All about politics, policy, society and how those things relate to culture and art.
Connoisseurs know: often actors spend two months rehearsing a play with only one goal in mind: to recover the freshness and surprise of the 'first reading'. After all, at that first reading, actors hear the text for the first time from their colleagues, read the words aloud for the first time, and everything sounds new and unexpected....
Towards the end of this Berlinale, it could be heard in the corridors that the Danish costume piece A Royal Affair about a nipped-in-the-nippled revolution was surely going to win the Golden Bear. However, the jury did not care about that and designated Caesar Must Die by the Taviani brothers as the best film. The jury chaired by...
Dutch film Hemel was chosen as best film in the Forum section for young cinema by the jury of international critics at the Berlin festival. This is a fine success for director Sacha Polak who delivers her first feature-length film with this drama about a young woman who has lost her way in search of love. Heaven, after a...
Would today's revolution makers even study Shakespeare? In Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), the competition entry by the Italian Taviani brothers, we witness the preparation and performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Anyone watching this with the world's noise in mind will often feel a shock of recognition. The tragedy about a coup in ancient Rome shows...
He barely showed his face in recent months, rarely engaging in debate with artists or the public. Now that the mega cut in culture is law, and nothing can be changed about it until 2016, we can follow Halbe Zijlstra's victory lap again. Also on twitter.
For more than a decade, Something Raw has been one of the few places in the Netherlands where the question of artistic and social urgency of the body is explored on stage, with all the fun and risk involved. Many performances struggled with the 'impasse of display': have people then become mere things to look at? Porn is the...
It was a 'roundtable discussion', so that is extremely informal. Lower house members of the ministry of OCW's 'lead committee' listen to people from the field. In this case, all people involved in, or leading, arts education. It was an awkward meeting.
It happens regularly that you see or hear something, in the tram, on the train, on the road, on holiday. But also on the street, in your own home. And that you think: what is that? Chances are you are dealing with 'Art'. And that can have all kinds of side effects: pleasure, chills, confusion, sadness, or even indifference, and depression. Art can,...
We were somewhat mildly ironic about it, but hats off, meanwhile, to Toneelgroep Amsterdam's PR department and the audience, who responded remarkably well to the 'choose the reprise' campaign the company launched a few weeks back. We have the hard numbers we feared we would never see. And they are credible. We quote the press release: From 2 to...
Can a filmmaker born and raised in West Germany strike just the right tone in a film set in the former East Germany? I hadn't really thought about that before, but the Berliner Zeitung raised that question in response to Christian Petzold's Barbara, about a Berlin paediatrician who, after requesting to go to the West,...
This week, the National Travel Opera begins rehearsals of Mozart's Le nozze di figaro. In the bin, the brand-new Netherlands Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jan Willem de Vriend. Business as usual, as the two companies have been working closely together for years and are united in the National Music Quarter Enschede. Only: orchestra and opera company have not been talking to each other since last week.
Exactly how Little Red Riding Hood was eaten by the wicked wolf, the fairy tale does not tell. Fairy-tale-telling parents limit themselves to the before and after. And that the evil wolf is cut open by the hunter, freed from Little Red Riding Hood and filled with stones eventually ends up in a well to die is part of the winding down of the happy ending. Enough...
Timo Vuorensola has done it to him. Perhaps reading the name of this Finnish director and music video maker does not light up a light yet, but then you do not belong to the extensive internet fan club that has been closely following the genesis of the potential cult hit Iron Sky for several years. Its world premiere at the Berlin festival is now the...
It saves Liverpool's GGD millions on dispensing antidepressants. And it only costs them a tonne and a half. They spend that much hiring Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra musicians for workshops in addiction clinics. No idealistic preaching, then, as in the countless columns and reactions to Halbes' cultural cut, but hard pecunia and proven effects. In England,...
The 62nd Berlinale opened tonight with Benoït Jacquot's Les adieux à la reine, a French costume piece that does not play by the rules. The dresses worn by Queen Marie Antoinette's servants get dirty and one of the main characters stumbles in her haste and passes out twice. As the film begins we write 14 July 1789, and the...
Om hoeveel BMW’s het qua tegenwaarde gaat, weten we niet, maar feit is dat het Duitse autoconcern van zoefauto’s een nieuwe stap heeft gezet, weg van het snellejongetjesstraatracerscircuit dat inmiddels toch al bevolkt wordt door Audi en VW. Hoewel. De nieuwe generatie die het bedrijf aan zich wil binden is even jong, maar dus aanzienlijk cultureler. Het zijn de jonge…
We already noticed it in the daily twitter stream: when it comes to book reviews on twitter, the 'low' genres (at least according to connoisseurs) dominate the charts: fantasy, diaries of disease sufferers, 'regional work', howto's and erotica. No news, you may say, but there is more to it.
Last month, it was announced that Erwin van Lambaart, once brought in as heir apparent to his company Stage Entertainment by Joop van den Ende, is leaving as CCO 'to spend more time with his family'. Last week, a press release appeared in which the group reported that it had signed a so-called €75 million club deal with ABN-AMRO and ING.
We tweeted it, but that doesn't yield much. That's why we're just showing it here. That they can handle social media very well in the government. Because social media, that's like email for the advanced.
According to the Volkskrant, Rick van der Ploeg was state secretary of culture in the early 1990s (in reality, he was at the end of those years), and in Het Parool columnist Gerard Mulder claims that the fact that he "fortunately knows nothing about art subsidies" need not deter him from some wild speculations...
Smiling, she lets a boy film her with his mobile phone and she happily wriggles into lascivious curves in the process. But when he really wants to see her breasts she flinches. Yet later she will go much, much further and she gets staggeringly little in return. Jasna, the rebellious protagonist from Cliff (Clip), is a Serbian teen...
We got another press release, and wondered: top or flop? How does quirky artistry rhyme with audience-determined repertoire choice? Andne: do all those people who chose the winning piece also get a free-or at least discounted-ticket to the performance of their choice? Andne: who checks the results, as there is no notary. Enne:.
That Martin Scorsese's mesmerising Hugo was number one in the audience rating for a while at the Rotterdam festival is not so surprising. What is surprising, however, is the film that emerged as number two yesterday and has now ousted Hugo from first place: the documentary Back to the Square in which filmmaker Petr Lom looks at how things stand in Egypt after the...
Last night, Rotterdam festival-goers in Pathé's Hall 4 witnessed a small miracle. Some film fragments from 1906 by the legendary Georges Méliès were now shown in stereoscopic 3D for the first time. So that you could, as it were, imagine yourself present on the set of this French pioneer who was the first to understand that cinema is not there...
Compared to previous editions, you could almost call the choice of opening film that kicks off the Rotterdam Film Festival tonight almost un-Rotterdamian. No wild young debut, exotic Asian or artistic crossover this time. The French book adaptation 38 Témoins, which has its world premiere in Rotterdam tonight, is the seventh feature by Walloon actor/director Lucas Belvaux and has already been acquired...
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