The mirage of Bill Viola, the theater of Robert Badinter, the romanticism of Lana del Rey Our 5 cultural highlights

The mirage of Bill Viola, the theater of Robert Badinter, the romanticism of Lana del Rey Our 5 cultural highlights

Lana del Rey, romanticism assumed

Lana Del Rey is a pop diva, let it be known! As a promo for her seventh album Chemtrails Over the Country Club, she gave only one interview in the written press. The British magazine Mojo is the lucky one who devotes its front page to him. The singer, 35, appears there with her visual signature, luscious lips, false eyelashes and eyeliner. Her latest opus is in line with Violet Bent Backwards Over the grass (2020) a collection of her poems set to music. Purified, stripped down, this forty-minute disc gives pride of place to the intimate, to the piano-voice. Once again, she revisits the Californian myth, this time from the angle of the Laurel Canyon district of Los Angeles where Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell lived in the 1970s. Muted or twilight, his voice is always overwhelming.The mirage of Bill Viola, the theater of Robert Badinter, the romanticism of Lana del Rey Our 5 cultural highlights The mirage of Bill Viola, the theater of Robert Badinter, the romanticism of Lana del Rey Our 5 cultural highlights

Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Lana del Rey, Polydor/Universal.

Africa 21st century, a reference picture book

300 reproductions, 51 artists, Africa 21st century, is a panorama of contemporary African photography and the societal, cultural, political and ecological issues of the entire continent. If the pictures were taken for the most part in the last decade, the book also pays homage to the old ones, among others the great Malian portraitists Seydou Keïta or Malick Sidibé... Articulated in four chapters Hybrid cities (on the transformation of the African metropolis), Zones of freedom (on questions of war and identity), Myth and memory (on the telescoping of reality and fiction) Interior landscapes (on visions of Africanity) this work, whose direction was entrusted to Ekow Eshum, curator, journalist, writer, explains what it means to live in Africa today. A magnificent sum.

Africa 21 esiècle, by Ekow Eshun, Textuel editions, 272 pages, €55.

Bill Viola, a mystical video in Saint-Eustache

Bill Viola's mirage, theater by Robert Badinter, the romanticism of Lana del Rey Our 5 cultural essentials

“Mirages, then, are about the most real of the unreal things that exist. Watching, staring at this woman advancing towards us, approaching as close as possible, the enigma persists and it is the history of humanity that walks towards us. This is how Bill Viola, videographer and sculptor of time, comments on his work Passage into Night (2005), a fixed 50-minute shot which stages the enigmatic march of a silhouette. It is urgent, in this Easter week, to go and contemplate in the nave of the Saint-Eustache church his video lent by the Pinault collection. Desert crossing ? Transition from darkness to light? Everyone will interpret this spiritual work in the light of another inspiring phrase, that of Ibn Al-Arabi, Sufi poet of the 11th century: “If you embark on the journey, you will arrive”.

Passage into the night, until April 5, Eglise Saint-Eustache.

Robert Badinter, crazy about theater

Would we celebrate the Badinter year in 2021 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in 1981? Still, the former Minister of Justice is under the spotlight. While lawyer Richard Malka and cartoonist Bernard Fred are working on the adaptation of Idiss, (a novel about his grandmother published in 2018), Dominique Messika and Maurice Szafran are devoting a biography to him The Right Man published by Taillandier, Robert Badinter, for his part, published three plays Cellule 107, The Red Bricks of Warsaw, C.3.3, confessing his secret passion on the back cover “I have always loved the theater”. The title of the Théâtre 1 collection is proof that we are still optimistic at 92!

Théâtre I, by Robert Badinter, Fayard editions, 306 pages, €23.

Amos Gitai, memory builder

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995 is a historic event, the violence of which marked Amos Gitai, a tragic source from which his artistic creation draws: a first film in 1996, The Arena of Murder, followed in 2O15 by a second feature film resulting from documentary research The last day of Yithzak Rabin. The filmmaker having donated to the BnF all of his paper and digital archives related to his work on the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister, Nobel Peace Prize winner, the library is devoting an exhibition to him, Yitzhak Rabin/ Amos Gitai, composed of 16 panels that unwind, with the help of filming photos, unpublished images, leaflets, sound extracts the stages of this drama. Invisible for the time being, this exhibition is a remarkable work of memory. While waiting for the reopening of the library, we can read "Chronicles of an assassination" Amos Gitai's promise: "I sat down at my table to try to write about Yitzhak Rabin..."

Amos Gitai/ Yitzhak Rabin, until November 7, 2021, BnF-Site François Mitterrand.

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