Brooks Riley, director, producer, film critic, editor and screenwriter, is a former Senior Editor of Film Comment magazine and former film critic for WNYC-TV. She has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Boston Phoenix, Opera News and The Washington Post. She also worked for Jean‐Luc Godard as producer at Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. She was Executive Producer on a number of films, including Mee-Shee the Water Giant, Puckoon, and Führer Ex. She has directed 10 opera productions for TV and DVD, including Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung from the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar and the Israeli Opera Festival’s Aida in Masada. Email: brooks.r [at] gmx.de
by Brooks Riley Something has happened in the last forty days. The planet has gone quiet, a vast, reverberating, gesticulating global chorus suddenly muted by something wee and invisible which is borne across continents, streets and rooms by friends and strangers. Mass extinction, once the whispered woe of a distant future, suddenly sounds louder and…
by Brooks Riley 1. As the coronavirus continues to disrupt human life in many corners of the globe, a phrase from George Frideric Handel’s Messiah has wormed its way through the background noise of my attention span. It occurs in a Part III recitative usually sung by a bass with enough gravitas to shake the…
by Brooks Riley When Vienna‘s Albertina Museum exhibition of works by Albrecht Dürer ended in January 2020, it seemed quite possible that several of the masterpieces on display might never again be seen by the public, among them The Great Piece of Turf. This may sound like a dire prediction for a fragile work that…
by Brooks Riley A long time ago, on a mountainside in Liechtenstein, I tuned my transistor radio to the Deutschlandfunk, one of neighboring Germany’s state radio stations whose broadcast range leaked into that tiny country. This is what I heard: Hier ist der Deutschlandfunk, heute aus der Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee. It wasn’t…
by Brooks Riley Now that the Emmys are over and we Americans have patted ourselves and a few Brits on the back for outstanding work, it’s time to consider one of the grandest achievements of the past year, a Netflix series from South Korea called Mr. Sunshine, which has, inexplicably, been ignored by media critics…
by Brooks Riley It’s not every day that a small, unexpected masterpiece shows up in your mailbox, arriving with the same modest ‘ping’ that announces the other electronic missives. This was no ordinary masterpiece. It was the photograph of a detail from Luca Signorelli’s fresco La Fine del Mondo on the entrance wall of La…
by Brooks Riley Racing down a German autobahn at impossible speeds is like running past a smorgasbord when you don’t have time to eat. Exit signs fly by, pointing to delicious, iconic destinations that whet the appetite but that one has no time for: Hameln, Wittenberg, Quedlinburg, Eisenach, Erfurt, Altenburg, Jena, Weimar, Dessau—markers of histories…
by Brooks Riley The attic of Notre Dame cathedral, with its tangled, centuries-old dark wooden beams, was affectionately known as the ‘forest’. The fire that originated up there last week made me think of an early Anselm Kiefer painting Quaternity, (1973), three small fires burning on the floor of a wooden attic and a snake…
by Brooks Riley The Alps are much grander this morning. I like to think they tiptoed closer in the night, but it’s only an optical illusion created by a local high-pressure system called föhn, which magnifies them and everything else on the horizon. Sitting outside in the loggia, a spacious recessed balcony that resembles a…
by Brooks Riley Sometime in the late Fifties, Roman Vishniac, a pioneer of photomicrography, picked up a knife, cut a thick horizontal slice of skin from his own thumb and photographed it under a microscope using polarized light. The resulting image succeeded on two levels: the scientific parsing of human skin’s rich textural terrain; and…
by Brooks Riley When architect Otto Wagner commissioned this large painting by Carl Moll for the Kaiser’s personal railroad station in Vienna in 1899, he might not have seen the irony of an eagle’s view of the city. View of Vienna from a Balloon envisions a future beyond rails in which a bird shows the…
by Brooks Riley For someone who spent most of his life trying to get on Page Six, (the New York Post’s iconic gossip column), hitting Page One was pay dirt for Donald Trump. Now that he’s there, he means to stay there, devouring our attention for the foreseeable future. One could even argue that all…
by Brooks Riley “They are shape, form, waiting to emerge. They present the plastic possibilities of life,” Albrecht Dürer said this of the pillows in various states of rumpled use that he drew on the back of a piece of paper he had been using to draw hands, wasting no surface to explore the ‘plastic…
by Brooks Riley For most of us, the act of looking at a painting is, and should be, subjective. The baggage we bring to the confrontation–how we see, what we notice, what we know, how we feel, what we like or don’t like—is as individual as a finger print, and often highly idiosyncratic. Like the…
by Brooks Riley Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious. —Peter Ustinov President Trump is no laughing matter. Paradoxically, he’s become just that, a side-splitting political earthquake triggering a tsunami of jokes and routines that fill the late-night air with barbs so sharp no ordinary ego might survive, the limits of humor now…
by Brooks Riley According to a biologist who studies the properties of dirt, a single teaspoon of the stuff contains more living organisms than there are people on earth. Not a particularly salient fact, but enough to launch the imagination toward other epic notions and distortions of scale: What if our whole world is just…
by Brooks Riley First, the jungle out there: Sound familiar? Hint: It’s not the clatter of journalists in a feeding frenzy over the latest insanity to emerge from the White House. Just an ur-Twitter storm here in Mitteleuropa at 4 in the morning, recorded from my balcony. Ever since November 9, 2016 I’ve been looking…
by Brooks Riley I feel a stress disorder coming on. Call it Persistent Trump Stress Disorder. Or PTSD 2.0. This is not about Trump himself, the ‘dingo’ here, whose many inadequacies, fallacies and prevarications are scrutinized, dissected, biopsied, and finally lampooned 24/7 in every corner of the fourth estate, reaching every corner of the globe.…
by Brooks Riley National Theater, Goethe and Schiller To paraphrase Heinrich Heine, I dream of Weimar in the night—not the era, but the town of Weimar, a lovely word on its own, one steeped in intellectual significance, historical resonance, cultural audacity, political and artistic enlightenment, philosophical bravura–and in modern times monstrous atrocity. I remember the…
by Brooks Riley If I could hug a tree a day without seeming a complete idiot, I would. Trees matter to me now–how fast they grow, how full their crowns, how tall they are, how odd their leaves, how extraordinary their shapes, how thick their trunks, how nearby they are. This late interest has crept…