Новости за 15.12.2016

How films get made. In this case, Scorsese’s long-awaited Silence, based on Shusaku Endo’s novel about the persecution of Christians in 17C Japan. Scorsese first read the book while flying to Japan for a cameo in a Kurosawa film. Then a fan jogged his elbow. “I was in France for Aviator. Chirac wanted to meet us and say hello. He was the president at the time. And his wife was something of a Chinese and Japanese scholar. Actually, a lot of Japanese literature I read came through her giving me books”

There is life on Mars — microbes carried on non-sterile machinery sent from Earth. Let evolution commence! “If Mars warmed up and water began to flow again, these microorganisms would revive and reproduce. It is within our power to make that happen. Terraforming — making a barren world suitable for widespread life — is well developed in science fiction. The primary challenge is to warm the planet. And warming planets is a technology that we humans are all too good at”

On the peculiar power and lasting influence of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, first produced in 1594. “If Dr. Faustus is the first modern man, it’s because he is the first of a modern type: the artist. Where once the individual was but a conduit for God, with Faustus he began to serve a different master. Dr. Faustus during the witching hour, with his leatherbound tomes and his scrying mirrors, divinating with the sacred geometry, wasn’t a mad scientist: he was the artist. He was Marlowe himself”

What were the sounds of Ancient Greece? What did the poets hear in their heads as they wrote? Sean Alexander Gurd explores these questions in his “thrilling” new book, Dissonance, a work of “sensuous scholarship” for the mind and ears. “It is only silent at night. The rising sun sets the air popping and sizzling. Goats and sheep bleat, cows raise a clamor, bulls bellow. Cicadas sing, as do birds. The earth is split by thunder. Where there is sound, there is danger, disruption, agony, or worse.”

The prolific industrial designer Raymond Loewy “affected the daily life of more Americans than any man of his time”, claimed Cosmopolitan with forgivable exaggeration. He designed tractors for International Harvester, cookers for General Electric, a livery for Air Force One. He thought consumers were curious about new things but also fearful. The optimal products were “bold, but instantly comprehensible”; for which he coined the acronym “maya”, meaning, “most advanced yet acceptable”