Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

Kubrick Holocaust film to be told in installation

Stanley Kubrick was one of the greatest, and often demanding, film directors of all time, making movies from Spartacus to Full Metal Jacket. And if it had not been for his friend Steven Spielberg, there may also have been one called Aryan Papers, set in the Nazi-occupied Warsaw Ghetto. The story of the movie Kubrick never made - despite investing enormous energy into it - is to be told through a new art installation at the British Film Institute in London by the Turner-prize nominat

Anger at plans for 'official' European history

MEPs have given the green light to a multi-million pound state-of-the-art "House of European History" to be opened in Brussels by 2014. The project to "promote an awareness of European identity" is the brainchild of Hans-Gert Poettering, President of the European Parliament and a Federalist German Christian Democrat. "I should like to create a locus for history and for the future where the concept of the European idea can continue to grow,&quo

Cutty Sark 'Not Ready To Reopen'

After being devastated by fire in May 2007, work to resurrect the Cutty Sark has been painstaking. Disappointed tourists cannot see anything beyond the boarding that surrounds the world-famous clipper. On site, a rusting skeleton is all that is visible through the tarpaulin and scaffolding. Arson was suspected, but the cause of the fire was more mundane - an industrial vacuum cleaner left on over a weekend. First a crime scene and then a toxic

Matisse sketch stolen in Berlin

More than 30 artworks, including prints by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, have been stolen from a Berlin gallery. The artworks - worth an estimated 180,000 euros ($250,000/£173,000) - were stolen over the New Year holiday. Picasso's 1947 Profil au Fond Noir and Nude in a Rocking Chair (1913) by Matisse are among the pieces missing. The works, including sculptures and etchings, were taken from the Fasanengalerie, a private gallery near western Berlin's

Uncovering layers of rage in 'Defiance'

... 30 years later, when my childhood friend Clay Frohman suggested we make a Holocaust-theme film based on Nechama Tec's book"Defiance," I groaned,"Not another movie about victims.""No," he said,"this is a story about Jewish heroes. Like the Maccabees, only better." The triumph of the three Bielski brothers, Tuvia, Zus and Asael, who fought the Nazis in the deep forests of Belarus and saved 1,200 lives, was unlike anything I had ever read about that dark time. Rather than victims

Cuba unveils Hemingway papers, including notes on WWII sub hunt

Unpublished texts by Ernest Hemingway about the hunt for German U-boats off the Cuban coast during the Second World War are part of an important collection of the writer’s works to be released next week. While serving on a ship tracking Nazi submarines in the Gulf of Mexico, Hemingway wrote in code about his exploits. The notes are among 3,000 letters and other writings by the Nobel laureate to be made accessible online from Monday by curators at the writer’s former res

Copyright Expires on Gandhi Works

It's now open season when it comes to publishing the texts and concepts of Mahatma Gandhi, as copyright law holds that 60 years after someone's death, their written works go into the public domain.

Ukraine asks Barack Obama to help save its White House

Its paint is peeling, its grounds are scruffy and there are no Secret Service agents in sight, but Ukranian students are hoping that US president-elect Barack Obama will help them save their own version of the White House. Built for a nobleman as a country estate a couple of decades after the better-known White House, Ukraine's white house slipped into obscurity and disrepair in the bleak post-Soviet era. It now houses Chernomyn School, and school officials say they have appealed to

Soderbergh takes on 'tough,' controversial 'Che'

Steven Soderbergh made certain his new movie,"Che," about the life of revolutionary Ernesto"Che" Guevara, couldn't be attacked -- at least on a factual level. "I didn't mind someone saying, 'Well, your take on him, I don't really like,' or 'You've left these things out and included these things.' That's fine," Soderbergh said."What I didn't want was for somebody to be able to look at a scene and say, 'That never happened.'" But he's aware that he's going to be accused of romantic

Che - review

As movie-making endeavours go, Steven Soderbergh's Che is up there with the boldest, and possibly most perverse, in recent memory. This $58 million production was made entirely without American financing, and its eschewal of Hollywood formulae is quite startling. Soderbergh isn't interested in grand revelations about the Latin revolutionary hero Che Guevara, in potted psychology, in Che's controversial stature, or even in fitting his life into a two-part, four-hour-plus viewing mar

Museum diplomacy: Directors of rival museums in China and Taiwan to trade visits

The first ever visits will give officials at Beijing's National Palace Museum, in the Forbidden City, a close-up look at some of the 654,000 pieces of jade, scrolls, pottery and bronze war Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang took when they fled to Taiwan sixty years ago. Curators from the National Palace Museum in Taipei will head to Beijing for a chance to examine some of the 600,000 not-so-spectacular pieces of art that were left behind by the Nationalists and are now stored in Chi

As Europe's Cultural Capital 2009, Linz Faces Nazi Past

Some European Capitals of Culture are luckier than others. While this year Liverpool banked on the Beatles, the Austrian town of Linz has to grapple with its connection to Adolf Hitler in 2009. But besides using the opportunity to deal with the fact that Hitler planned to make Linz a major cultural center of the Third Reich, the steel town along the Danube river will offer a host of quirky cultural projects geared towards a wide public rather than a select few. "Li

As Another Memoir Is Faked, Trust Suffers

In media circles, there is a joke about facts that are too good to check. This week Oprah Winfrey and the New York publishing industry stumbled on yet another unverified account in the form of a Holocaust survivor who said his future wife had helped him stay alive while he was imprisoned as a child in a Nazi concentration camp by throwing apples over the fence to him. The story of Herman and Roma Rosenblat, who said they reunited years later on a blind date in New York, turned out t

"Grant & Lee: In War and Peace" (Exhibit/N-Y Historical Society)

The stories of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War should be well known to most school kids. But a new exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, "Grant & Lee: In War and Peace," explores their lives before and after the war. The first thing you learn as you enter the temporary gallery is that Grant was a much better artist than Lee. Indeed, while Lee was able to go all four years at West Point without a single demerit a

Still Paging Mr. Salinger

On Thursday, J. D. Salinger turns 90. There probably won’t be a party, or if there is we’ll never know. For more than 50 years Mr. Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish, N.H. For a while it used to be a journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters up to Cornish in hopes of a sighting, or at least a quotation from a garrulous local, but Mr. Salinger hasn’t been photographed in decades now and the neighbors have all clammed up. He’s been so secretive he

Apples Over the Fence: The fake Holocaust memoir

I don't know whether to be sad or angry -- or both. The recent exposé of the fact that Herman Rosenblat's Holocaust memoir is a hoax was no surprise to me. From the first time I heard the story of his "miraculous" survival during the Nazi era, I doubted that it could be true. Rosenblat's claim that, as an inmate in a Buchenwald sub-camp, he had survived because a young girl had tossed an apple over the fence each day for seven months just did not seem credible to me.

Biographer: Robert Burns was democratic, sympathized with French Revolution

In the late 18th century, it was a dangerous idea, a political view that could entail deportation to the penal colonies. But the revered Scots poet Robert Burns was openly discussing republican sentiments in the last months of his life, risking punitive action for challenging the authority of the king, an expert in Scottish literature has found. In a biography to mark the 250th anniversary of Burns's birth, Prof Robert Crawford of St Andrews University has unearthed new evidence whi

Poland split over whether Daniel Craig is film hero or villain

Daniel Craig crouches with his back pressed hard against the white trunk of a birch tree. Gripping an Erma MP40 submachine gun, he glares over his shoulder at a target in the forest. This is not a new James Bond film, but Craig playing the lead role as Tuvia Bielski, a real life Jewish partisan commander who waged guerrilla warfare against the Germans in Poland during the Second World War. Bielski’s and his fighters saved more than 1,200 civilians, mainly Jews, and th

A new BBC adaptation portrays Anne Frank in an unfamiliar light

For her 13th birthday, on June 12, 1942, Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a gift from her parents. It was a diary, with a red gingham cover. In one of her first entries, on June 20, she wrote: "It seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a 13-year-old schoolgirl." Rarely can a writer's prediction have been so far off the mark. The Diary of Anne Frank, first published in 1947, has become the

Dinosaur fossils found in China are world's largest collection

More than 7,600 fossils have been recovered from a 980 ft-long pit near Zhucheng city over the last seven months, and the number is still rising, according to Zhao Xijin, the palaeontologist in charge of the project. The finds include the remains of a 65 ft-long hadrosaurus, which could be a record size for the duck-billed dinosaur. In addition, the first ceratopsian skull to be found outside of North America has been excavated. Mr Zhao said the majority of the fossil