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LA STAMPA

Liz Taylor, A Personal Reflection. Last Of The Unforgettable Stars

Liz Taylor, A Personal Reflection. Last Of The Unforgettable Stars

Famed Italian director Franco Zeffirelli worked with Elizabeth Taylor, and was also a longtime friend. Here are his reflections on the death of the legendary American actress at the age of 79.

Elizabeth Taylor (spleeny)



People like Liz no longer exist. With her passing, the sun has set on that image of the unforgettable diva. Today, we are witnessing a vertiginous descent in the quality of public personalities, in every field: you just don't find people like her anymore in an age where breaking through is so much harder, where certain kinds of films no longer get made, and fairy tales don't come true.

Liz was born a star, a major league star, on screen, but also in life. When she appeared, she immediately captured the attention of everyone, a unique woman who left a deep mark over many years in the history of global show business.

I was lucky enough to know her well. We worked together on two films (Taming of the Shrew, 1967; Toscanini, 1988), and we became very good friends. She possessed a winning mix of rare qualities -- beauty, intelligence, talent – that made her the diva she was and could provoke a certain kind of embarrassment in those who met her.

She also had a great sense of freedom, so she could allow herself, in times very different from those of today, seven husbands and eight marriages. As a friend, she was formidable, witty, cheerful; we loved the same things, had great fun together, and shared the same taste in making fun of others. If someone fell down in our web, we were capable of tormenting them for days on end. Between us, there was a great understanding, we would call each other often, exchanging confessions and allowing each others' outbursts.

On the set, she paid incredibly close attention in what she did and said, always with the desire that everything was absolutely perfect. Among her best films there is definitely "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." She was also very careful with the press and the manner in which news of her was communicated. The last time I saw her was in Los Angeles last year, and had talked to her by phone since then. I am deeply saddened, and sorry to hear how much she suffered. All of us are destined to disappear from the scene, but she was inimitable, and her passing will leave a huge void.

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Society

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp who lived with his family close to the camp. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, a favorite to win at the Cannes Festival, tells Höss' story, but fails to address the true inhumanity of Nazism, says Die Welt's film critic.

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

A still from The Zone of Interest by

Hanns-Georg Rodek

-Essay-

BERLIN — This garden is the pride and joy of Hedwig, the housewife. She has planned and laid out everything — the vegetable beds and fruit trees and the greenhouse and the bathtub.

Her kingdom is bordered on one long side by a high, barbed-wire wall. Gravel paths lead to the family home, a two-story building with clean lines, no architectural frills. Her husband praises her when he comes home after work, and their three children — ages two to five — play carefree in the little "paradise," as the mother calls her refuge.

The wall is the outer wall of the concentration camp Auschwitz; in the "paradise" lives the camp commander Rudolf Höss with his family.

The film is called The Zone of Interest — after the German term "Interessengebiet," which the Nazis used to euphemistically name the restricted zone around Auschwitz — and it is a favorite among critics at this week's Cannes Film Festival.

The audacity of director Jonathan Glazer's style takes your breath away, and it doesn't quickly come back.

It is a British-Polish production in which only German is spoken. The real house of the Höss family was not directly on the wall, but some distance away, but from the upper floor, Höss's daughter Brigitte later recalled, she could see the prisoners' quarters and the chimneys of the old crematorium.

Glazer moved the house right up against the wall for the sake of his experimental arrangement, a piece of artistic license that can certainly be justified.

And so one watches the Höss family go about their daily lives: guiding visitors through the little garden, splashing in the tub, eating dinner in the house, being served by the domestic help, who are all silent prisoners. What happens behind the wall, they could hear and smell. They must have heard and smelled it. You can see the red glow over the crematorium at night. You hear the screams of the tortured and the shots of the guards. The Höss family blocks all this out.

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