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    Basel Will Host Eurovision Song Contest (Unless Its Taxpayers Revolt)

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    Many in the Swiss city celebrated the announcement. But after a debate about the cost, a conservative party wants a referendum over whether the public should pay.Basel, a quaint riverside city in northern Switzerland, on Friday won the right to host next year’s Eurovision Song Contest, the high-camp international singing competition.To many Basel residents, the news, which Eurovision’s organizers announced in a release, was a cause for celebration: Next May, the city would have a moment in the international spotlight.Yet some lawmakers in Switzerland had an altogether different reaction. To them, Eurovision is not a fun spectacle; it is a waste of money and “a celebration of evil” that has no place in their country.Members of the Federal Democratic Union of Switzerland, a conservative Christian party, are campaigning for a referendum to stop Basel’s government contributing tens of millions of dollars toward Eurovision’s running costs.Samuel Kullmann, the lawmaker leading the campaign, said that Eurovision had a “cultural agenda” that threatened Christian values. That included, he added, allowing musicians to promote Satanism onstage.At this year’s Eurovision, Kullmann said, entrants included Bambie Thug, a heavy metal act representing Ireland, who sang standing in a pentagram. “People might say it’s metal or Gothic music, but they’re ignoring the obvious,” Kullmann said. “It was a celebration of evil.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ira von Fürstenberg, Jet-Setting Princess and Actress, Dies at 83

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      With her aristocratic lineage, high-profile husbands and famous friends, she embodied a chic life of luxury as an international social figure.Ira von Fürstenberg, who came as close as one can get to having it all as an Italian-born princess descended from Charlemagne, an heiress to the Fiat fortune, a Vogue model, a big-screen ingénue and a globe-trotting bon vivant, died on Feb. 19 at her home in Rome. She was 83.Her son, Hubertus von Hohenlohe, said she died after breaking ribs and perforating her lungs in a domestic accident.Blending the gilded privilege of the old-world European aristocracy with the élan of the midcentury film and fashion peerage, Ms. von Fürstenberg seemingly defined the term “jet setter,” bouncing between homes in Rome, London, Paris and Madrid and on Lake Geneva.“My only real home is on airplanes,” she said. “I spend so much time going from country to country that my children suspect that I’m really a flight attendant.”She shared a surname with the renowned fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, who married the princess’s fashion designer brother, Egon, in 1969. “When I first met Egon, she was the famous sister,” Diane told Women’s Wear Daily last month. “She had gotten married in Venice and was a movie star.”Ms. von Fürstenberg in Monte Carlo in 2007. Descended from Charlemagne and the founder of Fiat, she lived a lavish life, including as an actress, model, artist and fashion executive.Hubertus von HohenloheWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Inheritance’ Arrives at a Festival of German Drama

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      A new production of Matthew López’s seven-hour play was among 10 shows chosen for Theatertreffen, a celebration of the best theater from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.Midway through Matthew López’s “The Inheritance,” a character lashes out at E.M. Forster, the British author of “Howards End,” who appears as a spiritual guru to the play’s protagonists.“Why should we listen to you lecture us about fearlessness and honesty? You were never honest about yourself,” the character screams, excoriating Forster for spending his long life in the closet.When “The Inheritance,” a seven-hour intergenerational saga about gay men in New York, opened in London in 2018, it was praised to the heavens. When the production transferred to Broadway a year later, there was far less critical love.This month, a reprise of the first German production of “The Inheritance” kicked off the annual Theatertreffen, a showcase of the best German-language theater, for which organizers selected “10 remarkable productions” from 461 theatrical premieres in Germany, Austria and Switzerland that debuted last year. The ethics of storytelling and of responsible representation emerged as unofficial themes of the lineup.López’s skill as a dramatist comes through in Hannes Becker’s translation, but the lyricism of his prose less so. Despite the impressive plotting and memorable characters, “The Inheritance” often fizzles during its generous running time. And the play’s cliché-riddled depiction of New York — an entire scene consists of little other than a lesson in how to order correctly at Peter Luger, the celebrated steakhouse — often had this New Yorker rolling his eyes.In the end, the production, which hails from the Residenztheater in Munich, is redeemed by heroic performances from the company’s ensemble. It’s a tough call, but for my money Vincent zur Linden gives the evening’s most indelible turn: Playing both the aspiring actor Adam and the hustler Leo, zur Linden shifts between coyness, arrogance and twitching brokenness. As Eric Glass, the play’s central character, Thiemo Strutzenberger fills a bland role with emotional complexity. And Michael Goldberg, one of the troupe’s older members, inhabits the play’s two mentor-like figures, Forster and Walter Poole, with avuncular gentleness and secret sorrow.Theatertreffen loves a good theatrical marathon, like Frank Castorf’s seven-hour “Faust,” seen here in 2018, or Christopher Rüping’s even longer “Dionysos Stadt” a year later. Yet sheer length does not an epic make. Compared to those gutsy avant-garde extravaganzas, Philip Stölzl’s sleek, handsome production of “The Inheritance” felt tame.“The Bus to Dachau” considers how the Holocaust is depicted in art and how it will be taught and commemorated when no survivors are left.Isabel Machado RiosWhen I returned to the festival several nights later, it was for a production much more in line with the formally daring, conceptually knotty theater more commonly found at Theatertreffen: “The Bus to Dachau,” a coproduction between the Dutch theater collective De Warme Winkel and the Schauspielhaus Bochum theater in western Germany.Subtitled “a 21st century memory play,” this absorbing production takes a singular and idiosyncratic approach to confronting the Holocaust through art, and asks what form commemoration and education will take once all of the survivors are gone.Featuring audience participation and live video — including blue-screen effects and Snapchat filters — the production tackles its weighty themes with an off-kilter mix of irreverence and severity. As the actors feel their way through the material, they explore the moral implications of depicting the Holocaust onscreen and how Germany’s culture of memory can carry a whiff of arrogance and even, perversely, of possessiveness.“The Ego and Its Own” was inspired by an 19th-century paean to radical selfishness by Max Stirner, the German philosopher.Arno DeclairYet while “The Bus to Dachau” found compelling ways to dramatize its risky and sensitive themes, another aesthetically bold production at Theatertreffen was ultimately less successful at bringing unlikely material to the stage.That work, “The Ego and Its Own,” from the Deutsches Theater, was one of two shows on the lineup that originated at Berlin playhouses. (The other was the choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s latest freak-out vaudeville-style revue, “Ophelia’s Got Talent.”)Inspired by an 1844 paean to radical selfishness by the German philosopher Max Stirner, the abstract production finds six actors cavorting on a white spiral ramp that resembles the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The play’s director, Sebastian Hartmann, a festival favorite, and the composer PC Nackt fashion a musical revue from Stirner’s opus that is equally arresting and bewildering.The actors intone and belt out slogans from the 19th-century text while Nackt and a drummer accompany them with a wild, mostly electronic score. Stark lighting, live video, fog and even 3-D projections contribute to the trippy expressionistic atmosphere. But despite the constant multisensory stimulation and energetic performances, it quickly grows tiresome. It’s a trip, to be sure — but I’m not sure how it illuminates Stirner’s influential and contentious ideas.One of the festival’s closing plays, “Zwiegespräch” by the Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke is an emotionally resonant production about intergenerational conflicts.Susanne Hassler-SmithControversy often attends the works Peter Handke, the Austrian who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. For many, Handke has been tainted by his sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian war criminal. The news of the writer’s Nobel win was met, by some, with disbelief, and his 2020 play “Zdenek Adamec” premiered at the Salzburg Festival under the threat of protest. Still, Handke, now 80, continues to publish and be performed at an impressive clip.His latest text for the stage, “Zwiegespräch,” was published as a book shortly before its world premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The author dedicated the dramatic dialogue to the actors Otto Sander and Bruno Ganz, the stars of the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire,” which Handke wrote the screenplay for; much of this brief, poetic text is concerned with the essence of acting and storytelling. There is also a sense of fraught struggles between grandfathers, fathers and sons.At Theaterteffen, “Zwiegespräch” will be performed on Saturday and Sunday as one of the festival’s closing productions. Not long ago, it headlined another one of Germany’s main theater festivals, “Radikal Jung,” at the Volkstheater, in Munich, which is where I caught it last month.The dazzling production, overseen by Rieke Süsskow, a young Berlin-born director, heightens the dialogue’s intergenerational conflicts. She sets her production in a nursing home and distributes Handke’s text to a cast of actors playing frail residents and their sinister caregivers, somehow creating a convincing dramaturgy without clearly differentiated characters or a conventional plot.Much credit is due to her stage designer, Mirjam Stängl, and her ingenious set, a succession of folding panels that expand and contract over the width of the stage like a fan, and Marcus Loran for his hallucinatory lighting design. Thanks to the attentive artistry of Süsskow and her team, Handke’s 60-odd page pamphlet comes to life in an emotionally resonant performance about memory, loss, regret and the nature of art.Separating the art from the artist shouldn’t mean giving artists a free pass. In the context of this sensitively paced and finely wrought production, however, there seemed little doubt that Handke is attuned to the moral responsibilities of storytelling.TheatertreffenThrough May 29 at various venues in Berlin; berlinerfestspiele.de. More

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      in Movies

      Jean-Marie Straub, Uncompromising Filmmaker, Is Dead at 89

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      Emerging from the French New Wave, driven by artistic purity, he and his wife and directing partner, Danièle Huillet, didn’t care if audiences walked out on their films.Jean-Marie Straub, a celebrated filmmaker aligned with the French New Wave who sparked critical debate with films he made with his wife, Danièle Huillet, that were known for their aggressively cerebral subject matter, Marxist leanings and anti-commercial sensibility, died on Sunday at his home in Rolle, Switzerland. He was 89.The Swiss National Film Archive announced his death.“The Straubs,” as they were often called (although they preferred Straub-Huillet as a professional moniker), emerged in the 1950s from the same circle of revolutionary French filmmakers as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, a friend over the years who lived nearby in Rolle until his death in September.The New Wave directors upended moviemaking conventions by channeling their cinephilic theories into auteur-driven works that reflected the anti-authoritarian sentiments of postwar France. Mr. Straub and Ms. Huillet took those same impulses in a more radical direction, eschewing traditional narrative techniques and structures to create a form of ideologically driven film that proudly flouted basic standards of entertainment.Their 1981 documentary, “Too Early, Too Late,” for example, featured Ms. Huillet, in a voice-over, reading from a letter written by Friedrich Engels to the Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky about the economic despair of French peasants as seemingly unrelated footage of locations in contemporary France played onscreen.Mr. Straub with his wife and filmmaking partner, Danièle Huillet, in 2002. Their films, one critic wrote, “indifferent to love or admiration, are monuments to their own integrity.”Sipa/ShutterstockThe films’ source material often seemed plucked from a graduate-level syllabus, drawing from the likes of Bertolt Brecht, the novelist and literary critic Elio Vittorini and the operas of the atonal composer Arnold Schoenberg.Critics, film theorists and discerning viewers held strong views of their work, which could be seen as either poetic or tedious. Their minimalist approach to editing, cinematography and acting demanded that “one be in a mood so receptive that it borders on the brainwashed,” as Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times in his review of “Class Relations,” their 1984 interpretation of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel, “Amerika.”The film is now hailed as one of the most accessible and beautiful of the Straub-Huillet films, but Mr. Canby said the actors’ impassive line delivery sounded “as if they were giving instructions on how to put on one’s life jacket in case of an unscheduled landing at sea.”To other critics, that steadfast commitment to an aesthetic was an artistic statement in itself. “Some movies want to be loved,” the critic J. Hoberman wrote in The New York Times reviewing a 45-film Straub-Huillet retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2016. “Others prefer to be admired. And then there are the movies, like those by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, that, indifferent to love or admiration, are monuments to their own integrity.”Despite a body of work largely confined to art-house theaters and museum screenings, Mr. Straub was awarded the Leopard of Honor lifetime achievement award in 2017 by the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, an award that previously went to the likes of Bernardo Bertolucci, Werner Herzog and Mr. Godard. (Ms. Huillet died in 2006.) Richard Brody of The New Yorker wrote that Mr. Straub was “one of the least known of great filmmakers — he never had a hit or sought one.”If audiences shifted uncomfortably in their seats, so much the better. To the combative Mr. Straub, filmmaking could be a revolutionary act. “If we hadn’t learned how to make films,” he once said, “I would have planted bombs.”Mr. Straub in 2017 at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, where he received its Leopard of Honor lifetime achievement award, an honor previously bestowed on the likes of Bernardo Bertolucci, Werner Herzog and Jean-Luc Godard. Urs Flueeler/EPA, via ShutterstockJean-Marie Straub was born on Jan. 8,1933, in Metz, in northeastern France, and was a film buff from an early age, showing an affinity for the films of Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson and Jean Grémillon.He studied literature at the Lycée Fustel-de-Coulanges in Strasbourg, eventually earning his degree from University of Nancy. In the early 1950s, he organized a film club in Metz, to which he invited Mr. Truffaut, then a provocative critic for the seminal French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, and André Bazin, a Cahiers founder, to discuss films. (Mr. Straub began contributing to the magazine himself.)He met Ms. Huillet in 1954, and the couple settled in Paris, where Mr. Straub began his film career as an assistant, working on movies like Mr. Bresson’s “A Man Escaped,” released in 1956. Two years later, to avoid conscription in the Algerian War, he fled France for West Germany. He and Ms. Huillet were married in Munich in 1959, beginning a long career as expatriate filmmakers working largely in Germany, Italy and Switzerland.Their first short feature, “Not Reconciled” (1965), was adapted from a novel by Heinrich Böll, which dissects the growth and legacies of Nazism. The writer and public intellectual Susan Sontag later said the film had made her want to kiss the screen.In 1968, the couple won international acclaim for their first full-length feature, “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach” (1968), which was a deconstructed version of a biopic of Johann Sebastian Bach.Set in locations in Germany where Bach had actually lived and worked, the film offers a sparse narrative consisting of voice-over reminiscences from a fictional diary by Bach’s second wife (the text was written by the filmmakers). Much of the action, as it were, is provided by musicians in period costume performing the composer’s great works.While the film baffled some critics in its day — A.H. Weiler deemed it “repetitious and static screen fare” in The Times — others, over time, came to see it as a masterpiece, a work of art “whose visual austerity, resolute slowness and refusal of conventional narrative were meant to advance a ruthless critique of capitalist aesthetics,” as A.O. Scott wrote in The Times in 2018.A scene from “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach” (1968), which won international acclaim. It was Mr. Straub and Ms. Huillet’s first full-length feature film.Collection Christophel/AlamyAs their reputation grew, Mr. Straub and Ms. Huillet continued to push boundaries over the decades. Their films “From the Clouds to the Resistance” (1979) and “Sicilia!” (1999) both premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, a category reserved for artistically daring works.Critics were less kind to their 1979 adaptation of “Othon,” a 17th-century French play by Pierre Corneille, which announced its intentions to confound with a 22-word title in English: “Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times, or, Perhaps One Day Rome Will Allow Herself to Choose in Her Turn.”The film featured nonprofessional actors costumed as ancient Romans barking out the text of the play in an emotionally flat, rapid-fire fashion from the ruins of Palatine Hill in contemporary Rome, with the din of the modern city humming below.Ever the utopian, Mr. Straub said he considered the target audience of “Othon” — about a Roman nobleman’s political ambitions amid calls for bringing power to the people — to be the modern proletariat.“I would like to have ‘Othon’ seen by workers in Paris,” he was quoted as saying in a 1975 interview. “They’ve never been told that Corneille is impossible to understand.”The film, he added, “threatens not just a class, but a clique of power.”That clique of power apparently included critics at the New York Film Festival in 1970, half of whom bolted for the exit during the film’s press screening.But perhaps that was the point. As Mr. Straub once put it, “We make our films so that audiences can walk out of them.” More

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      Alain Tanner, Leading Director in Swiss New Wave, Dies at 92

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      With his brainy works of neorealism, he made films that helped establish Switzerland as a film center in the 1970s.Alain Tanner, a pioneering director in the Swiss New Wave movement that took off in the 1970s, known for his cerebral, left-leaning films that challenged bourgeois complacency, died on Thursday in Geneva. He was 92.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the Association Alain Tanner, a Geneva-based group that preserves and promotes his work.Growing up in Switzerland, surrounded by France, Germany, and Italy with their rich cinema traditions, Mr. Tanner went on to be a founder of the so-called Group of 5, norm-shattering Swiss directors who helped drive a new form of national cinema. His best-known films tended toward a stark neorealism, laced with incisive dialogue and an arid wit, and often centered on characters struggling against conformity.Looking back on his career in his later years, Mr. Tanner said he was proud to have been part of a generation that strove to shake the social order.“During the second half of the last century,” he said, “I lived through what was probably the most engaging for cinema, with the questioning of the old styles, the break with old structures and the arrival of modernity.”A sharp-eyed observer of discontent, both emotional and social, he never achieved the name recognition of the French New Wave masters like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who died on Tuesday at 91. He acknowledged both as influences.Regardless, critics considered him an important voice. In a 1990 review of Mr. Tanner’s film “A Flame in My Heart,” Vincent Canby described him in The New York Times as a “first-class director” and “one of the most securely cerebral of European filmmakers.”Bulle Ogier in Mr. Tanner’s 1971 film “The Salamander.”Filmo – Verein CH.Film“The Salamander” (1971), which Mr. Tanner shot in 16-millimeter, established his reputation worldwide and had a yearlong run at the Cinéma Saint-André des Arts in Paris. “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976) was an art-house hit in Europe and the United States.Mr. Tanner, a native of French-speaking Geneva, made his early films in French, but his first English-language film, “Light Years Away,” which starred Trevor Howard as a junkyard-dwelling spiritual guide to a rebellious young drifter, won the jury’s special grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981.By that point Mr. Tanner’s reputation in film circles was already cemented based on his groundbreaking films that grappled with the spirit of revolution and personal reinvention of the 1960s.His first feature film, “Charles, Dead or Alive” (1969), conceived in the wake of the 1968 student protests that swept Europe, involved a prosperous middle-aged Swiss watchmaker who abandons a thriving family business, adopts an assumed name and embarks on an ill-fated journey of self-discovery as he settles into a life on the fringes of society with a young couple.Mr. Tanner’s best known films of the 1970s, written with the English novelist, critic and Marxist theorist John Berger, concern the legacies of the tumultuous ’60s.“The Middle of the World” (1974), explores a love affair between an Italian waitress at a railroad cafe and a married engineer who is running for the Swiss Parliament, but also the class tensions between them.Mr. Tanner’s film “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976), with the actors Myriam Mézières and Jean-Luc Bideau.Citel Films“Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976), focuses on a group of disillusioned friends in Geneva — including an activist-turned-proofreader, an itinerant history professor and a trade unionist — who are prone to extemporizing on topics as diverse as capitalism, revolution, train travel and sex.“Each of the characters is, in his or her own way, as surrounded as Switzerland, hemmed in,” Mr. Canby wrote in The Times in 1976. But, he added, “they have not been anesthetized by mediocrity into dreamless boredom.”Alain Tanner was born on Dec. 6, 1929, in Geneva. His father was a publicist, writer and poet; his mother was a painter.Growing up in Romandy, the French-speaking region in western Switzerland, Mr. Tanner felt alienated from the country’s German-speaking majority. “Switzerland exists much more for the German Swiss than for us,” he was quoted as saying in a 1976 interview with the film critic James Monaco. “They have a real identity, while we don’t.”A lover of movies since childhood, he experienced an epiphany as a teenager when he discovered Italian neorealist directors like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. At the University of Geneva, Mr. Tanner studied economics, but his real passion was for film. He started a campus film club with Claude Goretta, who would help found the Group of 5. Seeking adventure beyond his native country, he joined the merchant navy after graduation.In the mid-1950s, Mr. Tanner and Mr. Goretta settled in London, where they found work curating archives and subtitling films for the British Film Institute. They befriended the young directors Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, who were involved with a budding school of documentary filmmaking called Free Cinema. In 1957, Mr. Tanner and Mr. Goretta joined the movement with “Nice Time,” a 17-minute documentary rumination about Piccadilly Circus at night. It won the prize for experimental film at the Venice Film Festival.Returning to Switzerland a few years later, Mr. Tanner directed for television before forming the Group of 5 in 1968; besides Mr. Goretta, the others were Michel Soutter, Jean-Louis Roy and Jean-Jacques Lagrange. His first feature, “Charles Dead or Alive,” won the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Mr. Tanner is survived by his wife, Janine; two daughters, Nathalie and Cécile; and three grandchildren.By the end of his career he had made 21 feature films, including the erotic psychological dramas “A Flame in My Heart” (1987) and “The Diary of Lady M” (1993), along with numerous documentaries for Swiss television.A director once invigorated by the spirit of revolution had long ago mellowed in his political passions.“I believe that neither capitalism nor Communism does anybody any good,” Mr. Tanner said in a 1976 Times interview. “I’m not so much politically minded; I think more about the individual and peoples’ lives.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Vedette’ Review: A Cow’s Trouble in Paradise

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      In this documentary, two French filmmakers meet a formidable Swiss cow and, under her impassive gaze, ruminate on her Alpine life.Few places are lovelier for cows to ruminate in than the Valais in southern Switzerland. This alpine region’s most famous attraction is the Matterhorn, but it is also where you find a breed of cattle known as Hérens. There, on lush, steep slopes, these brown-black animals graze and graze some more, at times using their horns to plow into the dirt and one another.The title subject of the French documentary “Vedette” is a typically brawny specimen with a massive head and formidable bass-y moo. She looks so tough, so intimidating, though this may be fantasy; it is, after all, easy to imagine all sorts of nonsense about animals. That’s certainly one of the lessons of “Vedette,” which was directed by Claudine Bories and Patrice Chagnard, who are married, although it’s unclear if they entirely grasp their movie’s contradictory messages, its untapped complexities or its downright weirdness.Over a leisurely, sometimes slack hour and a half, the filmmakers tell an initially inviting and benign story of one cow and the sparsely populated area in which two- and four-legged creatures exist side by side, seemingly much like generations have done before. With Bories serving as the narrator and interviewer, and Chagnard handling the cinematography, the directors introduce a world that looks almost untouched by modernity, despite technologies like cellphones and portable milking machines. A lot of this seems genuine and true, even if there’s also a tourist-board quality to the upbeat tone and some of the hovering camerawork.Amid copious beauty shots of cows and land alike, the movie skitters from the personal to the lightly ethnographic and the quasi-sociological. One ritual that’s distinct to this region is cow fighting — “combats de reines” or “battle of queens” — bloodless, surprisingly watchable spectacles in which pairs of bovines push against each other’s heads. (Their horns have been dulled.) Each winner is then matched with another cow until a head-ramming champion is declared queen. She receives a little crown of flowers for her troubles; for their part, the proud owners earn bragging rights to owning a queen, a honor Vedette has long held.It’s not clear why, when or how this ritual emerged, which is typical of Bories and Chagnard’s frustratingly incurious approach. There’s much you never learn here, including fundamentals about dairy farming. Cows need to have calves to produce milk, and at one point, you see Vedette during a difficult birth. The calf needs to be pulled out using an obstetric chain, and right after it’s born, it disappears; like most dairy calves, it was probably sent to another farm or to slaughter. The possibility that Vedette’s calves were turned into veal chops might be a bummer for some viewers, but it would provide a true picture of life for most dairy cows.The movie loses its thread and interest midway through after Vedette loses a fight. As they do throughout, the owners speak about Vedette’s feelings — how it affects “her morale” — anthropomorphizing that Bories doesn’t question and repeatedly echoes. To spare Vedette’s ostensible shame, the owners move her alone to a barn next to the directors’ home, where Bories sings her a song and reads aloud passages from Descartes’s “Animals Are Machines.” I imagine the filmmakers thought this charming, though they’re also clearly fumbling toward some greater awareness about animals beyond the purely instrumental.“Vedette” joins a recent roster of documentaries about the uses and abuses of farm animals (others include “Cow” and “Gunda”). It’s disappointing that Bories and Chagnard fail to add anything to this environmentally urgent topic beyond their own surprise that these animals are more than indistinguishable milk factories. Vedette is a nice cow; she deserves more consideration than she receives. This shallowness is especially disappointing given the shocker ending, which throws everything that’s come before into a new, mind-bending light. I’ll say no more other than, as history teaches us, some queens lose more than their crowns.VedetteNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Music

      Watches and Music: A Harmonious Match

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      As the former lead guitarist for Anthrax, Daniel A. Spitz understands the fundamental link between music and timekeeping, something Swiss brands also have embraced.In the late 1990s, when Daniel A. Spitz was a student at the Watchmakers of Switzerland Training and Educational Program (better known as WOSTEP) in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, he visited the Audemars Piguet factory in nearby Le Brassus.“I was trying to explain to them, ‘Do you have any idea how much disposable income and how many watch collectors there are in music?’” Mr. Spitz said on a recent video call from his home in Gun Barrel City, Texas, about an hour’s drive southeast of Dallas. “‘If you collaborated with musicians, how many more people would have an awareness of what a really good timepiece is?’ They just looked at me as if I was nuts.”Oh, how times (and tunes) have changed!Over the past few years, many Swiss watchmakers, including Audemars Piguet, have struck partnerships with artists, D.J.s, award shows, music festivals and even recording studios that underscore the fundamental link between music and timekeeping. (Let’s not forget the Italian word “tempo” comes from the Latin “tempus,” meaning time.)It’s a topic Mr. Spitz is particularly qualified to address. A former lead guitarist for the pioneering thrash metal band Anthrax, he left the group in 1995 to become a watchmaker, a passion he attributes to a childhood spent tinkering with Swiss timepieces at his grandfather’s watch and jewelry store in New York’s Catskills region.Mr. Spitz performing with Anthrax in 1991. He left the band four years later.Lisa Lake/Getty Images(He did return to Anthrax from 2005 to 2008 for a reunion cycle, then quit music for good. “My carpal tunnel syndrome inhibits me from playing for long periods of time,” he said.)The carpal tunnel syndrome has not stopped Mr. Spitz from designing and building about three custom wristwatches a year, with prices starting at $128,000, and a waiting list approaching two years. Making one complete watch at a time has allowed him to avoid making repetitive tasks with his hands, he said, but when there was a problem he would just stop and work on something else.As he riffed on the intrinsic link between music — particularly his brand of heavy metal — and high-end mechanical watchmaking, he emphasized the focus, precision and ambition that both fields require. “When you want to become one of the best guitar players on the planet, you lock yourself up in your room for years and you play and you play and you play — you have to figure it out,” Mr. Spitz said. “It’s the same in watchmaking.”As for the Swiss, the connections have struck a chord — look to just a few recent sponsorships, themed collections and even product collaborations.In 2019, Audemars Piguet became a global partner of the Montreux Jazz Festival (a role formerly filled by the Swiss brand Parmigiani Fleurier). That same year, the watchmaker introduced a music program to support rising music artists and to create music experiences for audiences around the world.Before the festival’s 55th edition concluded on July 17, the brand continued that mission by presenting a live performance by the Montreal-based hip-hop duo the Lyonz, staged in the foothills of the Swiss Alps around Montreux.The American watchmaker Bulova, owned by Citizen Watch, staked its claim on the mainstream music industry in 2016, when it signed agreements with the Recording Academy and the Latin Recording Academy to create and distribute watch collections featuring the logos of the Grammys and the Latin Grammys.Bulova sponsored the Grammy Brunch in 2020, which featured a performance by Cari Fletcher.Charley Gallay/Getty ImagesIt even has made special-edition Grammy watches for first-time winners featuring dials made of the same custom alloy used for the ceremony’s gramophone-shaped award, a substance called Grammium.“It’s not just about selling a watch,” Jeffrey Cohen, Bulova’s chief executive, said. “It’s about selling a vibe or a feeling.”Even though the pandemic generally made it impossible to enjoy that vibe at live events, plenty of brands created virtual music experiences throughout 2020 and the first half of 2021. Bulova, for one, continued its three-year-old “Tune of Time” video series spotlighting emerging musicians, established in partnership with the Universal Music Group. And Zenith teamed with the electronic music D.J. Carl Cox last fall to organize a private D.J. set on Zoom for about 50 clients in Mexico.“Clearly, you’re not getting the same outcome when you’re doing it online,” said Julien Tornare, Zenith’s chief executive, on a recent phone call. “You miss the atmosphere, you miss the real sound, you miss the interaction with the artists. But between doing nothing and this, we went with this.”The inner workings of one of Mr. Spitz’s watches.JerSean Golatt for The New York TimesFor the Geneva watchmaker Vacheron Constantin, which in 2018 signed a long-term agreement with Abbey Road Studios, the London recording site made famous by the Beatles, the pandemic was trickier to navigate. “It definitely put a hold on client experiences,” said Laurent Perves, the brand’s international commercial director and chief marketing officer.Before the pandemic, Vacheron Constantin used the recording complex as an event space (like celebrating the debut of its Fiftysix collection in 2018). More intriguing, however, was what the brand did with its La Musique Du Temps collection of chiming watches introduced in 2019: Vacheron arranged for the sound engineers at Abbey Road to record each timepiece’s unique sonic print, “so if one day clients want to have their watches serviced, we can reproduce the exact sound,” Mr. Perves said.That kind of project is a more sophisticated endeavor than just a sponsorship to raise a brand’s profile, said Silvia Belleza, the Gantcher associate professor of business at the Columbia Business School in New York, where she studies how consumers indicate status to one another. “If you can show why there’s a connection between the measurement of time and the music or sound,” she said, “it’s not only placing the brand name close to an event or cultural activity, you’re actually creating a story.”But, do any of these collaborations actually sell watches?“The objective here is to bring something additional to our clients in terms of experience, content, access and storytelling,” Mr. Perves said. “Spreading the message and educating people on what we do is important to us.”(The executives may not be saying it, but of course that kind of community building is a pillar of the industry’s modern sales strategy.)Although if watchmakers wanted to determine the return on their investment, it’s doubtful they could.“I’m not going to lie — it’s very difficult to quantify,” Ms. Belleza said. “It’s not like you have a shop at the music event and you can count how many watches you are selling. The return is more about awareness, visibility, connection with high-end activities — not the number of watches sold in the short term.”Mr. Spitz designs and builds about three custom wristwatches a year.JerSean Golatt for The New York TimesInstead, watchmakers who create sensory experiences powered by music — even, or especially, when the music doesn’t match the brand’s image (cue Mr. Spitz’s Anthrax hits, like “I’m the Man” from 1987) — may form long-term connections with existing clients and pick up new customers along the way.Take it from Lee Garfinkel, an advertising creative director who has used music throughout his career, often unexpectedly.In 1995, he created a television commercial for Mercedes-Benz with Janis Joplin singing “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz” on the soundtrack.“At first, the dealer group went crazy,” Mr. Garfinkel said on a recent phone call. “‘Why are you using this screeching woman singing about my cars?’ But in my mind, it was a great way to help people wake up and realize there was something new and different happening.” More