AN ODDITY IN THE OPENING CREDITS for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962) has gone largely unremarked, probably because it is so cursory. A minute or so into the credit sequence, which is accompanied by the stately largo from Vivaldi’s Concerto for Viola d’Amore and Lute in D Minor, a fly suddenly enters at the lower right-hand side of the frame, meanders a bit before pausing on the name of an actor (Giulio de Stephanis) as if to inspect it, and then skitters off as quickly as it had emerged, its time on-screen totaling three seconds. Was the intrusion of the insect an accident most likely or, given Pasolini’s radical ways, an intentional aberration? I conferred with the Pasolini archives in Bologna, Italy, which found no reference regarding this strange anomaly, so one must assume that the fly’s brief invasion of the image either went unnoticed by the director or that, once detected, the insect was permitted its guest appearance, for reasons other than the merely pragmati
UNIVERSALIZING HISTORIANS have given the newspaper comic strip a distinguished pedigree as the twentieth-century descendant of sacred Egyptian hieroglyphics. True or not, no classic strip was better suited to embellish the inner sanctum of Pharaoh Tut’s tomb than Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running tot saga Nancy.
Selections from Thiebaud's collection come home to UCD | Art davisenterprise.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from davisenterprise.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Hauser & Wirth opens a new gallery in Basel with the first retrospective in Switzerland devoted to Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi, a painter famous for his interior paintings. Eighteen works from private collections will be on display.