This Week's Culture

Somehow this week's homework has largely consisted of my professors telling me to go check something out on the internet, and, more specifically, wikipedia (yeah, who knew).

"Dorthea Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother".
The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson, but Lange apparently never knew her name. ... Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it."

These are the two films I will be seeing at the Nickelodeon this week. The first is a hopeful, and not required. The second is our weekly film, which this week includes a Q&A session with the director.

THE RAPE OF EUROPA
"The Rape of Europa" is a feature documentary that takes the audience on an epic journey through seven countries and into a violent whirlwind of fanaticism, greed, and warfare that threatened to wipe out the artistic heritage of Europe. For twelve long years, the Nazis looted and destroyed art on a scale unprecedented in history. But heroic young art historians and curators from America and across Europe fought back, mounting a miraculous campaign that would rescue and return the millions of art works displaced by the war. Joan Allen narrates this chronicle about the battle over the very survival of centuries of western culture.


APPARITION OF THE ETERNAL CHURCH BY PAUL FESTA
In this award-winning film, 31 artists and thinkers listen to a ten-minute piece of music through headphones and describe what they hear. What all but a few don't know is that the music is Olivier Messiaen's monumental organ work Apparition of the Eternal Church. A devout Catholic and the organist at the Church of the Trinity in Paris, Messiaen wrote this music to send listeners to the heights of spiritual ecstasy. In actuality however, Festa's listeners respond in wildly different fashions. ... Together, the music and its interpreters conjure something like what William Blake famously called "the marriage of heaven and hell."