G. Allen Johnson April 13, 2021Updated: April 13, 2021, 6:36 pm
The subject of the documentary “Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts,” about an Alabama farmer who was born into slavery and became a celebrated artist. Photo: Kino Lorber
By the time Charles Shannon, a white artist in Montgomery, Ala., came across Bill Traylor, a homeless African American man scribbling away on pieces of cardboard as people passed by on the city’s celebrated Monroe Street, Traylor was in his 80s, having lived quite the life.
Born into slavery in 1853, Traylor worked as a sharecropper for decades into his 70s, until the boll weevil infestation that swept the South in the early 20th century devastated his farm, prompting his move to Montgomery. So he told his story and that of the Jim Crow South in thousands of remarkable sketches, drawings and paintings.
G. Allen Johnson March 11, 2021Updated: March 12, 2021, 7:25 am
Antonius (Max von Sydow, right) plays chess with Death (Bengt Ekerot) in Ingmar Bergman’s classic “The Seventh Seal” (1957). Von Sydow, who died in 2020 at age 90, is the subject of a six-film online retrospective that is a partnership of the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive and the California Film Institute’s Smith Rafael Film Center. Photo: Janus Films 1957
It started by challenging Death to a game of chess and ended with “Game of Thrones.”
Max von Sydow carved out a legendary international career that included roles such as Jesus in the biblical epic “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” villains opposite Flash Gordon and James Bond, and was a must-have character actor for some of the world’s greatest directors, including William Friedkin (in “The Exorcist”), David Lynch (“Dune”), Steven Spielberg (“Minority Report”), Martin Scorsese (“Shutter Island”) and J.J. A