Steve Schapiro Photography

Born in Brooklyn, greatly attracted by Henry Cartier Bresson, Steve Schapiro hung camera around his neck and prowled in New York streets.He later studied with W. Eugene Smith, pioneer of the photo essay. From 1961 Schapiro worked as a freelance photo-journalist and contributed to major magazines. His photos appeard in cover pages of Life, Look, Time, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair etc..
Schapiro shifted his attention to film and produced advertising material, posters and publicity stills for films as varied as The Godfather, The Way We Were, Taxi Driver, Midnight Cowboy, Rambo, Risky Business and Billy Madison. He also was responsible for record covers starring Barbara Streisand and David Bowie.

'Magritte and I didn't talk much, although we were in high spirits. Our relationship was based on smiling'
Schapiro said Magritte is his best shot.

Rene Magritte by Steve Schapiro

Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver

Martin Luther King Jr. - Selma March, 1965

Three Men, New York, 1961

Mohammed Ali with mini boxing gloves, Louisville, Kentucky, 1963

Marlon Brando (The Godfather)

Federico García Lorca: Murder in Granada (1976)

Federico García Lorca: Murder in Granada (1976)
TV Movie  -  61 min
Documentary
Director: Humberto López y Guerra
Writer: Humberto López y Guerra
Country: Sweden
Language: Spanish | English
Frederico Gracia Lorca, the profound Spanish dramatist, poet was murdered by Nationalists at the age of 38 due to his political activities. This 61 minute documentary gives an idea about his life, works and death. Jumping from conversations to conversations (sometimes irksome) and using vintage video footages Lorca's life is "narrating". The attempts, more clearly difficulties, faced by Lorca to draw/write things during his secondary school days seems to be more interesting to me. He had great affection towards drawing which came little late after his interest to music and literature. "He had a very good hand with music and playing with piano, but he had difficulties with drawing and writing"- quoting his brother Fracesco Garcia Lorca. Also he failed in penmanship five times, a subject in secondary school !!!
To create a new form in writing and bored with Madrid life he often moved to his place Granada. The Gypsy, greenish life, orange trees came to his poetry from Granada.
His achievements in theater was incredible. He formed a group in 30's named La Barraca with amateur actors and students and performed dramas in various parts of Spain as a Travelling Theater. He said " La Barraca is my most important work. It interests me more" Neruda commented on La Barraca that its his own self.
We can also see Lorca's life in Madrid, the evolution of "Generation 1927", relationship with Dali, Vicente Aleixandre, his political involvement in Spain through drama, his anti-fascist visions in this documentary.
Federico García Lorca: A Murder in Granada ( 1976) directed by Humberto Lopez y Guerra and produced by the Swedish Television. In October 1980 the New York Times described the transmission of the film by Spanish Television in June that same year as attracting "one of the largest audiences in the history of Spanish Television"

TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard (2013)

TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard (2013)
85 min  -  Documentary
Director: Simon Klose
Stars: Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij
Country: Sweden
Language: Swedish | English

A documentary about the leading file sharing website, " The Pirate Bay". Film shows trial faced by Gottfrid Svartholm, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij - the steerers of TPB,their efforts to keep the site online, Impact of US/Hollywood, their pressure on Swedish judicial system to shut down this site, finally the verdict and conviction. 

The Blind Owl (1987)

La Chouette aveugle (1987)
The Blind Owl
90 min  -  Drama | Fantasy
Director: Raoul Ruiz
Writers: Sadegh Hedayat (novel), Benoît Peeters, Tirso de Molina (Play), Raoul Ruiz
Stars: Jean-François Lapalus, Jessica Forde, Jean-Bernard Guillard
Country: Switzerland | France
Language: French

A movie is wonderfully made using the threads of shadows interposing between dream and reality (actually "between" is wrong since there is no difference between them). La Chouette aveugle (1987) is clearly a cinematic experience, freely adapted from "The Blind Owl" by Sadegh Hedayat and "Damned by Despair" by Tirso de Molina.
A projectionist working in a mysterious theater is intoxicated by gaze of character in a movie he is showing. He constructed movie by connecting some stories with the base plot and used dark, shadowy, exhausting atmosphere. There are so many limitations for a director to visualize "The Blind Owl". Raoul Ruiz freely adapted the theme of book and its techniques.
La Chouette aveugle is not a rigorous one like the novella, it vacillate between the events in the movie showing and that of watcher; projectionist. The demarcation "between" reality (projectionist) and illusion (cinema) is disappearing here.("We are sated and hungry")
Like a labyrinth we are twisted inside, directed from one story to another, throwing out from it- a different kind of feeling. In the move projectionist watching, a holy man is searching his crazed uncle( not sure he is searcher's father or not) found a man in the woods telling story about two twin brothers who loved a Jewish girl. The man is telling the story of searcher's father/uncle; a similar situation like projectionist and his co-worker Kasim, his lover Fatima; like something repeating by cancelling time, space and being. The projectionist himself is an uncle for his unknown nephew.Mixing the story of Christian niece with this nephew.
May be the protagonist's life is somewhat like that of the film's story when we consider the term "repetition". But its not sure.Ruiz made the film in different levels make the viewer to think this happening in different lives, different times also merging all these to a single plane. In cinema it seems to happen in another life, a previous one or another world, and it is repeating in some other plane.
Ruiz gave some space for the woman's mental agitations (can compare with "bitch" in novella). She asks about damnation and pardon to the butcher. She, her husband, butcher (he kills sinners) all are damned. Even death is not an ultimate rescue. It will repeat, souls will be saved for perdition. We will have to play the same  part of same drama; may be without knowing. But that spark is haunting, disturbing.Only the shore changes, it will be in the same earth and with the same river(Abandon all hope, ye who enter here)

The Blind Owl (1975)

The Blind Owl (1975)
"Boof-e koor" (original title)
Director: Kiumars Derambakhsh
Writers: Kiumars Derambakhsh, Sadegh Hedayat (novel)
Stars: Parviz Fanizadeh, Farshid Farshood, Parvin Solaymani
Country: Iran
Language: Persian

Based on Sadegh Hedayat's novella of the same name but film cant gratify the viewers who already read the book "The Blind Owl". Film mainly visualizes the dreams mentioned in the novel. The film rejects the non-linear and equivocal narration techniques that used in novella thereby losing the spirit. In climax, director adds some extra visuals of a cadaver, which is not in the book, resembling Hedayat's face and he is comparing the existential death of protagonist with that of Hedayat (At the start its showing "An encounter with the anguishes of Hedayat").

The Blind Owl (1937)

The Blind Owl (1937)
Sadegh Hedayat
Iran
Novel

The Blind Owl is written by modern Persian literate Sadegh Hedayat in 1937 during the dictatorial reign of Reza Shah in Iran. But the first edition of book was published in Bombay stamped with "Not for sale or publication in Iran.". After his rule it was released in Tehran in 1941.
An amazing translation to Malayalam was done by Vilasini.
The protagonist/narrator is living outside city from the hustle and bustle of people's lives surrounded by relics of some old houses. Novel/Novella moves through the thoughts, dreams, memories, sexual desires and oppression, fears also reality of this isolated man (Hedayat didn't give names to characters in this work except Bugam Dasi,). In the first part of The Blind Owl we can see dreamy incidents happening to narrator and they are beautifully blended with the realistic second part.
Using repeated descriptions Hedayat made this fiction a wonderful bizarre piece of art and pushes the readers into a whirlpool of disturbing images. But after analyzing the second part we can see that all the "facts" in the first part is somewhat connected, still Hedayat retains mysteries by leaving some incidents isolated. When we say about 'something repeating' there is an intuition in our mind to set an initial point or from which time it started; thereby rejecting the whole idea of recurrence. In Blind Owl how beautifully he used that technique without giving reader, the initial point. Sometimes we feel that we are succeed in finding that the foremost spot during the advance of reading but it surpasses."My life, on the other hand, my entire life, has had one season and one state." The laughs, Horses, Drawing, scene through hole, geometrically shaped houses, his father and uncle, brother-in-law and his wife etc..
But most of his thoughts are linked with his childhood memories. He inducing those images to his dreams to escape from the "world of fools". The narrator is so disturbed with flow of life, finds death as an ultimate solution from the chaos he facing (death/a state of oblivion).
In the first portion of novella, he is entering a new world/dream by ignoring the previous events in his life. By ignoring, i meant the author induced forgetfulness to him there by adding beauty to the images for readers. The Protagonist is fulfilling his desires in another world unannoyed by time and reality. The mysterious woman comes to his house, fall on his bed, giving her body to him without any resistance. But narrator also loved to kill his wife ( he is calling her a whore) giving her poisonous purple wine. That too he is performing in his dream.(By saying "dream" dont take its as a concrete one, a fluid state)
Only one time he was allowed by his wife to kiss her and the rest of time he was rejected cruelly. And she selected all other males to fuck her. "My feelings of love and hatred for her were mixed." shows his strange emotion to his wife. He is fully rejected from satisfying his sexual desires. During a forceful intercourse he accidentally kills her. I had become the rag-and-bone dealer. To some extent the narrator is similar to the old rag and bone dealer except the fact that the dealer is allowed to sex with her. ("On the whole, this time I did not disapprove of my wife's taste,because the rag-and-bone dealer was not a commonplace, vulgar and colorless man like the stud-males who attract foolish women with an inordinate desire for coition. The layers of misfortune encrusted on the old man's head and face, along with the misery that emanated from him, distinguished him as a demi-god; and even though the old man was not aware of this, he was a manifestation, a representative of creation itself").
We cant find a connection/meaning for all the incidents mentioned in the work and that attempt is boring (which kills the beauty of ambiguity) too. Narrator is always fearing watchmen for some crime he has committed. Since we read the first part,  a confusion may arise  "what crime he committed". There are many instances like this in "The Blind Owl".
The novel gives us a wide ground to think about God, mirror, rooms, walls, rest and rust of ourselves, death (influenced by Rilke, Kafka (from the notes by Bashiri)) above all the thoughts, i loved those grotesque visuals this book gave me.