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Memorials

By Jonah Wolf 8/27/12 11:37am

Memorials

TK caption.

An All-Day Tribute (and an Anonymous Shrine) for Deceased Filmmaker Chris Marker at Light Industry

Visitors arriving at Greenpoint cinematheque Light Industry yesterday were greeted outside by a shrine to the late French director Chris Marker consisting of candles, flowers, words and images from his films, a VHS cassette of Hitchcock’s Vertigo and waving plastic cats of the sort seen at the Japanese temple in Mr. Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983). The subject of Sunday’s day-long retrospective, Mr. Marker, who died on his 91st birthday this July, was clearly for this anonymous shrine-building fan what he was for Light Industry co-founder Thomas Beard: a “model of poetic insight and moral intelligence and restless, searching political imagination.” Read More

By Erica Schwiegershausen 8/23/12 4:44pm

Memorials

Michael Moore recounts his memories of Gore Vidal.

Dick Cavett and Friends Remember Gore Vidal

Longtime friends, colleagues and admirers of Gore Vidal gathered in the currently patriotically decorated Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre—where Mr. Vidal’s 1960 play The Best Man is playing through September 9—on Thursday afternoon to pay their respects to the recently departed writer. The mood was serious yet not solemn as many who were likely humbled to be counted among Mr. Vidal’s contemporaries took the stage to recount memories and share anecdotes from their own experiences with the man.

Reading selections from his own eulogy for Mr. Vidal and praising his friend’s great wit, Dick Cavett recounted many of Mr. Vidal’s most celebrated one-liners. His favorite, he told the audience: “Success is not enough. One’s friends must fail.”

“Whenever my friend succeeds, I die a little,” was another Vidal aphorism recalled to much laughter, and, reading a line from a message prepared by David Mamet for the memorial, Liz Smith decreed Mr. Vidal “smart enough to see through the self-interest of everyone except himself.” Yet none of this seemed to remotely deter the hordes of successful friends who seemed to be endlessly seeking his advice. Read More