July 2, 2003

Art Briefing

HIGHLIGHTS

VENICE: TRIBUTE TO HEPBURN Katharine Hepburn will be saluted by this summer's Venice International Film Festival with a screening of her 1955 film "Summertime," Agence France-Presse reported yesterday. In the film, directed by David Lean and also starring Rossano Brazzi, Hepburn plays a spinster who falls in love with a married man while on vacation in Venice. The portrayal by Hepburn, who died on Sunday at 96, earned her an Academy Award nomination. The festival begins on Aug. 27.

POETS' CORNER: HEANEY HAILS EMINEM Guess who thinks the rapper Eminem is cool? None other than the Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. Mr. Heaney was fulfilling a speaking engagement in Norwich, England, when journalists asked him if anyone in popular culture prompted interest in poetry and lyrics as Bob Dylan and John Lennon once did, Reuters reported yesterday. Mr. Heaney, the 1995 Nobel laureate in literature, replied: "There is this guy Eminem. He has created a sense of what is possible. He has sent a voltage around a generation. He has done this not just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy."

COMING ATTRACTION: A SIBELIUS FILM A film about the life of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) will have its premiere on Sept. 4 during the annual Sibelius week in Lahti, Finland, the film's director, Timo Koivusalo, has announced. Agence France-Presse reported that the film, featuring some of Sibelius's best-known music, portrays his rise to national and international fame.

PIAF SINGS SOME MORE Half a dozen Édith Piaf songs, long thought lost, will be heard on a CD planned for release in a collection for the 40th anniversary of the death of Piaf, the French chanteuse, on Oct. 11, 1963. Made from 1940 to 1943, the tracks were among master recordings cleared out to make space in the basement of the music company Polydor in the 1960's, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday from Paris. A scrap dealer was about to buy them when the National Library took them over. The recordings languished forgotten until transferred to the modern complex that opened in 1996 in eastern Paris. Universal Music, current owner of the Polydor label, had the masters restored for release on CD.

GRAND RAPIDS: ART OF PATRIOTISM The attack, leaving thousands dead, took the nation by surprise. Seven months later a campaign was begun behind the slogan "United We Stand," a rallying cry that dates to the American Revolution. The surprise attack was not the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center in Sept. 11, 2001, but the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The proposal for "United We Stand in July 1942" was presented to the National Publishers Association, now the Magazine Publishers of America, by Paul MacNamara, a publicist for the Hearst Corporation and an editor of Cosmopolitan. His was a vision of newsstands whose wares would feature a sea of American flags on July 4, 1942. All but forgotten, that campaign to raise spirits and elevate patriotism by using magazine covers is the subject of a new show from the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Opening on Friday and continuing through Sept. 14 at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., "July 1942: United We Stand" features 88 original magazine covers that convey history, artistry and patriotic symbolism.

THEATER: HOLLYWOOD HISTORY The screenwriters Ring Lardner Jr. (1915-2000) and Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976) had much in common. Lardner, above right, won Academy Awards for his screenplays for "Woman of the Year" (he shared the award with Michael Kanin) and "MASH." Trumbo, above left, wrote the Oscar-winning original stories for "The Brave One" and "Roman Holiday." He wrote them under other names because, like Lardner, he had been jailed and blacklisted for contempt as one of the Hollywood 10 who defied the House Un-American Activities Committee during its hunt for Communists in Hollywood in the late 1940's. In 1942 and 1943 these friends wrote a screenplay based on three short stories by Ira Wolfert. Their drama, never filmed, was "The Fishermen of Beaudrais," about Louis Garoux, an elderly rapscallion who learns the meaning of patriotism in a seaside town in France during the Nazi onslaught early in World War II. From tomorrow through July 20, "The Fishermen of Beaudrais," adapted for the stage by Joseph Rinaldi and Kathleen Rowlands, will be presented at the Bank Street Theater, 155 Bank Street, in Greenwich Village.

NEWARK: SONGS OF PATRIOTISM In the aftermath of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the voice of Daniel Rodriguez, New York City's singing policeman, helped to lift spirits and express love of country. Patriotic songs, as well as opera arias and Broadway tunes, will be on his program when he appears with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, led by Tom Scott, at 7:30 p.m. Sunday at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark.

FOOTNOTES

Under the title "A Salute to George M. Cohan," the Bronx Arts Ensemble will celebrate July 4 with a jazz and Dixieland concert in Van Cortlandt Park. The free event will take place at 2 p.m. Friday at Rockwood Drive Circle, near Broadway and Mosholu Avenue, just past the Van Cortlandt Stables. Besides Cohan favorites like "You're a Grand Old Flag," and "The Yankee Doodle Boy," the music of Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers, among others, will be heard.