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      The Academy Museum Names Jacqueline Stewart as New Leader

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      The film historian and preservationist specializes in Black cinema and silent movies. She had been serving as the institution’s chief artistic and programming officer.The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Wednesday named Jacqueline Stewart, a film scholar who worked to make the long-delayed project a reality, as its new director and president.The museum’s former leader, Bill Kramer, was appointed chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that oversees the Oscars, last month. As the museum’s chief artistic and programming officer, Stewart worked closely with Kramer to bring the institution over the finish line amid pandemic challenges, and bring it up to date with social movements, like #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo, that exposed inequities in the film industry.Stewart, a film historian and preservationist with a specialty in Black cinema and silent films, is a professor in the cinema and media studies department at the University of Chicago. In 2019, she became the first Black host on the cable channel Turner Classic Movies when she stepped in to introduce the programming series Silent Sunday Nights. She is chair of the National Film Preservation Board, which advises the Librarian of Congress on the National Film Registry, and founded an organization on Chicago’s South Side that preserves and screens footage of everyday life there.At the museum, which opened in Los Angeles last year, Stewart has helped steer exhibitions, screenings and workshops; she has also hosted a new podcast under the museum’s banner that delved into key social and cultural moments in Oscars history.In a news release announcing the appointment, Stewart said she looked forward to working with the museum board and staff and with the academy itself:“Our ambition in opening the Academy Museum was to give Los Angeles and the world an unprecedented institution for understanding and appreciating the history and culture of cinema, in all its artistic glory and all its power to influence and reflect society,” she said in the release. “I feel deeply honored to have been chosen for this new role.” More

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      They Loved Volcanoes and Each Other

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      In “Fire of Love,” the voice-over quotes Maurice and Katia Krafft’s feelings about the risks in their line of work: exploring and filming volcanoes. “I prefer an intense and short life to a monotonous, long one,” Maurice wrote. Katia acknowledged the danger but said that in the moment, she didn’t care at all.The Kraffts, married French volcanologists, were killed on June 3, 1991, observing an eruption of Mount Unzen in Japan. But the stunning 16-millimeter footage they shot throughout their careers — full of gushing lava, flying rocks and giant clouds of smoke — lives on in the new “Fire of Love,” an all-archival documentary compiled from roughly 200 hours of their material along with 50 hours of TV appearances and other clips.“I have so many questions that I wish I could have asked them personally, and one of them is what reels didn’t make it,” Sara Dosa, the documentary’s director, said during an interview in Tribeca last month. After all, visiting volcanoes is fraught with hazards. The film tells of Maurice scalding his leg in boiling mud and shows him playfully testing Katia’s helmet by throwing a rock at her head. Dosa said they didn’t use “a fun shot we had of Maurice taking his melted boot and throwing it into a lava flow.” It’s safe to assume that not all of the couple’s film equipment survived, either.The Kraffs’ relationship is also the subject of the new documentary.Image’EstBut “Fire of Love” is not just about the Kraffts’ time in the field; it’s also about their lives and their marriage. Dosa, who learned about the couple while doing research for a previous documentary, has described her film as a love triangle involving Maurice, Katia and the volcanoes.The movie tries to stay true to them — “we always wanted to start with Katia and Maurice, first and foremost,” Dosa said — while maintaining some critical distance. A voice-over from Miranda July expands on and at times complicates the Kraffts’ descriptions, countering Maurice’s claim, for instance, that he was “not a filmmaker,” but merely “a wandering volcanologist forced to make films in order to wander.” The couple — short-haired, bespectacled Katia; bushy-maned, garrulous Maurice — toured the world giving lectures and holding screenings. Even today, in part thanks to their many books and TV appearances, they enjoy a measure of global fame.“We wanted to kind of explore how they were crafting their own image as well,” Dosa said. “They seemed to understand that their public image helped them to continue to live the lives that they wanted to lead. They performed versions of themselves, not in a way that was inauthentic at all — it seemed to be almost this higher truth of who Katia and Maurice were.”Bertrand Krafft, Maurice’s older brother, now 82, maintained the footage after the couple’s deaths. “My parents didn’t know anything about photography and cinema, and Katia’s parents didn’t either,” he said, speaking by phone through an interpreter. “Somebody had to take charge to manage the assets that Maurice and Katia left behind, and I was the only person who was available to do that.”Katia Krafft said that she was mindful of the dangers of her work but that in the moment, she didn’t care at all.Image’EstThe grey gas and smoke of a pyroclastic flow, the kind that killed the Kraffts.Image’EstBertrand has granted permission for Maurice and Katia’s images to be used in other documentaries. Indeed, another feature that makes use of the Kraffts’ material, “The Fire Within: Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft,” directed by Werner Herzog, had its premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest in Britain on June 26. But Bertrand said that the film he participated in the most over the years has been Dosa’s. “Her ideas, her approach to the project seemed excellent to me,” he said. “That’s why I did anything I could to be able to help her.”Inside the World of Werner HerzogIn his decades-long career, the filmmaker has come to seem more and more like one of the existentially inclined dreamers who populate his work.First Novel: Werner Herzog made a late-career foray into fiction with his new book, “The Twilight World.” He feels he has finally found his medium.Review: The book vividly reconstructs the personal war of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer who stayed in the Philippine jungle for years after World War II ended.In the Family: The filmmaker narrated “Last Exit: Space,” a documentary on the feasibility of off-world colonization by his son Rudolph.Interview: At the start of the pandemic, Herzog spoke of apocalyptic themes in his work, the universe’s indifference and the meaning of life.The footage included fully finished movies and working materials both edited and not, according to Mathieu Rousseau of Image’Est, the French archive that had been storing the Krafft collection of 800 reels of film and 300,000 slides. (Bertrand Krafft sold the material to a Geneva-based company, Titan Film, after the documentary was underway.)“What was complicated in the beginning, and also when we had to digitize everything to be able to allow Sara to be able to make her movie, was that we needed to figure out what Maurice had done,” Rousseau said through an interpreter during a video call. Maurice, he noted, “did the editing himself. He had his own logic.”Maurice Krafft on top of an active and hardening lava flow. “I prefer an intense and short life to a monotonous, long one,” he wrote. Image’EstDosa and her editors also had to make sense of the hundreds of hours of footage. Jocelyne Chaput, one of the editors of “Fire of Love,” said that on some reels, “I got the impression that someone had swept the cutting-room floor of Maurice’s house and then respliced it all together, and that was that reel.” Erin Casper, the other editor, said that making sure they were staying accurate — with footage that was loosely arranged geographically but not necessarily chronologically — was difficult as well.Furthermore, none of the Kraffts’ 16-millimeter footage had sound; all the audio of churning lava, for example, had to be added. The finished version of “Fire of Love” draws on a mix of Foley effects and a library of field recordings that the sound designer, Patrice LeBlanc, said had been accumulated over 30 years. Using sound wouldn’t have been alien to Katia or Maurice, Chaput and Casper suggested: Some of the Kraffts’ films used sound effects or voice-over, or would run while Maurice was lecturing over them.Ken Hon, the scientist in charge at the United States Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, knew the Kraffts beginning in the late 1980s, and remembers that filming volcanoes then was unusual.“There wasn’t a lot of footage of volcanic eruptions at that time, and certainly not stuff that was up close,” he said. “You had to be a volcanologist to film like they did because you had to be able to point the camera at the correct thing to understand the process that’s going on.” Today, such footage is much more common thanks to lighter and cheaper equipment. Maurice, he said, “would be so in love with drones right now.”When the Kraffts traveled through Hawaii, Hon recalled, he sometimes accompanied them into closed areas, like the town of Kalapana when it was overrun by lava in 1990.Filming “was just like second nature to them,” he said. “They’re setting up cameras and continuing to chat,” never pausing to say, “Stop, I have to focus, I have to concentrate.” Hon had some appreciation for the challenges the Kraffts faced: He helped his wife and fellow volcanologist, Cheryl Gansecki, make videos for about 20 years.Lava flowing at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, as seen in “Fire of Love.”Image’EstKatia and Maurice Krafft in aluminized suits at the edge of the Kilauea crater in Hawaii.Image’Est“High temperatures, it’s usually wet and there’s the acidic gas coming out of the volcanoes, right?” he said. “The combination of those things are exactly what they tell you not to immerse your electronic item into.”Steven Brantley, a volcanologist who retired after 37 years with the Geological Survey but has returned part-time, said that even when the Kraffts’ footage might make it appear that they were in harm’s way, they positioned the camera “in such a way that they could walk in front of it and live to tell the tale, over and over and over,” he said. “So in that sense I think they were very careful, even though it may not look like they were.”Hon also didn’t think of the Kraffts as incautious. “The kind of eruption that got them at Unzen, the dome-forming eruptions with collapses and small explosions and things, those are the most dangerous kinds of eruptions because they’re so unpredictable,” he said.The New York Times reported at the time that the couple and another volcanologist, Harry Glicken, who died with them, “had no chance to escape when the pyroclastic flow from the main crater, two miles away, plunged down the slope at a speed estimated at 100 to 125 m.p.h.”Brantley never worked with the Kraffts in the field but did collaborate with Maurice on a video about volcanic hazards that was nearly complete when Maurice died. Sections of it were screened in time to warn Philippine residents of the eruptions at Mount Pinatubo that occurred less than two weeks later. Brantley emphasized that educating the public about volcanoes was as much a part of the Kraffts’s legacy as their striking footage.Herzog, through a representative, said shortly before the premiere of his own Krafft film that he had not yet seen “Fire of Love” but that he hoped to “in a theater within the next weeks.”The potential confluence of two Krafft movies reminded Hon of the overlapping releases of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano” in 1997. This must just be the way it is with volcano movies, he suggested. “We don’t do them at once,” he said. “We always do a pair.” More

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      ‘Fire of Love’ Review: A Volcanic Romance

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      Sara Dosa’s new documentary chronicles the lives and deaths of the French scientists Katia and Maurice Krafft.The subjects of Sara Dosa’s new documentary “Fire of Love” are Maurice and Katia Krafft, married French scientists who devoted their lives to the study of volcanoes. Really, though, it might be more accurate to describe the couple, who died in a volcanic eruption in 1991, as co-directors, since they were the ones who captured the most arresting images in this curious and haunting film.Those images, still and moving, record the before, during and after of volcanic eruptions on several continents. Some of these are terrifying, as molten rock shoots skyward and clouds of ash roll down the sides of mountains. Others are eerie, capturing the glow of an active crater or the otherworldly contours of newly formed rock. The sheer existence of these photos is mind-boggling when you think about how close the people with the cameras must have been to the lava and the smoke.The Kraffts, who grew up in Alsace, France, and met at the University of Strasbourg, were devoted to each other and smitten with Etna, Stromboli, Nyiragongo and other volatile spots. As the film tells it — and archival interviews and broadcast appearances confirm — their shared interest wasn’t just a professional matter. It was an all-consuming and ultimately fatal passion.Maurice was a geologist and Katia a geochemist, and the difference between those disciplines is an occasional source of nerdy humor. A geologist, Maurice suggests, is someone who paddles an inflatable canoe into a lake of sulfuric acid, while a geochemist has the good sense to stay on shore taking measurements and collecting samples.The narration, read by Miranda July, underlines temperamental contrasts between the scientists that are seemingly confirmed by the pictures. Katia, birdlike and ironical, kept track of the data and took the still photographs, while Maurice, who resembles a curly-headed lion cub, gave public lectures and wielded the movie camera.Out in the field, tiptoeing across lava streams or trudging through ash and mud, they wore matching red wool caps and silver insulated jumpsuits and, sometimes, metal helmets that extend over their shoulders to protect them from molten debris. “Fire of Love,” which also includes animated sequences, has some of the willful enchantment of a children’s book. Even Maurice’s flights of philosophical rhetoric — he and Katia were French intellectuals, after all — have a naïve charm, expressing a sense of inexhaustible, starry-eyed wonder.The objects of that fascination are lethally destructive and scarily unpredictable, but, for the Kraffts, the danger was part of the allure. “Fire of Love” is a romance shadowed by tragedy. The fact of the couple’s death is established early on, and by the time the details are filled in at the end of the movie, you more or less know what’s coming. What might look like recklessness is part of a devotion that takes on a moral — even spiritual — dimension.There’s a reason that volcanoes have, throughout human history, been worshiped and placated like gods. Maurice and Katia Krafft represent a secular, scientific variation on that old-time religion. They craved sublimity, but they also wanted to be helpful. “Fire of Love” makes much of the distinction between relatively predictable “red” volcanoes and their more deadly “gray” counterparts — “the ones that kill,” as Maurice puts it.In their last years, the Kraffts spent most of their time studying the killers, hoping to discover patterns that would enable people living in the path of destruction to escape. They risked their lives to do this, and the movie argues that their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. More than that, it preserves their work and their idiosyncratic, unforgettable human presence.Fire of LoveRated PG. Geological violence. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Directing the Beatles Was Just One Part of His Long and Winding Career

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      HUDSON, N.Y. — Of course I wanted to talk with Michael Lindsay-Hogg about the Beatles. Everyone wants to talk with him about the Beatles, especially since his star turn in “Get Back,” Peter Jackson’s epic documentary, which debuted last fall on Disney+.In January 1969, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg was the brash young film director who tried to charm and cajole John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr through warring agendas as they hashed out new songs and gave their last concert on a London rooftop. Soon after that, he started shaping his nearly 60 hours of footage into the documentary “Let It Be,” a film largely unavailable since its initial theatrical run in 1970.Mr. Lindsay-Hogg’s footage, as well as more than 100 hours of audio that he recorded with his crew, some of it with hidden microphones, got new life when Mr. Jackson cleaned it up and reassembled it for his nearly eight-hour series. Mr. McCartney and Mr. Starr, along with most critics, hailed “Get Back” as an upbeat corrective to Mr. Lindsay-Hogg’s more somber take.So would he like to talk about his time with the Beatles?“That was a small part of a long career,” he said in the sitting room of his three-bedroom Civil War-era house in Hudson, N.Y.He had a point. In the so-called Swinging London of the 1960s, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg made a name for himself as a creator of the music video, directing promotional films, as they were then called, for the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who a decade and a half before MTV. In the early 1980s, he was again a trailblazer, as the co-director of “Brideshead Revisited,” an 11-hour adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh novel that was a forerunner of prestige television dramas like “The Sopranos.” He is also a Tony-nominated stage director, painter and author. Oh, and Orson Welles may very well be his biological father.It’s almost too much to get through. No wonder he had a request, delivered in a deadpan voice: “Please make the entire article about my painting.” But eventually, over the course of three interviews, we got around to John, Paul, George and Ringo.The Third ManMr. Lindsay-Hogg, 82, lives with his wife, Lisa Ticknor Lindsay-Hogg, a former fashion model and casting agent, in a narrow cream-colored house in this river town nestled into lush green hills. The rooms have a lived-in feel, with book stacks rising from table tops and the walls blanketed with paintings, many of them scavenged from flea markets, and photos from his varied career.“I am the maximalist,” he said. “Lisa is the organizer.”A photo on display in Mr. Lindsay-Hogg’s home of a dinner in London more than 50 years ago, after a screening of his film “Let It Be.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIn addition to working with the Beatles, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg directed the Rolling Stones in the concert film “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesSprinkled among the decorations are posters from past projects, including “Agnes of God,” a 1982 Broadway play he directed, for which the actress Amanda Plummer won a Tony, and “The Object of Beauty,” a 1991 film written and directed by Mr. Lindsay-Hogg, with John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell in the lead roles. A sculpture of a rabbit head sits on a credenza. He got it in Harare, Zimbabwe, when he filmed Paul Simon’s “Graceland: The African Concert” in 1987.Three cats provide daily entertainment. “She’s a movie star waiting to happen,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said when a black cat named L’il Mew brushed against my leg.The couple has lived here less than two years. During lockdown, they rented a rock-star-style tour bus and fled Los Angeles, where they had lived since they were married in 2002. California’s wildfires were part of what drove them out.“The sky was yellow,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said. “You could taste the soot.”The move meant abandoning a city where he had deep ties. Although he was born in Manhattan and educated at Choate, the Connecticut prep school, he spent six years of his childhood in Hollywood, mingling with William Randolph Hearst, Olivia de Havilland and Humphrey Bogart.His mother was the actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, who starred opposite Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s “Wuthering Heights” in 1939. His father — at least, according to his birth certificate — was Sir Edward Lindsay-Hogg, a baronet of Rotherfield Hall in East Sussex, England. The younger Mr. Lindsay-Hogg inherited the title upon the elder’s death in 1999.“Technically, I could be a ‘Sir,’ but unlike Mick and Elton, I didn’t earn it,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said, referring to his friends Mick Jagger and Elton John.A young man in Swinging London: Mr. Lindsay-Hogg in 1965, when he was a director of the British pop music show “Ready Steady Go!”Evening Standard, via Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesThe question of paternity has long hovered over him. His mother, born in Ireland, made her American stage debut opposite Orson Welles in a 1938 revival of George Bernard Shaw’s “Heartbreak House.” The production was directed by Mr. Welles at the Mercury Theater, the New York repertory house he had co-founded. When Mr. Lindsay-Hogg was a teenager, his mother told him of the rumors that Mr. Welles, best known for his 1941 film classic “Citizen Kane,” was his biological father.“It certainly played into my life growing up, partly because of the way I look,” he said. “I was heavy when I was young, and Orson was heavy. I have a round face; he had a round face. I didn’t look like Edward Lindsay-Hogg, who, if anything, looked more like, say, Jeremy Irons.”At 19, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg had a small role in Mr. Welles’s stage production of “Chimes at Midnight” in Dublin. “I knew him over the years, and he’d pop up every so often,” he said. Shortly after the run, Mr. Welles offered him a job in a London production of Eugène Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros.” “He said, ‘I’ll call you in a couple of days and you can come over,’” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg recalled. “I then did not hear from him for five years.”Decades later, his mother, who had Alzheimer’s at the time, gave a cryptic confirmation that Mr. Welles was his father — then seemed to contradict it. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg got an answer when he spoke with Gloria Vanderbilt, a friend of his mother’s whom he had dated in the 1980s, while working on his 2011 memoir, “Luck and Circumstance.”“Gloria said, ‘I hesitate, because I promised your mother I wouldn’t say this, but she’s dead now. Geraldine told me Orson was your father,’” he recalled. He took a pause. “I’m kind of past that,” he said. “Whoever was in the bed that night was in the bed that night.”‘Seventh Career’He led me up a narrow staircase to a well-lit bedroom that he had converted into a painting studio. His latest work was on the easel: a portrait of a couple with haunted eyes that recalled the German Expressionists of the 1920s. Painting has become “a seventh career of sorts,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said.He said he recently sold four pieces at the Frieze Art Fair in Los Angeles, but art is more of a passion than a business. Painting also comes as a relief for someone who has endured the pressures of directing. “It’s all yours,” he said. “There’s no producer to say, ‘I don’t like that scene, why don’t you cut it out.’”Mr. Lindsay-Hogg calls painting his “seventh career.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesHe hasn’t abandoned show business entirely. In recent years he directed several episodes of the web comedy series “Tinsel’s Town,” about a YouTube star in Hollywood, and he is writing a script for a film he hopes to direct, set in 1946 Nevada.On the wall next to the staircase were two black-and-white close-up portraits of Mr. Jagger in his early 20s, both stills from the 1960s British pop music show “Ready Steady Go!,” the program that gave Mr. Lindsay-Hogg his start in directing at 24, a few years after he dropped out of Oxford. On the third episode he directed, the Rolling Stones performed “Play With Fire,” and Mr. Jagger made an immediate impression.“He was absolutely beautiful, like a Botticelli cosh boy,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg recalled, using an old British slang term for stylish teenage hoodlum.He went on to direct more than a dozen Rolling Stones music videos, from early hits like “Paint It Black” to “Start Me Up” in 1982, and has remained close with Mr. Jagger. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said he called him for advice last year, shortly before he was scheduled to have valve-replacement heart surgery, a procedure Mr. Jagger had gone through.“Mick is creative,” he said, “but he’s also extremely practical.”In 1968, around the time of the release of the Rolling Stones album “Beggars Banquet,” Mr. Jagger asked him to direct a TV concert film. A few weeks later, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg called Mr. Jagger and said, as he recalled it: “‘I’m going to say seven words to you: “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.”’ And he got it. It just sounded right.”The production, filmed during a grueling one-day shoot on a London soundstage, included performances by the Who, Jethro Tull and a supergroup called the Dirty Mac featuring John Lennon, Eric Clapton and Yoko Ono. The Rolling Stones closed the show. Now considered a classic, the film was shelved until 1996, when it premiered at the New York Film Festival.“In late January ’69, while doing ‘Let It Be,’ I showed a rough cut to Mick, Keith and Allen Klein,” he said, referring to the guitarist Keith Richards and the group’s manager at the time. “When it was over, they thought the Who were great, but didn’t think the Stones were as good as they could be. Keith said, ‘If it were called “The Who’s Rock and Roll Circus,” I wouldn’t mind.’”Mr. Lennon’s appearance came as little surprise. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg had been working with the Beatles since 1966, when he directed promotional films for “Paperback Writer” and “Rain.” Two years later, he was at the helm for the videos for “Revolution” and “Hey Jude.”Let It Be?In late 1968, Mr. McCartney asked him to direct a television special meant to accompany the album the band was about to record. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg was enthusiastic, but he knew from experience that “four Beatles would be four opinions.”“Giving an idea to them was like putting a lump of meat in an animal’s cage,” he said. “One of them would pick it up and sniff it and toss it to the next one to take a bite.”A poster in Mr. Lindsay-Hogg’s home of a 1991 film he wrote and directed, “The Object of Beauty.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesHis leather-bound diaries, which he started keeping in the mid-1960s, in his library in Hudson, N.Y.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesAfter 10 days of filming, it became clear that the production he had envisioned — a concert in a cinematic location, with Mr. Lindsay-Hogg pushing for an amphitheater in Libya, as well as a separate show documenting the rehearsals to run as a kind of teaser — was not going to happen. In the end, he did what he could to salvage something of the original idea by nudging the Beatles to the roof of the Savile Row building that housed Apple Corps, the group’s media company. There they played a glorious lunchtime set as passers-by peered up quizzically from the sidewalks below.Drawing from the dozens of hours that did not make it into “Let It Be,” Mr. Jackson turned Mr. Lindsay-Hogg into a major character in “Get Back”; his efforts to maintain some kind of momentum against long odds provided the three-part series with a narrative through-line. When “Get Back” started streaming, however, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg found himself in a vulnerable position: The man accustomed to a behind-the-camera role was now in the spotlight.And so he was seen chomping on a cigar and suggesting that he could film the Beatles playing a benefit show for orphans or sick children. “But I don’t mean for really sick kids,” he was quick to tell the group. “I mean for kids with broken legs. I mean, really, kind of, 1944 Hollywood musical Bing Crosby kids.” On social media, Disney+ viewers took swipes at his 28-year-old self, calling him “the upper class twit of the year,” among other insults.“I try to steer as clear from social media as possible,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said.He added that he is more concerned about the legacy of his own documentary. The Beatles skipped the premiere, and “Let It Be” has never appeared as a DVD or on streaming platforms. Most fans know it from washed-out videocassettes; and its reputation has suffered thanks to remarks made by Mr. Starr and Mr. McCartney. “There was no joy in it,” the Beatles drummer said last year on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”Mr. Lindsay-Hogg disagrees with that assessment.“There are moments of great sweetness,” he said. “No matter where you put the camera, no matter how you edited it, they loved each other. Anybody who sees ‘Let It Be’ again will find that.”He believes the tone he struck is not really so far from that of “Get Back,” which he said he found “terrific.” Mr. Jackson’s account, he added, had the advantage of being five times longer, its images and sound enhanced by 21st-century technology. “He had canvas to fit a Rubens painting,” he said, “and I had a canvas to fit a little David Hockney painting.”On July 20, 1969, the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, the four Beatles and some family members attended a private screening of a rough cut of “Let It Be” in Hanover Square. They seemed pleased, Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said. Afterward, he and his girlfriend at the time, the British actress Jean Marsh, went for a late dinner at Provans, a restaurant in the Fulham section of London, with Paul and Linda McCartney, Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono, and the Apple executive Peter Brown.“It was a friendly meal,” he recalled. “We had a couple of bottles of wine and mostly talked about our differing childhoods. They were happy with the way things were going, certainly, otherwise there would have been no dinner.”“They were grown men, not the Fab Four of the early 1960s,” he added. “And they were OK with being shown navigating relationships which were old, but changing.”Mr. Lindsay-Hogg in his studio.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe film was a victim of bad timing, in his view. By the time of its May 1970 premiere, the Beatles had broken up. Traumatized fans saw it as “a breakup movie: ‘Mom and Dad are getting divorced!’” he said.Apple has said in the past that it had plans to rerelease “Let It Be” at some point, and Mr. Lindsay-Hogg believes it deserves a fresh viewing; but he doesn’t dwell on his time with the Beatles, or the past in general, he said.“I have a very, very good memory,” he said. “It may be because I never took all the drugs. But I’m very not-nostalgic. Nostalgia is, for me, like the vermouth that I do not put in my martini.”He has preserved much of what he went through with the Beatles in diaries, which he has kept since the “Ready Steady Go!” years.He led me to a bookcase in the memento-filled library next to his art studio. It was filled with dusty leather-bound diaries, many overstuffed with letters and photos. At my suggestion, he dug out the volume from 1969. It was curiously slender.He thumbed through the pages and landed on January 30, the blustery day in London when the Beatles played in public for the last time. As captured by Mr. Lindsay-Hogg and his team, their swan-song performance was the climax of both “Let It Be” and “Get Back.”The diary page was blank, except for one word scribbled in black ballpoint pen.Roof.“The busier you are,” Mr. Lindsay-Hogg said, “the less you write down.” More

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      Joe Turkel, the Spectral Bartender in ‘The Shining,’ Dies at 94

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      Also memorably seen in “Blade Runner,” he was a favorite among directors looking for someone who could bring zealous professionalism to even the smallest role.Joe Turkel, a gaunt-faced yeoman character actor who appeared in scores of movies but is best known for two of his final performances — as Lloyd the bartender in “The Shining” and Dr. Eldon Tyrell in “Blade Runner” — died on June 27 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 94.His son Craig Turkel said the death, at a hospital, was caused by liver failure.Mr. Turkel (pronounced ter-KELL) was a favorite among directors looking for someone who could bring zealous professionalism to even the smallest role.In movies like “Hellcats of the Navy” (1957) and “The Sand Pebbles” (1966), he held his own alongside leading men like Ronald Reagan and Steve McQueen. It was often up to Mr. Turkel to provide a subtle but unmistakable plot pivot, using his steely onscreen demeanor and perfectly delivered lines to shift a film’s entire mood.Nowhere was that more true than in the three movies he made for Stanley Kubrick, with whom he formed something of a mutual admiration society. Both men, who were about the same age, had grown up as working-class secular Jews in New York. Both were huge baseball fanatics. And both were perfectionists about their work.Mr. Turkel had a small role in “The Killing,” Mr. Kubrick’s 1956 film about a racetrack robbery, and then returned a year later as a condemned soldier in “Paths of Glory.” In both films, he contrasted a stony stillness with sudden explosions of manic action to convey meaning far beyond his few brief lines.He went on to become a prolific television actor, with roles on popular shows like “Bonanza,” “Ironside” and “Fantasy Island.”He returned to Mr. Kubrick’s service in 1980 for “The Shining,” an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. The story revolves around an author, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), who is hired as the winter caretaker of the secluded, otherwise empty Overlook Hotel and moves there with his family.Under the influence of malevolent supernatural forces, Jack slowly goes crazy. At one point he enters the hotel’s bar, where he finds Lloyd, played by Mr. Turkel. Jack asks for a bourbon, and Lloyd pours him a shot of Jack Daniel’s.Mr. Nicholson dominates their conversation, but it is Mr. Turkel’s ominously stoic presence that shifts the film into a darker register.“In dress and demeanor, he’s the prototypical old-school hotel barman,” Mr. Turkel told The Toronto Star in 2014. “He obviously takes pride in his work and the corruption he enables; most bartenders are stylish and a little bit evil. Poor Lloyd doesn’t know the difference between bourbon and Tennessee whiskey, though.”Joseph Turkel was born on July 15, 1927, in Brooklyn. His father, Benjamin Turkel, was a tailor, and his mother, Gazella (Goldfisher) Turkel, was a homemaker and part-time opera singer.Along with his son Craig, Mr. Turkel is survived by another son, Robert; his brother, David; and two grandchildren. His wife, Anita (Cacciatore) Turkel, died before him.He joined the U.S. merchant marine in 1944 and the Army in 1946. After receiving an honorable discharge, he briefly returned to New York for acting classes before heading to Hollywood in 1947.His first credited role was in “City Across the River” (1949), a film about a program for juvenile delinquents that also featured a young Tony Curtis.His work on “The Shining” brought him to the attention of Ridley Scott, who was casting “Blade Runner,” his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”He was cast as Dr. Tyrell, the brilliant but haughty founder of a company that produces robots so perfect that they blur the line between human and machine — an uncanniness that leads to Dr. Tyrell’s bloody demise at the hands of one of his creations.Although “Blade Runner” has become one of the most critically acclaimed science fiction films in history, it was originally a box-office dud. Mr. Turkel, having grown tired of grinding through auditions after decades in Hollywood, decided to retire; aside from a few more small TV and film roles, he never acted again.Instead he tried his hand at screenplays (although none of them were produced), became a regular on the fan-convention circuit and wrote a memoir, “The Miseries of Success,” which remains unpublished.“I’ve done some great films,” he told an interviewer for Blade Zone, a “Blade Runner” fan site, in 1999. “I know other actors that have done brilliant films. They still have to go out and audition and meet the producer, director, and please these people no matter what they’ve done. Of course the great big stars don’t do that. But there are great quality actors that do that and they find it demeaning.”Still, he added, “I’ve had a hell of a career.” More

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      ‘Elvis’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      Trying to Capture the Life and Lyrics of That Wry Sage Leonard Cohen

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      The makers of a documentary on the singer-songwriter took a deep dive into his “writing and rewriting and erasing” to better understand the man.The documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song” illuminates the unpredictable paths taken by a singer-songwriter and his music. The directors, Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine (“Ballets Russes”), trace Cohen’s career from his early days in Montreal to his 21st-century renaissance, exploring his creative process, his spiritual search and how his perhaps best-known song, “Hallelujah,” took on a life of its own.Of the musician’s sagelike appeal, A.O. Scott wrote in a Critic’s Pick review, “His gift as a songwriter and performer was rather to provide commentary and companionship amid the gloom, offering a wry, openhearted perspective on the puzzles of the human condition.”I spoke with Geller and Goldfine about their insights into Cohen’s life and lyrical artistry, and his enduring mysteries.What did you learn about Leonard Cohen that surprised you most?DAN GELLER He was clearly struggling to find his sense of place in his life, his universe and his love life — and in his spiritual life. He was seeking so deeply over decades, and when that went away, as he said, “The search itself dissolved,” and a lightness entered his being. He couldn’t even explain why. And he didn’t want to examine it too much because he was afraid that by examining it, it might go away again.DAYNA GOLDFINE I had thought that the only reason he had gone back out on the road in his mid-70s, after a 14-or-15-year hiatus, was because he had had all his money ripped off, and it was a financial compulsion. But just as important was that Leonard felt as if he had never truly reached the same level as a performer as he thought he might have reached as a singer-songwriter. You really saw him then reaching this pinnacle that made a Leonard Cohen concert so deep and so spiritual.He’s amazing in archival interviews because he essentially speaks in lyrics. What is that wonderful phrase he casually drops, “the foothills of old age”?GOLDFINE Yes! “70 is indisputably not youth. It’s not extreme old age, but it’s the foothills of old age.” Isn’t that gorgeous? I found Leonard’s wit both immensely gratifying and also surprising. Especially in the first couple decades of his career, he was painted as this monster of gloom. But if you really hang with him and listen to what he’s saying, he’s one of the funniest guys ever. It’s a very droll, dry wit.Whenever possible, we tried to come up with something fresh so that even the most devout Leonard Cohen head would find something new in our film, or if we were going to use a piece of archival material that had been used in the past, we would try to reframe it. Rabbi [Mordecai] Finley, for instance, reframes some of the material in a really interesting way that gives you a fresh perspective.What were the biggest revelations about “Hallelujah” and Cohen’s writing process?GOLDFINE I hadn’t realized the sheer number of verses that Leonard was writing and rewriting and erasing and reconfiguring throughout the five or so years that it took him to write that song. And then the number of times that he reconfigured the song in performing it. I love in the film where he takes it from the King David Old Testament version of the song and moves it into a secular realm.GELLER There’s also the way that other people have responded to the song — listening to John Cale or Brandi Carlile or Eric Church, to hear why they resonated with the song. It’s given me a window into the souls of these other singer-songwriters.His notebooks are fascinating because there are versions of lines that have different resonances but are also super powerful. “When David played, his fingers bled, he wept for every word he said” — that’s an incredible line there, too! He could have stopped anywhere along the way and had maybe an equally powerful song.GOLDFINE You also see the very first incarnation of “Anthem,” one of his most famous songs, and the first time he ever wrote that line: “There’s a crack in everything.” That almost brought tears to my eyes when I saw it — the first infant steps of “Anthem.” Also in those notebooks you see his datebook, and the first time he met Dominique Issermann, the woman he considered the first great love of his life.Although you couldn’t interview Cohen, did you hear anything from him while making the film?GELLER The Dominique [interview] was interesting because she was staying with Leonard at the time when we were going to film her. She said that he asked her, “Look, if they start asking questions like, ‘Was it your kitchen chair that he was tied to when he wrote the song?’ don’t let them go down that path.” This is the only direct, or close to direct, feedback we ever got from Leonard. Of course, we would never ask that! But I thought, That’s good, because what he was really saying is: Don’t concretize the song and its lyrics. Leave it open to interpretation, and a mystery. Don’t make it specific to Leonard himself.What’s your favorite version of “Hallelujah”?GOLDFINE When I was embroiled in shaping the John Cale section, I just couldn’t get enough of the John Cale version. And Jeff Buckley was the first “Hallelujah” that I ever heard, and it blew me away. But at the end of the day, it’s Leonard Cohen singing it in those last five years’ worth of concerts and, night after night, getting down on his knees to start that song.GELLER Buckley’s haunting guitar arpeggios are so beautiful and exquisite. I love those and his gorgeous voice. But Leonard performing it live — we saw him do it twice at the Paramount Theater in Oakland. Just watching someone truly stand in the center of his song, a song that’s filled with the complications of yearning, of brokenness, of hopefulness, of love, of sex — all of it! More

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      Watch Austin Butler Cause Hysteria in ‘Elvis’

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      The director Baz Luhrmann narrates a sequence in which Elvis gives an early performance that stirs up the audience.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.It was the hip swivel that changed a generation. And it is at the heart of this scene in the biopic “Elvis” that introduces the musician to the world.In the sequence, Elvis (Austin Butler) is giving one of his first performances in front of an audience while Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), the man who would become his manager, watches on.While historically Elvis’s first big introduction was said to be at Sun Records, performing for its owner, Sam Phillips, the film takes a different route.The director Baz Luhrmann wanted that moment to take place in front of a crowd, showcasing all of the pieces that came together when the rocker performed.“Elvis wasn’t just about what he sang,” Luhrmann said, narrating the scene. “It was as much about how he looked and how he moved. But most importantly, it was his effect upon the audience.And boy, what an effect here. As Elvis sings and moves his hips, he seems to prompt almost uncontrollable screams from the women in the audience. That builds to a kind of infectious hysteria that feels as shocking as it does organic.Luhrmann worked with Butler (and some very airy trousers) to get the moves right. But the key to the scene was the extras. The moment may seem chaotic, but it was heavily designed. A movement coach and choreographer, Polly Bennett, worked with a team of performers they called the scream queens. These women had training in producing hysterical movements and also in high-pitched keening that solidified the action of the sequence.Read the “Elvis” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More