Born today: Françoise Sagan

Melinda on Françoise Sagan, who would have turned 81 today, from Through Parisian Eyes: Reflections on Contemporary French Arts and Culture: Sagan talks quietly. She responds to questions with a momentary look of deep reflection, then looks straight  at you as she rushes through her thoughts. She rarely disappears into a reverie or a monologue. And she does not lose herself in her thoughts. She constantly tried to find out my responses to all the issues we discussed.m not as a way of avoiding being interviewed but rather out of curiosity. She is extremely considerate and thought she had just come in from a dentist's appointment, it was hard to tell that she was in pain. Her liveliness radiates out of her very thin frame and gives her an ethereal quality. Yet her voice is deep and earthy.

Read the full interview here.

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Melinda on set with Wim Wenders and Kit Carson

"Most movies about men and women describe relationships as a total disaster, or they describe them, in the wrong way, as a beautiful and doable, as if love can overcome anything. So I felt that this film, Paris, Texas, should make an effort to show, not a solution, not a way out, nor a Utopia, but just show some sort of transcendence like a man jumping over his own shadow or some sort of reverse order of thigs, where everything would be doable again.

"So that's what we're trying to do, and it took us a long time to get to the point where I was ready, or where the movie or the people were ready, to transcend this theme that the movie is about. We are all working on it and it very much about what men expect from women, and also very much about America, things in America that I'm preoccupied with, and maybe both are the same after all. So - so what did I start off with?" asked Wim Wenders, the young German director who is now shooting his eleventh feature film, Paris, Texas, in and around Houston and Los Angeles.

The screenplay (conceived by Wenders and Sam Shepard) was still undergoing changes when I arrived on the set; and Wenders was allowing the natural character development of Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and their child (Hunter Carson) to determine his rewrite. Sam Shepard was on the telephone from Iowa (where he is starring in a film, Country), monitoring the changes that Kit Carson, author of the film Breathless, was dictating on location.

Mr. Carson is the actual father of the child actor, Hunter Carson, and he said that the story of Paris, Texas, mirrored his own in many ways: that of a father who leaves his child and wife and returns in order to bring about some new relationship or family bond. How the father creates this new bond, and the way he transcends his own confusion and disintegration, is the basis of this ever-changing screenplay. But Wenders stressed that he was not just interested in the lonesome self-discovery of Travis. For the first time in his career, he was attempting to explore a women's development.

Read the full interview with Wim Wenders and Kit Carson from the set of Paris, Texas here.

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Born today: Olivier Todd

Melinda's interview with the French author and journalist Olivier Todd, who turns 87 today, was included in her book Through Parisian Eyes: Reflections of Contemporary French Arts and Culture.

Todd on his trip to England: "One thing this trip to England made sure of, was that I could never become a Marxist. And you know the importance of Marxism in France. I didn't trust words the way the French do. I mean a lot of writers in France get totally carried away by words, whether it's Malraux or Bernard Henri-Levy. They may come to the right conclusion but they get drunk on words. Sentences have a poetical beauty. But the verification principle just doesn't apply."

Todd on Sartre: "I think that Sartre, like many intellectuals, should have spent more time writing and less time standing on a crate in front of Billancourt, harrying the workers. There's no reason why intellectuals should be competent, particularly literary intellectuals, to deal with politics."

Todd on Jean-Marie Le Pen: "Le Pen is a nasty character, and some of the people around him are even nastier than he is. It's absolutely true that he represents xenophobia and racism."

Todd on his reporting of the Vietnam War for Le Nouvel Observateur: "I did support Hanoi and the Vietcong for many years...I changed my mind much too late. Its obvious that when I landed in Vietnam in February 1965 for the first time that I should have know what was actually going on. It took me from 1965 to 1973 to see the light. I mean, how slow can you be?"

Read the entire excerpt from Through Parisian Eyes here.

MelindaCamberPorter.com

New Exhibit Just Announced

The Melinda Camber Porter Archive is proud to announce the University of South Dakota's Melinda Camber Porter Exhibition of Art, Books and Film, September 19 until October 14, 2016.


This USD Exhibition is the first time, that all 90 Luminous Bodies watercolors and 27 Triptych oil paintings art series are presented in one venue, along with her books and films. This is made possible by the University of South Dakota community and their expansive John A Day Gallery and Exhibition Hall.

Luminous Bodies Series are works of celebration and mourning with 90 watercolors. These images explore the spiritual and cultural forces that continuously vie to originate and then heal the rift between the body and the soul.

“In order to produce art like Luminous Bodies you have to be like William Blake, absolutely fearless.” RobinHamlyn (Senior Curator, Tate Britain).
 
The Triptych Series are 27 large oils on canvas exploring the triptych form as both altarpiece and sculptural shape. 

Peter Trippi, editor of Fine Art Connoisseur states, “In an art market crowded with hollow protestations of “self-identity,” Melinda Camber Porter’s works offer us a new cosmology and an authentic vision of our


John A Day Gallery and Exhibition Hall
University of South Dakota
414 E. Clark Street, Vermillion, SD 57069
Contact: Michelle St. Vrain, 605-677-3177

My Polaroid Selfie No. 1

See more of Melinda's Polaroid Selfies on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram

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A page from Melinda’s Camber Porter Fashion in the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), written and illustrated by Porter while she attended Class 2 at The City of London School for Girls.

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