1995: ЯƎTЯOSPECTIVE | Events, Deaths, Crossings

Cathartic, a solemn exposition of the sacred and the profane or a sensationalist exploitation of the dead? Marcus Harvey’s large, 9 feet by 11 feet Myra (’95) used casts of an infant’s hands to create a black, grey and white mosaic—a replica of the police photo of child murderer Myra Hindley.

In 1995, Mark Fraser bought a broken laser pointer for $14.83—the first item that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar listed on the site, called AuctionWeb then. Fraser later told a surprised Omidyar: “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.”

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John Wainwright, an Australian software engineer based in California, became Amazon’s first customer when he purchased Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies: Computer Models Of The Fundamental Mechanisms Of Thought by Douglas Hofstadter on April 3, 1995.

Lana Turner (1920-95)

The reason why pretty teenagers hung about in LA drugstores in attractive, snug winterwear was because Lana Turner was discovered thus in 1937. ‘The sweater girl’, screamed the film press at MGM’s prodding. For Turner, that early effervescence curdled into sinuous imperiousness soon enough—her pose, those immaculately arched eyebrows, that large-eyed expression and a measured smile spelt a consciously radiant beauty. Early films included They Won’t Forget Me (’37) and Four’s a Crowd (’38), followed by the tepidly successful Ziegfeld Girl, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Honky Tonk (’41). A modestly talented actress, she’s burnt into public memory as the murderous, adulterous Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice (’46): that prominent lipstick, the white turban, abbreviated blouse and white shorts…John Garfield’s Frank just couldn’t resist the ghastly deed. Turner was then cast in simple costume dramas like The Merry Widow (’52); a meatier role was in The Bad and the Beautiful (’52) and she was a mother with an illegitimate child in Peyton Place (’57). In 1958 her daughter Cheryl accidentally killed her mobster lover, and Hollywood rushed in with another role of shabby-genteel beauty in Imitation of Life (’59), her last great success. She declined swiftly after this. Later movies like By Love Possessed (’61) and Madame X (’65) paid homage to a classic Hollywood figure, but couldn’t revive her fortunes.

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Louis Malle (1932-95)

Louis Malle’s cinematic career spanned that of those of the Nouvelle Vague directors—Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette et al, but he eschewed their formalistic ingenuity, rapid cutting of scenes, a mashup of plot, improvised dialogue, the exhilarating clash of charming innocence and grave, pained irony and central characters borne along on a whimsical whirligig. No, Malle’s cinema, in its poetic realism and lingering attention to detail, adherence to plot and handling of controversial themes harks back to such old French masters as Marcel Carne, Jean Vigo, Rene Clair and Jean Renoir, as also the great Robert Bresson (Malle was his assistant for a while) and Henri Georges Clouzot. He gained prominence with Lift To The Scaffold (’57), starring Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronen—a brash, skillfully composed thriller with a score by Miles Davis. He followed this up with the hugely controversial, amoral depiction of passion and eroticism undermining the certainties of bourgeois existence in The Lovers (’60), also starring Moreau. In 1962, he adapted with joyful spirit Raymond Queneau’s Zazie In The Metro, about a foul-mouthed pre-teen’s romp through Paris. Isolation, alienation, the experience of being an outsider or a misfit permeates his films and can be felt as a dark undertone even in such a light-hearted film like Murmurs of the Heart (’71), about a teenager’s erotic feelings for his attractive mother, and the two great films about a favourite French topic, the Nazi occupation of their country—Lacombe Lucien (’73) and Au Revoir Les Enfants (’87). The first, about a youth’s easy seduction by the Gestapo after a rebuff by the resistance, deals with the silent collusion with the Germans. The second, a hauntingly beautiful feature, about children, Jewishness, loyalty and betrayal, lances that other boil of modern French history—its inherent anti-semitism. A lesser filmmaker—and France is full of them—would have skirted both issues. Pretty Baby (’80), Malle’s American debut, deals with another taboo subject—child prostitution. He had in Sven Nykvist a master cinematographer and in young Brooke Shields an actress with eerie poise, but the film was judged by critics as being timid and coy, as if scared of possible charges of exploitation. Malle also shot a seven-part TV miniseries about India, Phantom India (’68). That, along with Calcutta (’71), were acclaimed for their visual elegance, but was disliked in India because of a familiar reason: gratuitous display of poverty while ignoring the obvious development since independence.

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Gerald Durrell (1925-95)

Barring the ubiquitous P.G. Wodehouse, rarely have ‘light humour’ been regarded as must-read classics in India as the fictionalised, autobiographical books of Gerald Durrell. Their warm, wry tone, shot through with a self-deprecating humour and easy musicality, with a cast of loveable characters have been well thumbed for over 60 years. Yet it is easy to overlook, while being immersed in the scrapes of young Gerald, Leslie, Mango, Larry and Roger the dog in books such as my Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of Gods, Durrell’s significant achievements as a naturalist, zookeeper and conservationist. With his love for wildlife sparked by the mentorship of the British-Greek naturalist and polymath Theodore Stephanides in Corfu (where the family spent four years from 1935-39, and which provided the setting for his three most popular books—the Corfu Trilogy), Gerald started his career as a helper at an aquarium during the war and junior keeper at a zoo after it. Wildlife collecting expeditions to Cameroon (’47, ’49) and Guyana (’50) followed, with the animals sold to zoos. Yet his deepening knowledge of wildlife led to disillusionment about the state of zoos and the condition of animals therein. Conviction grew that they should act as reserves and used for the regeneration of species. A final trip to Cameroon to 1957 was undertaken to collect animals for Durrell’s own zoo, the Jersey Zoological Park, where he set upon practising his credo. In following years, Durrell was the guiding spirit of projects to save threatened species in far corners (eg Mauritius), while pioneering zoo and habitat management. He was also a leading expert in the field of captive breeding (lowland gorillas, for example) and in 1978 started a training centre for conservationists at his zoo. Durrell’s elder brother Larry (Lawrence) investigated love and passion in the perfumed decadence of the Levant (The Alexandria Quartet) and swam the tricky waters of postmodern metafiction (The Avignon Quartet) in rich, sensuous prose. Durrell had use only for limpid clarity. Generations of animals who have existed for the pleasure of humans have him to thank for their humane treatment.

The Reichstag’s tortured history spanning imperial, Weimar, Nazi, divided/neglected and united Germany proved to be irresistible to artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude as a symbol of freedom. In June 1995, they draped the huge structure with fabric—public art on the grandest scale, attracting millions and sparking amazement and joy.

Ginger Rogers (1911-95)

Strikingly blue, sad eyes, a glorious smile, a mass of blonde hair and a pair of legs that froze stares from Beverly Hills to Bombay, Ginger Rogers was a pin-up before lonely WWII GIs fell for Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable and Jane Russell. Virginia Catherine McMath could always dance—winning a Charleston contest at 14 and being George Gershwin’s original ingénue in Girl Crazy (1930). In Hollywood, she stole many scenes in the musical 42nd Street (’33). Then, RKO paired her with the budding genius of dance, Fred Astaire in Flying Down To Rio (’33). The effect was magnetic. His slick, aloof efficiency, juxtaposed with her robust, yet sylph-like sheen, blended two contrary archetypes in enduring movie magic—the man about town and the girl next door. Note the unexpected twirl in the hotel lobby in Swing Time (’36), as well as the unforgettable ‘never gonna dance’ scene in that movie—Rogers in a white satin, figure-hugging gown, Astaire in full regalia, complete with top hat. Or song-and-dance sequences like Night and Day in The Gay Divorcee (’34) and the immortal Cheek to Cheek in Top Hat (’35). In these and others, Rogers and Astaire’s moves, while being choreographic perfection were fun, artistic, emotional and assisted by heavyweight writers and composers—Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and Gershwin. Rogers tried her hand in other, ‘substantial’ roles, with one notable success: the Oscar for Kitty Foyle (’40), where she played a young woman from the wrong side of the tracks. It’s the ’30s musicals with Astaire that made Rogers a screen legend, movies that glisten with sparkling sets and polished floors. Rogers the global star attracted fan mail from across the world, including from a teenage Satyajit Ray (she replied).

Harold Larwood (1904-95)

The little stock footage of Harold Larwood’s bowling shows a relaxed, loping gait, gradual acceleration, a classical side-on action, the left arm dragging down the sky, the right drawing strength from the ground. But those patchy, spotty, hurried reels don’t tell the effect he had: frightening speed, combined with deadly accuracy. Like a symphony, his progress was slow, and his performance from 1924-30 showed great promise, but were erratic. Unlike a symphony, his career as cut short well into the allegro, just as he was establishing himself as the finest bowler of his generation. The instrument of his downfall was, of course, the 1932 ‘Bodyline’ Ashes series where, with Bill Voce and Bill Bowes, battered a great Australian batting order, pulling the average of Don Bradman down to the level of a mortal. Yet, for all the exaggerated, bloody romance of cracked ribs and fractured skulls, the Aussies by the end of the series were getting to grips with Leg Theory: Stan McCabe remained defiantly brilliant, and Ponsford and Bradman had good scores too. For a man who took 33 wickets at 19.52 and won them the series that meant so much to so many in England, the treatment meted out to Larwood—never picked for a Test again after he refused to apologise—was unbelievably harsh. The reasons were the Australians’ horrified discovery of shortcomings of many of their batsmen, England’s scramble to end a diplomatic row and, mostly, the humiliating caste system in English cricket, where ‘professionals’ were often treated by gentlemen ‘amateurs’ as mere menials. Like his fellow Nottinghamshire genius from the collieries, D.H. Lawrence, Larwood was undone by hypocrisy. Like Lawrence, his methods became mainstream—used most notably by Lillee-Thompson in the ’70s, followed by the Windies pace quartets. If 78 wickets from 21 Tests at an average of 28 seem insignificant, remember Neville Cardus’s homily: “There are more things in the game of cricket than are dreamt of in the economy of scorers”.

Stephen Spender (1909-95)

The Bloomsburys, that charmed circle of literary/artistic personages were sainted long back. On their heels followed the progressive young poets and writers of the Thirties set: W.H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Edward Upward, Louis MacNeice, Christopher Isherwood and Stephem Spender. Born of part Jewish and Anglo-German parentage, Spender met many of them in Oxford and embarked on a poetic career. Far from continuing the tradition of Pound and Eliot, these ‘political poets’ had sharper topicality, showed interest in Left wing politics and was shaped by economic doom and the heightening tension of the Hitler years. Some of Spender’s best work appeared in Poems (1933), deploying a natural lyric gift often muted to include the detritus of contemporary life: Now over these small hills they have built the concrete/ That trails black wine:/ Pylons, those pillars/ bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret (The Pylons). Like Isherwood and Auden, Spender went to Germany in 1929 and spent years of feverish artistic existence. Then followed the great event of their generation, the Spanish Civil War, the very embodiment of class struggle and fight against fascism rolled into one, and it provided Spender and others the one decisive political act of their lives. But the bloodletting amidst the Republicans led to great disillusionment, and Spender left the Communist Party soon after. It did, however, result in the poems of The Still Centre (1939): I tell myself the shooting is only for practice,/ And my body seems like a cloth which the machine-gun stitches/ Like a sewing machine, neatly, with cotton from a reel;/ And the solitary, irregular, thin ‘paffs’ from the carbines/ Draw on long needles white threads through my navel (Port Bou).

In later years, Spender edited the literary journals Horizon and Encounter, held many academic posts and was feted, venerated and knighted as a poet, critic, diarist and survivor of a pre-war Augustan age. In a ’30s letter to Isherwood, Spender sets down his conviction: “I think all a writer can do, the only completely revolutionary attitude for him today, is to try and create standards which are really civilised.” That task has acquired urgency today.

Fred Perry (1909-95)

Before today’s invincible troika of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic, before Sampras, Agassi, Becker and Edberg, before the icy Borg and the mercurial Connors and McEnroe, before even the cusp-of-the-open-era champs Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, John Newcombe and Lew Hoad—that relay team of Australians who changed batons over two decades—before all of them there were men in long, white flannels and half sleeves flickering to and fro over freshly cut grass and pressed clay, laying down styles and fundamentals of play for posterity to improve upon. The prince of them all was Briton Fred Perry. Built much like the Djoker, Perry was lightning fast on his feet, had perfect placement, a devastating forehand and a consummate serve-and-volley game. He won eight Grand Slams, was World No 1 amateur player for three years and won three consecutive Wimbledon Championships from 1934-36. In the ’36 final, he did a 6-1, 6-1, 6-0 demlition job of German Gottfried Von Cramm in 45 minutes—the quickest final in the 20th century. In addition to this, he was world table-tennis champion in 1929. His accomplishments made him a sporting superstar, but the working class Perry was, at every step, insulted and derided by the class-ridden Lawn tennis Club of Great Britain. Disgusted by toffs clinging on to class privilege, Perry turned professional in 1936—a more fraught decision than can be appreciated today—moved to the US, became a citizen in ’39 and served in the US Army Air Force in WWII. As a professional, while being ostracised by the world of genteel tennis, he played extensive ‘tours’, comprising upwards of fifty matches, often against the next best professional, Ellsworth Vines. In this, he was a precursor to players toiling in today’s punishing ATP tour. As if this wasn’t enough, Pery designed the white tennis shirt for his clothing line in the early ’50s, a fashion staple worn by all of us. The handsome Perry kept the tabloids busy too—married thrice, he had affairs with Marlene Dietrich and actress Mary Lawson. And, like Harold Larwood, he lived long enough to see himself canonised by the establishment. Few sportsmen can show more than all this.

Miklos Rozsa (1907-95)

Silent cinema had established the use of music as an essential tool to convey narrative mood. If the foundation of modern movie scores were laid by pioneers like Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the following generation expanded their themes in a burst of variations: Nino Rota, Henry Mancini, John Williams, Maurice Jarre, Ennio Morricone and Miklos Rozsa. Young Rozsa had a solid grounding in the Leipzig conservatory, but with life as a concert composer tough without a wealthy patron, gravitated towards film music, moved to London and scored music for Knight Without Armour (’37), his first, directed by Alexander Korda. In the US, he collaborated with top directors in some of their greatest films, with his scores being an essential part of our experiencing classic cinema. His suite for The Jungle Book (’42) was recorded by RCA, the first substantial marketing of film music. In Paramount, he composed for Billy Wilder’s Five Graves To Cairo (’43) and Double Indemnity (’44). In 1944, he composed an Oscar-winning score for Hitchcock’s Spellbound, pioneering the use of theremin for suspenseful effect. Its prelude, a sweeping romance, opens with a thoroughly unnerving, eerie, Banshee-like note. Rozsa received his second Oscar for A Double Life (’47), where his anguish-filled music mirrored the plight of a Shakespearean actor, played by Ronald Coleman, gripped by approaching madness. Rozsa then composed grand orchestral suites for a flurry of MGM period dramas in the ’50s like Quo Vadis, Ivanhoe, and the irrepressibly majestic, all brass and drums, Ben Hur, for which he won his third Oscar. Wilder returned to Rosza for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Fedora (’78), while Alain Resnais sought him out for his first English film, Providence (’77).

Mordechai Gur (1930-95)

Lt Gen Mordechai Gur belonged to the generation of prominent Israelis whose lives spanned the pre-history and much of the history of the state of Israel: the days of settlement, civil war and independence struggle; the heady early days of the new state, characterised as much by a unique Left-nationalism as by an awareness of constant threat from the neighbourhood; stunning successes in the face of existential threat that gave the nation a huge moral superiority and the gradual erosion, in later decades, of much of that advantage.

Gur was born in Jerusalem and in his teens fought in the Haganah—the underground Jewish paramilitary that fought Arab militia as well as colonials in the British mandate of Palestine. In the war of independence in 1947, he was in the Negev brigade that faced an aggressive Egyptian army. The bulk of Gur’s military career was spent as a crack paratroop commander—in 1954 he commanded a company, took part in ‘retaliation operations’ and was wounded and commended for valour by Army chief Moshe Dayan. In the 1956 Sinai campaign, when Israel, in secret collusion with a Britain and France bent on teaching Egypt’s Nasser a lesson after his nationalisation of the Suez Canal invaded the Sinai, Gur commanded a battalion. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Gur commanded the 55th Paratroop Brigade in East Jerusalem against the Jordanian Army, and their fighting on Ammunition Hill is part of Israeli folklore. Afeter encirclement of the old city, he led the forces entering it through the Lion’s Gate, sending the jubilant message: ‘The Temple Mount is in our hands’. During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, he was an attaché in the US, negotiating the generous military help that saved the day for Israel. As chief of the IDF in 1974-78, Gur reshaped the army’s strategies in the light of the loss of face in ’73. Entering politics in 1981, Gur became a Knesset member for the Labour Party; in 1988 he was a member of Yitzhak Shamir’s government and in ’92 served as deputy defence minister. As a defence strategist, Gur supported the 1981 Israeli strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor and flagged concerns about the threat from a militaristic Saddam Hussein. Jerusalem’s ‘liberator’ would have surveyed with a wry smile the current scenario: a West Asia more fractious than ever; the Palestinian cause all but forgotten, a hitherto unthinkable rapprochement between Arab nations and Israel and aggressive settlement plans for Jerusalem, with growing demands for shifting the capital there.

Like a latter-day Viking god looking out benevolently to the boats that pull out for trade and conquest, the granite sculpture Man from the Sea (Havmannen), by British artist Antony Gormley, rises out of a fjord in the Norwegian city of Mo i Rana. It was created in 1995 as part of the international project Artscape Nordland. It has inspired a local festival—Havmanndagene.

Morarji Desai (1896-1995)

The classic photo by Raghu Rai just after the euphoric 1977 victory had JP blessing JP, in a way. Jayaprakash Narayan was convalescent on the hospital bed, and beside him sat, back to the camera, Morarji Desai—the man who would be the first non-Congress prime minister of India, at the helm of the Janata Party. It was not a tenure he could solidify to any degree—the party’s own implosive tendencies ensured that. And so, despite his long years in politics, his participation in the freedom movement, his near-heretic presence in Nehru’s socialist-leaning cabinet, and his stand against dynasty with the Syndicate (against the ‘Indicate’), Morarji came to be known more as the oddball born on that additional day of a leap year, and of course, his experimentations with ‘cola’. He had nearly a century to show for it too, but converts to his legendary brand of liquid autophagy were as hard to come by as rival contenders for prime ministership were in abundance during his brief stint
in the spotlight.

Dogme 95

When you think Denmark, you think cheese rather than cinema. But one of the most compelling movements in contemporary cinema arose from the near-Dadaist rejection of norms by Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. It came in the form of a violent reaction to the big-budget, studio-led extravaganzas that had come to be the mainstay of films. So how one to go radically indie? They drew up a set of rules in a manifesto. Extreme fidelity to time and place: shoot only on location, in the here and now, no temporal or spatial leaps. No props or sets. No sound outside of what really happens—of course, no music too, unless it’s actually there. Hand-held camera, 35 mm, no special lighting or filters, no thrills and frills. Cinema verite taken to its logical extreme. Many raw and very real cinematic moments were thus born, including the 2003 avant-garde classic with Nicole Kidman, Dogville.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995)

Common language has come to absorb ‘the Other’ as a word to denote the foreign, the enemy—the thing to be feared; in fact, the very thing against which one’s identity is constructed. Lithuanian-born French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, on the other hand, placed the ‘Other’ at the centre of his philosophical project. The encounter with the Other, for him, is an intersubjective experience that does not reduce foreignness. “If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other,” he wrote. And yet, drawing on an immersive, and arguably non-rational tradition in Western philosophy as also his own Jewish roots, he offered a kind of radical love, without any expectation of reward, as the core of his ethics. Thus, having himself faced the worst of Nazi horrors, Levinas emerged in post-War Europe as a kind of ironic antithesis to Zionism, even if he subscribed to a moderate version of it.

Jerry Garcia (1942-1995)

Rock ’n roll was genetically programmed to be a permanent teenager among all musical genres—brash, strident and self-consciously grandiose. Even if the more virtuosic and serious artistes took it across unknown frontiers, they generally played by these rules. Jerry Garcia, with his genial professorial smile, a musical ethos that drew on both bluegrass and the blues, a cool ‘California sound’ that relied on long, languid, non-abrasive and lyrical lines, his lush tumbledown mop of hair, and most of all a voice aglow with the soft light of dusk, was different. He was at the centre of the acid-soaked Sixties thing, too, very alternate, very copyleft. That combination made the frontman of the Grateful Dead both a gentle, off-off-Broadway rebel and an icon rolled into one.

Don Cherry (1936-1995)

By common consensus, not the most perfect player of the trumpet in a jazz century studded with expressive geniuses of all ilks, from a Louis Armstrong to a Miles Davis, with a Dizzy middle. Yet, Cherry blew like a cat on a hot tin roof along with Ornette Coleman, unarguably the most far-out man out there. And surfed those rolling, tsunamic waves with most other avante-garde free jazz buccaneers—till his lava cooled enough in the Seventies to produce some fusion, including, believe it or not, a Raga Malkauns. A charming participant-observer to a whole vital chapter in jazz.

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1995: ЯƎTЯOSPECTIVE | Events, Deaths, Crossings

Art, cinema, music, technology, sports, politics…a look at what (and who) passed in 1995 offers us a window to a whole century.