Material for thought » art

Noh, Akira and Geishas

Christophe Bruchansky — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:59:17 +0000

I was very impressed by the Miyako Odori Geisha dance when I was in Kyoto last year. The music was fascinating because of its expressiveness and sophistication, broken purposefully by exclamations that added to the feeling of restrained eloquence. It gave me the idea to post few videos of Japanese music, here they are!

The soundtrack of Akira (1988) had also parts of classical Japanese music…

There are great Japanese music concerts in Europe, I attended to one few months after my trip to Japan at the Japanese Culture Institute of Cologne (it was played then by Kikuchi Naoko and Carin Levine). There seems to be a well established practice of playing the koto in disruptive ways…

Play Time by Jacques Tati, Masterpiece of Post-modernism

Christophe Bruchansky — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 20:17:03 +0000

Play Time (1967) by Jacques Tati is a relatively unknown movie. It is a more than two hours long and highly sophisticated visual comedy with nearly no dialogues, which probably explains why it wasn’t a big success in the box office. The film is however the best criticism of modern society that I have ever seen, and is still very relevant today. It is also a sharp criticism on modern architecture, both capturing the ideals of modernism and pointing at its delusiveness.

The movie confronts the reality of human condition to its modern idealization, culminating in a final scene where jazz and spiritedness defeat the order so preciously orchestrated, at least for the time of a dance. Play Time is a post-modernist masterpiece because it plays with the paradoxes of human existence; humour and derision being the only possible postures.

Beautiful brutalism

Christophe Bruchansky — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 11:41:29 +0000

I love concrete and brutalism. Concrete is crude and fits well in a natural environment. It doesn’t need paint and decorative accessories. It is there and fills the space.

Louvain-la-Neuve where I spent my years at university, 1999

Gardens at the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, 2002

Station of the Washington DC Metro, 2003

The Barbican Estate in London, 2009

The Ryoan-ji garden in Kyoto

Christophe Bruchansky — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 17:21:50 +0000

Japan is full of beautiful gardens, but none of them impressed me as much as the Ryoan-ji garden in Kyoto. The best is to visit the Zen garden early in the morning before the other tourists come in, and to be alone in front of the masterpiece. The garden itself is small and very simple, but once you have seen it, all other gardens seem gimmicky and missing the essential. Many books have been published about this garden, but one specific aspect that struck me is its relation with the outside. The walled garden is actually within a bigger garden, and even though you cannot see it from the inside, you can hear it and see the branches of the trees. I would even say that the best way to enjoy the outside garden is from the Ryoan-ji garden. It is the essence of any garden, offering a window to the outside world, a meaningful perspective.

The garden

The trees outside the garden.