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      Heddy Honigmann, Whose Films Told of Loss and Love, Dies at 70

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      A documentarian, she liked to engage her subjects — Parisian subway buskers, Peruvian taxi drivers, survivors of genocide — in conversations.Heddy Honigmann, the Peruvian-born Dutch filmmaker whose humane and gently paced documentaries of Parisian subway buskers, Peruvian taxi drivers, disabled people and their service dogs, Dutch peacekeepers and the widows of men who had been murdered in a tiny village near Sarajevo, were stories of loss, trauma and exile — and the sustaining forces of art and love — died on May 21 at her home in Amsterdam. She was 70.Jannet Honigmann, her sister, confirmed the death. She said Ms. Honigmann had been ill with cancer and multiple sclerosis.In the economic chaos of Peru in the 1990s, when the government nearly bankrupted the country and inflation soared, many middle-class people began moonlighting as taxi drivers, slapping a “Taxi” sticker on their Volkswagen Beetles or battered Nissans to signal that they were on call.Ms. Honigmann collected their histories in the 1995 film “Metal and Melancholy,” riding in the back seat of more than a dozen cabs whose drivers included a teacher, a police officer, an actor and an employee at the Ministry of Justice. (She took more than 120 taxi rides to find her subjects.)The stories that unspooled included a devastating tale from a man whose 5-year-old daughter had leukemia and who was driving to pay for her costly medical care. When he tells Ms. Honigmann that he encourages his daughter, whom he describes as a fighter, by saying “Life is hard, but beautiful,” it’s a maxim not just for this film but for all of Ms. Honigmann’s work.In “The Underground Orchestra” (1999), musicians busking in the Paris metro — including a disc jockey from Zaire who has escaped a forced labor camp and an Argentine pianist whose torture at the hands of his government nearly destroyed his hands — describe the refugee odysseys that have brought them there. Stephen Holden of The New York Times called it “an open-ended celebration of human tenacity and life force that builds up a compelling personal vision in an offhanded, roundabout way.”Ms. Honigmann rode in the back seat of more than a dozen cabs to collect the stories of cabdrivers in Lima, Peru, for her film “Metal and Melancholy” (1995).Icarus FilmsDespite stories of terrible trauma, the movie is also a celebration of the culture these artists have left behind — a “world-music primer,” as Mr. Holden put it, “featuring some astonishingly beautiful sounds.”The cultural critic Wesley Morris, in his Times review of “Buddy,” Ms. Honigmann’s 2019 film about people with disabilities and their service dogs, called Ms. Honigmann a humanist who “listens to the ignored, sympathizes with the lonely and can ask questions so leading that when her subjects give her a skeptical look before trying to answer, she has to laugh, almost out of embarrassment.”But she was more of a gentle interlocutor than an insistent interrogator. There were no narrators in her films, no propulsive music or quick cuts to tell viewers how to experience what they were seeing. Her pacing was almost languid; she allowed her subjects to tell their stories in their own way and in their own time. And she hated the word “interview.”“‘Interviews were for subjects,’ she would say,” said Ester Gould, who was a co-writer, researcher and assistant producer on many of Ms. Honigmann’s films. “‘I have conversations with people.’”In an interview at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2002, Ms. Honigmann said: “I think the only rule for me is that when I hear the stories, if they keep my attention, they will also keep the attention of the spectators.” She added: “I lost myself in conversations. And conversations, if they are interesting, they are never boring.”Ms. Honigmann was primarily a documentarian, but she also made narrative films — notably “Goodbye” (1995), about the doomed, highly charged affair between a young preschool teacher and a married man.In “O Amor Natural” (1997), Ms Honigmann invited older Brazilians to read aloud the erotic poetry of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, all of which had been published after his death in 1987 because he worried that they would be seen as pornographic. Ms. Honigmann’s readers took to their roles with gusto and often confided their own erotic histories. Graphic, sensual, tender and at times very funny, the film is a rumination on desire, memory and age.In “O Amor Natural” (1997), Ms Honigmann invited older Brazilians to read aloud the erotic poetry of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.Film ForumMs. Honigmann’s films have won awards at film festivals all over the world and been shown in retrospectives at the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Paris Film Festival, among other venues.In 2013 she was given the Living Legend Award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Yet she may be the most famous filmmaker Americans have never heard of, according to Karen Cooper, the longtime director of Film Forum in New York, which has presented the premieres of many of Ms. Honigmann’s movies.“As Americans, we live in a bubble in terms of film, because Hollywood is so dominant that documentary filmmakers don’t get the same kind of attention that narrative fiction film receives,” Ms. Cooper said in an interview. “In this country, among documentary filmmakers, Heddy was a star. In Europe, she was a superstar. In the Netherlands, she’s a national treasure.”Heddy Ena Honigmann Pach was born on Oct. 1, 1951, in Lima, Peru. Her parents were European Jewish refugees.Her father, Witold Honigmann Weiss, an artist and illustrator who created a popular comic strip, was born in Vienna and had been interned at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria before he escaped in 1942, making his way to Peru by way of Russia and Italy. Her mother, Sarah Pach Miller, an actress and homemaker, had left Poland with her family for Peru in 1939. (In Peru, it is the custom to use the surnames of both parents. Heddy dropped the name Pach as a filmmaker.)Heddy studied biology and literature at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima. Her father wanted her to be a doctor. She first wanted to be a poet — she loved Emily Dickinson — but decided filmmaking was a better medium for her. She left Peru to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and she did not return to her home country for nearly two decades.An early marriage in Lima to Gustavo Riofrio ended in divorce. In the 1970s she married Frans van de Staak, a Dutch filmmaker she met in Rome, and the couple moved to Amsterdam; she became a Dutch citizen in 1978. Their marriage also ended in divorce.In addition to her sister, she is survived by her son, Stefan van de Staak; her husband, Henk Timmermans; and her stepson, Jaap Timmermans.Ms. Honigmann’s film “Good Husband, Dear Son” (2001), told of the women left behind in the village of Ahatovici, just outside Sarajevo, after Bosnian Serb forces killed the men there. Pieter Van Huystee FilmOne of Ms. Honigmann’s most harrowing films was “Good Husband, Dear Son” (2001), about the women left behind in the village of Ahatovici, just outside Sarajevo, after Bosnian Serb forces had murdered the men and burned the place to the ground in 1992. Ms. Honigmann captured the women’s loss by drawing out their memories of their loved ones, and by showing the photographs and belongings the women had saved as mementos.She said she tried to show that the most terrible thing about war is not the numbers of the dead, which she called an abstraction: “The catastrophe is, for instance, seeing that a whole town has lost all the craftsmen, that people who were in love were separated forever, that children who loved to play football and loved music cannot hear it anymore.”“When you are born from immigrants you are educated in melancholy,” Ms. Honigmann said in her 2002 talk at the Walker Center. “You hear all the time of stories of people leaving. That’s in my films. People are left, or they are leaving, or losing their memory.”When Michael Tortorello, her interviewer, asked her what her life might have been like if she had stayed in Peru, she answered promptly: “I would have a been a taxi driver.” More

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      Ivo van Hove on His Famously Short Rehearsal Times

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      5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More

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      Bernard Haitink, Conductor Who Let Music Speak for Itself, Dies at 92

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      Mr. Haitink, who was closely identified with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, drew direct, unaffected interpretations of symphonic works and opera.Bernard Haitink, an unaffected maestro who led Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for 27 years and was known for presenting powerful readings of the symphonies of Mahler, Bruckner and Beethoven conducting orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic, died on Thursday at his home in London. He was 92. His death was announced by his management agency, Askonas Holt.Along with the Concertgebouw, Mr. Haitink had long associations in Britain with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Glyndebourne Festival. He was also a prolific recording artist, putting on disc the complete symphonies of nearly a dozen canonical composers — sometimes twice.Mr. Haitink let the music emerge from the orchestra, often transcendently, without imposing a heavy-handed interpretation that a star conductor might.His self-effacing nature was noticed early on.He was “not one of the glamour boys on the podium,” Harold C. Schonberg, the chief classical music critic for The New York Times, wrote in January 1975 after Mr. Haitink’s debut with the New York Philharmonic, conducting Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7.“He does not dance, he does not patronize the best tailor on the Continent,” Mr. Schonberg continued. “But he is a dedicated musician, always on top of the music, getting exactly what he wants from his players.”Reviewing his performance of the same symphony with the Philharmonic in 2011, the critic Steve Smith wrote in The Times: “Some conductors strive for mysticism in late Bruckner; Mr. Haitink, with his unerring sense of shape, transition and flow, lets the music speak for itself, with results that can approach the supernatural and often did here.”Mr. Haitink was so humble as a young man that he almost missed out on his first big break. The Concertgebouw had asked him in 1956 to replace an indisposed Carlo Maria Giulini for a performance of Cherubini’s Requiem in C minor. But he initially turned down the opportunity, despite having conducted the work many times. He said he didn’t feel ready.But he changed his mind, the concert was a success, and so began his long collaboration with the Concertgebouw. He became a regular guest conductor, was appointed co-chief conductor in 1961 and then chief conductor in 1963.Mr. Haitink began conducting opera in the 1960s and made his debut at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1972, leading Mozart’s “Abduction From the Seraglio.” He was music director of the Glyndebourne Opera from 1977 to 1988 and of the Royal Opera from 1987 to 2002.In an opera world where increasingly outlandish stagings were becoming the fashion, Mr. Haitink had a strategy when required to conduct a production he didn’t like. “One closes one’s eyes and lives in the music,” he said in a 2009 interview with the Guardian.That strategy seemed to have worked at Covent Garden for a mid-1990s staging of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle by Richard Jones, in which Brünnhilde wore a body-stocking with a skeleton print and a gym skirt, and the Rhinemaidens sported latex nude-body suits.The critic Rupert Christiansen wrote in The Spectator that the “sketchiness” of the staging “was cruelly shown up by the contrasting finish and maturity of the musical aspects of the performance.”“I have never heard Bernard Haitink conduct anything better than this Götterdämmerung,” he added. “In its combination of fluency and subtlety with blazing grandeur, it was consummate.”In addition to the Concertgebouw, Mr. Haitink held conductorships of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Dresden Staatskapelle. He also regularly led the Vienna Philharmonic, and in 2006 he was hired as principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.“These things are never planned, but things just happen to me — I’m not a chess player,” he told the Guardian, regarding the Chicago appointment.His reputation for being unassuming trailed him throughout his career. In 1967, Time magazine described him as “a short, quiet man who likes to take long bird-watching rambles in the woods,” and pointed out that “in a profession where flamboyance and arrogance are often the hallmarks of talent, the diffident Haitink is an anomaly.” A New York Times article in 1976 carried the headline “Why Doesn’t Bernard Haitink Act Like a Superstar?”Mr. Haitink’s colleagues lauded his modesty, integrity and musicianship when he was awarded the prestigious Gramophone Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. The pianist Murray Perahia, who recorded the complete Beethoven piano concertos with Mr. Haitink and the Concertgebouw, praised him as being “dedicated to a real collaboration: neither dictating an interpretation, nor slavishly following — but a natural give and take.”But Mr. Haitink did not shy away from taking a stand when he thought it necessary. In 1982, he threatened to “never set foot on a Dutch stage again” after learning that the Dutch government planned to reduce the Concertgebouw’s subsidy, a move that might have led to the firing of some two dozen orchestral musicians. The cuts were eventually avoided. And in 1998 he resigned from the Royal Opera in London to protest a yearlong closing that was to take effect in January 1999 after a period of artistic and financial tumult. He rescinded his resignation shortly afterward, however.Mr. Haitink frequently gave master classes. In an event held at the Royal College of Music in London, he wryly advised a class of young conductors not to criticize the orchestra musicians since any flaws might be as much the mistake of the conductor as of the players.“You are there to give them confidence even if things aren’t going perfectly,” he said.“Mr. Haitink, with his unerring sense of shape, transition and flow, lets the music speak for itself,” a critic once wrote, “with results that can approach the supernatural.” He conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Mass., in 2006.Michael Lutch for The New York TimesBernard Haitink was born on March 4, 1929, into a well-off family in Amsterdam. His father, Willem Haitink, was a civil servant, and his mother, Anna Clara Verschaffelt, worked for the French cultural organization Alliance Française. Neither were musicians. The family lived under Nazi occupation during World War II, and Willem was imprisoned for three months in a concentration camp.Mr. Haitink referred to his youth as his “lazy days.”“I wasn’t stupid,” he explained, “but I just wasn’t there. Half the time we were taught under our desks because of air raids. But even when things became normal, I wasn’t interested. Maybe this is why now, when I am over 70, that people always ask me why I work so hard.”He began playing the violin at age 9 and later studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory. He joined the second violin section of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra but was insecure about his abilities as a violinist. After taking a conducting course, he was appointed conductor of the orchestra in 1955 at age 26.Mr. Haitink, who once said that “every conductor, including myself, has a sell-by date,” officially retired during his 90th year after an acclaimed farewell tour of European summer festivals. Reviewing his concert with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Royal Albert Hall in London on that tour, the critic Erica Jeal wrote that the “last word had to be from Bruckner.”“Haitink, as ever, emphasized beauty over structure,” she wrote, “yet did not allow the music’s sense of shape to slacken for a moment.”His extensive recordings include, for the Philips label, the complete symphonies of Bruckner, Mahler, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn and Schumann; the complete symphonies of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, for EMI; the complete symphonies of Shostakovich, for Decca; the complete Debussy orchestral works, also for Philips; and Beethoven and Brahms symphony cycles for the London Symphony Orchestra’s LSO Live label.Mr. Haitink was married four times and had several children and grandchildren. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.In 2011, in another interview with The Guardian, Mr. Haitink mused on the strange life of a conductor. “I have been doing this job for 50 years,” he said. “And, you know, it is a profession and it is not a profession. It’s very obscure sometimes. What makes a good conductor? What is this thing about charisma? I’m still wondering after all these years.” More

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      Film or Real Life?

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      THE TAKEFilm or Real Life?Jake Michaels for The New York TimesSometimes a place is more than just a place; it can be a scene. Even the blankest backdrops, like a parking lot or a sun-baked freeway, can shimmer with cinematic potential. Four photographers showed us the movie moments that they found all over.Jolie Ruben and Jake MichaelsWhen Jake Michaels began shooting around Los Angeles, he noticed how the backdrop and spontaneous action within the frame combine to tell a story, and how those moments dissolve quickly. “That’s why I think it’s interesting to go back to a place several times,” Michaels said. “You can see life kind of cycling. You see from a static point of view how much life exists in that frame.”Jake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesAn Rong XuAn Rong Xu, who made these photographs around Taiwan, is often influenced by the movies of 1990s Hong Kong and the Taiwanese cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing, who created images from “slow gestures that gather into something larger,” Xu said. In other words: Viewers sense a bigger story in the photo and are drawn in by that mystery.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesSarah Van RijSarah van Rij made these pictures around Amsterdam and The Hague. Van Rij declared that filmmakers strongly influence her work — “maybe more than other photographers,” she said. Van Rij, who takes most of her shots outside on the streets, searches for a feeling before snapping the shutter, sometimes inventing her own private back story for a scene.Sarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn BottomsFor September Dawn Bottoms, who shot in and around Tulsa, Okla., the answer to what makes a photo cinematic flows from her personal point of view. “I photograph my own life all of the time,” she said. “Every photo is about me and what I’m seeing, I’m just never in it.”September Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times More

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      One of Turkey’s Hottest Rock Bands Has an Unlikely Source

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOne of Turkey’s Hottest Rock Bands Has an Unlikely SourceAltin Gun’s fans say the band does more for Turkey’s image than the government. No one seems to mind that it’s actually Dutch.From left, Erdinc Ecevit, Merve Dasdemir and Jasper Verhulst of Altin Gun performing in Amsterdam in 2019.Credit…Ben HoudijkMarch 2, 2021, 11:29 a.m. ETLate one night in 2016, Jasper Verhulst was sitting on his balcony in Amsterdam, pondering his next career move.The Dutch bass player had been playing in an indie band, he recalled in a recent video interview, but its singer had decided to stop touring, and Verhulst needed a new project.That night, he put on a playlist of his favorite Turkish rock songs — tracks written in the 1970s that combined traditional Turkish melodies and instruments with psychedelic rock, to make a funky sound all their own. Suddenly, he was struck by thought: “This is what I want to do.”Turkish rock songs like these would sound great at a music festival, he thought, yet he’d never heard that before. So he decided to fill the gap. He just had a few problems to overcome first: He didn’t speak Turkish, and he didn’t play any Turkish instruments.Soon, he was posting “Wanted” advertisements in Turkish grocery stores and restaurants around Amsterdam, as well as on Facebook, looking for musicians to play cover versions of the most famous tracks from the 1970s. “I really didn’t know if there would be any Turkish people who would like the idea,” Verhulst said. “But I thought, ‘I would love to do this, so let’s just try.’”Five years later, the six-piece band Verhulst formed, Altin Gun (which means “Golden Day” in Turkish), is arguably the world’s most prominent Turkish-language rock band. Two of its members, Merve Dasdemir and Erdinc Ecevit, both of Turkish descent, joined thanks to his Facebook post. The other members are Dutch, or British, and the band rehearses in Amsterdam.In 2019, the band became the first Turkish-language act to be nominated for a Grammy, leading Hurriyet, a Turkish daily newspaper, to call them “our pride on the red carpet.” They regularly play sold-out shows in Istanbul, and they have also become a sight on festival posters across Europe and the United States. They were scheduled to play the Coachella and Bonnaroo festivals last year, before the coronavirus pandemic stopped both events.The band’s new album, “Yol,” released last week, is already being lauded by fans in and outside Turkey. “These individuals do a better job than our minister of tourism and foreign affairs to strengthen our foreign relations,” one Turkish fan wrote on YouTube beneath one of Altin Gun’s recent videos. Another fan simply wrote the Turkish word for “Beautiful!” and followed it with Turkish flag emoji.Verhulst said he found the group’s growing popularity, especially in Turkey and its diaspora, overwhelming at times. “It’s kind of weird when something’s bigger than you feel,” he said. Dasdemir, in a video interview, agreed it could be odd. Playing sold-out shows in Istanbul “feels like conquering my own country,” she said.Turkish psychedelic rock is undergoing a resurgence, said Cem Kayiran, the music editor of Bant Mag, a Turkish youth magazine, in a telephone interview. The style emerged in the 1970s, when some of Turkey’s biggest pop stars took old folk songs and updated them with modern instruments, he said.In the early 2000s, several record labels, notably Finders Keepers in Britain, began reissuing records from that time, bringing the music to a Western audience, he added. Now, acts like Altin Gun and Gaye su Akyol, a Turkish rock star, were revitalizing the genre all over again. “It’s really hype right now,” he said.Altin Gun were so good at what they did, Kayiran added, that some younger Turkish people didn’t even seem to realize the band was covering old folk tunes. “I’ve got Turkish friends in the United States who’ve sent me YouTube links of their songs going, ‘You have to hear this band, they’re really cool,’” he said. “I have to send them links to the originals back,” he added.Dasdemir, who was born in Turkey but moved to the Netherlands as a young adult, said she didn’t think twice about joining Altin Gun after seeing Verhulst’s advertisement. “I was tagged in his Facebook post and just couldn’t believe my eyes that this Dutch guy wanted to make music from my culture,” she said. “I thought it was so cool.” A handful of people have accused the group of cultural appropriation, she said, but this didn’t make sense to her. “I’m 100 percent Turkish,” she said. “If I’m not going to cover my own culture’s music, who’s going to do it?” she added.Fans agreed it didn’t matter where the band’s members were born. “You literally could dance to their music at a Turkish wedding, in rural Turkey,” said Ozgur Muslu, a fan living in Massachusetts, in a Facebook message.“I ultimately look at the final product, and I am seeing a rainbow of influences,” Muslu said, including electronic elements that are far from typical Turkish rock music.Altin Gun in Amsterdam in 2019. “We’re a folk band,” Verhulst said, just like the ones who used to wander their countries and bring old songs to new audiences.Credit…Ben HoudijkDasdemir and Ecevit, the band’s Turkish members, often choose which songs to cover. But Verhulst said he suggested tunes, too, despite having no idea what the lyrics were about, picking tracks from his own record collection, or YouTube. This doesn’t always go according to plan. “Sometimes Merve and Erdinc are like, ‘We can’t sing that, it’s a wedding song!’ or ‘No, this is too religious,’ or ‘These lyrics are really lame,’” he said.He always accepted their decision, he said. “I’m the bass player. It’s not like I’m going to sing Turkish songs to Turkish people,” he added.Gaye su Akyol, one of Turkey’s most famous rock musicians, said she would like to see the band branch out from covers and release its own material. “Musical genres need new compositions to develop and expand,” she said in a telephone interview. Altin Gun were great musicians, “faithful to the soul of Turkish psychedelic music,” she said, but she was sure they could push the genre into new places if they wanted to.Dasdemir said that wasn’t the plan for now. For a start, she’d find it hard to write an original song in the old Turkish style, she said, as the lyrics were often old-fashioned and highly poetic. Original music was also just not what Altin Gun was about, Verhulst said. “We’re a folk band,” he said, just like the ones who used to wander Britain, the Netherlands or, indeed, Turkey, bringing old songs to new audiences.He loved music from all over the world, he added, and Turkish music was “just 5 percent” of his record collection. But for now, he added, it was all he wanted to play. “There’s all these beautiful songs written in Turkey, some of them more than 100 years old, where the composers are totally unknown,” he said. “It’s nice to keep that tradition going.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More