Directory and Actor Sydney Pollack Dies at 73

[swimmernsecretsea]

Sydney Pollack Dies at 73
Today 7:19 PM PDT by Jovie Baclayon

Legendary director, producer and actor Sydney Pollack died from cancer Monday evening at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73.

The filmmaker won Oscars for directing and producing 1985's Out of Africa. He picked up another Best Picture nod for coproducing last year's Michael Clayton, in which he also appeared opposte George Clooney.

"Sydney made the world a little better, movies a little better and even dinner a little better," Clooney said in a statement. "A tip of the hat to a class act. He'll be missed terribly."

Pollack's other Academy Award nominations came for producing and directing Tootsie (1982) and directing They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969).

Complete story here: http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b139253_sydney_pollock_dies_73.html


I recall years ago falling in love (seriously) with the film "Out of Africa." I'd been familiar with the work of Isak Dinesen from some of her short stories, one of which became the film "Babette's Feast," a film about a mysterious young woman living in a colony of retired old missionaries, bitter from living with only themselves for company, and how she lovingly prepares a great meal that miraculously restores their happiness.

I felt as if I would love the movie "Out of Africa" before I saw it, and I wasn't wrong. I suppose it was for sentimental reasons; I tend to soften for a good love story. It occasionally had the too-sweetness of a romance novel, but some of the moments in it were breathtaking. I recalled the moment when Karen, destitute from her ruined farm, having to move back to Denmark, is asked by Denys what he can do to make her feel better. She responds by requesting that he dance one last time with her, making the hurt worse, because she'll have that memory when she is long gone. Or when she collapses from Syphilis, given to her by her own husband, shortly after she remembers someone telling her "Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road." Or when Denys moves her by giving her a view of her beloved country from the sky, flamingos scattering over the beaches, elephants migrating to watering holes.

I can admit to having become a bit obsessed with the movie. I dressed like Denys for a while, even. So much so that one of my friends actually said to me that I dressed as if I'd come off the set of "Out of Africa." Because of that obsession, I sought out the writings of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen). They were nothing like I'd expected. Her book consisted of brief descriptions of her encounters with the landscape and natives of the land, and the terrible longing she felt for it after she'd left it. It was gothic, mysterious, and had the touch of a fable or story passed around from ages to child. One of my favorite pieces was this:

The chief feature of the landscape and of your life in it, was the air. Looking back on a sojourn in the African Highlands you are struck by your feeling of having lived for a time up in the air. The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it had a blue vigor to it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and woods a fresh deep blue. In the middle of the day the air was alive over the land, like a flame burning: it scintillated, and shone alike running water, mirrored and doubled all objects, and created great Fata Morgana. Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the Highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.

I read an interview with Sydney Pollack saying that he took on the project thinking it would be impossible to film her book; what he came away with was the powerful elegiac sensation Blixen's work could have from reading it and used the focus of the impossible love story at the center to evoke that feeling. I think he was greatly successful, and I shall miss his work.