Search Results

Chapter 8 considers the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and how Europe was represented or interpreted in his work. It looks at the contradictions, problems and capacities of the photographic medium for the representation of Europe, and how these corresponded with Cartier-Bresson’s political, social, and aesthetic commitments. To this end it examines three spaces and their reception by their Paris audiences: first, his exhibition at the Musée des arts décoratifs in the Louvre (1955), which displayed his work from both Europe and the non-European world. Second, it looks at Cartier-Bresson’s record of the culmination of the Chinese Civil War and its subsequent presentation in a collection of 1954–D’une Chine à l’autre. This is contextualised in terms of the representation of Europe in terms of its Others. Third, it analyses his 1955 work Les Européens in which Cartier-Bresson’s impressions of his European travels were presented.

Nabokov left France in 1933 to lecture at the Barnes Foundation. Shortly afterward, his ballet Union Pacific, on a scenario by poet Archibald MacLeish, the first ballet on an American theme, triumphed in a choreography by Massine. Nabokov’s friendships in New York included photographers Cartier-Bresson and Beaton and composer Elliott Carter, to whom he always remained close. In 1936, after visiting his mother in Nazi Germany, he took up a position as music professor at Wells College, in upstate New York.

Rosi's cinematic sensibility was influenced by his father's photography and sketching, his formative years he spent in Naples, and his apprenticeship with Visconti. La sfida (The Challenge, 1958), his debut work, which shows great affinity with the work of Cartier-Bresson, announces Rosi's future themes: the seductions and traps of power, the collusion between organized crime and business, the harsh social reality of Italy's South. His second, more ambitious work, I magliari (The Swindlers, 1959), is one of the first Italian films confronting the cultural and ethnic issues arising from southern Italian emigration. The film, which alternates documentary-like scenes with popular Italian comedy, is enhanced by the location shooting that will become a hallmark of Rosi's cinema. Rosi departs from the overly melodramatic style of La sfida and develops an aesthetic characterized by a realist exactness of space and penchant for exploring psychological states of mind.