Post Coital Gamesmanship

I just love this quirky short film. Made me laugh out loud ... a sure sign for a post.

Won't say more about it, just enjoy ...

... and tell us what you think.

Last Of Her Race

Fanny Cochrane-Smith (1834-1905)

Mainstream white histories tell us that Trugernanner [Truganini] (1812-1876) ...

 Trugernanner [Truganini] (1812-1876)

... was the last surviving full-blood Tasmanian aboriginal.

As a not directly relevant issue here, aboriginal people I know say aboriginality is a matter of identification rather than full bloodedness.

Truganini is now widely used by liberals, like me (and you?) to signify the genocide with repect to the indigenous inhabitants of this country by the European settlers.

However, born on Flinders island of a Tanganutura mother of the North-eastern tribe and of a Nicermenic father from the Robbins Island group of the Northwestern tribe, Fanny Cochrane-Smith (1834-1905) LINK can better claim to be the last of her race from the Australian island State of Tasmania.

 

 

That Fanny's claim has been largely ignored may well be due to the politics surrounding identity and its requirement of living a more complete and typical indigenous lifestyle. From the age of seven and with no known aboriginal name, she lived and later worked in white homes and institutions and married married a white man, the English lawyer and ex-convict, William Smith. 

 Fanny, husband William Smith and perhaps two of her sons

However, Fanny continued traditional practices - hunting, gathering bush food and medicines, making baskets, diving for shellfish and engaging in aboriginal religious rituals. And was heralded as the 'last Tasmanian aboriginal' at a concert held in her honour in 1899 in Hobart.

You must know by now I'm pretty drawn in by the 'Window into the Past' experience - and it was flung wide open this morning in cyberspace, when I happened across some wax cylinder recordings made by Fanny between 1899 and 1903. 

 Fanny - 1903 Recording

They are the only extant examples of a Tasmanian aboriginal dialect - spoken and in song, songs which in some cases she also recorded in English ...

 

 

... and just just managing to survive, due to the dawn of wax cylinder recording!

A Story Looking For Its Movie

One of the last re-posts - nearly back to the way we were guys.

So ... some stories just seem to be looking for their movie, and this one is particularly high on that list.

Rather than a too long-winded telling the story, I thought I'd bullet point a few of the more startling events in the particularly startling life of Mathilde Kschessinskaya (1872-1971) - and there were certainly plenty of them.

• As the C19 drew to a close, she was the Prima Ballerina Assoluta of the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg

• At the age of seventeen, the ballerina had became the mistress of Nicholas II, when grand duke

• Even more scandalously for the day, she then formed a ménage à trois with two Grand Dukes of the Romanov family - Sergei Mikhailovich and his cousin Andrei Vladimirovich

• In 1902, she gave birth to a son, Prince Vladimir Sergeyevich Romanovsky-Krasinsky ('Vova'), who quite naturally was never sure who his father was

• Throwing realism completely to the wind, the ballerina would have selections from her valuable jewels sewn onto her costumes - for example, coming on stage as the Princess Aspicia in The Pharaoh's Daughter wearing a diamond encrusted tiara and choker - not a little like the American opera singer Leontyne Price who infamously jewelled up for the role of the enslaved Nubian princess in 'Aida'

• Kschessinskaya comissioned the famed Russian jeweller, Carl Faberge, to design a fetching gold and pearl encrusted, shall we say, 'top'

• It was from the balcony of her elegant house in Moscow that Lenin addressed a revolutionary crowd on his return from Finland in 1917

• In staggeringly stereotypic fashion, Mathilde escaped the Russian revolution with her jewel collection intact, moved to Europe and in 1921 married Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, becoming Her Serene Highness Princess Romanova-Krasinskaya

• The impresario Serge de Diaghilev invited the prima ballerina to dance with the famed Ballets Russes at the Paris Opera but she declined

• The family moved to Monte Carlo, where Mathilde dissipated the remaining wealth of family at the gamblimg tables - the remainder was sequestered by the crash of 1929

• Back in Paris, Grand Duke Andre was reduced to driving a taxi

• Kschessinskaya opened a ballet school in the French capital, teaching at times the likes of Ballets Russes ballerina Dame Alicia Markova, the Ballets Russes 'baby ballerinas' Tatiana Riabouchinska and Tamara Toumanova and The Royal Ballet's Dame Margot Fonteyn

Mathilde Kschessinskaya teaching 'baby ballerina' Tatiana Riabouchinska

• The prima ballerina absoluta performed one last time, aged 64, at a charity event with TheRoyal Ballet at Covent Garden

• Mathilde Kschessinskaya died in her 100th year.

'Alright already'!

Now this post was primarily prompted by my having come across 1920s footage of this 'larger than life' character at some kind of outdoor social gathering - she is seen in characteristically imperious mode greeting guests and firmly directing proceedings. And at the end there's a little section showing her son 'Vovo' loading up his plate from the outdoor buffet!

Her dying words?

'My life was beautiful'

You betcha baby!

And it makes our own seem just a tad on the dull and uneventful side. Well, mine at least - I don't know about yours!!!

Sylvia Beech Talks of Shakespeare and Co. in Paris in 1919, and of Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce

Sorry guys for going all blue stocking again, and so soon ... but, having put out a post on my extraordinary experience with respect to the famous English language bookshop in Paris 'Shakespeare and Company' (LINK) ...

... I couldn't resist another when I stumbled across a 1950s interview with its 1919 founder, Sylvia Beech.

Sylvia and girlfriend Adrienne Monnier, ...

... who ran a French language lending library, ...

... formed, as the little documentary surrounding the interview says, 'the nexus for the interchange between French and English literature' in the 1920s and beyond. 'Shakespeare and Company' was one of the major centres for much of activity of the ex-pat American artistic community.

In this interview, Sylvia Beech talks about her friendship with writer James Joyce and her publishing his 'Ulysses' in 1922. It had been serialised in 'The Little Review' between 1918-1922.

She also speaks about her relationship with Ernest Hemingway ...

As with all footage like this, for me the thing is getting a sense of the person, as much as engaging with the content. A bit like Peter Seller's 'being there'.

Really hope you like this one!

C19 French Artists on Film!

Amazingly I just came across tiny pieces of film of four of the giants of C19 French art.

The first records the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) ...



... painting at home - first in his garden and then indoors ...

The second piece captures Edgar Degas (1834-1917), one of the founders of Impressionism but who preferred to be known as a realist ...



... walking past a cafe in a street in Paris past with lady ...

The third segment of footage captures the father of modern post-naturalistic (as opposed to realistic) sculpture, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) ...



... walking in and out of, and inspecting, a rather monumental perhaps antique building, and then posing in a garden, uncharacteristically top-hatted ...

The final film fragment shows famed Impressionist painter of water lilies, Claude Monet (1840-1926) ...



... talking to a gentleman outdoors, and then painting en plein air at the edge of a pond in his garden at Giverny ...

It all makes me wonder just what other film stock might still be out there, in some musty old archive/library/museum/cellar/wherever!

Ram Gopal (1912-2003) - 'The Indian Nijinsky'

Most often for me, performances don't reach across cultures and eras. But those of Ram Gopal do - partly, I'll admit, through the fluid sensuality of the dancing.

It may sound patronising to use the Polish critic Tadeus Zelinski's tag 'The Indian Nijinky', but it gives a sense of Gopal's international stature as a dancer.

Ram Gopal meeting Vaslav Nijinsky (c.1950)

The footage I've put together is from 'The Lord Shiva Dance' (1948).







Gopal was more than passingly interested in Western ballet, having for a time a partnership with the great Diaghilev Ballets Russes era star, Dame Alicia Markova.

Ram Gopal with Dame Alicia Markova

I don't want to go on too much - I was just interested to see if any of you guys responded similarly to the performance.

So is it a thumbs up or down situation?

Early Martha Graham Choreography

Yesterday, I came across some extraordinary early C20 Eastman Kodak dance footage - the earliest extant record of Martha Graham's choreography, 'The Flute of Krishna' (1926).

Krishna, the god of love, plays a call to love on his flute and cavorts with three tantalising girls or Apsaras. However, he is finally won over by his fiancee, Radha.

The iconography of the choreography stems mostly from Hindu sculpture and C19 European Orientalism, but also takes other inspirations, such as classical sculpture - for example, 'The Three Graces' - though these compositions may have antecedents in Indian sculpture.

Though not appearing in this film, Graham appeared in the original dance ...

' ... clad in a heavy gold kimona, making patterns with her body against a screen of brilliant lacquer ... . Martha Graham presents a series of pictures that fire the imagination and make a hundred stories for every gesture. Shall we say her dances are motion pictures for the sophisticated'

'The Dance' magazine

In this footage Robert Ross is Krishna and Evelyn Sabin is Radha, with Thelma Biracree, Constance Finkel, Betty MacDonald as Apsaras. The music is a new traditional Indian music score, as the original by George Ruckert is lost.

This is obviously an other than Indian fabrication, but curiously Martha Graham's piece does not look the awkward pastiche that is often the result of such cross-cultural explorations.