Saturday, March 31, 2018

Dita Von Teese / This much I Know / ‘Staying pale takes some effort in LA’






Dita sitting on a bed wearing a white dress
 ‘Heather Renée Sweet – my real name – was a very quiet, painfully shy person’: Dita Von Teese. Photograph: John Russo/Contour by Getty Images



THIS MUCH I KNOW

Dita Von Teese: ‘Staying pale takes some effort in LA’


The burlesque dancer, 45, on divorcing Marilyn Manson, collecting lingerie and why she’s actually quite low-maintenance

Craig McLean
Saturday 31 March 2018

Burlesque has become a place for an alternative feminist movement. I didn’t ever think I was going to be famous. I just started doing it because it was fun and something cool that nobody else was doing. We get to decide if we want to be objectified. But I recognise that one person’s empowerment can be another person’s degradation.
You can only hunt swans if you’re royalty. The pair I have in my living room at home in Los Angeles are my best taxidermy score for sure. I got them on eBay. They’re antique, obviously, in case anyone is freaking out.
It’s good to collect, but sometimes it’s better to sell. I’ve been putting my hats on Depop – it’s Instagram for shopping. People get to say: “I’m wearing Dita’s hat!” But other things of mine, they’ll have to prise from my cold dead hands.



The ideas interview / Julia Kristeva


Julia Kristeva

The ideas interview: Julia Kristeva


Why is a great critic ashamed of being fashionable? 

By John Sutherland
Tue 14 Mar 2006



T
o her admirers, Julia Kristeva is one of the heroic band of French critics who injected "theory" into the sluggish Anglo-Saxon cultural bloodstream. To diehards on the other side, she is a prime exponent of impenetrable and unnecessary critical complexities. One colleague, to whom I mentioned her name replied with the single word "bonkers". Another suggested she should get a Nobel prize.

She is particularly associated with three concepts, which she now seems to wish to disown. Le semiotique is the idea that speech works as much through sub-verbal codes as by what is actually said. The real work of signification is done in the "cleavage between words and meanings". This fascination with the sub- or pre-verbal is something that, looking back, Kristeva now associates with the liturgy of the Orthodox Church: "All my childhood was bathed in this," she says.
The second of Kristeva's hallmark ideas is what she calls "abjection". Why, Kristeva inquires, are we fascinated by things that disgust and horrify us? As she put it in her essay on the subject: "There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced."
Most famously, Kristeva is associated with the concept of "intertextuality" - the idea that all literature is constantly in conversation with all other literature, undetachable, as a single unit, from the textual mass. Having patented these influential ideas, Kristeva is now acutely uneasy at being chained to her own thought, or confined within her own thinking. "I am very proud of the widespread use of my ideas," she says, "and at the same time very much ashamed because they have become so fashionable. Everybody thinks and talks about 'intertextuality', everybody thinks and talks about 'abjection'. The ideas become politically correct everywhere in the world and I hate it because I think when people repeat what you have done and said, they can no longer recognise you yourself. You are denied. It's a kind of decay of this moment when the idea burst out of your mind. Now the idea is consumerised."

Kristeva applies one term to her project - "synthetic". She likes to join things, mix them fluidly. It is, perhaps, something that links with her background. She came to France in 1965, aged 24, as a refugee from communist Bulgaria. She says she now thinks in French. But clearly, as her latest writing indicates, she still feels Bulgarian.
In recent years, restless as ever, Kristeva has utilised fiction as her principal mode of expression. Her latest detective novel, Murder in Byzantium, revisits the Greek Orthodox Christianity of her childhood and incorporates religious conspiracies and Thomas Harris-style serial killers. What does she see as the connection between Kristeva the critic and Kristeva the novelist? "There is a continuation", she replies. "As you know, I belong to the tendency, or school, in French philosophy which developed in the 60s, in which conceptual work is deeply involved with the personal and in which notions, or ideas, are sutured by style. There is a lot of imagination, rhetorical figures, subjective expressions and so on that that often bother the so-called Anglo-Saxon reader because they consider this French 'stuff' - theory - to be somehow indigestible."

Why is her latest novel so concerned with religion? Is she attracted by the Church? Or merely fascinated by it? "I am not a believer, I believe in words. There is only one resurrection for me - and that is in words. My novel is a kind of anti-Da Vinci Code. I'm not Catholic by background. My father was a very great believer, but in the Orthodox Church, in Bulgaria. As a young woman my Oedipus conflict was in a perpetual fight with that." She laughs. "Afterwards I tried to understand what Christianity is and my approach became more intellectual. On the one side, I'm very much interested in religion. On the other hand, I don't make any kind of spiritual - how shall I say - extrapolation or message. My idea is to link religion with politics and see how in both of them there were, and will be, a lot of crimes and human folly."
Why the detective novel format? "It is necessary to revisit the starting point of my writing detective stories. I date it as some months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when my father was assassinated in a Bulgarian hospital. It was a very, very difficult experience for me. When I arrived, after he was dead, the family was not informed of the cause of his death.
We could make no inquiry as to who was the criminal who had done it. And finally he was, without our permission, cremated, which was wholly contrary to his religious belief. It was very, very difficult for me to recover from this grief - to mourn. In this situation the detective story imposed itself on me, without any voluntary act on my part."
Since then, Kristeva has written a string of detective novels. Is it an entirely separate exericise from the academic work?" No. This is why I made the point about the 60s, and the French theoretical 'stuff'. There have always been some personal implications in my essays. But now it's a jump because I think that writing novels is a sort of process I like to call transubstantiation. There is, as I see it, a very strong linkage between words and flesh in writing fiction. It's not merely a mental activity. The whole personality is in it. You have psychology, you have belief, you have love affairs, you have sexuality, you also have a connection to language. When I'm writing novels, I am making a voyage around, or into, myself. I do it also, of course, in my essays. But my essays are a defence of my self-voyaging. In the novel, I take all the risks of the traveller, or the explorer. And I get all the pleasures as well"





Friday, March 30, 2018

Julia Kristeva was communist secret agent, Bulgaria claims



It was claimed thatJulia Kristeva worked for the communist-era secret services under the code name ‘Sabina’. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Renowned psychoanalyst and philosopher alleged to have become collaborator in 1970s


Julia Kristeva was communist secret agent, Bulgaria claims

 Renowned psychoanalyst and philosopher alleged to have become collaborator in 1970s

Reuters in Sofia
Wed 28 Mar 2018


The renowned Bulgarian psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva worked as an agent and collaborator with the Balkan country’s secret services during the communist era, a state commission has claimed.

Kristeva, 76, is the author of more than 30 books and worked alongside leading French intellectuals such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes.

The Bulgarian commission that identifies people who had worked for the communist-era secret services alleges that Kristeva, under the code name “Sabina”, had been a collaborator for the first department of the Committee for State Security. The department oversaw intelligence in the area of the arts and mass media.

It said she began working for the state security organisation in 1971. She had moved to Paris in 1965 on a French government scholarship. The document did not say how long she had worked for state security or whether she had received any payment.

Kristeva, who still lives in Paris, was not immediately available to comment on the matter.

In its heyday, Bulgaria’s state security, working closely with the Soviet KGB, operated a network of about 100,000 agents and informers. It was dissolved in 1989 following the collapse of the communist regime.

The issue of access to, and publication of, its files has continued to raise powerful emotions in Bulgaria during its difficult transition to democracy.

Foreign Policy magazine has ranked Kristev as one of the 100 greatest thinkers of the 20th century. As well as books on psychoanalysis and philosophy, she has written extensively on cultural and feminist issues and is also a novelist.

She is an emeritus professor at the Université Paris Diderot and a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York.





Thursday, March 29, 2018

Sienna Miller talks about close relationship with ex Tom Sturridge: 'We still love each other'


Sienna Miller



Sienna Miller talks about close relationship with ex Tom Sturridge: 'We still love each other'



SHARNAZ SHAHID
Despite calling off their engagement in 2015, Sienna Miller and Tom Sturridge have remained the best of friends as they continue to co-parent their only child, four-year-old daughter Marlowe. Speaking in a new interview with Harper's Bazaar, the 35-year-old actress has revealed she still has a "lot of love" for her ex fiancé. "We still love each other," she explained. "I think in a break-up somebody has to be a little bit cruel in order for it to be traditional, but it's not been acrimonious in a way where you would choose to not be around that person."
The former lovebirds began dating in 2011 and got engaged the following year after announcing they were expecting their first child together. Although they lead private lives, the stars are often seen out and about spending time together with their daughter. "We don't live together, as has been reported recently, but we do half the time," added Sienna. "Everybody will stay over or we'll all go on holiday and that's because we genuinely want to be around each other. It's great for our daughter that she has two parents who love each other and are friends." She also noted: "He's definitely my best friend in the entire world."
Sienna Miller and Tom Sturridge are still the best of friends

Since parting ways, Sienna has been linked to American film director Bennett Miller. The couple were first rumoured to be dating in May last year, after they were spotted at a Met Gala afterparty in New York. At the moment, the mother-of-one is preparing for the release of her next blockbuster, The Lost City of Z. Directed by James Gray, the movie follows the story of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared with his son in 1925 during an expedition in the Amazon. She stars alongside Charlie Hunnam in the biopic, which will be released in cinemas later this month.




Look of the Moment / Sienna Miller II







Look of the Moment | Sienna Miller


Splash News
The Look: A no-brainer – minimal makeup, tousled hair, the perfect LBD and a shoe with some spunk. It all adds up.
The Girl: Sienna Miller, who stars in the West End production of “Flare Path,” exiting the Theatre Royal Haymarket.
The Details: Azzedine Alaïa dress and Tabitha Simmons “Dusty” shoe.



Look of the Moment / Sienna Miller I


Sienna Miller





Look of The Moment | Sienna Miller


Nick Harvey/WireImage
The Look: Fluff Piece — an electric dress with feathers and plenty of sparkling appliqués is as attention-grabbing as any bird of paradise.
The Girl: The actress Sienna Miller at the All Saints dinner at Petersham Nurseries in Richmond, England.
The Details: Matthew Williamson dress, Charlotte Olympia for Matthew Williamson shoes, Jacques Fath clutch.




Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Obituaries / Stéphan Audran


Stéphane Audran, left, in the Oscar-winning Babette’s Feast, 1987. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex
Stéphane Audran obituary
Star of Babette’s Feast who shone in the films of her husband Claude Chabrol
"She was one of the icons of French cinema, and pitch perfect in the Hélène cycle: enigmatic and vulnerable. One of those end of an era moments, which gives me the excuse to re-visit her films with Chabrol, starting with the masterpiece: 'Le Boucher'."
Ronald Bergan
Tue 27 Mar 2018
Of all the director-and-star couples in the history of cinema, there was none more prolific than Claude Chabrol and Stéphane Audran, who made 23 films together. Chabrol also directed Audran as Lady Macbeth at a theatre in Versailles, near Paris, in 1964, the year of their marriage. In her husband’s films, Audran, who has died aged 85, perfected her portrayal of the bourgeois Frenchwoman – graceful, aloof, intelligent, reserved and yet passionate. She dominated Chabrol’s films for more than two decades from 1960, often playing adulterous and/or betrayed wives called Hélène.


The “Hélène cycle” – variations on the theme of marital infidelity leading to murder – in which Audran played a wife caught between two characters, usually called Charles and Paul, began with La Femme Infidèle (The Unfaithful Wife, 1969). Chabrol seemed to draw mischievous pleasure from directing his wife in such roles.
Although Audran made dozens of films for other directors, she never shone as brightly as she did in Chabrol’s movies. One exception was as the Frenchwoman who enraptures a group of austere members of a tiny, remote community in 1870s Denmark with her cordon bleu cooking in Gabriel Axel’s Oscar-winning Babette’s Feast (1987).
She was born Colette Suzanne Jeannine Dacheville in Versailles - Stéphane Audran was the stage name she adopted later. Her father, Corneille Dacheville, a doctor, died when she was six. From then until the age of 15, she suffered from renal colic. Her mother, Jeanne (nee Rossi), having lost her first child, was obsessed with Stéphane’s health. She did not approve of her daughter entering the acting profession. Nevertheless, Stéphane studied drama after leaving the Lycée Lamartine.


Audran, second left, at a press conference for the film Violette Nozière in 1978 in Cannes, with the director Claude Chabrol, seated, and the actors Jean Carmet and Isabelle Huppert.
Pinterest
 Audran, second left, at a press conference for the film Violette Nozière in 1978 in Cannes, with the director Claude Chabrol, seated, and the actors Jean Carmet and Isabelle Huppert. Photograph: Ralph Gatti/AFP/Getty Images

She made her screen debut opposite the future film director Maurice Pialat in Le Jeu de la Nuit (1957), but it was while filming the role of a hotel manager in Eric Rohmer’s first feature, Le Signe du Lion (The Sign of Leo, 1962), in 1959, that her life changed, when she met Chabrol.
He immediately cast her in his second movie, Les Cousins (1959), in a supporting role. As Françoise, with dyed blonde hair and a revealing, strapless dress, trying to seduce an innocent country boy, Charles (Gérard Blain), at a party, she showed little to suggest a future star. But Chabrol foresaw her potential. At the time, he was married to Agnès Goute. Audran was divorced after a short marriage to the actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, whom she married in 1954 when they were both at drama school.


Audran was further stretched in Chabrol’s early masterpiece Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), as one of four shop girls longing to escape their monotonous existence. Audran, as the sullen beauty Ginette, finds an outlet by singing at a tatty music hall, pretending to be Italian. She then went on to feature in almost every one of Chabrol’s films in the next 20 years, acting as his muse.






The first real inkling of what was to come was her elegant performance in L’Oeil du Malin (The Third Lover, 1962) as Hélène, the French wife of a successful German author, a seemingly happy couple whose lives are disturbed by a voyeuristic journalist. But it was not until Les Biches (1968) that Audran was given a role worthy of her subtle expressiveness, helping her to establish herself as one of the most potent French stars.






Stéphane Audran with Jean Yanne in Claude Chabrol’s Le Boucher, 1970.
Pinterest
 Audran with Jean Yanne in Claude Chabrol’s Le Boucher, 1970. Photograph: Alamy

The part of Frédérique won her the Best Actress award in Berlin. Audran played a cool and callous rich woman who picks up a young student in Paris and takes her off to her villa in St Tropez, but the local architect (Trintignant) causes a rift in their relationship. The fact that Audran played love scenes with her ex-husband, directed by her present one, gave the witty and caustic bisexual ménage-a-trois an extra frisson.

In La Femme Infidèle, Chabrol applied his sharp scalpel to bourgeois marriage, represented by a respectable husband (Michel Bouquet), complacently happy in his marriage, who discovers that his wife has been having an affair with another man. In order to save the marriage, Hélène is quite prepared to coolly cover up her husband’s murder of her lover.
Juste Avant la Nuit (Just Before Nightfall, 1971) was the reverse of La Femme Infidèle, being centred upon an unfaithful husband, yet in both cases it is the husband who does the killing. He murders his mistress, then confesses to his wife, who doesn’t condemn him. Again, Chabrol’s ironic point is that murder must not be allowed to disturb the surface of middle-class marriage or interrupt elaborate meals.
Audran showed her more emotional side in La Rupture (The Breach, 1970) as an innocent woman fighting to keep her son against the custody demands of her unscrupulous father-in-law (Bouquet). In the same year, in Le Boucher (The Butcher), Audran was extremely sympathetic as a schoolteacher in a small town, who establishes a relationship with the shy local butcher, who turns out to be a murderer.
The blackly humorous Les Noces Rouges (Wedding in Blood, 1973), in which Audran played the wife of a small-town mayor, who has an affair with her husband’s deputy, was the last of the Chabrol films in which she starred as an adulterous ice maiden. Now entering her 40s, she started to be given more supporting roles, such as the lower-class slovenly mother who is poisoned by her daughter (Isabelle Huppert) in Violette Nozière (1978).






Les Biches
Pinterest
 Audran, right, in Les Biches, 1968, which helped establish her as one of the most potent French stars. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

After the couple divorced in 1980, and Chabrol remarried, he cast her in four movies – Le Sang des Autres (The Blood of Others, 1984), Cop au Vin (1985), Jours Tranquilles à Clichy (Quiet Days in Clichy, 1990) and Betty (1992). Although they were underwritten parts, it seemed important enough for him to have her there as a reminder of better days.


Audran also appeared in a mix of films, good and bad, by mainly non-auteurs. The exceptions were Luis Buñuel and Sam Fuller. For Buñuel, she was the wealthy society hostess in Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972), serenely unfazed by the bizarre events that occur during one night. For Fuller, she played the small role of Doctor Bogdanovich (named as a tribute to the director’s friend Peter Bogdanovich) in the low-budget made-in-Germany thriller Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972) and she had one powerful scene in The Big Red One (1980) as an underground fighter holed up in a psychiatric hospital.
It was one of several English-language films in which the soignée Audran appeared, though they did nothing to increase her international fame. The Black Bird (1975) was a strained spoof of The Maltese Falcon, with Audran as a Russian with a strong French accent; and she was merely required to wear designer gowns as a rich Iranian in the lame comedy Silver Bears (1978). The lowest point came when playing Jean-Claude Van Damme’s mother in the action movie Maximum Risk (1996).
She was better employed on television as Lord Marchmain’s Italian mistress Cara in two episodes of Brideshead Revisited (1981), and as Georgette in The Sun Also Rises (1984). However, the glory of her non-Chabrol career was her luminous portrayal of the cook-housekeeper in Babette’s Feast, a far cry from the glacial bourgeois persona that was her trademark.
Although she was no stranger to having large meals at home or in a restaurant in her ex-husband’s films, usually orchestrated into the action, this was the first time she was seen to cook any. According to the New York Times: “Her Babette is a portrait filled with poise, great dignity and an illuminating resonance as the solitary artist in exile who finally has the occasion to unveil her talents in the kitchen, to please her public, no matter how uncomprehending they be.”
She is survived by her son, the actor Thomas Chabrol.
 Stéphane Audran (Colette Suzanne Jeannine Dacheville), actor, born 8 November 1932; died 27 March 2018