The good: Leadership. “Its festival directorships were shared equally between men and women, and … its executive board was similarly balanced.”
The less good: Director numbers. “The majority of films shown at the competition were still made by male directors. At this year’s festival, 37.9% of films were directed by women, and six of the 18 films in competition were directed by women, which is down from seven last year.” – The Guardian (UK)
Blog
Johni Cerny, Chief Genealogist Who Helped Oprah, Bernie, And Others Find Their Roots On TV, Has Died At 76
Cerny, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., was “the proverbial dean of American genealogical research, … [whose work was] transforming raw data into narratives and metaphors about diversity and our common humanity.” Gates, the Harvard prof who hosts and produces Finding Your Roots on PBS, began working with Cerny in 2006, and their work on personal (and social) histories flowered from there. – The New York Times
Riverdance Is Now A Quarter Of A Century Old
The dance itself, and Irish dance in general, is obviously older – but it débuted as an interval act at Eurovision, and its appeal has never gone away. Its newest star says, “It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do since I was a tiny little girl. I wasn’t even born yet when Riverdance began.” – BBC
Parasite Rode A Wave Of Korean Culture Across The World
K-Pop and K-Drama success wasn’t by accident. “The wave spread across Asia before reaching a global audience thanks to savvy social networking strategies and a steady stream of media with increasingly high production values.” – Los Angeles Times
France Can’t See What’s Erotic About Two Women Falling For Each Other
This is the weirdest possible sentence to write, but director Céline Sciamma says that Portrait of a Lady on Fire isn’t considered erotic in, of all places, France. What? WHAT? Quoi?? Sciamma: “It’s a very bourgeois industry. There’s resistance to radicalism, and also less youth in charge. ‘A film can be feminist?’ They don’t know this concept. They don’t read the book. They don’t even know about the fact that ‘male gaze’ exists. You can tell it’s a country where there’s a lot of sexism, and a strong culture of patriarchy.” – The Guardian (UK)
Vine Started The Short Video Craze, And Then Died – But It May Be Back
Vine was introduced in 2012, bought by Twitter, and killed in 2016. But in its time, it “turned everyday people into stars on other platforms and beyond. Its musical whims warped the music industry. It cultivated memes that might have been dismissed as inside jokes if not for their tendency to flourish outside the app.” Can the app make a comeback in 2020, where TikTok rules the internet? – The New York Times
The Vibrant Electronic Music Of Video Game Soundtracks
They’re different from the quality of movie soundtracks, many of which don’t stand alone, and they’re “a marvelous untapped source of experimental instrumental electronica. … The context of gameplay encourages compositions that are melodically specific, sharp-edged, and hummable.” – Hyperallergic
The Scottish Artist Who Brought Oz To Life
Sound stages of the 1930s and 1940s needed lots of stage sets, and at MGM, George Gibson was the man in charge. “The backdrops he created appeared in films such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), An American in Paris (1951) and Brigadoon (1954). His backdrops were as large as 60ft x 150ft (18m by 45m) and so realistic that the audience often did not realise the setting was a soundstage.” – BBC
We Lost A Lyric Poet When We Lost Amelia Earhart
But no one really knew it because her husband kept it one of her carefully guarded secrets. Now, “searching the archives for Amelia Earhart’s lost poems is a study in fragments—every tucked-away line on the back of a receipt hidden in a notebook an invitation to speculate on her thoughts. Even when her widower published pieces of her verse in his memoir, he had an independent source verify the authenticity of one of them, unsure if the private voice on the page was indeed hers.” – LitHub
Archaeologists Find A New Shrine In Rome, Perhaps To Romulus
The find is in the Roman Forum, where authorities revealed on Friday that they believe this may date to the 6th century B.C.E., 200 years after Romulus was said to have lived. That means it’s a memorial site, if indeed it is a site to Romulus. Also, oops: “It’s the second time the sarcophagus and cylindrical stone stub have been unearthed, but it’s only now that archaeologists are attributing an exciting significance to them.” – The Washington Post (AP)