In its latest POP Cinema program, Spot — Taipei Film House (光點—台北之家) is offering retrospectives on British theater and film director Peter Brook and French comedic filmmaker Jacques Tati in one festival entitled Body & Space.
Brook’s latest theatrical work, Warum Warum, will be staged at the Taipei National University of the Arts from Aug. 28 to Aug. 30, but before then the POP Cinema program features an essential list of the 84-year-old artist’s films and TV productions.
Brook’s lineup includes Moderato Cantabile (1960), based on Marguerite Duras’ novel of the same title and starring Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo; a condensed version of the landmark TV production The Mahabharata (1989), which was adapted from the Indian epic of the same name; his excellent 1963 adaptation of Lord of the Flies; and the groundbreaking Marat/Sade (1967).
The Tati program includes his best-known films, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967), all of which star a timeless character, Hulot, whose clumsy and quixotic struggle with modern-day life is a hilarious commentary on the obsession with modernity and consumerism that prevailed in post-World War II France. Also included in the program are rarely screened Tati shorts dating back to the 1930s.
Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday introduces Hulot, a gauche, raincoat-wearing pipe-smoker who in Mon Oncle has a hard time adapting when he moves from rural France to his sister’s ultramodern house in the city. In Playtime, the most expensive of Tati’s movies (it was the biggest-budget film in French history when it was made and it nearly bankrupted its director), Hulot wanders through a cold, futuristic glass-and-steel Paris.
The festival will screen seven works from Tati’s oeuvre, three shorts and six feature films. All the copies are newly restored.
“There exist two worlds in each of his films: a world of the past and the arrival of a new one. The inability to fit in with the modern space is comically expressed through Tati’s bodily clumsiness,” curator Wang Pai-chang (王派彰) said.
Body & Space runs through Sept. 4 at Spot, from Sept. 8 to Sept. 13 at Taichung Wonderful Cinema (台中萬代福影城) and from Sept. 1 to Sept. 13 at Kaohsiung Municipal Film Archive (高雄市電影圖書館).
Tickets cost NT$170 for Spot members and NT$200 for non-members. Screenings in Taichung and Kaohsiung are free. On the Net: www.spot.org.tw.
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
As we live longer, our risk of cognitive impairment is increasing. How can we delay the onset of symptoms? Do we have to give up every indulgence or can small changes make a difference? We asked neurologists for tips on how to keep our brains healthy for life. TAKE CARE OF YOUR HEALTH “All of the sensible things that apply to bodily health apply to brain health,” says Suzanne O’Sullivan, a consultant in neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, and the author of The Age of Diagnosis. “When you’re 20, you can get away with absolute
May 5 to May 11 What started out as friction between Taiwanese students at Taichung First High School and a Japanese head cook escalated dramatically over the first two weeks of May 1927. It began on April 30 when the cook’s wife knew that lotus starch used in that night’s dinner had rat feces in it, but failed to inform staff until the meal was already prepared. The students believed that her silence was intentional, and filed a complaint. The school’s Japanese administrators sided with the cook’s family, dismissing the students as troublemakers and clamping down on their freedoms — with
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
RSS