University Daily Kansan
Friday, April 6, 1979
9
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Arts & Leisure
'Last Wave' carries message of fate, doom
Reviewer
Bv VINTON SUPPLEE
Water as an instrument of apocalypse is hardly an original conception. The Great Flood dovetails in virtually every corner of the world, including destruction. Update this hoary tale to 1788, set if in urban Australia, and a dash of white liberal guilt and you have Peter Wers' "The
Portents of doom form the film's substance. A clear sky spews forth monstrous hail, black rain and frogs. Abnormal rainfalls deluge Sydney; foreboding rainbows appear over the city. Water is a symbol of preternatural retribution.
Richard Chamberlain portrays a corporate lawyer who stumbles into defending a group of aborigines who've killed a transgressor of their trial laws. Chamberlain's personality disintegrates as his dreams are invaded, first by a young woman with a shaman, or respected tribal member (Nardijwarra Amagula). The lawyer is an atavist, his ancestors having brought supernatural powers to the first aborigines eons ago. It is his unhappy lot to foresee the annihilation of Sydney's population for definite reasons, and that Wave '7' reaches the denomination of Chamberlain's fate through dreams and omens.
WERI'S THEME is extremely romantic in its assumption that the instinctive will be
trumpet over the civilized, the primordial over the present. The fatalistic conclusion that man's destiny has already been determined by ancient, possibly extraterrestrial, forces, implicit in "The Last Wave" makes it similar to end-of-the-world exploitation films such as "The Late Great Oceanic Storm" is much superior in concept and in execution. The film's staging and photography are superlative.
Chamberlain's acting and the film's slow pace is its greatest drawbacks. Despite recurrent references to the lawyer's great spiritual powers' essential to his ability to speak, Chamberlain seems merely bewildered and outwardly ambiguous, for it is never certain whether he simply perceives the supernatural or actually precipitates it. In the contrast, the aborgines, as played by Gulpili and Amagula, are mysterious and gracefully sylvan even in urban settings. Clearly, Weir must have bold savage to the bourgeois modern man.
THE DELIBERATE PACE of "The Last Wave," combined with its morbid theme, kills any mass entertainment appeal in the quick scare game that it provides. The quick scare would be better directed to "Halloween: Invasion of the Body Snatchers." "The Last Wave" is an "art film" and it is flawed art, it displays considerable talent and artistry for its young Australian director.
The musical story of an unhappy prince who is cursed by an evil witch to fall in love with three oranges will unfold at 8 p.m. tonight on the University Theatre stage in KU's production of Sergel Prokofiev's opera, "The Love for Three Oranges."
A 55-member cast and a 47-piece orchestra will perform the opera, which was written by Prokofiev in 1919 to poke fun at the serious grand opera of the day.
Comic opera opens tonight
The opera, which also will be presented tomorrow, April 13 and 14 at b.p.m., was staged by George Lawner, professor of music and Mary K. Haira, instructor of theater.
The opera had an unsuccessful premiere
at the Chicago Opera Company in 1921 and was not performed again in the United States until 1949, when its production at the Lincoln Center made it a popular opera for young audiences.
The KU production features Larry Julian, Mountain Grove, Moe., graduate student, as the King of Clubs; Richard Stitt, Lawrence graduate student, as his son, the prince; Matthew Foerscher, Kansas City, Kan., graduate student; David Lai, Lecture in chemistry, as the second
The Gary Burton Quartet, a contemporary jazz-rock group, will bring its sound to the Lawrence Opera House, 642 Massachusetts St., tomorrow night.
Jayne Casselman Frager, Hiawatha senior, seniors the role of the evil witch, and Julie McCorey, Portage, Wis., graduate students, plays the princess who emerges from one of the oranges and finds the prince's true love.
The band, which features Gary Burton, Bob Moses, Tiger Okehi and Jackchip, will be making its only Midwest appearance of this tour at the Opera House.
Concert, exhibit tomorrow
Two of the quartets members, Burton and Okoshi, are powerful jazz-rock musicians. Katz said. Okoshi is a “hot trumpet player” and has played with several groups.
An early love of art without a talent for creating it led Pierre Rosenberg to his career as curator of painting at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
The 1,000-year history of Poland will be recounted in an exhibit that opens tomorrow at the Polish Academy of Sciences.
"Perspektywa Polska," an internationally acclaimed exhibit sponsored by the American Institute of Polish Culture, includes portraits of major historical and cultural figures, such as Copernicus, Nicolaus Copernica, and photographs of architectural monuments. The show also includes Polish painting and sculpture.
Staff Reporter
Curator at Louvre explains his love of art
"My family was quite interested in the arts and I have always been to museums," he said yesterday. "But I am not an art artist myself. I have no gifts at all. I did not need to try in order to know that. I loved art but I knew making a living with art. That is why I studied law with art history in order to have a profession."
By RHONDA HOLMAN
Rosenberg, 42, is the first annual Franklin D. Murphy lecturer in art at the University of Kansas. His lecture last week was on *Tombstone*. Charidin was the featured event at the Midwest Art History Society meeting this weekend at the Helen Spencer Schneer
ROSENBENGER, A NATIVE of Paris, earned two degrees from the University of Paris. He said his job at the Louvre, the national museum and art gallery of France, combined his love of art with administrative abilities.
"One learns my profession through a practical approach," he said. "I'm in charge of exhibitions but that is not all I do. The variety of situations one has to resolve makes the pleasure of the job. The museum is growing and the number of visitors is constantly tremendously since I came in 1946. So the familiar aspect of the lob is no more."
Rosenberg will spend 10 days at KU and the Nelson School-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo., giving lectures, individually with art history students.
Rosenberg said he traveled around the world in search of paintings to add to the Louvre's large collection.
He said the Louise owned one of the most comprehensive groups of European paintings in the world.
ROSENBERG IS A well-known connoisseur of 17th and 18th Century French painting. He has written articles for art and museum journals and books on several French painters and has cataloged several exhibitions.
"It's one of the biggest collections anywhere and it's an old collection which has never stopped increasing, although its wounds's ends 100 years ago," he said.
The Louvre museum dates back to the 10th century. It opened as a national public gallery in 1783.
Rosenberg, who visited Lawrence during the early 1960s, said he was impressed by the quality of works in the Spencer Museum.
"The new museum collection is not very large, but has a very fine variety, and certainly the collection of German art and international works are outstanding," he said.
"Now in France, people must p$u$, inhabitance taxes that are used to purchase works at the museum," he said. "So it's a very good thing for pictures. It's a very good thing to be able to pay for art with the state. The state has taken care of the arts in France since the French Revolution two centuries ago. It has had no dependence on private sponsors."
THE AMERICAN arts depend on private contributions, but in France, Rosenberg said, all the arts are funded through the government.
"Both systems of funding have their problems, but the private aspect of the American museum is each year diminishing and the public aspect of the
French museum is also diminishing. I think they're moving in opposite directions toward the same type of funding."
Rosenberg said he thought visual art, unlike music and drama, was not
dependent on performers for success and that art only needed appreciative eyes to endure time.
"Painting is existing now," he said. "It does not need to be performed to exist. It does not need us."
Staff photo by BRUCE BANGLE
Pierre Rosenberg, curator of paintings at the Louvre in Paris, paused for a moment before going to one of his discussions during his visit to the Helen Forsman Spencer
Watchful Eye
Spare Time
Nightlife
Lawrence Opera House, 642 Massachusetts
seats St.
- Gary Burton Quartet, with Happy Jack Feder, April 6.
- Pat's Blue Riddim Band, April 7.
- Paul Gray's Jazz Place, 926 Massachusetts St.
- Carol Comer and Milt Abel, April 6-7
Theatre
The Love of Three Oranges by Prokofie, b.p.m. April 6 and 13-14, University Theatre. The Fantails by Rene Marques, b.p.m. April 10 and 12-17, William Inge Theatre.
Concerts
Graphics show offers wide variety
- KU Convention Band, 3:30 p.m., April 8.
University Theatre.
- Lawrence Stirling Quartet, 2 p.m., April 8,
Science Museum of Art
UNIVERSITY MUSEE:
Bairmen Hall, soprano, 8 p.m., April
Carmen Balfour, soprano, B.p.m., April
8. University Theatre.
9. Gustavo Fiorentino.
- Herbie Mann, 8 p.m. April 8, Horec Auditorium
- Oklahoma Woodwind Quintet, 8 p.m.
April 11, Swarthout Recital Hall
Suzanne Fairbairn, organ, 8 p.m., April 6
Fran Bergweier, piano, 3:30 p.m., Valerie Nystrom, voice, 8 p.m., April 12
all recitals are in Swarthout Reception Hall
Recitals
Rv SARAH ILES JOHNSTON
Reviewer
There are a lot of very famous and very good prints and drawings now on display at the Spencer Museum of Art. There are very famous names on the tags underneath them, too, such as James Francisco, Giovanni Fazio, Emil Noldo, Robert Motherwell and Christo.
But some of the best work in this show, "Recent Acquisitions in Modern Graphics," is by lesser-known artists, such as Max Klinger, from the German metaphysical school of the late 19th century; William Sharp, an American artist of the mid-19th century; Kathie Kolwitz, a German expressionist of the 1930s; and John Talurell, professor of art at KU.
Klinger offers us an united etching that has an effective lack of traditional polish and finesse. The subject is centrals—but not the grand, haunty creatures usually seen in the raucous, defiant ones told about in mythology. Klinger's contours are puerile, and he gives them a real English children splice onto feyties one. It is three-ringed around a rock in a way that draws the viewer's sympathy to the ack.
THE SCRATCHY Brown lines Klingen use to sketch the centurions and the rocky peaks of the background helped create a childish, adventurous tone.
These prints are an eerie hybrid of scientific illustration and fantasy techniques. Looking larger than life, the lilies are insistently unquagmic. These prints are the first a viewer sees as he travels into the gallery. They shay his eye continually as he travels "around the exhibition.
Sharp drew the spittle yepers on the lily pods with precision and they bristle at the viewer from underneath the glass. The petals are
A series of four chromolithographes by William Sharp is on display. Victoria Regina or the Great Water Lily of America," she said.
KANSAN
At the Gallery
ALTHOUGH KOLLWITZ'S name is not widely known, she has produced several prints about women and death that are familiar to many viewers. "Death and a Woman" is included in Spencer's show.
so symmetrical, and the leaves float on the water with such organization that the lilies look like cunning machines that have almost been disguised as plants. The colors seem brighter than the normal flowers could have, and this adds to the alien, threatening tone of the prints.
John Tallerue is exhibiting "Flying Bishop," a pleasingly macabre color woodcut and pencil drawing done in 1968.
Against a gray, hazy background, cluttered with pigeonish wisps,
the heaviest, dark shape of a bishop is placed.
The bishop looks spokey, because he looks dead. His hands are crossed on his chest and his face—printed in softly rumple purple ink—like a carbon-paper copy of a real face that was left out of the image. He is also in an express flight—projected straight from Earth to parts unknown.
AS USUAL, in his larger shapes, such as the bispous's roof. Talleur has placed interesting shards of color, a by-product of the woodcut technique. These give his prints texture and a hand-hewn, slightly primitive look.
These prints, and about 25 other prints and drawings, will remain on display in the Kress Gallery until May 27. The coordinators of this exhibition, who managed to bring us seldom- seen gems yet at the museum, are Teresa Gandolfo and Rachel Cohen in modern graphics, deserve praise for this variegated show.
Movie pods create terror, suspense
By RON BAIN Reviewer
Reviewer
There, that's one of them! No, don't touch it! It's not just a flower—it's one of them!
You can't sleep. That's when they get you—while you sleep. Run, got to keep running.
Involving aliens have been pictured by the film industry in many forms: bugged midges, green slime, mummifying silver robots, silver robot robots and pink flowers.
In "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," mysterious seeds from outer space land on earth, sprouting pink flowers capable of producing zombie-like replicas of humans. The movie, a remake of a 1960 science-fiction thriller, stars Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams and Leonard Nimoy.
Pink flowers?
Nimoy, famous for his role in "Star
Roll" as the unemotional Mr. Spock,
has a sense of humor and an adorable
her boyfriend's changes are all in her
mind. Later it is revealed that Nimoy is
Emotion is foreign to the invading plant beings, whose evolution shaped them to a single purpose: adaptation and survival. Nimoy, as a spokesperson for the invaders, returns to the stone-faced act he performed during his role as
The story is suspenseful and tense. On-foot chase scenes dominate the latter half of the movie, building to a teethy end as the villain plants duplicate more and more people.
SUTHERLAND PLAYS a San Francisco health department official who is one of the first persons to recognize the need for social media assistant, played by Brooke Adams, convinces him that his boyfriend is not acting normally, and they try to find out
KANSAN Review
Although "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" was undoubtedly meant to ride on the science-fiction coattails of "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters", its obvious that director Philip Kaufman intended to produce a first-class horror movie rather than another sci-fi flack. The movies we saw in theaters were used much since the '50s, but Kaufman converts the worm story line into a convincing tale of terror.
Spock, after his psychiatrist cover is blown.
The last half of the film is a paranoid's nightmare. Sutherland and Adams seem to be the only real humans left in a world where everyone who carry on human affairs unsmilingly.
THE FILMS' special effects are average by today's studio standards, but they convey the appearance and nature of the aliens adequately. Scenes showing the "births" of duplicate humans from plant pods are well done.
Tension is built methodically throughout the movie, reaching a nerve-wrenching crescendo near its end. Children might be terrorized by certain scenes, so well are special effects and suspense tied together.
Pink flowers may not seem dangerous, but anyone who sees "Invasion of The Body Snatchers" will think twice before visiting a flower shop again.
The acting, particularly Sutherland's, is consistently good. Kaufman's direction and the mesophere of terror that pervades the movie. Even the soundtrack, often strange and discordant, adds a paranoid rhythm to the movie's many fast-paced
By RON BAIN Staff Reporter
Invasions of bacteria or viruses from outer space might have caused the bubonic plague, the common cold or influenza, according to an article that appeared in *The Scientist* magazine. The article was written by British astronomer Fred Holey.
A professor of astronomy at the University of Kansas, Don Bord, described Hoyle's article as "interesting speculation."
Space flu infects Earth, story says
Comets, which were considered harbinger of doom in the Middle Ages, could have brought the alien microorganisms to Earth during collisions or near-misses. Hoyle proposed in his article.
Haley's comet will pass near the Earth
Cornets, such as Koboutek, have been shown to carry some of the organic molecules required for the development of primitive life forms. The impact of a factor four billion years ago might have caused the origin of life on Earth, the article said.
"He's certainly a very intelligent person, a person with a far-ranging intellect," Bord said.
HOYLE'S IDEA is "not entirely out of the realm of possibility, but it would be very hard to verify." Bord said yesterday.
Bord said that Hoyle's reputation among other astronomers allowed him to take public speculation a little further than most scientists would, and, that Hoyle's speculations had created confusion in significant scientific research.
in 1986, according to Bord and if Hoyle's speculations are true, an outbreak of an unidentified strain of influenza or some other disease should follow the comet's pass by Earth. Haley's comet was last seen in 1910, Bord said.
"THE FIRST clear description of a disease resembling influenza was in the 17th century A.D., while the earliest reference to the common cold was in about the 15th century A.D." Hoyle wrote.
According to modern medical theory, new strains of the cold or flu develop from naturally-occurring mutations, and are spread from person to person. Immunities to new strain develop slowly, while those against flu over continents before being stopped.
Hoyle disagrees. The Earth passes through left-over dust from comets regularly, and this comet dust could be a source of influenza or cold, his article said.
"RELATIVELY MINOR variants of the 'name' disease—the common cold—could be due to more frequent, regular infections in children of shorter-period combs." Hooke wrote.
Hoyle, a science-fiction writer as well as a scientist, often takes ideas that seem to be science-fiction and presents them in books that makes them seem probable, Bord said.
Hoyle's "suggestion," as he calls it, dredges up memories of an old science-fiction movie, *The Andromeda Strain*. Mr. Hoyle points out that Earth on a satellite that fell from orbit.
If Hoyle's speculation is true, comet scares may replace UFO scares as kicks for stargazers.