Bixby Creek Bridge, Big Sur

Laura Reynolds (Liz Taylor) is a free-spirited, unwed single mother living with her young son Danny in an isolated California beach house. She makes a modest living as an artist. A judge orders her to send the boy to an Episcopal boarding school where Dr. Edward Hewitt (Richard Burton) is headmaster, and his wife Claire teaches. At an initial interview, there is a momentary immediate attraction between Laura and Edward, but this quickly turns into tension brought on by their greatly differing world views and Laura’s dislike of religion. Laura’s unconventional morals initially disturb Edward, as they conflict with his religious training. After visiting her several more times he finds that he wants her very much and cannot get her out of his mind.

And so on…The movie is The Sandpiper and it was made in 1965.

Laura lives in a ramshackle artist’s house somewhere around Big Sur. The Reverend has to drive over Bixby Creek Bridge to visit.

Original GSV at http://goo.gl/maps/fkelx

Chemin Entre les Deux Eaux

During our virtual trip to Provence, I visited Châteaurenard, where this little street is bounded on both sides by two streams that run through the city.

In homage to Cannes and Antonioni’s movie, “Blow Up”, I took this long-lens shot in black and white to capture a little drama of two women with a small child, in a hurry to go somewhere or away from somewhere.

“Blow Up” chronicles a day in the life of a glamorous fashion photographer, inspired by the life of an actual “Swinging London” photographer, David Bailey. Wandering into Maryon Park, he takes photos of two lovers. The woman is furious at being photographed. The photographer then meets his agent for lunch, and notices a man following him and looking into his car. Back at his studio, the woman arrives asking for the film, but he deliberately hands her a different roll. She in turn writes down a false telephone number to give to him. His many enlargements of the black and white film are grainy but seem to show a body in the grass and a killer lurking in the trees with a gun.

The New York Times observed that the film “has something real to say about the matter of personal involvement and emotional commitment in a jazzed-up, media-hooked-in world so cluttered with synthetic stimulations that natural feelings are overwhelmed”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowup

Original Google Street View image is at http://goo.gl/maps/RHLhD

Rue de la Poissonerie, Grasse

What happens in Grasse stays in Grasse…

One evening, during the feast celebrating the coronation of Louis XV, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille sensed a perfume that he had not experienced hitherto. This magnificent perfume led him across the entire city to a young girl in the Rue des Marais. Overwhelmed with desire to possess this perfume, Jean-Baptiste strangled her and tore her clothes off, to better savour her scent. He escaped the scene of the crime, but not without planning to become the best perfumer in Paris.

Despite his success, Jean-Baptiste was frustrated by his inability to capture the scent of objects like glass and stone. More importantly, he would have liked to replicate the smell of the young girl in Rue des Marais. Baldini confided to him that there were other, more sophisticated techniques that were used, and that these could be learned in the city of Grasse.

Le Parfum, the story of a murderer is the work of the German writer, Patrick Suskind. This novel has been translated from the original German into 45 languages. A movie, starring Ben Whishaw and Dustin Hoffman, was adapted from this bestseller in 2006.

https://redstarcafe.wordpress.com/2007/11/19/le-parfum/

Image: Google Street View in Grasse with three flics converging on a scene.

Castillo de San Sebastián

Castillo de San Sebastián is built on a very small island opposite Playa de la Caleta. Originally built in 1706 it was designed to protect Cádiz from seabourne attackers. Initially the castle could only be reached during low tide, however a long pier connecting the castle to the beach was built in the 19th century so the castle could be accessed at all times. The castle now serves as a lighthouse.

The castle doubles as the DNA Clinic Zao visits in Havana to change his identity. James Bond manages to gain access to the facility, grabs some diamonds (which leads him to Sir Gustav Graves), and then encounters Giacinta ‘Jinx’ Johnson also making her escape from the pursuing guards. In a snazzy move, Jinx does a cool back flip of one of the perimeter walls to a waiting boat way below, leaving Bond stunned.

Thanx, James Bond Multimedia: http://www.jamesbondmm.co.uk/locations/castillo-de-san-sebastian

Google Street View capture enhanced in Nik Color Efex and Alien Skin Snap Art Impasto.

 

Fv783, Nordland

This could be a scene out of Babette’s Feast (although that took place in Denmark). Thanks to Google Street View, this view of a Norwegian marsh is practically SOOC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babette’s_Feast

 

Glassdrumman Road

Dylan Thomas described these little seaside towns so well in “Under Milk Wood”, a play for voices.

“To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless
and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched,
courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the
sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.
The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night
in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat
there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock,
the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds.
And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are
sleeping now.”

Richard Burton’s pear-shaped tones transport the listener in this recording: UNDER MILK WOOD.

The Icicle Thief

During our tour this week of Paris, we pay homage to our friends at Google Street View who do the heavy lifting and take these photographs. All we do is find them and tart them up. This one is a capture along the Seine near the Pont Neuf. This fellow rides une bicyclette !

We also pay homage to Ladri di saponette (The Icicle Thief), a favourite Italian film by Nichetti in B&W.

From Rotten Tomatoes : “…The Icicle Thief shamelessly parodies Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief –but it’s much more than a mere lampoon. Director Maurizio Nichetti appears on-screen as a pompous filmmaker whose new film The Icicle Thief is the last-minute substitute for a more highly regarded “masterpiece” on an intellectual Italian TV program. The film, in black and white, begins to unreel on screen, only to be interrupted at crucial moments by loud, vulgar, full-color commercials. The film-within-a-film’s central character (Nichetti again!), who works in a chandelier factory, is suddenly cut adrift when there’s a power failure at the TV studio. Soon the hero of the film finds himself in the alien environment of TV advertising, and separating reality from fantasy becomes a lost cause. The worst of it is, the viewers at home don’t notice that anything’s amiss–they’ve been so long inundated by commercial intrusions on theatrical films that they’re grown numb to the artistic outrages perpetrated upon both director Nichetti and star Nichetti. “

Cape Reinga

After all of the idyllic landscapes and beach scenes, one is perhaps not expecting to see the Ninth Circle of Hell. But here we are at the very top end of New Zealand’s North Island at Cape Reinga.

Of course, the road leads to a touristy vista point and not into the gaping maw of The Beast or some scene from Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” or maybe “Night on Bald Mountain” from Fantasia . This is a Google Street View image, enhanced in Nik Color Efex.
Bosch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights
Night on Bald Mountain: Fantasia – Night on Bald Mountain

Trevi Fountain

I took my virtual pastel chalks out and set up an easel as far from the crowd as I could.

The film Three Coins in the Fountain is over half a century old but this frothy confection, splendidly photographed in Rome, Venice and the Italian countryside, continues to be a delightful chick flick.

Three young, single American women are employed as secretaries in Rome. Of course, all three find romance, not to mention ever-changing wardrobes and lavish living accommodations. In 1954, secretaries must have made a bundle in Italy ! For Jean Peters, romance comes in the form of a ruggedly handsome Italian law student, Rossano Brazzi. Maggie McNamara attracts the attention of an Italian prince with a womanizing reputation, Louis Jourdan.And Dorothy McGuire is finally noticed by her stuffy, self-absorbed boss and best-selling author, Clifton Webb.

The song was done by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and a few others. Here is Doris Day’s version: Doris Day – Three Coins In The Fountain

Lido

The beach from Lungomare Gabriele d’Annunzio on the Lido just off Venice. The Lido featured in Visconti’s 1971 film, Death in Venice .

Starring Dirk Bogarde and Björn Andrésen, the film is based on the Thomas Mann’s novella of the same name. The protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, travels to Venice for health reasons. There, he becomes obsessed with the stunning beauty of an adolescent Polish boy named Tadzio who is staying with his family at the same Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido as Aschenbach.

While the character Aschenbach in the novella is an author, Visconti changed his profession to that of a composer. Playing the role of Aschenbach’s music in the film is the music of Gustav Mahler, in particular the moving Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony, which opens and closes the film.

While Aschenbach attempts to find peace and quiet, the rest of the city is being gripped by a cholera epidemic, and the city authorities do not inform the holiday-makers of the problem for fear that they will all leave. As Aschenbach and the other guests make day-trips out into the city centre it eventually dawns on them that something is seriously wrong. Aschenbach decides to leave, but in a moment of impulse decides to stay to be close to Tadzio. However, he himself is dying.

1971 Death in Venice – Trailer