Rembrandt biography video edgar allan poe

I can well imag­ine that the inser­tion of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy into many of Edgar Allan Poe’s sto­ries would have a tremen­dous ben­e­fit for those sto­ries’ vic­tims, and a dele­te­ri­ous effect on their mono­ma­ni­a­cal plots. In one of the ironies of cul­tur­al trans­mis­sion, the time­less qual­i­ty of Poe’s work seems to depend upon its use of delib­er­ate­ly ancient meth­ods of sur­veil­lance and tor­ture. In a fur­ther para­dox of sorts, Poe’s work nev­er suf­fers, but only seems to shine, when tech­nol­o­gy is applied to it.

Film­mak­ers as esteemed as Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Fed­eri­co Felli­ni have adapt­ed him; sin­gu­lar dra­mat­ic tal­ents like James Earl Jones, Christo­pher Walken, Vin­cent Price, and Christo­pher Lee, and Lou Reed and Willem Dafoe have made fine record­ings of his most famous poem; The Alan Par­sons Project record­ed a pret­ty amaz­ing prog rock ver­sion of “The Raven,” the first rock song to fea­ture a dig­i­tal vocoder.

Poe also appears as an ani­mat­ed pup­pet, along­side Dick­ens and Dos­to­evsky, in a suc­cess­ful Frank Capra-direct­ed sci­ence edu­ca­tion film. This role belongs to a rich tra­di­tion of Poe in ani­mat­ed film. “The Raven” inspired one of Tim Burton’s first ani­mat­ed films, Vin­cent, at the top, about a boy who wants to be Vin­cent Price (nar­rat­ed of course by Vin­cent Price). The poem was also adapt­ed by The Simp­sons (above). South Park has fea­tured the mor­bid 19th cen­tu­ry writer, and Poe’s “The Pit and the Pen­du­lum” birthed an award-win­ning ani­mat­ed short, as well as an inter­ac­tive dig­i­tal com­ic book.

Even before his screen time in Capra’s film, shared with famous actor Eddie Albert, Poe appeared in ani­mat­ed film with movie stars. In the 1953 adap­ta­tion of “The Tell Tale Heart” above, a men­ac­ing­ly suave James Mason nar­rates the sto­ry. This take on Poe’s tale of m

The works of Edgar Allan Poe have frightened and thrilled readers for more than one hundred-fifty years. Terror of the Soul—inspired by the preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque—explores Poe's poetry, fiction, and literary criticism and his profound influence on later writers. The exhibition will feature nearly one hundred items drawn primarily from the Morgan's holdings and the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, two of the most important collections of Poe material in the United States. In addition a number of exceptional private collection loans will be on view.

Poe's mastery of multiple writing genres will be represented by poem and short-story manuscripts, early printed editions, letters, and literary criticism published in contemporary newspapers, magazines, and journals. On view will be such works as Annabel Lee and The Bells in Poe's own hand, one of the earliest printings of The Raven, the first printing of The Cask of Amontillado, and an unprecedented three copies of Tamerlane, Poe's earliest published work and one of the rarest books in American literature. Lesser-known writings, including “A Reviewer Reviewed” (Poe's never-before-exhibited critique of his own work written under a pseudonym) and the author's annotated copy of his last published book, Eureka, provide a more complete picture of this complex writer.

Importantly, Terror of the Soul is among the first museum exhibitions to explore Poe's wide-ranging influence on fellow writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, Stéphane Mallarmé, Vladimir Nabokov, and Terry Southern. Other literary masterpieces on view include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Paul Auster's previously unpublished lecture on Poe's influence on French authors, and T. S. Eliot's annotated type

Last week, we fea­tured three ter­mi­nal­ly ill art-lovers’ jour­ney to the Rijksmu­se­um to see their Rem­brandts for one last time. They saw those paint­ings far more vivid­ly, no doubt, than would those of us lucky enough to have longer on this Earth. Though noth­ing can con­vey the expe­ri­ence of see­ing any­thing, art­work or oth­er­wise, for the last time, these ani­ma­tions will at least give you the expe­ri­ence of see­ing Rem­brandt’s work in an entire­ly new way.

The videos (see them all here) bring to life six of the twelve can­vas­es from The Late Rem­brandt Exhi­bi­tion, the very same one to which Sticht­ing Ambu­lance Wens Ned­er­land took the three patients near­ing their ends. Even if you’ve nev­er con­sid­ered your­self par­tic­u­lar­ly up on the Dutch Mas­ters, you’ll more than like­ly rec­og­nize most of these paint­ings. Just above we have, for instance, 1642’s The Night Watch (or, more prop­er­ly, Mili­tia Com­pa­ny of Dis­trict II under the Com­mand of Cap­tain Frans Ban­ninck Cocq, or The Shoot­ing Com­pa­ny of Frans Ban­ning Cocq and Willem van Ruyten­burch), per­haps Rem­brandt’s best-known work, and one you may remem­ber Peter Green­away bring­ing to his own brand of life in Night­watch­ing.

If all this strikes you as an exer­cise in high-tech des­e­cra­tion, give the ani­ma­tions a watch and you’ll find them more sub­tly and taste­ful­ly exe­cut­ed than you might have imag­ined. You can see all six at the Youtube page of CS Dig­i­tal Media, who pro­duced them for Dutch telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions KPN, the Rijksmu­se­um’s main spon­sor — art hav­ing its patrons as much now as it did in Rem­brandt’s day.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Final Wish: Ter­mi­nal­ly Ill Patients Vis­it Rembrandt’s Paint­ings in the Rijksmu­se­um One Last Time

The Rijksmu­se­um Puts 1

About this exposition

The object of my research involves an elementary particle of meaning: a letter of the alphabet. The claim that a single letter can make to meaning is clear in the case of an initial—which is usually a single, capital letter—and even more so when this initial appears in the context of a signature. Specifically, my research deals with the initial letter "R" used by the 17th-century Dutch painter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) in his signatures. The meanings that an initial letter can mediate are not limited to identification and references to a full name. Letters of the alphabet, while being basic verbal units, have visual, not to say pictorial features. All by itself, a letter is not yet a word or phoneme. It exhibits the formal characteristics of a sign, grapheme, symbol. Many of the major writing systems in the world—phonetic or not—were derived from pictograms, from representational pictorial symbols. We all learned to write by drawing letters before combining them into words. The pictorial history of letters and writing (then printing) has been ignored by mainstream art history, which has devoted its attention to works of "high art," like painting. At what scale does an intentionally-made visual form become pictorially significant? The pictorial component is obvious in calligraphy and typography, even if only to a specialized audience. But there is a blindness relative to letter forms, such that, for example, few readers are aware of the shapes of the type or handwriting they are reading. This blindness is all the more surprising considering the fact that even phonetic writing was a visual achievement: the rendering of speech visible. Given this, the traditional opposition between the verbal and the visual, between word and image, needs to be reconsidered in terms of vision coupled with blindness. Vision, because eyes read texts and see pictures. Blindness, because in both cases the medium—print or paint—is overlooked. I post