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Dana Thomas
Articles by Dana Thomas
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THROUGH A CAMERA LENS DARKLY
Helmut Newton, the provocative German photographer who introduced kink to mainstream fashion, died following a car crash in Hollywood on Friday at 83. Long plagued with cardiac problems–he shot several blunt self-portraits while connected to EKG machines–Newton suffered a heart attack as he drove his Cadillac into a wall at the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard.Newton’s work was known for its hard-edged eroticism and straightforward point of view.
3 min read
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ERROL MORRIS
As a student at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1960s, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and in particular the U.S. secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.
4 min read
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GIVING BACK
Photographer Stanley Greene sees himself as a witness to life, and the pictures he takes as evidence of its capriciousness. For the past 10 years he has observed the war in Chechnya, and the evidence–now on display in Paris–is among the most disturbing in the annals of war photography.
4 min read
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Hollywood’s Anti-Star
Tilda Swinton struts into the ornate government office in Paris and sinks into a Louis XVI chair, her long, pale legs provocatively askew. She looks quizzically at Sir Alan Bates. “Being summoned by a minister–this is very mysterious,” she says. “What’s it all about?” This confrontation between Swinton’s character, a French magistrate tracking down a former Nazi collaborator, and her uncle [Bates] is the pivotal scene in Norman Jewison’s controversial new political thriller “The Statement.” It is also the moment the flame-haired Swinton, a queen of the indie-film circuit, gets her long-awaited Hollywood close-up. “From the beginning, I wanted someone like Tilda for this role–extremely intelligent and strong,” says Jewison. “There’s a confidence in her work that I like and her instincts are so solid.”Swinton is Hollywood’s anti-star, an actress who swats down the contemporary notion of her “day job” faster than you can say Nicole Kidman.
4 min read
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Rising From The Ashes
When Paolo Costa became mayor of Venice three years ago, he asked his advisers two questions: “When will La Fenice be finished? And how much will it cost?” He had good reason to wonder.
4 min read
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Towers To The Heavens
French explorer Michel Peissel was touring Tibet in 1982 when he first stumbled upon a series of tall, mysterious, star-shaped stone towers dotting the Himalayan valleys along the Chinese border. “I was blown away by them,” he remembers.
4 min read
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Neo Couture
In Tokyo last June, Prada unveiled its newest retail outlet: an $83 million, six-story “Epicenter,” covered with glass panels and a pointy-topped, rhomboid grid, designed by the internationally renowned Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.
5 min read
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‘Design Is For Living’
For more than 30 years, Giorgio Armani has been one of the driving forces behind the effort to bring design to the masses. In the 1970s, he ripped the stiff linings out of traditional banker’s suits to create the first easy-to-wear, casual menswear line.
4 min read
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Tropical Feast
On the south seas island paradise of Tahiti in 1897, French artist Paul Gauguin prepared for death. Suffering from a badly broken leg and boils that were probably caused by syphilis, Gauguin threw himself into painting what he called his “artistic testament”: a gigantic canvas that traced humankind from birth to death.
6 min read
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Mystery Man
“The worst tragedy for a poet,” Jean Cocteau wrote in 1926, “is to be admired through being misunderstood.” Yet that is what has happened to Cocteau. Indeed, he may be the most famous 20th-century artist whose works remain unknown.
6 min read
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Review: Mexico’s Wild West
When, in the opening minutes of “Once Upon a Time in Mexico,” Antonio Banderas swoops down from a rooftop through a spray of bullets onto a speeding bus with Salma Hayek handcuffed to his wrist, you think, “Ah, El Mariachi is back.” Alas, he’s not.
3 min read
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Fashion: A Fun And Modern Fall
Responding to the gloom of war and recession, designers have unveiled a fall season of chic and optimistic clothes that should appeal across the board. Miniskirts; fur-trimmed coats and jackets, and fuzzy, warm sweaters, all in cozy autumnal tones, are the key looks for the season.
3 min read
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All About The Shooting
Robert Rodriguez is an anomaly in Hollywood: a director who can make big box-office extravaganzas on the quick and cheap. And he does it all alone; the 35-year-old Mexican-American director of such films as “Spy Kids” and “El Mariachi” eschews Los Angeles in favor of Texas, where he writes, edits, composes and creates special effects in his stone-turreted castle on 25 hectares of rugged hill country.
7 min read
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Newsmakers
An Oscar–By Special Delivery When Harrison Ford accepted the best-director Oscar on behalf of Roman Polanski at the Academy Awards in L.A. last March, he promised he’d deliver it in person to the director of “The Pianist” as soon as he could.
4 min read
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Shooting Himself
In a revealing exhibit, Jim Dine points his lens inward
4 min read
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Making A Big Splash
Francois Ozon has made six films in the past five years, each completely different from the last. Yet his imprint is unmistakable. Eschewing the typical navel-gazing style of French auteurs, Ozon makes movies the old- fashioned way: with well-written stories and compelling femmes fatales.
6 min read
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Portrait Of A Tribe
Cloistered in the rain forests straddling the Venezuela-Brazil border, the Yanomami are one of the last indigenous tribes living in relative isolation from modern civilization.
4 min read
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This Side Of Paradise
In 1962, an unknown 68-year-old French photographer named Jacques Lartigue and his wife, Florette, took their first trip to the United States. While in New York, Florette showed some of her husband’s prints to Charles Rado, a former photo agent.
4 min read
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Directing In The Dark
Since his 1995 critically acclaimed “Breaking the Waves,” Danish director Lars von Trier has been hailed as a filmmaking genius–and dismissed as an eccentric blowhard.
4 min read
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Opposites Attract
It was a radical idea: to have the German-born Helmut Newton, known for his erotic and extremely composed photographs, shoot NEWSWEEK’s portrait of Cartier-Bresson, master of the wholly natural Decisive Moment.
2 min read
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Newsmakers
Who Will Bite for ‘Dogville’?Sure, it’s Nicole Kidman’s year. But that may not be enough to save Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” from the dogs. The avant-garde Danish filmmaker (“Breaking the Waves”) had yet to find a U.S. distributor for the new Kidman flick before its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this week.
4 min read
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