"Italian film maker Paolo Gioli creates a haunting short movie by animating photographs taken by Bert Stern of Marilyn Monroe shortly before she died at the age of 36, fifty years ago today.
Filmarilyn is both beautiful and foreboding. As the film's jazzy rhythms start to disintegrate and the images slow to a crawl, 'X' marks on the contact sheets appear like magical curses and a fresh scar on Marilyn's flesh transforms into a stigmata while her face, half-hidden by shrouds of white, eyes closed, turns impossibly pale and lifeless. In the final moments, close-ups of her hands in death-like repose seem almost saintly and as the film's last frames unspool we are left with the sense of having seen an apparition, a ghost... a soul X-rayed.
It's amazing how much power and sadness Gioli creates from so few elements - a testimony to his artistry, Marilyn's radiance and Stern's skill in capturing it."
(Marc Campbell, 05 August 2012, Dangerous Minds)
Fig.1 Paolo Gioli (1992) "Filmarilyn", uploaded to Vimeo by Volodymyr Bilyk.
"The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) is the official agency for the collection, analysis and dissemination of quantitative information about higher education.
It was set up by agreement between the relevant government departments, the higher education funding councils and the universities and colleges in 1993, following the White Paper 'Higher Education: a new framework', which called for more coherence in HE statistics, and the 1992 Higher and Further Education Acts, which established an integrated higher education system throughout the United Kingdom."
(Higher Education Statistics Agency)
"1992 - 20 years ago: all countries belonging to the European Union decided to create a single market. This meant removing the obstacles blocking the free movement of goods, people, services and capital among them.
20 years on, we can travel across Europe without having to show our passports, work and live in another country without any difficulty, and find the best deals across Europe when shopping online. But we all agree that more work needs to be done in order to have a fully functioning European single market.
If you are 20 years old, we want to hear from you: your experiences, stories, complaints and proposals to make Europe a better place to live and work."
(Generation 1992)
"It is with great sadness that we confirm that musician, rapper, activist and director Adam 'MCA' Yauch, founding member of Beastie Boys and also of the Milarepa Foundation that produced the Tibetan Freedom Concert benefits, and film production and distribution company Oscilloscope Laboratories, passed away in his native New York City this morning after a near-three-year battle with cancer. He was 47 years old."
(Beastie Boys)
Fig.1 Music video by The Beastie Boys performing "Gratitude". (C) 2009 Capitol Records, LLC [recorded in 1992 in Rotorua, Aotearoa New Zealand].
"in March 1991, television screens across the world broadcast [George Holliday's] videotaped footage of LAPD officers raining down 56 baton blows on an African American named Rodney King. ... on April 29, 1992, a jury in Simi Valley, one of the whitest exurbs of Los Angeles, acquitted three of the four officers involved in beating Rodney King. The response in South Los Angeles was loud and immediate: That night, thousands of residents, black and Latino, took to the streets, starting a four-day riot that destroyed more than 1,000 buildings, injured 2,500 people, killed 58, and resulted in $1 billion in damage and 16,000 arrests."
(Josh Sides, 19/04/2012, Design Observer)