PBS to broadcast The Rape of Europa nationwide in US on Monday, Nov 24th

My friend Tami Stepanek sent me this announcement from Richard Berge of Actual Films. Tami and her husband Petr both had worked on the film which was released in 2006 and will air on PBS next Monday, November 24 at 9 pm. Check your local listings to confirm times in your area.

"The Rape of Europa tells the epic story of the systematic theft, deliberate destruction and miraculous survival of Europe’s art treasures during the Third Reich and World War II. In a journey through seven countries, the film takes the audience into the violent whirlwind of fanaticism, greed, and warfare that threatened to wipe out the artistic heritage of Europe. For twelve long years, the Nazis looted and destroyed art on a scale unprecedented in history. But heroic young art historians and curators from America and across Europe fought back with an extraordinary campaign to rescue and return the millions of lost, hidden and stolen treasures.

The Rape of Europa begins and ends with the story of artist Gustav Klimt’s famed Gold Portrait, stolen from Viennese Jews in 1938 and now the most expensive painting ever sold." - from Acyual Films: The Rape of Europa Web Site

From: ActualFilms
Trailer for the newly released feature documentary film about the fate of art in the Third Reich and World War II. The film, based on the landmark history by Lynn H. Nicholas, is now playing at film festivals. www.therapeofeuropa.com

Winner of
Audience Award Best Documentary Feature Boston Jewish Film Festival
Best of Fest Palm Springs International Film Festival
Audience Award Best Documentary Film Atlanta Jewish Film Festival
Executive Producer - Bonni Cohen
Producers - Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newnham
Co-producer - Robert M. Edsel
Cinematographer - Jon Shenk
Editor - Josh Peterson
Narrator - Joan Allen
A Production of Actual Films in association with Agon Arts & Entertainment and Oregon Public Broadcasting
Based on The Rape of Europa by Lynn H Nicholas

Related:

• Actual Films - Films
• THERAPEOFEUROPA.COM
• YouTube - The Rape of Europa
• The Rape of Europa - Trailer - Cast - Showtimes - NYTimes.com

Get on the Bus Obscura!

It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Dublin, California and the Bus Obscura rode through town. Dublin is an East Bay suburb 25 miles east from Oakland at the intersection of interstate highways 580 and 680. The Bus Obsura is a piece of art on wheels and the creation of artist Simon Lee.

The bus is town for week and passengers like myself had the opportunity to take a little magical mystery of our own through familiar streets which looked completely different. There are no windows but as Simon Lee explains, in the short homegrown video I produced with Nikon L18 8MP still camera, there are 1,000+ pin hole cameras that project the images from outside within the bus.





Gina Halfert of the Tri-Valley Herald reported that, "the Bus Obscura is an everyday school bus converted into a multiple aperture camera obscura, wherein the windows are transformed into projection screens showing the world outside as upside-down multiple images. The Bus Obscura will be making several appearances in Dublin through April 26; the visits are sponsored by the Dublin Fine Arts Foundation and the City of Dublin."



Here's a mini-documentary video from Colgate University that describes Bus Obscura in more detail. Video description: " Artist Simon Lee and Colgate University students and professors created an art project called Bus Obscura" (View article...)




This type of post is a first for me on this blog as I haven't really done my own citizen journalism piece here so I offer this post as something new of which you may see more. I had fun creating the short UGC video and it didn't really take long to produce, maybe 30 minutes. as I mentioned, I used my Nikon L18 still camera to shoot the photos and the video. The videos were created as 640x480 AVI files that I easily transferred to my PC through the SD card reader and edited the video in Windows Movie Maker, which was the only application I had available on the PC. I added titles, dissolves, Ken Burns effect of the photos and an audio track from an mp3 file I created in Garageband and which I transferred from my iMac to the PC. For delivery, I exported it as a 768k WMV file and uploaded to both my blip.tv and YouTube accounts. I like the quality of the blip.tv version better and embedded that one instead.

In the spirit of independent production, use what you have available to get it done!

Related:

• New York artist brings 'Bus Obscura' to suburbs - Inside Bay Area
• Around Dublin: Bus Obscura is Coming to Dublin!
• Around Dublin: Bus Obscura Schedule Update
• cameraObscura.pdf (application/pdf Object)