Today, June 16, is Bloomsday, “the day in 1904 captured through the eyes of Leopold Bloom by James Joyce in his epic novel Ulysses,” as Becky Hogge reminds us at the Atlantic Wire. “Each year in Dublin fans of Joyce gather to celebrate the work in a day of public readings conducted at locations across the city that are featured in the book. 2012 is a special year for these Joyceans. The 71st since Joyce’s death, it marks the first—across the EU at any rate—that his work may be shared freely among them, without needing permission—for public readings, performances, or re-interpretations—from his estate. This is no small matter: since inheriting the estate in 1982, Joyce’s grandson Stephen Joyce has gained a reputation as the most controlling literary executor in history.”
If you’re hearing the call to commemorate, your options are many. At UbuWeb, you can listen to Ulysses read in its entirety; you can also go whole hog and listen to Finnegans Wake as well. There’s also the soundtrack to Joseph Strick’s 1967 adaptation of Ulysses, and you can watch Mary Ellen Bute’s Passages from James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” (1965-67). Open Culture presents a brief video in which Stephen Fry talks about his love for Ulysses and a longer one, Ian Graham’s 2000 documentary, James Joyce: The Trials of Ulysses. The Millions has a Joyce quiz and points us to the app Ulysses Seen. And in the Guardian, Colm Tóibín guides readers though Joyce’s Dublin.
More reading. “In the post-Blacklist era of the 1960s and 70s, an opportunity for a revival of [Edward Dmytryk’s Christ in Concrete (1949)] could theoretically have been countenanced,” suggests David Kalat at Movie Morlocks. “In some alternate universe one can imagine college kids falling in love with this blunt, gritty critique of American capitalism, made in the heart of a conservative time. But, you see, in the same way that late 1940s audiences objected to Dmytryk’s name as a Commie pariah and boycotted the film, 1960s and 70s audiences objected to Dmytryk’s name as a soulless sell-out and turncoat. Christ in Concrete was maligned and abandoned by both the Left and the Right, thanks to Dmytryk’s role as a political lightning rod.”
For the Nation, David Rieff reviews Claude Lanzmann’s “simultaneously compelling and repelling memoir,” The Patagonian Hare.
In the works. “Joe Cornish, who has been offered a ton of projects since his alien invasion breakthrough film Attack the Block, has been set to write and direct the Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash,” reports Deadline‘s Mike Fleming. “The book has just been reacquired by Paramount Pictures, with Kathleen Kennedy and Kennedy/Marshall producing.”
Also: “Benicio Del Toro has been set to star in Jimmy Picard, a drama that will be directed by Arnaud Desplechin. The project is adapted from Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, by acclaimed ethnologist and psychologist Georges Devereux.” Mathieu Amalric and Gina McKee are cast as well; and shooting evidently starts in just a few days.
Obit. “Carlos Reichenbach, a Brazilian filmmaker perhaps best known for his sex comedies of the ’70s and early ’80s, died of heart failure [on] June 14, while being rushed to a São Paulo hospital,” reports Andre Soares at the Alt Film Guide. Gabe Klinger: “Last fall I started to mount (together with Gerwin Tamsma) a retrospective for the International Film Festival Rotterdam centering on Boca do Lixo (Mouth of Garbage) production from Brazil and covering the period of 1967-1987…. Carlão had been the subject of a spotlight organized by Hubert Bals at IFFR back in the ’80s; this would have been reason enough for us to return to a focus of his films but we had a lot more in mind. We wanted to bring one of his masterpieces and a film that had been out of view since it was made, O Império do Desejo (Sensual Anarchy, 1981), back into circulation with a glorious new 35mm made from the original negative. We wanted it to be the centerpiece of our program. Symbolically, to us, it was.”
Tomorrow, of course, is Father’s Day. For the Guardian, Elaine Lipworth asks Danny DeVito, Helen McCrory, Oliver Stone, Sam Worthington, Olivia Wilde, and Thomas Haden Church about their dads. And LIFE posts a gallery of vintage photos of famous dads and their kids.
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