Arts / Entertainment Art museum will share Ansel Adam's brilliance
7
By JENNIFER FORKER
Staff writer
Ansel Adams, a photographer who captured beauty and the effects of light on mountain, forest and ocean shore scenes, wanted to insure that the public always would be able to view his photographs.
"He believed artists' function was to share their vision with as wide a public as possible, and he dedicated his life to that," said James Enyeart, of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.
Enyeart, who was curator of photography at the Spencer Museum of Art from 1968 to 1975, will speak about the artist's work in a geographic style April 2 at the museum.
Adams created the Museum Set Portfolio, which was a collection of his best work, with the understanding that the sets would be displayed in museums and not in individual exhibitions, and took the photographs from 1979 to 1982.
Adams died in 1984 but not before finishing some of the Museum Sets.
One of the Museum Sets will be exhibited for six weeks with the
museum's own collection of 10 prints from Adams' Portfolio V.
The exhibition opens Sunday with a gallery tour of the exhibition at 3 p.m.
The exhibit will tour throughout Kansas and the country after it落户.
Terry and Sally Suctliffe, Lawrence residents, bought the Museum Set of 25 prints and since have donated half of the prints to the museum. They intend to donate the full collection to the museum, said Tom Southall, photography curator at the museum.
Adams created other sets in addition to the original Museum Sets. Each contained 10 prints, and of the three, all had of 75 prints were made available.
Adams captured nature's beauty in his photographs of mountain streams, willow aspen and sprawling desert landscapes.
In "Ansel Adams, An Autobiography." Adams said, "I believe in
'He believed artists' function was to share their vision with as wide a public as possible, and he dedicated his life to that.'
— James Enyeart
beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate."
James Enyart director of the Center for Creative Photography
"Georgia O'Keeffe and Orville Cox," photographed by Ansel Adams in 1937 at Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona.
Movie rating reassures parents but sometimes infringes on art
Staff writer
By JERRI NIEBAUM
People who see "Angel Heart" in theaters will see the movie that Tri Star produced minus about 10 seconds.
The Classification and Rating Administration from the Motion Picture Association of America Inc., would not rate the film the first time it viewed "Angel Heart."
"Having an X rating on what I would call a quality film is like the kiss of death," said Rance Blann, city manager for the Lawrence Commonwealth Theaters. "It's just not going to do any business. Nobody really wants to play an X-rated movie."
After the producers removed a questionable 10 seconds from "Angel Heart," the administration gave the film an R rating.
The rating administration labels a movie G, PG, PG-13, or R. G-rated movies are ones the association considers appropriate for all audiences. PG-rated movies are appropriate for adults and children accompanied by adults, although children may be admitted without adults. Parental guidance is advised. PG-13-rated movies are appropriate for adults and children over age 13.
"Parents should be aware that this is not a Walt Disney-type movie." Blann said about the PG-13-rated movies.
Although films are rated X only for advertising purposes and aren't formally restricted, Blann and Foley's 17 were not admitted to them.
X and XXX ratings are not part of the Motion Picture Association's rating code, but are sometimes advertised by advertisers to unrated films.
R-rated movies are restricted to adults over 17, but children under 17 may attend if accompanied by an adult.
The rating administration is composed of seven parents who are hired as full-time movie raters by the Motion Picture Association.
"The whole purpose of the rating system is to serve parents," said Barbara Dixon, vice president of the Motion Picture Association.
Dixon said the parents hired by the association were not connected with the movie industry in any
other way. She said that some were recommended by the California Parent-Teacher Association and that others had applied for the jobs.
With the exception of the PG-13 rating, the movie industry has been using the current rating system since 1968 as a form of self-regulation.
Chuck Berg, associate professor of theatre and media arts, said, "Ratings have evolved so that they really are used in a subversive way by the industry to attract audiences."
'Having an X rating on what I would call a quality film is like the kiss of death.'
He said the ratings board wanted to avoid pressure from pro-censorship groups that have been active since the early 1920s. By keeping parents and interest groups satisfied with advisory ratings, producers and the ratings board prevent censorship and attract viewers.
Blann, who has been working for Lawrence theaters for more than 20 years, said that before the formal ratings were instituted, employees of the movie houses determined who was old enough to
The ratings board added the PG-13 rating about two years ago when parent groups protested that "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" was too intense for a PG movie. The film's rating was changed to PG-13.
— Rance Blann
Commonwealth Theaters
Lawrence manager
These types of self-regulation are not new to the film industry. In 1922, Hollywood founded the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (also known as the Hays Office) with Postmaster General Will Hays as its head.
"We would just sort of take it on ourselves to not let kids in," he said.
The code forbade words like "hot mama." "on the make." "nuts" and "nude" to be used in films that it accepted. And people didn't watch films that weren't accepted.
In 1930, they adopted a production code that lasted for 26 years.
In 1952, the Supreme Court reversed a 1915 ruling and granted films the First Amendment rights to free speech given to the media. Formal censorship, which had been practiced by states and municipalities since the early 1900s, no longer was allowed.
The code also forbade seductive costumes, suggestive dances and scenes that degraded clergymen.
But informal censorship by the general public kept the movie industry active in self-regulation.
Berg and Blann both said that movies were becoming more conservative. Blann said this was partly because most audience members were between 16 and 21 years old and many of them couldn't get into R- and X-rated movies.
"One could never show a priest, a pastor or a rabbi in a compromising position." Berg said.
"You don't have to be told what's going to sell in Peoria," Berg said.
"When they have an R-rated film, they're really cutting out a lot of our bread and butter business," he said.
"You don't have to have bodies thrashing around in colored lights or a string of four-letter words in order to make a point," he said. "It's just thrown in there to titillate the pre-adolescent in all of us."
Berg said viewers were becoming more interested in films that didn't use nude scenes or foul language.
Gary Price, Wilmette, IL., senior and chairman of Student Union Activities, said "Angel Heart" was not the first movie to be edited to receive a formal rating, "About Last Night" and "9% Weeks" also were edited to receive R ratings.
"It's a really thin line between artistic integrity and commercial success," Price said, agreeing with Blann that unrated films usually were not financially successful.
One of Adams' most famous photographs, "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico," was taken in 1941, Southall said. After taking photographs nearby, Adams passed the village while the sun was setting, and the moon was rising.
Knowing exactly what he wanted from the scene, Adams quickly mounted his camera and tripod on the top of his station wagon. Without using a light meter, he determined how much light the moon would reflect.
Ansel Adams's "Moon and Half Dome," photographed in 1960 by Yosemite National Park, Calif., will be featured Sunday at Spencer Museum of Art.
He was able to take only one exposure before the sunlight on the small graveyard's tombstones disappeared. In one quick instant, one of Adams' most famous photographs was taken.
Enyeart said that Adams did not try to create exact replicas of the subjects he photographed, but that he often enhanced the images to represent his feelings for them.
An example of this is "Black Sun, Owens Valley, California," in which overexposure caused the sun to be recorded as black rather than white.
Adams wrote about how photography could manipulate reality.
"Photography, when it tells the truth, is magnificent, but it can be twisted, deformed, restricted, and compromised more than any other art. Because what is before the lens always has the illusion of reality, but what is selected and put before the lens can be as false as any totalitarian lie."
"He didn't want to be labeled a conservationist. Even though he was politically involved, he separated himself from the political role conservationists had." Eneyart said. "He created monuments of nature."
Adams helped photography become an accepted art after World War II. In 1940. Adams was instrumental in starting the first department of photography as a fine art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1944, he founded the first department of photography at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. And from 1955 to 1981 he conducted annual "Ansel Adams Workshops" in Yosemite National Park.
Enyearn described Adams as a naturalist who used his photography to help preserve the land. Many of his photographs were taken at Yosemite, Yellowstone and Sequoia National Parks.
Adams explained his successful photography career in a passage in his autobiography about teaching.
Southall said Adams was not just a nature photographer who loved the spectacular.
"I think that the students do reflect my influence, and, joking aside, maybe I should stop fussing around and just be an influence! Actually what has happened is this: by some trick of fate I developed my work at the time of a general renaissance of straight photography, and I happened to be one of the very few who were articulate in writing, teaching, and lecturing. I did not invent
"He loved nature symbolically. He found certain aspects in the freedom of landscape to be inspirational to people," Southall said.
anything, just restated facts in terms of practical use," he said.
Adams always was receptive to other people's photography, but preferred his own, Enyeart said. He also was benevolent to anyone interested in photography, Enyeart said.
"He was a very pleasant, gentle, gregarious man. He had a great sense of humor and told the most awful jokes and puns of anyone I know," Enyart said.
"Ansel Adams was enormously instrumental in his own way to furthering appreciation of photography as an art form."
'Madama Butterfly' breaks hearts with rendition of age-old problem
Madama Butterfly will be performed at 8 p.m.
Wednesday in Hoch Auditorium. Tickets for the
opera are on sale at the Murphy Hall box office.
All seats are reserved. Tickets are $18 and $15
for 9:30 and $7.50 for KU and K-12
students and $15 for a senior citizen and other students.
By JERRI NIEBAUM Staff writer
Two 40-foot trucks and a pair of buses will bring the New York City Opera Touring Company and its production of "Madama Butterfly" to the University of Kansas on Wednesday.
A turn-of-the-century house, a backdrop of the gardens and hills of Nagasaki, Japan, and more than 150 pieces of lighting will be pulled from the trucks and assembled for each of the company's 32 performances during its six-week tour of the United States and Canada.
The sixth of Puccini's 12 operas.
"We always get applause when the curtain opens," said Paul Hartfield, a free-lance tenor who plays Lt. Franklin Pinkerton in the opera.
Hartfield and 22 other cast members will raise their voices to tell the story of Pinkerton, a U.S. Navy officer. At age 36, San, his 15-year-old Japanese wife,
A Japanese marriage broker brings the two together, telling Pinkerton that he could break the contract at any time.
Cio-Cio San, nicknamed Butterfly, is earnest in her love for the U.S. sailor, but Pinkerton views his marriage to the young geisha as only an exciting intermezzo that ends when Nagasaki and takes a U.S. wife.
Pinkerton returns to Nagasaki with his wife three years after his marriage to Butterfly. Butterfly, who has waited anxiously for Pinkerton, kills herself when she sees that he has remarried. Her blond-haired, blue-eyed son is left in Pinkerton's custody.
Giacomo Pucciwn the three act opera in 1903, basing it on a one-act play by David Belasco, a U.S. playwright. Belasco based his play on a magazine story by John Luther Long, who derived his story from Herre Lott's novel "Madame Chrysanthemum" and a real incident involving a gescha.
"Regardless of how well I've done, I'm constantly booed and hissed," said Hartfield, who considers the audience's reaction as a compliment to his performance.
“Madama Butterfly” at first was a failure. But in 1904, Pucci revisi the opera and it soon became popular worldwide.
The response was absolutely incredible because they could finally understand what was being said and what was going on.'
— Anne C. Ewers director of 'Madama Butterfly'
Subtitles will be flashed on a screen placed high at the back of the stage. The New York City Opera started using this system in 1983 after the Peking Opera and the Canadian Opera had used it successfully.
The Italian opera has been translated into English, but Anne C. Ewers, director of the production, said the company decided to perform it in Italian because the original language flowed better with Puccini's music.
"The response was absolutely incredible because they could finally understand what was being said and what was going on." Ewers said.
She said the subtitles would be high enough so that audience members would not have to look at them.
Ewers is a free-lance director who also runs the Boston Lyric Opera Company. She first directed "Madama Butterfly" four years ago in Boston. She worked with a Japanese woman who had grown up in Nagasaki, and the woman explained some Japanese traditions to Ewers.
"Her father had been in love with a geisha, so she knew the geisha tradition," she said. "Some of the things Puccini suggested in the score were not really accurate."
For instance, Puccini has Butterfly scatter cherry blossoms around her house in anticipation of Pinkerton's return. Butterfly carefully arranges flowers in Ewers' production, which she says is closer to Japanese tradition.
Butterfly and several other characters will wear authentic Japanese kimonos, even though most U.S. women don't have traditional Japanese bodies.
"The kimosos had to have a little extension here and there," Ewers said.