474 – Finding Vivian Maier (2013)

 spacetime coordinates: 20th century // 2000/10’s Chicago,  the Alpine village of Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur > street scenes in Chicago and New York during the 1950s and 1960sFinding Vivian Maier is a 2013 American documentary film about the photographer Vivian Maier  (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) written, directed, and produced by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, and executive produced by Jeff Garlin.

July 1957. Chicago Suburb, IL

Undated, Chicago

Undated, New York, NY

Maier was a French-American woman who worked most of her life as a nanny and housekeeper to a multitude of Chicago families. She carried a camera everywhere she went, but Maier’s photographic legacy was largely unknown during her lifetime. The film documents how Maloof discovered her work and, after her death, uncovered her life through interviews with people who knew her. Maloof had purchased a box of photo negatives at a 2007 Chicago auction, then scanned the images and put them on the Internet. News articles began to come out about Maier and a Kickstarter campaign for the documentary was soon underway.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2714900/

“the poor are too poor to die”

470

Welcome to Armageddon!

0469 – The Limehouse Golem (2016)

spacetime coordinates:  Limehouse in Victorian London  (1880)

The Limehouse Golem is a 2016 British horror-mystery film directed by Juan Carlos Medina from a screenplay by Jane Goldman. The film, an adaptation of Peter Ackroyd‘s 1994 murder mystery novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, it stars Olivia Cooke, Bill Nighy, and Douglas Booth.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4733640/

0463 – Justice League (2017)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0974015/

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0455

spacetime coordinates: 19th-century England, Yorkshire >  the Amazon and its tributaries > the Andes of Peru and Ecuador

Richard Spruce and the Trials of Victorian Bryology

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“Pushing against its scientific reputation as downright boring, moss in particular served to create some botanical, aesthetic sense of a setting that allowed for illicit sexual encounters and for primal yearnings. The reasons for this strange dual identity of bryophytes as both mundane and as primal are relatively clear: realistically, moss provided a soft bed for sexual romps that had to take place outside of stuffy Victorian homes. Serving, perhaps predictably, as a slang term for pubic hair, moss was understood to be consistently moist and jewel-like, glittering like emerald colonies under light. (…) Although tropes of sexual encounters occurring in gardens and forests far predated the nineteenth century, both realistically and literarily, these hidden moss grottoes conjured up an image of something semi-religious, some secret refuge from the trials of urban — and overwhelming imperial tropical — life.”

0445 – The Promise (2016)

spacetime coordinates:  1915  small Armenian village of Sirun in the southeast part of the Ottoman Empire >  Constantinople / Istanbul,  Taurus mountains

The Promise is a 2016 American historical drama film directed by Terry George and starring Oscar Isaac, Charlotte Le Bon and Christian Bale, set in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. The entire budget  for the film was donated by American businessman of Armenian origin Kirk Kerkorian.

Ara Sarafian, director of the Gomidas Institute in London and a leading historian of the Armenian Genocide, praised the film for its historical accuracy. “The key themes were historically accurate,” he said. “The producers did not take license to go beyond the historical material at hand yet they managed to capture much of the enormity of the Armenian genocide.” Sarafian also commended director Terry George for his “well balanced and creditworthy” sense of history.

IMDb pre-release voting controversy

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4776998/

0427 – The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)

spacetime coordinates: unnamed war-torn European city in “The Age of Reason” (late 18th century, Wednesday)

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a 1988 adventure fantasy film co-written and directed by Terry Gilliam, starring John Neville, Sarah Polley, Eric Idle, Jonathan Pryce, Oliver Reed, and Uma Thurman.

The film is based on the tall tales about the 18th-century German nobleman Baron Munchausen and his wartime exploits against the Ottoman Empire.

Background

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096764/