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italicus
Membru Senior
Inregistrat: acum 15 ani
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Biography:
Elegance, taste, care and an eye for the recreation of times past drape almost all the work of this American-born director who has ranged from India to England and back to America depicting the moods, manners, milieu and morals of enclosed societies whose members are pinned like butterflies and ruthlessly dissected for our inspection. After years of work in this field of human entomology, Ivory produced two masterworks in the early 1990s.
After studying fine arts at university, Ivory's first intention was to become a set designer -small wonder that the production design of his films is always so aesthetically pleasing -but later studied film, made some independent shorts (one of which was about Indian art objects) and then undertook a career-forming journey to India in 1960, initially to make a documentary there. He became fascinated by the Indian way of life, and by the collision between eastern and western cultures there. His films have expressed this clash of directions, although Shakespeare-Wallah (1965), set against the adventures of a rather down-at-heel group of British strolling players, was undoubtedly the most accessible to western eyes. Ivory managed to probe deep into the qualities of Indian life, without coming to such down-to-earth, even cynical terms with them as Satyajit Ray, the native Indian director whose work Ivory so much admired.
Since 1972, Ivory has spent more and more time back in America. His films, it seems predetermined by exhibitors, are not for the box-office masses there, or elsewhere come to that. Perhaps, in view of the unhappy failure of The Guru (1969) and The Wild Party (1975), they are right. But such Ivory offerings as Autobiography of a Princess (1975) and Roseland (1977) are well worth seeking out. Later, some of his films received their initial showing on television, a medium to whose intimacy Ivory's style seems ideally suited. The Europeans (1979) though, a graceful film full of richness and delicacy and the best expression of Henry James' work on screen, catching exactly the flavour and intimations of James' writing, remains best seen in a cinema. But critics expressed disappointment with Ivory's next cinema offering, Quartetv (1981). He was soon to turn the tables on them.
After his three chosen paths - India, the nostalgic past and the literary - collided in the hypnotic Heat and Dust (1983), Ivory hit a magic ten-year run which included Academy Award nominations for A Room with a View (1985), Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993). The first two were both adaptations from the work of E.M. Forster, and won several acting Oscars, while the latter, an exquisite study of repressed emotions, is possibly his best film, He has fallen a little from those peaks since, but his work remains pictorially stunning. The Golden Bowl (2000), was another star-studded Henry James adaptation but one that proved too intricate for Merchant-Ivory to film in an engaging
Jefferson in Paris (1995)
Director: James Ivory
Writer: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (written by)
Cast:
Nick Nolte ... Thomas Jefferson
Gwyneth Paltrow ... Patsy Jefferson
Estelle Eonnet ... Polly Jefferson
Thandie Newton ... Sally Hemings
Seth Gilliam ... James Hemings
Todd Boyce ... William Short
Nigel Whitmey ... John Trumbull
Summary:
One of the obsessive speculations in American history is whether Thomas Jefferson, in the years before he became president, had an affair with (and fathered a child with) his 15-year-old slave Sally Hemings. JEFFERSON IN PARIS follows Jefferson to France (as the U.S. ambassador to the court of Louis XVI), following the death of his wife his friendships and flirtations with the French, his relationship with his daughters and slaves from home (especially Sally), against the backdrop of the beginning of the French Revolution.
Links:
A Soldier`s Daughter Never Cries (1998)
Summary:
This fictionalized story, based on the family life of writer James Jones, is an emotionless slice-of-life story. Jones here is portrayed as Bill Willis, a former war hero and now successful author who obviously drinks too much and is starting to experience health problems. Living in France with his wife, daughter, and an adopted son, the family travels an unconventional road that leaves all of them as outsiders to others. Preaching a sexual freedom, his daughter's sexual acceptance begins at an early age and betrays her when the family moves to Hanover in America. Her sexuality is definitely not the normal for American teens and gives her a bad reputation and outcasts her. Meanwhile her brooding brother struggles with his own inner turmoils about his early desertion in life. Only within the tight knit confines of his family is he comfortable to even speak.
Links
The Wild Party (1975)
Summary:
Loosely based on the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, an aging silent movie comic star tries for a comeback by staging a wild party that turns into a sexual free-for-all. The comic ends up killing his mistress and her latest boyfriend.
Time also has a framing role in The Wild Party, shot soon after Autobiography of a Princess. It has a curious history, having been inspired by a blank-verse narrative poem of 1926 by Joseph Moncure March about a disastrous Greenwich Village party given by a vaudeville comic in his walk-up apartment. The lyricist Walter Marks saw in it the idea for a musical film, with the setting changed to Hollywood at the end of the silent-movie era. Shortly after the project was brought to Edgar Lansbury and Joseph Beruh, producers of Godspell and other Broadway musicals, Walter Marks's brother Peter discussed it with Ivory and mentioned that a director was needed. It was in this way that Ivory, as director, and Merchant, as coproducer with Lansbury and Beruh, were brought in. An important change was made in the script on which Ivory and Marks collaborated: the musical became a drama with music.
Links:
Savages (1972)
Summary:
A tribe of primitive "mudpeople" encounter a croquet ball, rolling through their forest. Following it, they find themselves on a vast, deserted Long Island estate. Entering, they begin to become civilized and assume the stereotypical roles and dress of people at a weekend party. There follows an allegory of upper-class behavior. At last, they begin to devolve toward their original status, and after a battle at croquet, they disappear into the woods.
LINKS:
The Europeans 1979
The Bostonians (1984)
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