Latest news with #BobFosse
The Guardian
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Give it a Polish! Classic film posters with a twist
Step into a world where Hollywood classics are transformed through the bold, imaginative lens of artists from the Polish poster school. Familiar Strangers: Hollywood and British Cinema in Polish Poster Art is at Coal Drops Yard, London, until 2 April. All photos courtesy: Kinoteka Polish film festival This exhibition unveils how Polish artists interpreted US and UK films such as The Shining and Return of the Jedi while navigating the harsh realities of communist and post-Soviet Poland, at a time when censorship, propaganda and surveillance were omnipresent It also highlights a new chapter in the evolution of the Polish poster school, as London-based digital artists will be reinterpreting these posters for digital screens Photograph: ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025 Blending raw intensity with haunting beauty, these posters reflect the psychological landscape of a society shaped by repression. This poster, inspired by Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972), is from the Kinoteka archives Additional posters will be on display in a digital exhibition at Samsung KX, London, until 2 April
New York Times
08-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
To Obey or Not to Obey
In 1978, my parents went to Poland, the first foreign trip in each of their lives. When they returned to our home in Moscow, my mother couldn't stop talking about what they'd seen — not a place but a movie, Bob Fosse's 'Cabaret.' One scene in particular stayed with her. Three friends are returning from a weekend trip. Sleep-deprived, hung over and preoccupied with their sexual and romantic entanglements, they pull over at a roadside cafe. There, a teenager wearing a Hitler Youth uniform starts singing. He is both earnest and, in his brown pants tucked into white knee-high socks, puerile. But after a minute, other young people in uniform join in, and soon all but one customer are standing and singing. The protagonists duck out. They have been pushing Nazism out of their minds, but at this moment they realize that they are in the minority, that life as they've been living it is over. The song everyone around them is singing is 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me.' I was 11 when my mother couldn't stop talking about 'Cabaret,' and I was confused. I thought my parents had gone to an actual cabaret and somehow gained an insight into the nature of the Soviet regime. A few years later, after I'd seen the movie myself, I realized my mother was right: That scene is the single most vivid portrayal of what it feels like to live in a society that is falling in line before a totalitarian leader. I experienced this in real life as an adult, when Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia and my world suddenly felt like a chessboard from which an invisible hand was picking off pieces faster than I had thought was possible. Now, in Donald Trump's America, I am living through something similar, and it is moving at a faster rate still. For me, it began before the election, when the owners of The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post decided to pull their papers' endorsements of Kamala Harris for president. It continued with Mark Zuckerberg remaking Meta to reflect what he called the 'cultural tipping point' that was the presidential election; with ABC News handing over millions of dollars in response to one of Trump's frivolous lawsuits and CBS considering doing the same; and most recently, with the great erasure: of records of trans care for minors provided by hospitals and of diversity-and-inclusion policies at many universities and corporations. Now some universities are quietly retooling their programming in hopes of conforming with expectations that have not yet been clearly laid out. I am talking not about deletions of pages from government websites, such as those of the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presumably mandated by newly installed officials; I am talking about actions that individual people or private institutions took pre-emptively, with some measure of free will. The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called this 'anticipatory obedience.' In his 2017 book 'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,' lesson No. 1 was 'Do not obey in advance.' Those who anticipate the demands of a repressive government and submit to these demands before they are made, Snyder wrote, are 'teaching power what it can do.' Snyder is right, of course, but his admonition makes obeying in advance sound irrational. It is not. In my experience, most of the time, when people or institutions cede power voluntarily, they are acting not so much out of fear but rather on a set of apparently reasonable arguments. These arguments tend to fall into one or more of five categories. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
