scorsese WHE73098
Barbra Streisand WHE73099
David Cronenberg WHE73101
Robert Zemeckis WHE73131
Robert Altman
John Frankenheimer
Adrian Lyne
Garry Marshall
William Friedkin
Clint Eastwood
David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker
Roger Corman
Michael Mann
James Cameron
Rob Reiner
Joel Schumacher
Steven Spielberg
Wes Craven
See also
British Film Institute, the British equivalent to AFI
References
External links
AFI Los Angeles Film Festival history and information
|
Arts organizations based in California
Cinema of Southern California
Hollywood history and culture
Los Feliz, Los Angeles
Organizations based in Los Angeles
1967 establishments in California
Organizations established in 1967
|
was a Japanese filmmaker and painter who directed thirty films in a career spanning over five decades. He is regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in film history.
Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief stint as a painter. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a director during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata. After the war, the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel 1948, in which Kurosawa cast the then littleknown actor Toshiro Mifune in a starring role, cemented the director's reputation as one of the most important young filmmakers in Japan. The two men would go on to collaborate on another fifteen films.
Rashomon, which premiered in Tokyo, became the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival. The commercial and critical success of that film opened up Western film markets for the first time to the products of the Japanese film indus
|
try, which in turn led to international recognition for other Japanese filmmakers. Kurosawa directed approximately one film per year throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, including a number of highly regarded and often adapted films, such as Ikiru 1952, Seven Samurai 1954 and Yojimbo 1961. After the 1960s he became much less prolific; even so, his later workincluding two of his final films, Kagemusha 1980 and Ran 1985continued to receive great acclaim.
In 1990, he accepted the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Posthumously, he was named "Asian of the Century" in the "Arts, Literature, and Culture" category by AsianWeek magazine and CNN, cited there as being among the five people who most prominently contributed to the improvement of Asia in the 20th century. His career has been honored by many retrospectives, critical studies and biographies in both print and video, and by releases in many consumer media.
Biography
Childhood to war years 19101945
Childhood and youth 19101935
Kurosawa was born on Ma
|
rch 23, 1910, in imachi in the mori district of Tokyo. His father Isamu 18641948, a member of a samurai family from Akita Prefecture, worked as the director of the Army's Physical Education Institute's lower secondary school, while his mother Shima 18701952 came from a merchant's family living in Osaka. Akira was the eighth and youngest child of the moderately wealthy family, with two of his siblings already grown up at the time of his birth and one deceased, leaving Kurosawa to grow up with three sisters and a brother.
In addition to promoting physical exercise, Isamu Kurosawa was open to Western traditions and considered theatre and motion pictures to have educational merit. He encouraged his children to watch films; young Akira viewed his first movies at the age of six. An important formative influence was his elementary school teacher Mr. Tachikawa, whose progressive educational practices ignited in his young pupil first a love of drawing and then an interest in education in general. During this time, th
|
e boy also studied calligraphy and Kendo swordsmanship.
Another major childhood influence was Heigo Kurosawa 19061933, Akira's older brother by four years. In the aftermath of the Great Kant earthquake of 1923, Heigo took the thirteenyearold Akira to view the devastation. When the younger brother wanted to look away from the corpses of humans and beasts scattered everywhere, Heigo forbade him to do so, encouraging Akira instead to face his fears by confronting them directly. Some commentators have suggested that this incident would influence Kurosawa's later artistic career, as the director was seldom hesitant to confront unpleasant truths in his work.
Heigo was academically gifted, but soon after failing to secure a place in Tokyo's foremost high school, he began to detach himself from the rest of the family, preferring to concentrate on his interest in foreign literature. In the late 1920s, Heigo became a benshi silent film narrator for Tokyo theaters showing foreign films and quickly made a name for hims
|
elf. Akira, who at this point planned to become a painter, moved in with him, and the two brothers became inseparable. With Heigo's guidance, Akira devoured not only films but also theater and circus performances, while exhibiting his paintings and working for the leftwing Proletarian Artists' League. However, he was never able to make a living with his art, and, as he began to perceive most of the proletarian movement as "putting unfulfilled political ideals directly onto the canvas", he lost his enthusiasm for painting.
With the increasing production of talking pictures in the early 1930s, film narrators like Heigo began to lose work, and Akira moved back in with his parents. In July 1933, Heigo committed suicide. Kurosawa has commented on the lasting sense of loss he felt at his brother's death and the chapter of his autobiography Something Like an Autobiography that describes itwritten nearly half a century after the eventis titled, "A Story I Don't Want to Tell". Only four months later, Kurosawa's eldes
|
t brother also died, leaving Akira, at age 23, the only one of the Kurosawa brothers still living, together with his three surviving sisters.
Director in training 19351941
In 1935, the new film studio Photo Chemical Laboratories, known as P.C.L. which later became the major studio Toho, advertised for assistant directors. Although he had demonstrated no previous interest in film as a profession, Kurosawa submitted the required essay, which asked applicants to discuss the fundamental deficiencies of Japanese films and find ways to overcome them. His halfmocking view was that if the deficiencies were fundamental, there was no way to correct them. Kurosawa's essay earned him a call to take the followup exams, and director Kajir Yamamoto, who was among the examiners, took a liking to Kurosawa and insisted that the studio hire him. The 25yearold Kurosawa joined P.C.L. in February 1936.
During his five years as an assistant director, Kurosawa worked under numerous directors, but by far the most important figure
|
in his development was Yamamoto. Of his 24 films as A.D., he worked on 17 under Yamamoto, many of them comedies featuring the popular actor Ken'ichi Enomoto, known as "Enoken". Yamamoto nurtured Kurosawa's talent, promoting him directly from third assistant director to chief assistant director after a year. Kurosawa's responsibilities increased, and he worked at tasks ranging from stage construction and film development to location scouting, script polishing, rehearsals, lighting, dubbing, editing, and secondunit directing. In the last of Kurosawa's films as an assistant director for Yamamoto, Horse Uma, 1941, Kurosawa took over most of the production, as his mentor was occupied with the shooting of another film.
Yamamoto advised Kurosawa that a good director needed to master screenwriting. Kurosawa soon realized that the potential earnings from his scripts were much higher than what he was paid as an assistant director. He later wrote or cowrote all his films, and frequently penned screenplays for other di
|
rectors such as Satsuo Yamamoto's film, A Triumph of Wings Tsubasa no gaika, 1942. This outside scriptwriting would serve Kurosawa as a lucrative sideline lasting well into the 1960s, long after he became famous.
Wartime films and marriage 19421945
In the two years following the release of Horse in 1941, Kurosawa searched for a story he could use to launch his directing career. Towards the end of 1942, about a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, novelist Tsuneo Tomita published his Musashi Miyamotoinspired judo novel, Sanshiro Sugata, the advertisements for which intrigued Kurosawa. He bought the book on its publication day, devoured it in one sitting, and immediately asked Toho to secure the film rights. Kurosawa's initial instinct proved correct as, within a few days, three other major Japanese studios also offered to buy the rights. Toho prevailed, and Kurosawa began preproduction on his debut work as director.
Shooting of Sanshiro Sugata began on location in Yokohama in December 1942. Produ
|
ction proceeded smoothly, but getting the completed film past the censors was an entirely different matter. The censorship office considered the work to be objectionably "BritishAmerican" by the standards of wartime Japan, and it was only through the intervention of director Yasujir Ozu, who championed the film, that Sanshiro Sugata was finally accepted for release on March 25, 1943. Kurosawa had just turned 33. The movie became both a critical and commercial success. Nevertheless, the censorship office would later decide to cut out some 18 minutes of footage, much of which is now considered lost.
He next turned to the subject of wartime female factory workers in The Most Beautiful, a propaganda film which he shot in a semidocumentary style in early 1944. To elicit realistic performances from his actresses, the director had them live in a real factory during the shoot, eat the factory food and call each other by their character names. He would use similar methods with his performers throughout his career.
D
|
uring production, the actress playing the leader of the factory workers, Yko Yaguchi, was chosen by her colleagues to present their demands to the director. She and Kurosawa were constantly at odds, and it was through these arguments that the two paradoxically became close. They married on May 21, 1945, with Yaguchi two months pregnant she never resumed her acting career, and the couple would remain together until her death in 1985. They had two children, both surviving Kurosawa a son, Hisao, born December 20, 1945, who served as producer on some of his father's last projects, and Kazuko, a daughter, born April 29, 1954, who became a costume designer.
Shortly before his marriage, Kurosawa was pressured by the studio against his will to direct a sequel to his debut film. The often blatantly propagandistic Sanshiro Sugata Part II, which premiered in May 1945, is generally considered one of his weakest pictures.
Kurosawa decided to write the script for a film that would be both censorfriendly and less expensi
|
ve to produce. The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, based on the Kabuki play Kanjinch and starring the comedian Enoken, with whom Kurosawa had often worked during his assistant director days, was completed in September 1945. By this time, Japan had surrendered and the occupation of Japan had begun. The new American censors interpreted the values allegedly promoted in the picture as overly "feudal" and banned the work. It was not released until 1952, the year another Kurosawa film, Ikiru, was also released. Ironically, while in production, the film had already been savaged by Japanese wartime censors as too Western and "democratic" they particularly disliked the comic porter played by Enoken, so the movie most probably would not have seen the light of day even if the war had continued beyond its completion.
Early postwar years to Red Beard 194665
First postwar works 194650
After the war, Kurosawa, influenced by the democratic ideals of the Occupation, sought to make films that would establish a new respec
|
t towards the individual and the self. The first such film, No Regrets for Our Youth 1946, inspired by both the 1933 Takigawa incident and the Hotsumi Ozaki wartime spy case, criticized Japan's prewar regime for its political oppression. Atypically for the director, the heroic central character is a woman, Yukie Setsuko Hara, who, born into uppermiddleclass privilege, comes to question her values in a time of political crisis. The original script had to be extensively rewritten and, because of its controversial theme and gender of its protagonist, the completed work divided critics. Nevertheless, it managed to win the approval of audiences, who turned variations on the film's title into a postwar catchphrase.
His next film, One Wonderful Sunday premiered in July 1947 to mixed reviews. It is a relatively uncomplicated and sentimental love story dealing with an impoverished postwar couple trying to enjoy, within the devastation of postwar Tokyo, their one weekly day off. The movie bears the influence of Frank
|
Capra, D. W. Griffith and F. W. Murnau, each of whom was among Kurosawa's favorite directors. Another film released in 1947 with Kurosawa's involvement was the actionadventure thriller, Snow Trail, directed by Senkichi Taniguchi from Kurosawa's screenplay. It marked the debut of the intense young actor Toshiro Mifune. It was Kurosawa who, with his mentor Yamamoto, had intervened to persuade Toho to sign Mifune, during an audition in which the young man greatly impressed Kurosawa, but managed to alienate most of the other judges.
Drunken Angel is often considered the director's first major work. Although the script, like all of Kurosawa's occupationera works, had to go through rewrites due to American censorship, Kurosawa felt that this was the first film in which he was able to express himself freely. A gritty story of a doctor who tries to save a gangster yakuza with tuberculosis, it was also the first time that Kurosawa directed Mifune, who went on to play major roles in all but one of the director's next
|
16 films the exception being Ikiru. While Mifune was not cast as the protagonist in Drunken Angel, his explosive performance as the gangster so dominates the drama that he shifted the focus from the title character, the alcoholic doctor played by Takashi Shimura, who had already appeared in several Kurosawa movies. However, Kurosawa did not want to smother the young actor's immense vitality, and Mifune's rebellious character electrified audiences in much the way that Marlon Brando's defiant stance would startle American film audiences a few years later. The film premiered in Tokyo in April 1948 to rave reviews and was chosen by the prestigious Kinema Junpo critics poll as the best film of its year, the first of three Kurosawa movies to be so honored.
Kurosawa, with producer Sjir Motoki and fellow directors and friends Kajiro Yamamoto, Mikio Naruse and Senkichi Taniguchi, formed a new independent production unit called Film Art Association Eiga Geijutsu Kykai. For this organization's debut work, and first fil
|
m for Daiei studios, Kurosawa turned to a contemporary play by Kazuo Kikuta and, together with Taniguchi, adapted it for the screen. The Quiet Duel starred Toshiro Mifune as an idealistic young doctor struggling with syphilis, a deliberate attempt by Kurosawa to break the actor away from being typecast as gangsters. Released in March 1949, it was a box office success, but is generally considered one of the director's lesser achievements.
His second film of 1949, also produced by Film Art Association and released by Shintoho, was Stray Dog. It is a detective movie perhaps the first important Japanese film in that genre that explores the mood of Japan during its painful postwar recovery through the story of a young detective, played by Mifune, and his fixation on the recovery of his handgun, which was stolen by a penniless war veteran who proceeds to use it to rob and murder. Adapted from an unpublished novel by Kurosawa in the style of a favorite writer of his, Georges Simenon, it was the director's first col
|
laboration with screenwriter Ryuzo Kikushima, who would later help to script eight other Kurosawa films. A famous, virtually wordless sequence, lasting over eight minutes, shows the detective, disguised as an impoverished veteran, wandering the streets in search of the gun thief; it employed actual documentary footage of warravaged Tokyo neighborhoods shot by Kurosawa's friend, Ishir Honda, the future director of Godzilla. The film is considered a precursor to the contemporary police procedural and buddy cop film genres.
Scandal, released by Shochiku in April 1950, was inspired by the director's personal experiences with, and anger towards, Japanese yellow journalism. The work is an ambitious mixture of courtroom drama and social problem film about free speech and personal responsibility, but even Kurosawa regarded the finished product as dramatically unfocused and unsatisfactory, and almost all critics agree. However, it would be Kurosawa's second film of 1950, Rashomon, that would ultimately win him, and J
|
apanese cinema, a whole new international audience.
International recognition 195058
After finishing Scandal, Kurosawa was approached by Daiei studios to make another film for them. Kurosawa picked a script by an aspiring young screenwriter, Shinobu Hashimoto, who would eventually work on nine of his films. Their first joint effort was based on Rynosuke Akutagawa's experimental short story "In a Grove", which recounts the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife from various different and conflicting pointsofview. Kurosawa saw potential in the script, and with Hashimoto's help, polished and expanded it and then pitched it to Daiei, who were happy to accept the project due to its low budget.
The shooting of Rashomon began on July 7, 1950, and, after extensive location work in the primeval forest of Nara, wrapped on August 17. Just one week was spent in hurried postproduction, hampered by a studio fire, and the finished film premiered at Tokyo's Imperial Theatre on August 25, expanding nationwide the fol
|
lowing day. The movie was met by lukewarm reviews, with many critics puzzled by its unique theme and treatment, but it was nevertheless a moderate financial success for Daiei.
Kurosawa's next film, for Shochiku, was The Idiot, an adaptation of the novel by the director's favorite writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The story is relocated from Russia to Hokkaido, but otherwise adheres closely to the original, a fact seen by many critics as detrimental to the work. A studiomandated edit shortened it from Kurosawa's original cut of 265 minutes to just 166 minutes, making the resulting narrative exceedingly difficult to follow. The severely edited film version is widely considered to be one of the director's least successful works and the original fulllength version no longer exists. Contemporary reviews of the much shortened edited version were very negative, but the film was a moderate success at the box office, largely because of the popularity of one of its stars, Setsuko Hara.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Kurosawa, R
|
ashomon had been entered in the Venice Film Festival, due to the efforts of Giuliana Stramigioli, a Japanbased representative of an Italian film company, who had seen and admired the movie and convinced Daiei to submit it. On September 10, 1951, Rashomon was awarded the festival's highest prize, the Golden Lion, shocking not only Daiei but the international film world, which at the time was largely unaware of Japan's decadesold cinematic tradition.
After Daiei briefly exhibited a subtitled print of the film in Los Angeles, RKO purchased distribution rights to Rashomon in the United States. The company was taking a considerable gamble. It had put out only one prior subtitled film in the American market, and the only previous Japanese talkie commercially released in New York had been Mikio Naruse's comedy, Wife! Be Like a Rose, in 1937 a critical and boxoffice flop. However, Rashomons commercial run, greatly helped by strong reviews from critics and even the columnist Ed Sullivan, earned 35,000 in its first th
|
ree weeks at a single New York theatre, an almost unheardof sum at the time.
This success in turn led to a vogue in America and the West for Japanese movies throughout the 1950s, replacing the enthusiasm for Italian neorealist cinema. By the end of 1952 Rashomon was released in Japan, the United States, and most of Europe. Among the Japanese filmmakers whose work, as a result, began to win festival prizes and commercial release in the West were Kenji Mizoguchi The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff and, somewhat later, Yasujir Ozu Tokyo Story, An Autumn Afternoonartists highly respected in Japan but, before this period, almost totally unknown in the West. Kurosawa's growing reputation among Western audiences in the 1950s would make Western audiences more sympathetic to the reception of later generations of Japanese filmmakers ranging from Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi, Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura to Juzo Itami, Takeshi Kitano and Takashi Miike.
His career boosted by his sudden international fam
|
e, Kurosawa, now reunited with his original film studio, Toho which would go on to produce his next 11 films, set to work on his next project, Ikiru. The movie stars Takashi Shimura as a cancerridden Tokyo bureaucrat, Watanabe, on a final quest for meaning before his death. For the screenplay, Kurosawa brought in Hashimoto as well as writer Hideo Oguni, who would go on to cowrite twelve Kurosawa films. Despite the work's grim subject matter, the screenwriters took a satirical approach, which some have compared to the work of Brecht, to both the bureaucratic world of its hero and the U.S. cultural colonization of Japan. American pop songs figure prominently in the film. Because of this strategy, the filmmakers are usually credited with saving the picture from the kind of sentimentality common to dramas about characters with terminal illnesses. Ikiru opened in October 1952 to rave reviewsit won Kurosawa his second Kinema Junpo "Best Film" awardand enormous box office success. It remains the most acclaimed of al
|
l the artist's films set in the modern era.
In December 1952, Kurosawa took his Ikiru screenwriters, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, for a fortyfiveday secluded residence at an inn to create the screenplay for his next movie, Seven Samurai. The ensemble work was Kurosawa's first proper samurai film, the genre for which he would become most famous. The simple story, about a poor farming village in Sengoku period Japan that hires a group of samurai to defend it against an impending attack by bandits, was given a full epic treatment, with a huge cast largely consisting of veterans of previous Kurosawa productions and meticulously detailed action, stretching out to almost threeandahalf hours of screen time.
Three months were spent in preproduction and a month in rehearsals. Shooting took up 148 days spread over almost a year, interrupted by production and financing troubles and Kurosawa's health problems. The film finally opened in April 1954, half a year behind its original release date and about three time
|
s over budget, making it at the time the most expensive Japanese film ever made. However, by Hollywood standards, it was a quite modestly budgeted production, even for that time. The film received positive critical reaction and became a big hit, quickly making back the money invested in it and providing the studio with a product that they could, and did, market internationallythough with extensive edits. Over timeand with the theatrical and home video releases of the uncut versionits reputation has steadily grown. It is now regarded by some commentators as the greatest Japanese film ever made, and in 1979, a poll of Japanese film critics also voted it the best Japanese film ever made. In the most recent 2012 version of the widely respected British Film Institute BFI Sight Sound "Greatest Films of All Time" poll, Seven Samurai placed 17th among all films from all countries in both the critics' and the directors' polls, receiving a place in the Top Ten lists of 48 critics and 22 directors.
In 1954, nuclear te
|
sts in the Pacific were causing radioactive rainstorms in Japan and one particular incident in March had exposed a Japanese fishing boat to nuclear fallout, with disastrous results. It is in this anxious atmosphere that Kurosawa's next film, Record of a Living Being, was conceived. The story concerned an elderly factory owner Toshiro Mifune so terrified of the prospect of a nuclear attack that he becomes determined to move his entire extended family both legal and extramarital to what he imagines is the safety of a farm in Brazil. Production went much more smoothly than the director's previous film, but a few days before shooting ended, Kurosawa's composer, collaborator and close friend Fumio Hayasaka died of tuberculosis at the age of 41. The film's score was finished by Hayasaka's student, Masaru Sato, who would go on to score all of Kurosawa's next eight films. Record of a Living Being opened in November 1955 to mixed reviews and muted audience reaction, becoming the first Kurosawa film to lose money durin
|
g its original theatrical run. Today, it is considered by many to be among the finest films dealing with the psychological effects of the global nuclear stalemate.
Kurosawa's next project, Throne of Blood, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbethset, like Seven Samurai, in the Sengoku Erarepresented an ambitious transposition of the English work into a Japanese context. Kurosawa instructed his leading actress, Isuzu Yamada, to regard the work as if it were a cinematic version of a Japanese rather than a European literary classic. Given Kurosawa's appreciation of traditional Japanese stage acting, the acting of the players, particularly Yamada, draws heavily on the stylized techniques of the Noh theater. It was filmed in 1956 and released in January 1957 to a slightly less negative domestic response than had been the case with the director's previous film. Abroad, Throne of Blood, regardless of the liberties it takes with its source material, quickly earned a place among the most celebrated Shakespeare
|
adaptations.
Another adaptation of a classic European theatrical work followed almost immediately, with production of The Lower Depths, based on a play by Maxim Gorky, taking place in May and June 1957. In contrast to the Shakespearean sweep of Throne of Blood, The Lower Depths was shot on only two confined sets, in order to emphasize the restricted nature of the characters' lives. Though faithful to the play, this adaptation of Russian material to a completely Japanese settingin this case, the late Edo periodunlike his earlier The Idiot, was regarded as artistically successful. The film premiered in September 1957, receiving a mixed response similar to that of Throne of Blood. However, some critics rank it among the director's most underrated works.
Kurosawa's three next movies after Seven Samurai had not managed to capture Japanese audiences in the way that that film had. The mood of the director's work had been growing increasingly pessimistic and dark, with the possibility of redemption through personal
|
responsibility now very much questioned, particularly in Throne of Blood and The Lower Depths. He recognized this, and deliberately aimed for a more lighthearted and entertaining film for his next production, while switching to the new widescreen format that had been gaining popularity in Japan. The resulting film, The Hidden Fortress, is an actionadventure comedydrama about a medieval princess, her loyal general and two peasants who all need to travel through enemy lines in order to reach their home region. Released in December 1958, The Hidden Fortress became an enormous box office success in Japan and was warmly received by critics both in Japan and abroad. Today, the film is considered one of Kurosawa's most lightweight efforts, though it remains popular, not least because it is one of several major influences on George Lucas's 1977 space opera, Star Wars.
Birth of a company and Red Beard 195965
Starting with Rashomon, Kurosawa's productions had become increasingly large in scope and so had the directo
|
r's budgets. Toho, concerned about this development, suggested that he might help finance his own works, therefore making the studio's potential losses smaller, while in turn allowing himself more artistic freedom as coproducer. Kurosawa agreed, and the Kurosawa Production Company was established in April 1959, with Toho as the majority shareholder.
Despite risking his own money, Kurosawa chose a story that was more directly critical of the Japanese business and political elites than any previous work. The Bad Sleep Well, based on a script by Kurosawa's nephew Mike Inoue, is a revenge drama about a young man who is able to infiltrate the hierarchy of a corrupt Japanese company with the intention of exposing the men responsible for his father's death. Its theme proved topical while the film was in production, the massive Anpo protests were held against the new U.S.Japan Security treaty, which was seen by many Japanese, particularly the young, as threatening the country's democracy by giving too much power to
|
corporations and politicians. The film opened in September 1960 to positive critical reaction and modest box office success. The 25minute opening sequence depicting a corporate wedding reception is widely regarded as one of Kurosawa's most skillfully executed set pieces, but the remainder of the film is often perceived as disappointing by comparison. The movie has also been criticized for employing the conventional Kurosawan hero to combat a social evil that cannot be resolved through the actions of individuals, however courageous or cunning.
Yojimbo The Bodyguard, Kurosawa Production's second film, centers on a masterless samurai, Sanjuro, who strolls into a 19thcentury town ruled by two opposing violent factions and provokes them into destroying each other. The director used this work to play with many genre conventions, particularly the Western, while at the same time offering an unprecedentedly for the Japanese screen graphic portrayal of violence. Some commentators have seen the Sanjuro character in thi
|
s film as a fantasy figure who magically reverses the historical triumph of the corrupt merchant class over the samurai class. Featuring Tatsuya Nakadai in his first major role in a Kurosawa movie, and with innovative photography by Kazuo Miyagawa who shot Rashomon and Takao Saito, the film premiered in April 1961 and was a critically and commercially successful venture, earning more than any previous Kurosawa film. The movie and its blackly comic tone were also widely imitated abroad. Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars was a virtual unauthorized scenebyscene remake with Toho filing a lawsuit on Kurosawa's behalf and prevailing.
Following the success of Yojimbo, Kurosawa found himself under pressure from Toho to create a sequel. Kurosawa turned to a script he had written before Yojimbo, reworking it to include the hero of his previous film. Sanjuro was the first of three Kurosawa films to be adapted from the work of the writer Shgor Yamamoto the others would be Red Beard and Dodeskaden. It is lighter in ton
|
e and closer to a conventional period film than Yojimbo, though its story of a power struggle within a samurai clan is portrayed with strongly comic undertones. The film opened on January 1, 1962, quickly surpassing Yojimbos box office success and garnering positive reviews.
Kurosawa had meanwhile instructed Toho to purchase the film rights to King's Ransom, a novel about a kidnapping written by American author and screenwriter Evan Hunter, under his pseudonym of Ed McBain, as one of his 87th Precinct series of crime books. The director intended to create a work condemning kidnapping, which he considered one of the very worst crimes. The suspense film, titled High and Low, was shot during the latter half of 1962 and released in March 1963. It broke Kurosawa's box office record the third film in a row to do so, became the highest grossing Japanese film of the year, and won glowing reviews. However, his triumph was somewhat tarnished when, ironically, the film was blamed for a wave of kidnappings which occurre
|
d in Japan about this time he himself received kidnapping threats directed at his young daughter, Kazuko. High and Low is considered by many commentators to be among the director's strongest works.
Kurosawa quickly moved on to his next project, Red Beard. Based on a short story collection by Shgor Yamamoto and incorporating elements from Dostoyevsky's novel The Insulted and Injured, it is a period film, set in a midnineteenth century clinic for the poor, in which Kurosawa's humanist themes receive perhaps their fullest statement. A conceited and materialistic, foreigntrained young doctor, Yasumoto, is forced to become an intern at the clinic under the stern tutelage of Doctor Niide, known as "Akahige" "Red Beard", played by Mifune. Although he resists Red Beard initially, Yasumoto comes to admire his wisdom and courage, and to perceive the patients at the clinic, whom he at first despised, as worthy of compassion and dignity.
Yz Kayama, who plays Yasumoto, was an extremely popular film and music star at the
|
time, particularly for his "Young Guy" Wakadaish series of musical comedies, so signing him to appear in the film virtually guaranteed Kurosawa strong boxoffice. The shoot, the filmmaker's longest ever, lasted well over a year after five months of preproduction, and wrapped in spring 1965, leaving the director, his crew and his actors exhausted. Red Beard premiered in April 1965, becoming the year's highestgrossing Japanese production and the third and last Kurosawa film to top the prestigious Kinema Jumpo yearly critics poll. It remains one of Kurosawa's bestknown and mostloved works in his native country. Outside Japan, critics have been much more divided. Most commentators concede its technical merits and some praise it as among Kurosawa's best, while others insist that it lacks complexity and genuine narrative power, with still others claiming that it represents a retreat from the artist's previous commitment to social and political change.
The film marked something of an end of an era for its creator.
|
The director himself recognized this at the time of its release, telling critic Donald Richie that a cycle of some kind had just come to an end and that his future films and production methods would be different. His prediction proved quite accurate. Beginning in the late 1950s, television began increasingly to dominate the leisure time of the formerly large and loyal Japanese cinema audience. And as film company revenues dropped, so did their appetite for riskparticularly the risk represented by Kurosawa's costly production methods.
Red Beard also marked the midway point, chronologically, in the artist's career. During his previous twentynine years in the film industry which includes his five years as assistant director, he had directed twentythree films, while during the remaining twentyeight years, for many and complex reasons, he would complete only seven more. Also, for reasons never adequately explained, Red Beard would be his final film starring Toshiro Mifune. Yu Fujiki, an actor who worked on The Lo
|
wer Depths, observed, regarding the closeness of the two men on the set, "Mr. Kurosawa's heart was in Mr. Mifune's body." Donald Richie has described the rapport between them as a unique "symbiosis".
Hollywood ambitions to last films 196698
Hollywood detour 196668
When Kurosawa's exclusive contract with Toho came to an end in 1966, the 56yearold director was seriously contemplating change. Observing the troubled state of the domestic film industry, and having already received dozens of offers from abroad, the idea of working outside Japan appealed to him as never before.
For his first foreign project, Kurosawa chose a story based on a Life magazine article. The Embassy Pictures action thriller, to be filmed in English and called simply Runaway Train, would have been his first in color. But the language barrier proved a major problem, and the English version of the screenplay was not even finished by the time filming was to begin in autumn 1966. The shoot, which required snow, was moved to autumn 1967, the
|
n canceled in 1968. Almost two decades later, another foreign director working in Hollywood, Andrei Konchalovsky, finally made Runaway Train 1985, though from a new script loosely based on Kurosawa's.
The director meanwhile had become involved in a much more ambitious Hollywood project. Tora! Tora! Tora!, produced by 20th Century Fox and Kurosawa Production, would be a portrayal of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor from both the American and the Japanese points of view, with Kurosawa helming the Japanese half and an Anglophonic filmmaker directing the American half. He spent several months working on the script with Ryuzo Kikushima and Hideo Oguni, but very soon the project began to unravel. The director of the American sequences turned out not to be David Lean, as originally planned, but American Richard Fleischer. The budget was also cut, and the screen time allocated for the Japanese segment would now be no longer than 90 minutesa major problem, considering that Kurosawa's script ran over four hours. Af
|
ter numerous revisions with the direct involvement of Darryl Zanuck, a more or less finalized cut screenplay was agreed upon in May 1968.
Shooting began in early December, but Kurosawa would last only a little over three weeks as director. He struggled to work with an unfamiliar crew and the requirements of a Hollywood production, while his working methods puzzled his American producers, who ultimately concluded that the director must be mentally ill. Kurosawa was examined at Kyoto University Hospital by a neuropsychologist, Dr. Murakami, whose diagnosis was forwarded to Darryl Zanuck and Richard Zanuck at Fox studios indicating a diagnosis of neurasthenia stating that, "He is suffering from disturbance of sleep, agitated with feelings of anxiety and in manic excitement caused by the above mentioned illness. It is necessary for him to have rest and medical treatment for more than two months." On Christmas Eve 1968, the Americans announced that Kurosawa had left the production due to "fatigue", effectively fi
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.