Villa Aurora Events Archive
April 2024
Arendt & Blücher: A conversation between experts Barbara von Bechtolsheim & David D. Kim
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
A conversation between David D. Kim and author Barbara von Bechtolsheim about Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher on the occasion of Bechtolsheim's biography of the couple.
Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher met as exiles in Paris. Four years later, they married and soon emigrated to the United States. They found their intellectual and emotional home in their dialogue with one another. Arendt and Blücher were almost inseparable: for over thirty years, they inspired each other another philosophical workshop, disagreeing with one another, trusting one another, and maintaining friendships with artists, literati, and philosophers. Their exile experience shapes the political thought and action of a creative couple who still inspires us today.
Author Barbara von Bechtolsheim will explore with David D. Kim how both figures lived and reflected upon exile, freedom, and social responsibility.
Participants
Barbara von Bechtolsheim studied Literature, Philosophy and Psychology in Munich and Stanford. She teaches Literature and Cultural Studies at various universities and researches the creativity of couples. As a literary translator, she acts as intermediary between American and German culture in many different ways.
David D. Kim is Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and Associate Vice Provost at the International Institute. Professor Kim’s scholarly interests range from postcolonial, global and migration studies and community engagement to human rights, cosmopolitanism, cultural and political theories, global literary histories, and digital humanities. He is the author of Arendt’s Solidarity (Stanford University Press, 2024), which tracks various manifestations of this vexing concept in the political theorist’s archival documents, publications and recordings.
Parking Information
Free shuttle service departs from Los Liones & Sunset starting at 6:30 pm. Last shuttle to Villa Aurora leaves 15 minutes prior to the event.
Screening & Discussion: Hans Werner Henze – Music, Friendship, Game
Crescent Theatre (100 N Crescent Drive, Beverly Hills, 90210)
Information
HANS WERNER HENZE – Music Friendship Game
This documentary is a journey through the life of Hans Werner Henze, one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. Born in 1926 in Guetersloh, Germany, the son of a school teacher, Henze was acclaimed for his many operas, symphonies, ballets, and for a commitment to political art.
As a youth in Germany, World War II left indelible marks on him through his lifelong hatred of Nazism. Henze’s father was killed on the Eastern Front, and Hans was conscripted into the army in 1944, and ended the war in a British prisoner-of-war camp. His anguish was worsened by his sense of shame for the Holocaust. Furthermore, he felt he was ostracized and abhorred as a homosexual in an intolerant society.
After the mass emigration of German artists and intellectuals who started new lives elsewhere, Hans Werner Henze left Germany in 1953 and moved to the Italian island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. He remained in Italy for the rest of his life.
The documentary reconstructs his artistic journey and recounts his longing for freedom and joy through his liberating creative process that was entwined with his personal suffering.
Director Nina di Majo met Henze in her youth at her family’s home in Naples. She poetically highlights Henze’s long friendship and fruitful collaboration with Ingeborg Bachmann through their letters.
Working with her as librettist, Henze composed the Operas Der Prinz von Homburg (1958), based on a text by Heinrich von Kleist, and Der Junge Lord (1964). The film also includes interviews with Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, (musicologist), Sir Simon Rattle (conductor), Alessio Vlad (composer), and Francesco Antonioni (composer), et al.
"Music is a means of communication and understanding," he said, "a means of reconciliation.”
Nina di Majo was born in Naples, Italy. She is an actress, director and producer. She teaches screenwriting and linear audiovisuals at several Universities in Italy(NABA,IULM, UNISA, Accademia Belle Arti of Naples. After having worked in opera theater and theater as assistant director Nina started to work in Cinema as assistant director of Mario Martone.
Nina wrote and directed several short and films.
“Beck to the wall“ ( 1998) won the David di Donatello award for best
Italian short film, and the Golden and Silver Sacher Award at the Nanni Moretti's Sacher Film Festival.
“Autumn”,( 1999) was selected at the Venice Film
festival, Chicago International Film festival, Nice film Festival(USA) and by other international film festivals .
“Winter”,(2022),presented at the Berlinale Film Festival, won
the International Press Award for Best Actor( Fabrizio Gifuni),and
the International Cinematographer Award. “Winter” was also the
only Italian candidate for the European Award at the Hollywood Film Festival.
In 2009 she wrote, with Francesco Bruni and Antonio Leotti, and directed a comedy, “Weddings and Other Disasters”.
In 2017 she wrote and directed the documentary Hans Werner Henze : Music, Friendship, Game., that was presented at the Madrid Film Festival and other Festival, screened at the Mother Contemporary Art Museum in Naples, and distributed on TV by Sky Classica.
Nina did several documentaries and video- sound performances on Art installations by Peter Greenaway, Anish Kapoor, Umberto Manzo, Natalie Sylva, Hans Werner Henze, Nanni Balestrini .
Nina lives in Milan.
More Information
SCHEDULE:
6:00pm Reception
6:30pm Screening
9:30pm Discussion with director Nina di Majo
100 N Crescent Drive
Beverly Hills , 90210
Partners
In collaboration with Italian Institute of Culture Los Angeles and VATMH Los Angeles.
Artist Talk: Janet Sternburg in Conversation with Lorenz Kienzle
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272)
Author and photographer Janet Sternburg and Villa Aurora Fellow Lorenz Kienzle discuss the exploration of unfamiliar territories through photography and an awareness of foreignness juxtaposed with the “assumption of ownership foreigners can bring to adopted places”.
On the occasion of the release LOOKING AT MEXICO / Mexico Looks Back (2023).
Admission is free, please RSVP here.
Participants
Lorenz Kienzle, born in Munich, studied photography in Rome and Berlin. In earlier projects and publications, he dealt with East German industrial culture. In 2006, he began a long-term collaboration with the U.S. sculptor Richard Serra. Since 2010 he has been working on several projects on fictional and real places in the work of Theodor Fontane and Alfred Döblin. Since 2018, he has also been dealing, in his curatorial work, with the estates of East German photographers. Lorenz Kienzle lives and works in Berlin.
Lorenz Kienzle is a Villa Aurora Fellow of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin.
Janet Sternburg is a writer of memoirs, essays, poetry, and plays, as well as a fine art photographer. Her literary books include two memoirs, "White Matter: A Memoir of Family and Medicine" (Hawthorne Books) and "Phantom Limb: A Meditation on Memory" (University of Nebraska Press) as well as the classic two volumes of "The Writer on Her Work" (W.W. Norton) described by Poets & Writers as "groundbreaking...a landmark," and "Optic Nerve: Photopoems" (Red Hen Press). In addition, she has published two previous monographs from Distanz Verlag: "Overspilling World: The Photographs of Janet Sternburg" with a foreword by Wim Wenders, and "I've Been Walking: Janet Sternburg, Los Angeles Photographs."
She is the recipient of the REDCAT AWARD, given to “individuals who exemplify the creativity and talent that define and lead the evolution of contemporary culture.”
LOOKING AT MEXICO / Mexico Looks Back (2023).
In the book’s introduction, Sternburg explains how, having no high-quality camera, she took her first photographs in Mexico, more than 20 years ago, using a simple, “disposable,” single-use camera, and how this led everything in the frame, including reflections, to appear in a single “interpenetrating” plane. For Sternburg, this was an innovation. Many of the photos here are imbued with a similar planar elision, often to breathtaking effect. Captured with an iPhone 10, they show, “without manipulation,” people and places around Sternburg’s adopted home of San Miguel de Allende, in Guanajuato, Mexico, and other locations such as Mexico City and Mérida. “In a world full of manipulated imagery,” Sternburg writes, “I don’t see, at least for myself, any need to distort.” No need at all. Her camera eye catches intersecting planes of light and color, ambience and moods both intriguing and austere. The result is a dazzling book of complex gravity and stunning beauty.
Source: Los Angeles Review of Books, Multifaceted Portals of Discovery: On Janet Sternburg’s “Looking at Mexico / Mexico Looks Back”
More Information
Free shuttle service departs from Los Liones & Sunset starting at x:xx pm. Last shuttle to Villa Aurora leaves 15 minutes prior to the event.