With home entertainment options the only option for many, this past year’s peculiar circumstances have underlined that sometimes despite a bazillion titles on Netflix and other platforms, it still feels like there’s “nothing to watch.” But that hasn’t been such a problem for people willing to explore the deep back catalogs of cinema even if they’re a minority. Most people are like the typical customer at Blockbuster a generation ago, who only looks in the “New Release” section and laments there’s “nothing I haven’t seen,” completely oblivious to the older films that comprise 90% of the store’s stock.
Girl meets carnival ride, girl gets carnival ride in the provocative French film
“Jumbo” (Darkstar Pictures), starring Noémie Merlant (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) as a shy young woman who becomes erotically fixated on the bright colors and flashing lights of a Tilt-a-Whirl at the theme park where she works late nights on the cleaning crew. Director Zoé Wittock’s Sundance hit has drawn critical acclaim around the world for its intuitive handling of an unusual love story.
Also available: British comedy greats Rob Brydon and Tamsin Greig co-star in the comedy
“Days of the Bagnold Summer” (Greenwich/Kino Lorber), featuring original music by Belle & Sebastian; Sophie Deraspe’s modern take on
James Van Der Zee. Tap Dance Dress Rehearsal (1928), vintage gelatin silver print The Tsiaras Family Photography Collection
William Tsiaras has a good eye a trait that serves him well as both an ophthalmologist and an influential photography collector, who has quietly donated hundreds of works to museums over the years. His latest gift is to his undergraduate alma mater’s Colby College Museum of Art in Maine of more than 500 photographs from his personal collection, built over the past 25 years alongside the works he would acquire for institutions. As a board member and former chair, “he really put the idea on the table that the museum needed to have a collection of photography,” says the Colby Museum’s director Jacqueline Terrassa, adding that Tsiaras’s involvement with funding for purchases and matching gifts, starting in the early 2000s under former director Sharon Corwin, “transformed the whole collection”.
Photographer, gatecrasher, New Wave pioneer: the large life of Ruth Orkin
From sneaking into balls with Dior and Dali, to installing floodlights in her flat, Ruth Orkin would stop at nothing to get the perfect shot
24 January 2021 • 12:00pm I felt like Beatrice walking through the streets of Florence Ruth Orkin s American Girl in Italy, 1951
Credit: Bonhams
On September 3 1951, Count Carlos de Beistegui held a costumed ball at the Palazzo Labia in Venice. A swarm of gondolas brought a thousand guests – among them, Christian Dior, Salvador Dalí and the Duchess of Devonshire – who arrived in a spume of powder, feathers, boned silk and gold leaf, and proceeded to cut loose until six in the morning.
Pioneering photographer Ruth Orkin celebrated in Bonhams New York Photographs sale
American Girl (Jinx Allen) in Florence, Italy, 1951, gelatin silver print. Photo: Bonhams.
NEW YORK, NY
.- In 1951, the young American photographer Ruth Orkin was sent from New York to Israel, on assignment for LIFE magazine. From there she travelled to Italy, where she met Ninalee Craig, known at the time as Jinx Allen, a fellow American who was also travelling alone. It was a photograph of Jinx, being starred at as she passed through a group of men, which was to become Orkins most recognizable image, An American Girl in Italy. Orkin included the photograph as part of a series, later published in Cosmopolitan magazine, entitled Dont be Afraid to Travel Alone.