Double Feature 4

in

Thursday: 12:00 pm – Cheese People/ Nikki’s Café
Friday: 11:00 am – Hendricks Art Center

Memoirs of a Scatterbrain

Category: Short | Double Feature
Country: Netherlands
Language: English
Rating: PG
Runtime: 52 min.
Director: Jan Thijssen
Producer: Jan Thijssen
Website:  Memoires Van Een Vergeetal

The Memoirs of a scatterbrain documentary about Eindhoven-born and bred artist René Daniëls (° 1950, Eindhoven – The Netherlands) tells the story of a career cut short in its prime and goes on to explore how Daniëls – in spite of his disability – manages to communicate through his recent paintings.

Heralded as a very promising young painter in the late 1970s, he went on to exhibit his work in Amsterdam, Paris and Kassel. His paintings were selling well and he was even being likened to Van Gogh and Mondriaan when on Christmas Eve of 1987, he was struck by a brain haemorrhage. Had the pressures of the international world of art literally become too much to bear?

Memoirs of a scatterbrain shows us Daniëls in his early years: hard at work in his workshop, shooting live footage in Eindhoven’s pop temple De Effenaar and out clubbing with the Sex Pistols in the wee hours. But the documentary also shows us how Daniëls is grappling with his disability, having lost the faculty of speech and his ability to communicate now confined to a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
We see Daniëls at his Eindhoven home where he arranges his memories in a little notebook, but also out to the haunts of yore he used to frequent: New York, Ghent and Paris.

Memoirs of a scatterbrain is a poignant portrait of a great artist who, in the wake of his brain haemorrhage and subsequent rehabilitation, has managed to find his own way to share his thoughts and images.

Filmmaker AttendingLeft Bank Bookseller

Category: Short | Double Feature
Country: USA
Language: English
Rating: PG
Runtime: 24 min.
Director: Lisa Reznik
Producer: Lisa Reznik
Website:  Left Bank Bookseller
Facebook:  Left Bank Bookseller

Sylvia Beach, a woman from Princeton NJ established the first English-language bookshop in Paris, Shakespeare and Company, which became a popular meeting place for The Lost Generation and for experimental writers. When Sylvia Beach attended a Sunday afternoon party with partner Adrienne Monnier, she unexpectedly met Irish author James Joyce who, became a member of Beach’s lending library. Joyce confided his struggles to publish his novel Ulysses to Beach.