Latest news with #TheHours
The Advertiser
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Nicole Kidman vows to keep pushing for gender equality
Australian actor Nicole Kidman vows to keep pushing for gender equality in cinema at an exclusive party attended by popstar Charli XCX, Irish actor Paul Mescal and other celebritites on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival. Kidman, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours in 2002, has worked with many of the leading male directors of her generation, but she pledged in 2017 to shoot with a female director every 18 months. She told journalists in the French Riviera resort town earlier on Sunday that in the eight years since, she's worked with 27 female directors, including projects in development. "Part of it is protecting and surrounding the women with almost like a force field of protection and support," she said. Other stars at the dinner included Dakota Johnson and Julianne Moore as well as Patrick Schwarzenegger of The White Lotus and director Guillermo del Toro. Brazilian director Marianna Brennand received the initiative's emerging talent award, which includes a grant of 50,000 euros ($A90,000) to work on a second feature project. "If you look at the numbers, unfortunately, the numbers, they don't change," said French director Coralie Fargeat, whose Demi Moore-led body horror hit The Substance found widespread success after premiering at Cannes in 2024. "We really need to keep making huge changes and not cosmetic changes," she said. According to Women in Motion organisers, the share of women directors increased to only 13.6 per cent from 7.5 per cent among the top 100 box office films in the United States between 2015 and 2024. Seven out of the 22 films in competition this year were made by women, including an entry from Julia Ducournau, one of only three women to have ever won the Palme d'Or top prize. Australian actor Nicole Kidman vows to keep pushing for gender equality in cinema at an exclusive party attended by popstar Charli XCX, Irish actor Paul Mescal and other celebritites on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival. Kidman, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours in 2002, has worked with many of the leading male directors of her generation, but she pledged in 2017 to shoot with a female director every 18 months. She told journalists in the French Riviera resort town earlier on Sunday that in the eight years since, she's worked with 27 female directors, including projects in development. "Part of it is protecting and surrounding the women with almost like a force field of protection and support," she said. Other stars at the dinner included Dakota Johnson and Julianne Moore as well as Patrick Schwarzenegger of The White Lotus and director Guillermo del Toro. Brazilian director Marianna Brennand received the initiative's emerging talent award, which includes a grant of 50,000 euros ($A90,000) to work on a second feature project. "If you look at the numbers, unfortunately, the numbers, they don't change," said French director Coralie Fargeat, whose Demi Moore-led body horror hit The Substance found widespread success after premiering at Cannes in 2024. "We really need to keep making huge changes and not cosmetic changes," she said. According to Women in Motion organisers, the share of women directors increased to only 13.6 per cent from 7.5 per cent among the top 100 box office films in the United States between 2015 and 2024. Seven out of the 22 films in competition this year were made by women, including an entry from Julia Ducournau, one of only three women to have ever won the Palme d'Or top prize. Australian actor Nicole Kidman vows to keep pushing for gender equality in cinema at an exclusive party attended by popstar Charli XCX, Irish actor Paul Mescal and other celebritites on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival. Kidman, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours in 2002, has worked with many of the leading male directors of her generation, but she pledged in 2017 to shoot with a female director every 18 months. She told journalists in the French Riviera resort town earlier on Sunday that in the eight years since, she's worked with 27 female directors, including projects in development. "Part of it is protecting and surrounding the women with almost like a force field of protection and support," she said. Other stars at the dinner included Dakota Johnson and Julianne Moore as well as Patrick Schwarzenegger of The White Lotus and director Guillermo del Toro. Brazilian director Marianna Brennand received the initiative's emerging talent award, which includes a grant of 50,000 euros ($A90,000) to work on a second feature project. "If you look at the numbers, unfortunately, the numbers, they don't change," said French director Coralie Fargeat, whose Demi Moore-led body horror hit The Substance found widespread success after premiering at Cannes in 2024. "We really need to keep making huge changes and not cosmetic changes," she said. According to Women in Motion organisers, the share of women directors increased to only 13.6 per cent from 7.5 per cent among the top 100 box office films in the United States between 2015 and 2024. Seven out of the 22 films in competition this year were made by women, including an entry from Julia Ducournau, one of only three women to have ever won the Palme d'Or top prize. Australian actor Nicole Kidman vows to keep pushing for gender equality in cinema at an exclusive party attended by popstar Charli XCX, Irish actor Paul Mescal and other celebritites on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival. Kidman, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours in 2002, has worked with many of the leading male directors of her generation, but she pledged in 2017 to shoot with a female director every 18 months. She told journalists in the French Riviera resort town earlier on Sunday that in the eight years since, she's worked with 27 female directors, including projects in development. "Part of it is protecting and surrounding the women with almost like a force field of protection and support," she said. Other stars at the dinner included Dakota Johnson and Julianne Moore as well as Patrick Schwarzenegger of The White Lotus and director Guillermo del Toro. Brazilian director Marianna Brennand received the initiative's emerging talent award, which includes a grant of 50,000 euros ($A90,000) to work on a second feature project. "If you look at the numbers, unfortunately, the numbers, they don't change," said French director Coralie Fargeat, whose Demi Moore-led body horror hit The Substance found widespread success after premiering at Cannes in 2024. "We really need to keep making huge changes and not cosmetic changes," she said. According to Women in Motion organisers, the share of women directors increased to only 13.6 per cent from 7.5 per cent among the top 100 box office films in the United States between 2015 and 2024. Seven out of the 22 films in competition this year were made by women, including an entry from Julia Ducournau, one of only three women to have ever won the Palme d'Or top prize.
Indian Express
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
What writers think of Virginia Woolf's ‘Mrs Dalloway', a century later
Do men read women? Or, more precisely, do books written by women about the lives of ordinary women count as 'literature'? In the century since the publication of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, about the life of an upper-crust London woman going about her day, much has changed in how literature now mainstreams what was once niche, suggesting that the domestic, the ordinary, is anything but trivial. This shift in perspective is powerfully echoed in Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel, The Hours, where Woolf's legacy ripples through the lives of women across generations, revealing how deeply her questions still resonate. Woolf herself wondered whether a novel could be built from the ebb and flow of a single day, from flowers bought, parties planned, thoughts half-spoken. That it could — and did — is why Mrs Dalloway remains a classic. Its enduring relevance lies in how it dignifies the internal lives of women, revealing depth in what society once dismissed as minutiae. A century later, writers, poets and academics speak of the quiet, radical power of Mrs Dalloway — and how it touched their lives: 'To teach Mrs Dalloway, as I did to third-year English Honours students, is to delve into the very bones and sinews of the book. What makes it so brilliant, for all its seeming simplicity, is what we looked at in the classroom, and the more you looked at it, the more depths were revealed. To knit together London, the war, the trenches, issues of sanity and madness, youthful homo-erotic love, the ecstasy and pain of living, all filtered through the mind of one woman, required a skill that one can only marvel at. Thank you, Virginia Woolf, for being a trailblazer for so many women writers after you.' -Manju Kapur, writer 'Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, like James Joyce's Ulysses, is set in one day. But within that time frame, Woolf plays around with time using flashbacks and memories. The novel fuses history and autobiography, haunted as it is by war, trauma, insanity, unrequited love, suppressed sexuality and death. In that dark world, emerging from the shadow of 'complete annihilation'', Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party – the kind of party that Woolf and her friends of the Bloomsbury Group must have hosted. In A Room of One's Own, she wrote about the need to retrieve the lives of women who had lived 'infinitely obscure lives'' but her own life and her friends' lives were far away from that world – 'they lived in squares and loved in triangles'. There is, in this novel, above everything else, Woolf's style – loitering, insidious and sensuous. It is one of the earliest examples of stream of consciousness writing in the English language in the 20th century and carried the influence of Marcel Proust, whose writings Woolf had read with great attention. Woolf, in her time, was unique. The last line of Mrs Dalloway could very well apply to her, 'For there she was''. -Rudrangshu Mukherjee, chancellor and professor of History, Ashoka University ''Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself '. I remember the opening line from the time my younger self first read the book – published a hundred years ago now. Considered Virginia Woolf's finest novel, it follows a day in the life of Mrs Dalloway, a London society matron, as she prepares for a party. The narrative is intercepted with other stories, interrogating themes of memory, remembrance, the aftermath of war, and a changing social order. The uniquely crafted novel gave a feminine lilt to form, style and the texture of language. Woolf's voice continues to remain immediate and spontaneous and to resonate with successive generations of readers.'' -Namita Gokhale, writer 'The novel first hit me like a storm. It was around 2006. It was Bachelor's third year, if I remember correctly, and an excellent teacher, Brinda Bose, taught us the text. She was a bit of an institution in Delhi University those days, and the way the novel came alive in her teaching was exceptional. That any prose could do such wave-like motions, I did not know. That writing could bide and expand, and hurry and shorten time, I did not know. That one's thoughts could be the subject of endless unravelling, I did not know. Woolf's prose, then, in Mrs Dalloway became a point of no return. Thereon, any writing one did, was an open-ended experiment, rather than a foreclosed set of possibilities. The novel taught me that prose could go to any place of your imagining.' -Akhil Katyal, poet 'For a hundred years now, people have wondered why Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Over the last 30 years, since I first read Woolf's novel, the emphasis in the opening sentence has kept shifting for me: from 'herself', when I was a university student, to 'buy' a few years later, and then to 'flowers' for a long time. In the changing history of these emphases was not only a record of my own proclivities, but a history of humanistic attention, aesthetic and political – on and of the woman, the 'herself'; an evolving lineage of consumption, that everything could be bought ('buy'); to 'flowers', the most ignored noun in the sentence and, by extension, the planet. Much older now, I see the invisible verb in that sentence that, I believe, gives us a history of modernism – walking, how it gives narrative energy and moodiness to the novel. A woman walking – in the city, in a novel, the sentences road and alley-like, not mimetically, but an experiment in rhythm.' -Sumana Roy, writer and poet 'For an artist, love is rarely enabling except in its non-fulfilment. So is sanity. Virginia Woolf wrestled with both all her life. One hundred years since its publication, Mrs Dalloway's fame has come to surpass its plotless plot and the sheer artistry of its techniques. This is a book which juxtaposes, both with caution and liberty, sanity and insanity (or, as she menacingly puts it, the 'odd whirr of wings in the head'), love and non-love, truth and untruth, life and death, an attempt which, puzzlingly or not I cant be certain, ends in the suicide of the 'mad' Septimus Smith and the survival of the 'sane' Clarissa Dalloway. If AN Whitehead's definition of the classic as 'patience in interpretation' is true, then Mrs Dalloway, just like its superior cousin, To the Lighthouse, will keep on yielding interpretations.' -Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, writer 'I read A Room of One's Own in my first year of college. I was stunned by the prose – I had never encountered anything like it. I must have been equally entranced by the book's structure, its slow and sensuous unfolding of an argument that was so sharp and steely – a dazzling contrast only an inventor of a form could pull off – but I know that, at the time, I did not have the vocabulary to frame it this way, or to see its craft as a feminist reclamation of language itself. I didn't know that by including the personal in the telling, by showing us the maturing of the idea against the environment in which it gestated, Woolf was doing something radical. Not having this vocabulary, however, was not a bad thing. I remember, instead, being aware of a peculiar sensation under my tongue, a salty sweetness, as I read the book, a kind of muted crackling in the viscera, followed by a gentle give, all of which possibly meant the book was reconfiguring me from within. I hope the 18-year-olds in my classroom whom I introduce the text to are able to feel themselves rewritten through it too. The text is the only teacher they need.' -Devapriya Roy, writer
Indian Express
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
10 lesser-known facts about Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway on its 100th anniversary
A century on, Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs Dalloway, remains a profound meditation on time, memory, and human connection. Its stream-of-consciousness style and psychological depth continue to inspire writers and readers alike. In honour of the novel turning 100, we revisit some fascinating, lesser-known details about the modernist masterpiece. From its original title to its surprising literary influences, here are 10 things you might not know about Mrs Dalloway: 1. It was almost called The Hours Before settling on Mrs Dalloway, Woolf's working title was The Hours. Later, Michael Cunningham borrowed the title for his 1998 novel (and the subsequent 2002 film) about Woolf's life and the legacy of her book. 2. Clarissa Dalloway debuted in an earlier novel Long before her 1925 spotlight, Clarissa Dalloway appeared as a minor character in Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). . 3. Iterations of the famous first line The iconic opening—'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself'—was originally about gloves, not flowers. Woolf's shift to 'flowers' introduced a motif that blossoms throughout the novel. 4. It was inspired by Ulysses Woolf admired James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) for its single-day structure but criticised its 'squalid' focus on bodily functions. She sought to capture a day in London with more psychological depth and lyrical beauty. 5. The sky-writing scene was based on real-life advertising The mysterious airplane writing letters in the sky was inspired by a 1922 Daily Mail stunt using sky-writing for ads. Woolf transforms it into a symbol of modernity's fleeting, fragmented messages. 6. Septimus Smith was a late addition Originally, Woolf planned to have Clarissa die by suicide. Instead, she created Septimus, a shell-shocked veteran, to embody postwar trauma—while allowing Clarissa to live, deepening the novel's contrasts. 7. Woolf wrote it while battling her own mental illness During Mrs Dalloway's composition, Woolf struggled with depression. Her intimate understanding of mental anguish shaped Septimus's harrowing breakdown and Clarissa's quiet existential reflections. 8. The novel's timeframe mirrors Woolf's writing process The book takes place on a single day in June 1923—a period Woolf wrote about in real-time, drafting sections in sync with the season to capture its sensory richness. 9. Motorcar symbolises modern alienation The motorcar that interrupts London streets represents impersonal modernity, much like Henry Ford's assembly lines. Woolf contrasts this with characters craving individuality in a mechanised world. 10. It's a novel about survival While Clarissa's party is the climax, the book explores deeper tensions: postwar grief, repressed love, and the struggle to find meaning. As Woolf wrote, it's 'a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane.'
Telegraph
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
I admire Philip Glass, but sometimes I detest his music
Philip Glass is one of a small handful of living composers who you would call a household name. He's so well-known that he can be satirised on The Simpsons and Family Guy. Glass has collaborated with everyone, from David Bowie to Ravi Shankar and Doris Lessing, he's composed well-known film scores, including The Hours and Notes on a Scandal, and his more than 30 operas have made him visible in a way that mere concert composers can never achieve. Yet he is also hated – at least by hard-line classical music lovers. For them being an enthusiast for Glass isn't like preferring Hollywood rom-coms to Swedish profundity. It's not a lapse of taste; it's simply incomprehensible. Those interminable arpeggios and scales and limp melodies aren't just vacuous, they're strangely inept. They ape the gestures of well-known classical composers but without any understanding of the grammar that underlies them. In that sense, Glass is actually worse than Ludovico Einaudi, another composer many classical devotees love to hate. Einaudi's music is merely empty, whereas Glass's seems actually wrong. And what makes it worse is that that wrongness is everywhere. Glass's repetitions, ponderous and manically excited by turns, have become the lingua franca of film music and TV commercial sound-tracks. Much of the time I agree with the Glass-haters. Sitting through his interminable 5 th Symphony was probably the worst concert experience of my life. The first time I heard the tremulous, orange-on-pink sound of Glass's own ensemble playing his Music in Twelve Parts I felt it would take the enamel off my teeth. And yet the strange thing is that, at the very moment I was wincing at that sound, something else kept me listening. Yes, there were moments in the following three hours when I wanted to scream. But there was also an ecstatic, otherworldly, innocent quality which I have found nowhere else – except perhaps in the music of that other 'father of minimalism' Steve Reich. I must admit to a personal bias here. I can't claim to know Glass, now 80, but have interviewed him several times and found him both likeable and admirable. There's none of that prickliness that often clings to creative people who had to endure ridicule and poverty for years, as Glass certainly did. He had to work more-or-less full time for 24 years at various 'blue-collar' jobs – steel-worker, plumber, taxi-driver – before he could live off his earnings as a musician. But as Glass says in his memoirs, he was too curious about life to resent this as 'wasted time'. On the contrary, he seems to have relished working as a plumber, and devotes pages to explaining exactly how you make an S-bend. He just loves discovering how things work, and there's a similar wide-eyed curiosity – but in reverse – in his composing method, particularly in his early hard-line minimalist period of the late 1960s and 1970s. Often he seems to be asking himself: what will happen if I set up this pattern and change it in this particular way? Pieces like Music with Changing Parts and that immense Music in Twelve Parts, and even Glass's first opera Einstein on the Beach are like burnished interlocking mechanisms, with all the parts fitting together perfectly and humming away in obedience to some arithmetical process of addition or subtraction. I don't think Glass would be offended if I describe them as a sort of musical plumbing. Naïve openness and 'wonder at the world' are at the root of his creative persona, as they are for many contemporary composers who've reinvented the musical language. Another example is Harrison Birtwistle, who like Glass stripped music down to its essentials – a note, an interval, a rhythm – before subjecting them to an ordering logic. In both composers these simple things were completely stripped of music's history. But unlike Birtwistle, Glass deliberately re-engaged with history from the mid-1970s onwards. Despite his enthusiasm for post-bebop jazz and Indian music, what he really wants is a lived connection to classical music's past. As he put it in his memoirs, 'lineage is everything'. And so instead of abstract patterns varied by adding one beat here, or subtracting one there, we find in his later music patterns that now bear familiar names: arpeggio, scale, sequences, all joined together with familiar tonal harmonies. And yet – to repeat – these things are fashioned and joined together in ways that seem methodical yet perverse, as if a computer had been maliciously programmed to write tonal music using the wrong rules. The miracle is that sometimes that apparently mechanical churning yields something that seems actually inspired. I have room to mention only a few examples. There's a mood of stately gravity Glass often strikes, which can be ponderous but in the first movement of the 3 rd Symphony is actually moving. There's a delightful rapturous innocence in the opening movement of Passages, the orchestral work he co-composed with the great sitarist who taught him so much, Ravi Shankar. There are entrancing things in the scores he composed for three films by Jean Cocteau. The La Belle et la Bête overture has a haunting anxiety, combined with disconcerting glittery harmonies. Often Glass's orchestral palette is dull but in Le Domaine de la Bête from the same film he summons extraordinary colours. If I had to name just one piece of Glass to take to a desert island, it would be the Vow scene from the 1980 opera Satyagraha, inspired by the life of Mahatma Gandhi. The same irresistibly striding bass, festooned with those orange-and-pink arpeggios is repeated over and over, each time accreting more choral voices. One feels that familiar disbelief—surely he isn't going to repeat that pattern again?—but eventually a magnificence emerges. So am I among the Glass-haters? I would say 'Yes, but'. I've learned that each new piece might just have something extraordinary, where the wonkiness becomes inspired and moving. And the best of the early pieces have a manic energy that can induce an ecstatic feeling of leaving one's body. Voltaire once described the good bits in Shakespeare as 'pearls hidden in a dung-heap'; much the same could be said of Philip Glass.
