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Mike Marsland—WireImage/Getty ImagesThe last vestiges of the Cold War seemed to thaw for a moment on Feb. 26, 2008, when the unfamiliar strains of "The Star-Spangled Banner" unfolded before 1,000 North Koreans as Music Director Lorin Maazel led the New York Philharmonic orchestra in a concert in the East Pyongyang Grand Theatre. Maazel and the orchestra offered a crowd-pleasing array of iconic works, including Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony and George Gershwin's An American in Paris. The performance, which was also broadcast live via television and radio to the rest of the country, was as much a historic gesture as it was a concert as two vastly different political systems and cultures used music as a symbol of, perhaps, a new phase in cultural diplomacy.
Another staple of Western classical music, Dmitry Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7, was also used as a symbol—albeit of an entirely different sort. In August Russian conductor Valery Gergiev journeyed to Tskhinvali in the region of South Ossetia, Georgia, to lead a performance of that symphony—the composer's paean to the defenders of Leningrad in World War II—to celebrate the "victory" of Russian troops over Georgian forces in their clash over the breakaway region.
Two months later Gergiev led a concert in Jerusalem to promote peace in the Middle East, following in the footsteps of conductor Daniel Barenboim, who had performed at similar events in the region in recent years in efforts to bridge the gulf between Palestinians and Israelis. In January Barenboim had moved a step farther; after playing works by Beethoven in the West Bank city of Ramallah, he announced that he had become a citizen of Palestine.
Politics as usual played out in Germany's Bayreuth Festival, an annual festival devoted to the music of Richard Wagner. In recent years the festival had been the focus of manic speculation about who would become the next head. In a power struggle to gain control upon the retirement of the composer's grandson, Wolfgang (who had ruled the event for 57 years), various branches of the Wagner family starred in an operatic duel of their own. Wolfgang's choice was said to have been his daughter Katharina, whose claim was contested by another group of Wagners in league with Gerard Mortier, then director of the New York City Opera. In the end, Katharina and her half-sister, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, won out. One of their goals was to distance the 132-year-old festival from its associations in the 1930s with the Nazis. (Wagner was Adolf Hitler's favourite composer.)
One of the Nazis' favourite conductors, the late Herbert von Karajan, was honoured throughout the year in celebration of the 100th anniversary of his birth. The conductor—whose political leanings were infamous but who was rehabilitated by his celebrated interpretations of the classical canon in the decades following the end of World War II—was feted at events in Berlin and Vienna, at festivals in Salzburg and Lucerne, and in CD reissues of highlights from some of his 900 recordings.
Another conductor, the late Leonard Bernstein, whose legacy extended to his roles as composer, social activist, educator, and beloved champion of classical music, was honoured throughout the year in which he would have turned 90. He was the subject of "Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds," a multivenue celebration in New York City that featured 30 concerts and events throughout the autumn. In October a performance of Bernstein's Mass was led by conductor Marin Alsop at Carnegie Hall.
Elliott Carter, one of the most illustrious composers of the 20th century, turned 100 on Dec. 11, 2008. Carter, a 1971 winner of the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for Eminence in Music and a member of the Classical Music Hall of Fame, was honoured with a series of concerts and events around the world. During the summer program at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., he was feted with three orchestral programs. In September, Musikfest Berlin 08 featured a number of his works, including Soundings and Symphonia: Sum fluxae pretium spei (the latter in its German debut), performed by Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin. Finally, in December an international colloquium devoted to his music, "Hommage à Elliott Carter," was held at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris.
American composer Charles Wuorinen had a very busy year as he turned 70. Six of his works received premieres, including his Second Piano Quintet, which was performed by pianist Peter Serkin and the Brentano String Quartet at the Rockport (Mass.) Chamber Music Festival. The New York City Opera also announced that Wuorinen had been commissioned to create an operatic version of the story-turned-movie Brokeback Mountain for its 2013 season; the company's budget woes later caused the commission to be withdrawn, however.
Milan's La Scala opera company announced in late May a new commission, a version of Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's book-turned-film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth. Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli was commissioned to create the work for the company's 2011 season, in time to mark the 150th anniversary of Italy's unification.
In September the Los Angeles Opera (LA Opera) offered the premiere of The Fly, Howard Shore's opera based on his score for the 1986 horror movie; the production was led by the film's director, David Cronenberg. The company also featured a production of Giacomo Puccini's Il Trittico, with its three segments staged by film directors William Friedkin (The Exorcist), who prepared two, and Woody Allen (Annie Hall).
Cinema played a central part in "An Evening with Anthony Hopkins" at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas. The famed British actor hosted an evening of clips from five of his films and performances of several of his musical compositions, including The Masque of Time, which was given its world premiere by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.
Made in America, a contemporary work by American composer Joan Tower, won three 2008 Grammy Awards in February. The CD of a performance of the piece by Leonard Slatkin and the Nashville Symphony won for best classical album and best orchestral performance, and Tower was honoured for best classical contemporary composition. The work also represented a new approach to the commissioning process, in which a consortium of 65 smaller U.S. orchestras banded together in 2001 to jointly pay for the work's creation and were then given the opportunity to perform it as part of their seasons. Another new work did not fare as well. In April the world premiere of Swedish-Israeli composer Dror Feiler's Halat hisar ("State of Siege") was canceled when musicians of Germany's Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra claimed that the volume level of the work—which incorporates simulated machine-gun fire—caused many of them to suffer ringing ears after a rehearsal.
Two wildly disparate ensembles marked significant anniversaries in 2008. The Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, Eng., the oldest professional symphony orchestra in the United Kingdom, celebrated its 150th anniversary. In Vienna the Vegetable Orchestra marked its 10th anniversary with a concert at the city's RadioKulturhaus. The orchestra's 12 musicians had toured the world, performing on such self-made instruments as "celery bongos," "leek violins," and "cucumberphones."
In England the Ford Motor Co. created an orchestra to perform on instruments made of parts from a Ford Focus. Although the ensemble did not have a name, it was featured in a £45 million (about $66.5 million) advertising campaign in which its 15 members played everything from a "clutch guitar" to a "window harp." The tag line for the ad was: "The new Ford Focus. Beautifully arranged."
A humanoid robot, ASIMO, which was created by Japanese automaker Honda, conducted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in May in a performance of the song "The Impossible Dream." The segment was part of a youth program that also featured cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
At Severance Hall in Cleveland, the public itself was allowed to take the baton, via the UBS Virtual Maestro. The device, which came with an electronic controller to manipulate tempo and volume level, allowed participants to conduct an onscreen virtual orchestra in excerpts of works such as Gioachino Rossini's "William Tell Overture" and Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique during the intermission of performances by the Cleveland Orchestra in May. The device later was taken to other U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Boston, and Seattle.
Media technology continued to play a role in the popularization of classical music. In September the Metropolitan Opera (the Met) in New York City broadcast its opening-night gala at Lincoln Center via a high-definition (HD) satellite hookup. The event marked the start of the third season of the company's "The Met: Live in HD" initiative, which drew more than one million viewers to cinemas around the world in its first two years. The Met's live simulcasts of several of its productions to 850 venues in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan reshaped the way cutting-edge technology had taken a venerable musical form to a wider world.
The trend was embraced (in the form of recorded performances) in 2008 by other opera companies, including London's Royal Opera House, San Francisco Opera, and La Scala. The LA Opera recorded Plácido Domingo's 40th anniversary gala—which featured tenor Domingo and soprano Patricia Racette and conductor James Conlon leading the LA Opera Orchestra—and broadcast it to 21 venues across the United States.
The Internet also served as a conduit to the classical music marketplace. In January 2008 online music retailer ArkivMusic announced that its revenues for the preceding year grew by more than 30%. The Web site, which at the beginning of the year offered more than 82,000 CD titles, saw this growth at a time when CD revenues in the rest of the music industry were declining at a rate of 15% annually. In a press statement, ArkivMusic's president, Eric Feidner, said, "It's hard to overemphasize the significance of this in today's music marketplace. We currently only sell physical CDs of classical music. With the industry's ever-increasing focus on digital downloads, I think this shows just how unique our particular genre of music is relative to the overall music business."
Before the existence of CDs, digital downloads, and other paraphernalia used for music enjoyment, there was the Edison cylinder, which played on the phonograph Thomas Edison introduced in 1877. In October the Marston record label announced that it was releasing three CDs of excerpts from recordings originally made on Edison cylinders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Julius H. Block. Thought to have been destroyed in Germany during World War II, the cylinders had recently been rediscovered in Russia. The label claimed that the cylinders represented some of the earliest recordings of works by Bach, Wagner, and others. Highlights of the first three CDs included such historic snippets as Russian writer Leo Tolstoy reading from his works, what was reputed to be the voice and whistling of composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, an 11-year-old Jascha Heifetz introducing himself at a performance, and a recording of pianist Paul Pabst, who studied with Franz Liszt.
In 2008 the classical music world marked the passing of a number of important artists. Composer-arranger Alexander Courage, who contributed to the scores of more than 100 films, including Funny Face and My Fair Lady, along with such television programs as Star Trek, died at age 88 on May 15 in Los Angeles. British musicologist Wilfrid Mellers died in May, and American soprano and educator Gail Robinson died in October. Other significant losses included those of Italian tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano, Danish soprano Inga Nielsen, Turkish soprano Leyla Gencer, German-born violinist Siegmund Nissel, Argentine-born composer Mauricio Kagel, and American composers Henry Brant and Norman Dello Joio.
Raymond Boyd—Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThe jazz world was shaken when a pillar of the jazz establishment, the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE), collapsed. For 40 years the IAJE—which by 2008 had 10,000 members in 50 countries—had provided services for jazz educators, published the Jazz Education Journal, and held conventions. After 1996, when the last JazzTimes convention was held, the IAJE's annual gathering became the major conclave of jazz students, teachers, and industry representatives, drawing more than 7,000 attendees in 2006 and in 2007.
Attendance in 2008 at the IAJE convention in Toronto plunged to 4,000. After the resignations of its executive director and president-elect, the IAJE canceled its 2009 convention, suspended its journal, and filed for bankruptcy. Almost immediately thereafter, the Jazz Education Network was founded by 35 educators. Mary Jo Papich, who had been elected IAJE president, became president of the new organization.
Much of the year's most interesting activity emerged from new artists and new jazz communities that had matured in the 21st century. After 50 years of jazz education in the United States and abroad, skillful young disciples of major artists such as Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, and Wayne Shorter emerged not only from the American heartland but also from Australia, Central Europe, and Asia. Most jazz education was oriented to jazz's heritage and to fusions with other musical traditions. A number of daring mentors, however, encouraged young musicians to experiment with organic, original developments of jazz sounds, rhythms, and forms.
New communities of musicians who played free jazz and cultivated free improvisation were often led by well-known veteran artists. Pianist Irene Schweizer was the centre of the scene in Zürich, and pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach was central to Berlin's underground jazz. Saxophonists Evan Parker and Lol Coxhill were senior members of London's large improvising community; interesting Dutch musicians appeared in the wake of drummer Han Bennink and pianist Misha Mengelberg. Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii formed big bands in Japanese cities, and drummer John Pochée and saxophonist Sandy Evans were among the leaders of Sydney's improvisers and composers. Vancouver, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and the New York City region were among North America's hot spots for exploratory jazz.
Veterans remained at the top of their form. Two of the most visible artists in 2008 were 78-year-old saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman. Both maintained busy international touring schedules, and Rollins released the live album Road Shows, Volume 1 on his own Doxy label.
Young alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón, whose CD Awake appeared, was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship (a "genius grant"). Legendary early-jazz pianist Tony Jackson was the subject of Clare Brown's play Don't You Leave Me Here, which premiered in London. In New York City the Jazz at Lincoln Center orchestra and the Abyssinian Church choir introduced a new composition by Wynton Marsalis to celebrate the Harlem church's 200th anniversary.
Jazz fused with country music as trumpeter Marsalis joined singer Willie Nelson in Two Men with the Blues, which made the hit album charts. The great jazz bassist Charlie Haden returned to the music of his childhood, singing with his family in a bluegrass concert in New York City and releasing the album Ramblin' Boy, which featured guest appearances by Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs.
After almost two years without a venue for nationally touring performers, Chicago once again had the Jazz Showcase when Joe Segal reopened the 62-year-old club in a new location. From nearby Evanston, Ill., collector Jim Neumann donated his library of more than 100,000 jazz recordings to Oberlin (Ohio) College. The huge collection was scheduled to be housed in a new building that would be completed in 2009. In a 20-year project, the recordings were slated to be digitized under the supervision of a full-time curator. David Stull, the dean of Oberlin's conservatory, said that the college planned to establish the world's largest online jazz archive.
Toronto-based jazz magazine Coda celebrated its 50th year in 2008. In the midst of the U.S. presidential election campaign, an all-star cast of New York musicians, including Roy Haynes, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Kurt Elling, and Roy Hargrove, held a fund-raiser for Barack Obama, who reportedly had tracks by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker on his portable music player. Herbie Hancock's album River: The Joni Letters, dedicated to singer Joni Mitchell, became the first jazz collection in 43 years to win a Grammy Award for album of the year. Other outstanding albums included the Ornette Coleman Anthology by Aki Takase and Silke Eberhard and a belated discovery, Paul Rutherford's Solo in Berlin 1975.
A book of major importance, A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music by George E. Lewis, came out during the year. Other notable book titles included Howard Mandel's Miles Ornette Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz and Bob Blumenthal's Jazz: An Introduction to the History and Legends Behind America's Music (2007).
With the death of American tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, jazz lost one of its last remaining hard-bop stars. British swing trumpeter and radio host Humphrey Lyttelton, American experimental clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre, Cuban bassist and bandleader Cachao, and young Swedish pianist Esbjorn Svensson were among the notable losses in 2008, as were American drummer Lee Young, American composer Neal Hefti, Italian saxophonist Mario Schiano, and Spanish drummer Peer Wyboris.
The global music scene was dynamic in 2008. Experimentation and unexpected collaborations abounded, and musicians from the landlocked West African state of Mali were highly visible. The bravery of the new African music scene was epitomized by Malian diva Rokia Traoré, who released her first album in five years, Tchamantche. Many of the album's songs reflected Traoré's subtle and bluesy electric guitar, which was matched with an ancient African lute, the ngoni. The intimate, sophisticated recording showed the quality and range of her singing and songwriting as she went from a Bambara-language song about the tragedies of illegal immigrants attempting to reach Europe to a highly individual English-language reworking of the Billie Holiday classic "The Man I Love," which begins as a brooding ballad and develops with vigorous improvisation.
Traoré's compatriot Toumani Diabaté, the world's best-known exponent of the kora, a West African harp, had a good year as well. He had worked with a wide range of musicians, from his own Symmetric Orchestra to the late Ali Farka Touré, but in 2008 Diabaté released only his second purely instrumental solo recording in 21 years. The Mandé Variations was a powerful demonstration of his virtuosic and varied playing; pieces ranged from references to being a griot (i.e., descended from a long line of hereditary Malian musicians) to praise songs that include playful musical references to film composer Ennio Morricone. Diabaté's wide-ranging musical interests were also reflected by his contributions to Maestro, a new album by American blues guitarist Taj Mahal, and Welcome to Mali, a new set by the highly successful Malian duo Amadou and Mariam, which also featured the adventurous British pop star Damon Albarn.
Rob Loud—FilmMagic/Getty ImagesAmadou and Mariam, Albarn, and many other artists took part in the experimental concerts organized by Africa Express, which began in 2006 and in 2008 were held in London and Liverpool, Eng., and Lagos, Nigeria. The aim was to promote equality between African and Western musicians, who were encouraged to perform together onstage. A series of impressive and unexpected spontaneous collaborations resulted; for example, Senegalese star Baaba Maal sang with the British pop band Franz Ferdinand, and Amadou and Mariam played with another British pop band, the Magic Numbers.
Alim Qasimov, the finest exponent of the mugham, the dramatic ancient poetry of Azerbaijan, performed alongside the celebrated Kronos Quartet from San Francisco at an emotional concert in London that could lead to further joint projects. From the East charismatic Cambodian singer Chhom Nimol and his colleagues from Los Angeles in the band Dengue Fever released a new album, Venus on Earth, and toured in Europe for the first time, bringing to new audiences the Cambodian music styles that flourished in the 1960s before the country's music scene was brutally crushed by the Khmer Rouge.
Barriers were transcended in Cuba, where 77-year-old singer Omara Portuondo was featured on three new albums, including a collaboration with Brazilian star Maria Bethania and a solo set, Gracias, which included a duet with another legendary veteran, Brazilian Chico Buarque. Portuondo could also be heard on Buena Vista Social Club at Carnegie Hall (2008), a live recording of the last-ever show by the best-selling Cuban supergroup, which took place in New York City in 1998.
In the United Kingdom the growing popularity of traditional music led to the emergence of new folk artists, including Julie Fowlis, a singer with an exquisite, pure style who specialized in Scottish Gaelic songs. She toured in both Britain and the United States and recorded an acoustic Scottish Gaelic version of the Beatles classic "Blackbird." She also took part in the Rogues Gallery concerts, in which pirate songs and sea shanties were revived by a celebrity cast that also included American actor Tim Robbins, Irish singer Shane MacGowan, and the project's American producer Hal Willner.
One of the tragedies of the year was the early death of the singer and songwriter Andy Palacio, who had brought the world the soulful, gently rhythmic music of the Garifuna people of Central America. Another loss was Rick Wright, the keyboard player and a founding member of the British band Pink Floyd.
The American record industry in 2008 continued to shift from traditional models to a digital marketplace. In the first half of the year, album sales totaled 204.6 million units, down 11% from the first half of 2007. "We're in unpredictable times," said country star Kenny Chesney, who released his Lucky Old Sun album in October. "People say, 'The music industry is over.' It's not over, though. … People are still going to want to go out and hear live music."
Tom Mihalek/APChesney was the only contemporary American hit maker to sell out numerous stadium concerts in 2008, and even he opted to lower some ticket prices in recognition of fans' economic stresses. Other top touring acts included Madonna, Rascal Flatts, Bon Jovi, and Eagles. Fans also supported an auditorium tour from the once-unlikely duo of Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant and bluegrass thrush Alison Krauss.
British neosoul singer Amy Winehouse was among the toasts of the 50th annual Grammy Awards, though she was unable to attend because of visa problems. By February Winehouse's erratic behaviour and substance-abuse issues were eroding what had been significant career momentum. Still, she won five Grammy Awards, including record of the year. The Grammys' top prize, album of the year, went to a jazz album—Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters—for the first time in 43 years. "I'd like to thank the Academy for courageously breaking the mold," Hancock said as he accepted the award. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted performers Leonard Cohen, the Dave Clark Five, Madonna, John Mellencamp, and the Ventures, and Kennedy Center Honors—the highest arts awards in the United States—were bestowed on George Jones, Barbra Streisand, Pete Townshend, and Roger Daltrey.
Theo Wargo—WireImage/Getty ImagesHip-hop music continued to sell well. For example, Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III album sold more than a million copies in its first week of issue. That was the highest debut-week sales figure since the release of 50 Cent's The Massacre in 2005. "Lollipop," the debut single from Lil Wayne's album, spent five weeks atop the all-genre Billboard charts. Atlanta rapper T.I.'s Paper Trail album was another notable release, and hip-hop also showed signs of maturing as a touring genre. Early in 2008 Jay-Z's tour with Mary J. Blige grossed more than $30 million, including sellout shows at Madison Square Garden in New York City and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. In addition, a tour headed by Kanye West made more than $31 million. These were hopeful signs for a genre that had posted only one top 20 North American tour in the previous five years, according to Billboard.
Many performers chose sides in the presidential race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain. Bruce Springsteen, John Legend, will.i.am, and others offered public support for Obama, while country stars Hank Williams, Jr., and John Rich were vocal in their support of McCain. Several musicians sought to restrict the use of their songs at political rallies. Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, and the Foo Fighters requested that McCain cease to use their songs; Browne actually sued the campaign. Sam Moore of Sam & Dave asked the Obama campaign to stop playing "Hold On, I'm Comin'."
Several former pop and rock acts released country albums in 2008. Jessica Simpson's Do You Know debuted at number one on the Billboard country chart, and Hootie & the Blowfish lead singer Darius Rucker became the first African American singer in a quarter century to have a number one solo country single. Country labels and country radio were also partial to American Idol alumni; Carrie Underwood, Kellie Pickler, Bucky Covington, and Kristy Lee Cook all worked in that format.
Among 2008's notable losses were soul music legend Isaac Hayes, groundbreaking guitarist Bo Diddley, record producer Jerry Wexler, gospel greats Ira Tucker and Dottie Rambo, singer-songwriter John Stewart, singer Edie Adams, Four Tops lead singer Levi Stubbs, and Country Music Hall of Fame member Eddy Arnold; other deaths included those of country guitar virtuoso Jerry Reed, blues singer Nappy Brown, revered session drummer Buddy Harman, and steel guitarist Don Helms.
Anniversaries and farewell performances were the highlights of 2008's dance activity. In and around New York City, the centennial of Antony Tudor's birth was variously marked, most prominently in a two-day conference that included symposia arranged by the Antony Tudor Ballet Trust in cooperation with the Juilliard School, where Tudor taught for a number of years, and in a fall City Center season by American Ballet Theatre (ABT). The company's annual spring-summer season at the Metropolitan Opera House opened with a rare performance of The Judgment of Paris, Tudor's acidic and hilarious take on the ancient story, transposed into the decadent 1930s. The company's fall season in the more intimate City Center included the landmark Pillar of Fire and the elegiac The Leaves Are Fading.
The spring season of New York City Ballet (NYCB) celebrated the career of Jerome Robbins, who died in 1998, with performances of 33 of his ballets. NYCB was joined by dancers from other companies for whom Robbins worked, such as the Paris Opéra Ballet, the Royal Ballet (London), and ABT. As a complement to NYCB's season, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts offered a wide-ranging exhibition called "New York Story: Jerome Robbins and His World."
San Francisco Ballet (SFB) started the year with celebratory programs to mark its own 75th anniversary, culminating in the New Works Festival in mid-spring. The event featured the world premieres of 10 works that SFB had commissioned, including ballets by Christopher Wheeldon, Mark Morris, and Paul Taylor. Selections from the festival supplied part of the repertory for SFB's U.S. tour in the fall.
Murad Sezer/APThe Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater celebrated its 50th anniversary. In December—during the troupe's annual monthlong season at City Center—two special premieres were given: Festa Barocca, a full-company work by Mauro Bigonzetti, and Go in Grace, a collaboration between choreographer Hope Boykin and singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock. Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, which had an erratic history (of folding and reopening) during the career of its choreographer and founder, staged a comeback to celebrate its 40th anniversary, with seasons of smaller works at the Dance Theater Workshop in New York City and larger ones at City Center.
To mark her 35th anniversary as dancer and choreographer, Canadian Margie Gillis presented a program called M.Body.7, a group showcase created by Gillis for dancers of a wide range of ages. Laura Dean, long absent from the modern dance scene, was given the prestigious Scripps Award at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C., which celebrated its 75th anniversary.
Several illustrious dancers retired from American stages in 2008. At NYCB two male dancers were saluted: Nikolaj Hübbe, a Dane who departed at the end of the winter season to head the Royal Danish Ballet, where he had begun his career, and Damian Woetzel, who since 2007 had also directed the Vail (Colo.) International Dance Festival. Notable ballerinas who announced their retirement included National Ballet of Canada's (NBC's) Jennifer Fournier, who made something of a second name for herself with the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, and Russian-trained, Georgian-born Nina Ananiashvili, who danced her final Giselle at ABT and announced that she would retire from the company in 2009.
Earlier in the year, Ananiashvili had led the State Ballet of Georgia, a troupe she had directed since 2004, on a U.S. tour. Among the offerings in repertory were some works by Aleksey Ratmansky, the departing artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet. In the fall ABT announced that Ratmansky had signed a five-year contract as artist in residence for the company. Ratmansky's Concerto DSCH was a thrilling display of daring dancing to Shostakovich at NYCB and a highlight of the season's new ballets.
Twyla Tharp worked prominently with both Miami City Ballet and ABT. For Miami she created work to music commissioned from Elvis Costello, called Nightspot, and for ABT she made Rabbit and Rogue to music commissioned from Danny Elfman. In the fall Tharp gave Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet two more premieres, Opus 111 (to music of Johannes Brahms) and Afternoon Ball (to music of Vladimir Martynov). By year's end Tharp had been awarded a Kennedy Center Honor.
Christopher Wheeldon wrapped up his work as resident choreographer of NYCB with a Tchaikovsky-inspired ballet called Rococo Variations. In the fall Wheeldon's own Morphoses played at City Center following its second appearance at the Vail festival. Wheeldon's Stravinsky-inspired Commedia was a highlight of the run.
Houston Ballet's (HB's) artistic director Stanton Welch created new works for his company, including A Doll's House (a story of chaos in a toy shop). Canadian choreographer James Kudelka created for the troupe Little Dancer, a Degas-inspired work set to the music of Philip Glass. The company had to cancel the end of its run of John Cranko's Onegin in the wake of Hurricane Ike. In November, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal went to Houston under HB's auspices, taking two works that were new to the city.
Washington's John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts presented two delightful samplers. In June Protégés II offered a mixed bill presenting the top pupils from prominent ballet academies around the world. Subsequently, Kennedy Center offered a five-day long celebration called Ballet Across America, which showcased companies from all regions of the country.
International visitors to North America included the Kirov (Mariinsky) Ballet in its first-ever season at New York City's relatively small City Center, where the stage could hardly contain the radiant and yet cool Uliana Lopatkina and the charmingly brash Alina Somova; the Russian dancers gave Balanchine's works a new accent. Likewise, the Kirov's dancers in the works of William Forsythe toned down some of the often frantic aspects of the dances. (Forsythe's own Impressing the Czar, in a revival by the Royal Ballet of Flanders, became the featured dance entry at the Lincoln Center Festival.) Lincoln Center's Great Performers series included dances by Michael Clark in a series of all-Stravinsky programs.
The Mark Morris Dance Group offered Morris's new Excursions at Tanglewood, Mass., before presenting Romeo and Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare at the kickoff of a Prokofiev festival at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. The three-act work used a newly discovered original version of Prokofiev's 1930s score, which differed from the work that became widely popular after the composer's revisions of the 1940s.
Among the touring appearances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, most notably a series at DIA:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y., the troupe gave a special performance of the Cunningham's John Cage-inspired Ocean in the Rainbow Quarry of Waite Park, Minn. The Paul Taylor Dance Company added to its own repertory Changes, set to the music of the Mamas and the Papas; the work was made by Taylor to fulfill SFB's anniversary commission.
Events across Canada included Marie Chouinard's Body Remix/Goldberg Variations, which was performed in Victoria, B.C., and Vancouver. Alberta-born Aszure Barton offered two works with Les Ballet Jazz de Montréal during Ottawa's Canada Dance Festival. Toronto was the setting for the final, closing performance of the Danny Grossman Dance Company, which had its beginnings in 1977.
The enduringly popular ballet film The Red Shoes celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2008. Dance on film and video had highlights, most notably in "Dominque Delouche: Ballet Cineaste," a retrospective festival of the Film Society of Lincoln Center; most of the films had been offered on DVD, notably by Video Artists International. Frederick Wiseman's 1995 documentary about ABT was newly released on DVD by Zipporah Films. Opus Arte, often in collaboration with the BBC, put out a number of titles, including the Royal Ballet in The Sleeping Beauty and La Fille mal gardée. Elton John's ballet-themed musical Billy Elliot (based on the 2000 film) went to Broadway in November.
Losses to North American dance included several Canadians: dancer Ian Gibson, dancer and choreographer Leonard Gibson, ballerina and teacher Rosemary Deveson, teacher and choreographer Kay Armstrong, former NBC artistic director David Haber, and British-born ballerina and teacher Joy Camden. Among the Americans who died in 2008 were jazz dancer and choreographer Gus Giordano, ballerina Sallie Wilson, Russian-born ballerina Irina Baronova, tap dancer Jimmy Slyde, and dancer and actress Cyd Charisse, as well as ballerina Ellen Everett, ballet dancer Michael Bjerknes, Russian-born dancer and longtime School of American Ballet teacher Hélène Dudin, Colombian-born modern dancer and choreographer Eleo Pomare, and dance writer Amanda Smith.
The bravest initiative in the European ballet world in 2008 was undoubtedly the opening of a completely new classical company in Spain, a country that for many years had seen its most talented dancers leave for lack of opportunities at home. One of those dancers was Ángel Corella, distinguished principal of American Ballet Theatre; thanks to his drive, determination, and years of planning, the 50-strong Corella Ballet gave its official first performance in Madrid in September with Natalia Makarova's production of Petipa's La Bayadère.
On a sadder note, the death of Maurice Béjart in late 2007 cast a shadow over the entire dance scene. His own company, Béjart Ballet Lausanne, continued to tour under the directorship of dancer and choreographer Gil Roman; one of the programs the company showed was Béjart's last piece, Le Tour du monde en 80 minutes, staged by Roman. Among other groups mounting tribute programs was the Paris Opéra Ballet, featuring Béjart's famous versions of The Firebird and Rite of Spring as well as the powerful Serait-ce la mort?
As usual, the Paris company also presented a new evening-length work by one of its dancers, this time Les Enfants du paradis by José Martinez, set to a commissioned score by Marc-Olivier Dupin. Visitors to Paris included New York City Ballet, with a much fuller and more interesting program than those it had presented earlier in the year in London and Copenhagen. Very high prices in London had dampened sales and elicited complaints from dancegoers; a much more reasonable pricing schedule in Paris was rewarded by full houses and a very enthusiastic reception. There was some disappointment, though, that the company had to cancel Balanchine's Vienna Waltzes—never seen in Paris—when the estate of composer Richard Strauss withheld permission for his music to be used for this ballet outside the United States.
There were major changes in Scandinavia; the National Norwegian Ballet moved into its new home in a fine new opera house in Oslo, and the national companies of Finland, Sweden, and Denmark each had a change of artistic director. Kenneth Greve took over the National Ballet of Finland, producing narrative ballets by Aleksey Ratmansky and John Neumeier and a triple bill of works by Nordic choreographers. Marc Ribaud's first season at the head of the Royal Swedish Ballet included the premiere of a piece by Patrice Bart based on the life of King Gustav III, the Swedish monarch who founded the company. Nikolaj Hübbe's first premiere for the Royal Danish Ballet (RDB) was a new production of Giselle, directed by Hübbe himself in collaboration with Sorella Englund; company ballerina Silja Schandorff and new principal dancer Nehemiah Kish performed the first night. English choreographer Tim Rushton made a new version of Askepot (Cinderella), in which the RDB was joined by members of Rushton's own Danish Dance Theatre; earlier in the season Christopher Wheeldon had made his first work for RDB—The Wanderers, to music by English composer Gavin Bryars. The company made a brief visit to China in connection with the Olympic Games in Beijing following seasons there by the Paris Opéra Ballet and the Royal Ballet (RB) from London.
Belinsky Yuri—Itar-Tass/LandovThe Kirov (Mariinsky) Ballet continued its extensive touring program, visiting U.S. cities as well as sending a smaller group to London with a program of short ballets. At home in St. Petersburg, the troupe premiered The Glass Heart, with choreography by company soloist Kirill Simonov; but for some months the headlines about the company focused on the rumoured departure of its director, Makhar Vaziyev, leading up to the announcement that he had indeed left the company and had been replaced by ballet master Yury Fateyev.
The year started for the Bolshoi Ballet with a major success, Johan Kobborg's production of Bournonville's La Sylphide. Kobborg himself danced the witch, Madge, at one performance, and the young star Natalya Osipova was much admired in the title role. Later in the season Ratmansky's revival of a famous ballet from the Soviet era, The Flames of Paris, combined some elements of the original version with new choreography of his own. Some critics had reservations about the result, but there was praise for Mariya Aleksandrova, and later Osipova, in the leading role. Ratmansky's contract as director of the company expired at the end of the year, after a brilliant if sometimes difficult five-year reign.
Kobborg later reproduced his version of La Sylphide in Switzerland for the Zürich Ballet. In Germany, John Neumeier made a new piece, Verklungene Feste, for his Hamburg Ballet, and Kevin O'Day created Hamlet for the Stuttgart Ballet. In Austria the Ballet of the Vienna State Opera gave its first performances of Kenneth MacMillan's epic Mayerling in October.
Also in October, MacMillan's earlier piece Manon entered the repertory of English National Ballet (ENB). Made for the RB in 1974, it had been performed by companies all over the world but never before by another British company. In the summer ENB presented at the Royal Albert Hall Strictly Gershwin, a spectacular with choreography by Derek Deane; later in the year ENB played a season in its original home, the Royal Festival Hall.
Kim Brandstrup, Christopher Wheeldon, and resident choreographer Wayne McGregor all made new work for the RB, while Jerome Robbins's Dances at a Gathering returned to the repertoire after more than 30 years' absence. Soloists Lauren Cuthbertson and Rupert Pennefather were promoted to principal rank; they joined Edward Watson as the only British dancers at the top level of the company.
Northern Ballet Theatre, one of the most creative companies in the United Kingdom, added two new full-length works to its repertoire: a version of Hamlet by director David Nixon and A Tale of Two Cities by Cathy Marston, a former RB associate who was director of the ballet company in Bern, Switz. Scottish Ballet produced a new Romeo and Juliet, using a pared-down scenario and choreography by Krzystof Pastor. Rambert Dance Company director Mark Baldwin made a new piece, Eternal Light, to a new score by Howard Goodall, for his company's autumn tour; the outstanding Jonathan Goddard, who earlier in the year had become the first modern dancer to win the National Dance Award for Best Male Dancer, joined the company from the Richard Alston group. Alston himself, celebrating 40 years as a choreographer, showed a program that included The Men in My Life, a compilation of pieces he had made for male dancers during his career. Matthew Bourne's latest work had its premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival, followed by a sold-out run in London; but although Dorian Gray seemed a natural subject for him, the piece had a cool reception from the critics.
The dance world was saddened by the deaths in 2008 of Norman Morrice, choreographer and former director of both Ballet Rambert and the RB; Nadia Nerina, South African-born former RB ballerina; the great Bolshoi ballerina Natalya Bessmertnova; Ulf Gadd, Swedish dancer and choreographer; and former RB principal dancer Maryon Lane.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/APControversies about public funding at the end of 2007 spilled into 2008, and the Arts Council was compelled to backtrack on a series of unpopular cuts in its grants to theatres such as the Bush in West London, a powerhouse of new writing for 30 years; the Northcott in Exeter, an important local venue that had already undergone an Arts Council-sponsored refurbishment; and the Bristol Old Vic, the most significant surviving Georgian theatre in the United Kingdom.
Although the funding pot was increased by 8% (over a three-year period) to a total of £318 million (about $560 million), 185 organizations had their grants cut completely, and 27 saw their subsidies reduced. The Arts Council had detected a cultural shift toward what was disparagingly referred to as "clowns on stilts" theatre and site-specific ventures in nontraditional venues, but as playwright David Edgar pointed out in a powerful polemic, the increased diversity brought by Asian and Afro-Caribbean playwrights was almost entirely text-based.
A commonly voiced complaint was that musicals were pushing the "straight play" out of the West End, though it was generally overlooked that the commercial West End—unlike the National Theatre (NT) or any other government-subsidized organization—had no obligation toward new drama. At any rate, new plays were rife on the fringe and in venues such as the Almeida, the Young Vic, and the Royal Court.
Still, the West End came up with three highly entertaining new dramas: Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage, translated by Christopher Hampton and starring Ralph Fiennes and Tamsin Greig in a battle of parents over their respective children; television stars Kris Marshall and Joanna Page in Neil LaBute's brilliant Fat Pig, a scabrous study in loyalty, love, and obesity; and Joanna Murray-Smith's The Female of the Species, in which Dame Eileen Atkins reveled in a performance widely taken to be a satiric portrait of the feminist academic Germaine Greer—who, without seeing it, denounced the play and its author. Atkins warmed up for this performance with a cutting comic display in the Theatre Royal, Haymarket's revival by Jonathan Kent of Edward Bond's The Sea, a brilliant comedy that combined elements of Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring and Shakespeare's The Tempest.
The Haymarket's adventurous season concluded with a slightly misfired musical, Marguerite, by Michel Legrand and the Les Misérables team of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg with Jonathan Kent. Ruthie Henshall gave her all as the eponymous heroine in World War II France, caught in a web of romance and espionage, but the show was not much of a success. Compared with Trevor Nunn's disastrous new version of Gone with the Wind, though, perhaps it was a triumph after all.
Audiences settled more happily for the irresistible Broadway import, recast for London, of Jersey Boys and found some kind of solace in a new musical version of Isabel Allende's novel of swash and buckle and derring-do, Zorro; Matt Rawle was outstanding as the hero, even if the songs by the Gipsy Kings were of average quality. The ersatz genre of the jukebox musical was represented by Never Forget—a tribute show to the British boy band Take That—and by a wonderful reimagining and staging of Jimmy Cliff's 1972 reggae film, The Harder They Come, which did not find the audience it merited.
The West End was galvanized by two events. The first was director Emma Rice's adaptation of the 1946 David Lean film Brief Encounter (itself based on Noel Coward's one-act Still Life) as a brilliant mixed-media "happening"—video, fluid stage locations, and vaudeville—in the cinema on the Haymarket where Lean's film had received its premiere. Producer David Pugh worked in collaboration with Kneehigh, one of the United Kingdom's most innovative companies, which also performed at the NT—e.g., in War Horse (2007).
The second jolt was provided by the Donmar Warehouse's launching of a West End season at Cameron Mackintosh's magnificently refurbished Wyndham's Theatre on Charing Cross Road. The Donmar continued to prosper at its home base in Covent Garden, with glorious revivals of Pam Gems's Piaf starring Elena Roger (it moved into the Vaudeville for a season) and Enid Bagnold's 1956 The Chalk Garden (also slated for possible transfer, starring Margaret Tyzack and Penelope Wilton). Donmar artistic director Michael Grandage launched a phenomenally interesting season with Kenneth Branagh in the title role of Chekhov's Ivanov, in a new version by Tom Stoppard, and with Sir Derek Jacobi as Malvolio in Twelfth Night.
Branagh's return to the London stage after a five-year absence was triumphant. The actor sought no sympathy as a gentleman farmer swimming in debts and depression while his Jewish wife—to whom he is unfaithful and verbally abusive—dies of tuberculosis. The wife was played with pellucid beauty by Gina McKee, but the whole company bristled with spirit and intelligence, from Lorcan Cranitch's impetuous estate manager and Kevin R. McNally's alcoholic neighbour right through to Andrea Riseborough's startling ingenue and Sylvestra Le Touzel's rapacious social climber.
Grandage—whose scheduled NT debut, directing Georg Büchner's Danton's Death, was delayed in 2008—imported his familiar high-level production values from his home base in the little 225-seat Donmar Warehouse; the dilapidated designs of Christopher Oram, the exquisite lighting of Paule Constable, and the gloriously discreet sound track of Adam Cork all proclaimed the new technical golden age in the British theatre.
The RSC scored heavily with its season of Shakespeare's history plays at north London's Roundhouse. The season in Stratford—where the Courtyard proved a great success as a temporary home while the main theatre was being rebuilt across the road—had mixed success: The Merchant of Venice was generally derided, and The Taming of the Shrew starred two unattractive actors and was burdened by a cumbersome "concept." However, David Tennant—best known as Doctor Who on BBC television—was outstanding both as Hamlet and as Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost, in productions directed by Gregory Doran.
The best overall Shakespeare work was at the Globe on the river in Southwark, where David Calder gave a marvelously moving King Lear; hot new director Jonathan Munby gave new life and spring to A Midsummer Night's Dream; and Christopher Luscombe masterminded a delectable production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, with Serena Evans and Sarah Woodward as the jolly scheming spouses.
There were several other notable new plays. The Globe, surprisingly, came up with Ché Walker's The Frontline, which was a contemporary Ben Jonson-style report from the muddle of drug-infested Camden Town, and the Royal Court garnered raves for American playwright Christopher Shinn's Now or Later, in which a Democratic presidential candidate's final push to victory is nearly sabotaged by his son's behaviour. Eddie Redmayne, a rising star, played the freckle-faced transgressor.
At the NT an ongoing success story continued under artistic director Nicholas Hytner (who confirmed that he would stay on at least until London hosted the Olympic Games in 2012). There were tremendous new plays from Simon Stephens and Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Stephens's was Harper Regan, an urban odyssey not dissimilar to Mike Leigh's defining movie Naked (in which the brilliant NT actress Lesley Sharp, who played Harper, also appeared), while Lenkiewicz's Her Naked Skin was directed by Howard Davies and featured Lesley Manville and newcomer Jemima Rooper as a lesbian couple highlighted against the turmoil of the Edwardian suffrage movement.
The NT also presented Howard Brenton's intriguing chronicle play about former prime minister Harold MacMillan, Never So Good, with Jeremy Irons in the lead; a magisterial revival of Shaw's Major Barbara with Simon Russell Beale and Clare Higgins; a lively version of Thomas Middleton's Jacobean shocker The Revenger's Tragedy, with Rory Kinnear (touted as the NT's next Hamlet) entering the underworld of a sleazy nightclub; and Ralph Fiennes as Oedipus in Jonathan Kent's impressively hieratic revival of Sophocles' tragedy, in a new version by Irish playwright Frank McGuinness, with Fiennes in imposing form and an all-male chorus given much individual character and speeches set to music by Jonathan Dove.
The very best new plays of the year, however, were off the beaten track. Philip Ridley's Piranha Heights at the Soho Theatre was a stunning account of disastrous interracial dysfunctional relationships at the top of an East London high rise, and Anthony Neilson's Relocated in the Royal Court's upstairs studio was a creepy thriller of false accusation and secret fears in the context of mounting public hysteria over child abuse. Sam Shepard's Kicking a Dead Horse at the Almeida Theatre, though critically lambasted, was a far-from-insignificant Wild West version of Beckett's Happy Days, with Stephen Rea, one of Shepard's most loyal and perceptive interpreters, charting his character's comic cultural dilemma by the side of his own supine equine.
The Almeida under Michael Attenborough had another good year, with a brilliant revival of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming; an extraordinary, highly charged theatrical presentation of Stephen Adly Guirgis's The Last Days of Judas Iscariot from Philip Seymour Hoffman's LAByrinth company (recast with local actors); and an insidious, compelling revival by Anthony Page of Ibsen's Rosmersholm starring Helen McCrory and Paul Hilton.
It was the 50th anniversary year of Pinter's The Birthday Party, and a fine production was duly given at the Lyric in Hammersmith, where the play had received its premiere; the staging was timely, in light of Pinter's death at the end of the year. The Bite program at the Barbican celebrated its 10th anniversary with a particularly rich series headed by Robert Lepage's nine-hour, nine-play masterpiece Lipsynch. Kevin Spacey's Old Vic was electrified by his double act with Jeff Goldblum in David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, followed by Matthew Warchus's glorious revival of Alan Ayckbourn's famous trilogy of comedies, The Norman Conquests, in a stunningly reconfigured auditorium.
Across the road the Young Vic offered a fascinating revival of Thomas Babe's A Prayer for My Daughter, which stood up well. The house maintained a high profile with a brilliantly theatrical revival by Richard Jones of Bertolt Brecht's The Good Soul of Szechuan (Jane Horrocks opened valiantly in the title role shortly after the real-life natural disasters in that Chinese province) and an overpowering staging of Kurt Weill's Street Scene, given too short a run but unquestionably one of the outstanding shows of the year.
The Menier Chocolate Factory marked time with revivals of old Broadway musicals. Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein's La Cage aux folles was done well, with Douglas Hodge and Philip Quast as the sentimental lovers (Denis Lawson replaced Quast when the show transferred to the Playhouse in October). Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager's They're Playing Our Song featured Connie Fisher, chosen in 2006 by television viewers to play Maria in The Sound of Music, but she failed to enhance her leading-lady status in the role of a ditsy lyricist.
Liverpool was designated the European Capital of Culture, and the sprawling, diverse drama program included a giant mechanical spider crawling all over the office buildings in the city centre and a King Lear in which Pete Postlethwaite renewed his early roots at the Everyman Theatre. The Edinburgh Festival was a bit of a washout—it rained incessantly for three weeks—though everyone loved the raunchy vaudeville La Clique, which moved to London at the Hippodrome (formerly the Talk of the Town). The Dublin Theatre Festival hosted Vanessa Redgrave in her startling NT performance (seen in 2007 on Broadway) as Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking and presented a new dance drama, Dodgems, set on a real fairground bumper-car track.
Sara Krulwich—The New York Times/ReduxThe radical economic downturn in the U.S. during the closing months of 2008 sent a chill through both the commercial and the nonprofit sectors of the American theatre. For Broadway the consequences were immediate: holiday tourism slumped; investment capital for all but the safest new projects went south; regular theatergoers slammed their wallets shut; and closing notices were posted in November and December for a spate of shows—including such ostensibly enduring hits as the musical Hairspray, slated to close in January 2009 after a six-year run, and Tony Award winners Spamalot and Spring Awakening—that had been expected to run for months, even years, into the future.
The nation's nonprofit regional theatres, more insulated from the slump's immediate effects by multiseason support from foundations and corporate givers, nevertheless shifted into crisis mode as well, recognizing that belt-tightening loomed on the horizon. The ominous mood was further darkened by the closing of at least four major theatre organizations across the country, including the influential but debt-ridden 30-year-old Theatre de la Jeune Lune of Minneapolis, Minn., and once-viable resident companies in Milwaukee, Wis., Stamford, Conn., and San Jose, Calif.
Hard times were nothing new for the theatre business, of course, and the industry took heart late in the year as the speeches and policy positions of President-elect Barack Obama offered hope that the health of the arts in general—and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in particular—would be high on the coming administration's agenda.
The economic trepidation in some circles was matched by a proud sense of accomplishment in others. Broadway's alarming losses were compensated for, artistically at least, by superb productions of two American classics of the post-World War II era—the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, staged at Lincoln Center Theater with characteristic élan by Bartlett Sher (now in his eighth year as artistic director of Seattle's Intiman Theatre), and Arthur Miller's 1947 drama All My Sons, which received a revelatory experimental treatment from British director Simon McBurney. Working with a cast led by John Lithgow, McBurney, the moving force behind the acclaimed London-based ensemble Complicite, employed Brechtian presentation and cinematic flourishes that unleashed a strain of raw power in Miller's warhorse of a play that more conventional productions had failed to tap. (South Pacific more or less swept the 2008 Tony Awards, with seven wins, including awards for direction and design; the Miller revival would be up for award consideration in 2009.)
It was a big year for another American theatrical icon, Edward Albee, who turned 80 on March 12. Among three major productions of his work in New York City and environs during the year were an intriguing self-directed revival of his absurdist shorts The Sandbox (1959) and The American Dream (1961) and the debut at Princeton, N.J.'s McCarter Theatre Center of Me, Myself, and I, an uncharacteristically sunny (and typically punny) treatment of family dysfunction.
The development of new plays continued to receive widespread support in 2008, via such efforts as a new NEA-funded initiative administrated by Arena Stage of Washington, D.C.; the newly established Yale Center for New Theatre in New Haven, Conn., underwritten by a $2.8 million Robina Foundation grant; the Public LAB of New York City's Public Theater, flush with $2.7 million from the Mellon Foundation; and such new-play standard-bearers as the Sundance Institute of Utah, Minneapolis's Playwrights' Center, and New York's New Dramatists. Up-and-comers Tarell Alvin McCraney (Wig Out), Shelia Callaghan (Dead City), Itamar Moses (The Four of Us), and Julie Marie Myatt (Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter) were among the new generation of writers to watch.
One of the most talked-about new plays of the season was Octavio Solis's Lydia, a dark, poetic melodrama of complex family relationships and sexual violence, set in the writer's native border town of El Paso, Texas. Commissioned and premiered by the Denver Center Theatre Company, Lydia was headed for high-profile productions in Los Angeles, New Haven, Conn., and elsewhere.
All 10 of the late August Wilson's 20th-century-cycle plays were mounted in chronological order of setting at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in March and April, under the overall supervision of Kenny Leon, artistic director of True Colors Theatre Company of Atlanta, Ga. Aiming to present the works "as if they were cut from the same cloth," Leon shared directorial duties with Wilson specialists Israel Hicks, Todd Kreidler, Gordon Davidson, Derrick Sanders, and Lou Bellamy.
Major job changes on the American scene included a virtual round-robin of artistic directorships in Massachusetts: Diane Paulus, whose Broadway-bound Shakespeare in the Park revival of Hair was a sensation in New York, took the reins of the influential American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., and Peter DuBois moved from his associate director slot at the Public Theatre to the top job at Boston's Huntington Theatre Company. The Huntington's Nicholas Martin, hitting his stride at 70, moved northwest to head the summer-season Williamstown Theatre Festival.
In Canada the much-discussed restructuring of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival went shockingly awry; Marti Maraden and Don Shipley, two members of the three-pronged leadership team that had been announced the previous year, abruptly backed out in March before their tenure began, leaving the American director Des McAnuff as sole head. McAnuff took on Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra as well as Romeo and Juliet and imported Stratford's first international production, Deutsches Theater of Berlin's already-well-traveled Emilia Galotti. Montreal-based auteur Robert Lepage, who had received the 2007 Europe Theatre Prize, continued to impress audiences and critics around the world with his lavishly visual high-tech interpretation of Hector Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust, which impressed audiences and critics at New York City's Metropolitan Opera and elsewhere.
Fringe festivals continued to thrive in major Canadian cities. Toronto's version marked its 20th anniversary by beginning a Next Stage fest-within-a-fest, with selected participants who had already proved themselves on the national fringe circuit (rather than being programmed by the usual lottery-selection process). These handpicked "cream of the crop" shows—in tandem with the festival's on-site heated beer tent—attracted a reported 4,500 spectators in chilly January.
Theatre figures who died during 2008 included actress Estelle Getty, better known for her role in TV's Golden Girls than for her considerable accomplishments in Broadway and Off-Broadway productions; playwright William Gibson, author of The Miracle Worker and Two for the Seesaw; and director and master teacher Paul Sills, a proponent of theatre games invented by his mother, Viola Spolin, and leader of Chicago's ragtag Compass Players, precursor of the comedy troupe Second City; other losses included Robert Alexander, creator of the Living Stage Theatre Company, which served for more than 30 years as the community outreach arm of D.C.'s Arena Stage; actress and playwright Oni Faida Lampley; Montreal-born Richard Monette, who led Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival for 14 seasons; and Barbara Ann Teer, founder of the National Black Theatre of Harlem.
(For selected international film awards in 2008, see below.)
Warner Bros./Everett CollectionIn a year without Harry Potter, other Hollywood franchises filled the cinemas with plenty of fantasy and excitement. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull gave enjoyable proof that time really can stand still; no bones creaked as director Steven Spielberg and his star Harrison Ford resumed the breezy adventure series for the first time since 1989. The tone of Spielberg's sequel contrasted sharply with the dark complexities and anguish of Christopher Nolan's second Batman adventure with Christian Bale, The Dark Knight—a film given a frisson all its own by the death in January of Heath Ledger, cast as the frighteningly maniacal Joker, the most evil of Batman's adversaries.
Daniel Craig returned as James Bond in Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster), a cold film so pumped up for action that characters scarcely had room to breathe. Livelier action-adventure was available in Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army, a feast of rococo images and humour, and the Marvel Comics spin-off Iron Man (Jon Favreau), lifted out of the genre pile by the intense performance of Robert Downey, Jr., as the superhero thrust into the front line against foreign foes of the United States. Klaatu, the extraterrestrial ambassador from the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, returned in the form of Keanu Reeves in Scott Derrickson's lavish but unimaginative remake.
The year's political dramas were chiefly confined to the real world and to the American presidential elections. Still, it was hard to ignore Oliver Stone's W., a surprisingly judicial treatment of the presidency and early years of George W. Bush, boisterously impersonated by Josh Brolin. Ron Howard's film of Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon extracted much human interest from the famous 1977 television meeting between interviewer David Frost (Michael Sheen) and disgraced former president Richard M. Nixon (Frank Langella). On the "war on terrorism" front, Ridley Scott's Body of Lies made superficial attempts to treat CIA antiterrorist operations realistically, but the film was essentially popcorn fodder.
Enough thoughtful quality product kept audiences' brains engaged. Steven Soderbergh went overboard with ambition in Che, an epic two-part biography of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara; although the film was weak as drama, it was bolstered by Benicio Del Toro's central performance (he won the best actor prize at the Cannes Festival). Mickey Rourke galvanized Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler with his comeback performance as a faded wrestler trying to get back on top. In Changeling, featuring Angelina Jolie, Clint Eastwood directed one of his most finely controlled and vibrant films; it was inspired by a true story of murder and deception in Los Angeles in the 1920s. Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes's scrupulous adaptation of Richard Yates's 1961 novel, locked the viewer into American suburbia in the 1950s; Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet excelled as the married couple unable to live happily ever after. The hardships of Brad Pitt proved longer and stranger in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher's smoothly accomplished film about a man who ages backward from wizened youth to unlined old age.
After several years of small-scale experimentation, director Gus Van Sant moved closer to the mainstream with Milk, a brilliantly observed account of the public career in the 1970s of Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay politicians in the United States. Sean Penn (an unorthodox casting choice) lit up the film with his mischief and warmth. John Patrick Shanley's version of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt featured a strident Meryl Streep as the Roman Catholic-school nun who spreads suspicions about Philip Seymour Hoffman's priest, but the play's power remained. British director Danny Boyle showed fizz galore in Slumdog Millionaire, a bustling film about a Mumbai (Bombay) street kid accused of having cheated on a TV show.
In the animation field, the best undoubtedly was WALL∙E (Andrew Stanton), Pixar's tale of robot love on an Earth trashed and deserted by humans. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath) was the rare animation sequel that was actually better than the original. Teenage viewers rushed to see Zac Efron in High School Musical 3: Senior Year (Kenny Ortega). This cinema spin-off from the television-movie phenomenon was typically spirited and well staged, but it offered little dramatic nourishment.
Michael Patrick King's film Sex and the City was thinly plotted, but four years after the television comedy series ended, fans were still happy to see Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and her fellow New Yorkers, now in their 40s, talk about their lives and dreams. Bigger audiences across the world flocked to Mamma Mia!, Phyllida Lloyd's version of the upbeat stage musical garlanded with ABBA songs; it was the year's one resounding feel-good film. Vicky Cristina Barcelona, set in Spain, was a funny Woody Allen movie about sexual attraction, sparked into extra heat by the teaming of Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz. Wider audiences enjoyed Jason Segel and Kristen Bell in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Nicholas Stoller)—a comedy that was rude one minute and sweet the next (in the current fashion) but that was dispatched with well-drawn characters. Two giants in the film industry, Paul Newman and Charlton Heston, died during the year.
No British film discomfited or transfixed the viewer as much as Hunger, the first feature by the video artist Steve McQueen, which described with eloquent visual detail the last weeks of the Irish Republican Bobby Sands in 1981 as he starved himself to death in prison. Michael Fassbender's performance was courageous and unflinching. Mike Leigh, known for exploring urban misery, lightened his mood for Happy-Go-Lucky, an ambling comedy about the daily whirl of a chattering, optimistic schoolteacher. Shane Meadows, another individualistic chronicler of modern Britain, offered Somers Town, the natural and funny tale of a cross-cultural teenage friendship. Director Terence Davies returned with Of Time and the City, a modest film essay about his home city, Liverpool.
Among "heritage" films, Julian Jarrold's Brideshead Revisited bathed the viewer in 1920s nostalgia; though details of Evelyn Waugh's revered novel were changed, the film kept enough of its spirit. Australian director Stephan Elliott's jazzy spin on Noël Coward's play Easy Virtue met with a mixed reception, as did The Edge of Love (John Maybury), a stylistically confused drama about the wartime loves of 20th-century poet Dylan Thomas. History received a contemporary kick in The Other Boleyn Girl (Justin Chadwick), which featured Scarlett Johansson as Mary, sister of Anne Boleyn. Lavish settings and Keira Knightley's beauty dominated another American co-production, The Duchess; unfortunately, the drama about the 18th-century duchess of Devonshire lacked meat and wasted the talents of a promising director, Saul Dibb.
Among films set in the present, Noel Clarke's Adulthood, a sequel to the earlier Kidulthood (2006; directed by Menhaj Huda, written by Clarke), pitched its antiviolence story at the level of a scream, but it proved a hit with British youth pleased to see their own lives mirrored on the screen. The powerful The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Mark Herman), adapted from John Boyne's novel, viewed the Holocaust through the eyes of the young son of a concentration camp commandant. Asa Butterfield's performance as the boy was exceptional.
No film could top the ambition, length, or flamboyance of Baz Luhrmann's Australia—165 minutes of colourful melodrama, stunning landscapes, and political breast-beating wrapped around a plot about Nicole Kidman's aristocratic English outsider who is trying to hold on to her late husband's land. Brandon Walters's mixed-race child supplied the film's political conscience and best performance; Hugh Jackman's cattle drover provided pin-up appeal. On a much smaller scale, Elissa Down's The Black Balloon was impressive for its caring treatment of the pressures of living with an autistic sibling. New Zealand's film scene remained quiet.
From Canada, Atom Egoyan's Adoration, one of the director's typically multilayered dramas, centred on an orphaned high-school student trying to make sense of his life and the dangerous world. In Ce qu'il faut pour vivre (The Necessities of Life), Benoît Pilon sensitively explored the experiences of an Inuit tuberculosis sufferer in a Quebec City hospital.
IFC Films/Everett CollectionA looming global recession did nothing to stop the French industry from spending $115 million, its largest-ever sum for a film, on Astérix aux Jeux Olympiques. French critics tore Frédéric Forestier and Thomas Langmann's comedy to shreds, but they found enough to praise elsewhere. Adapted from François Bégaudeau's memoir, Laurent Cantet's Entre les murs (The Class), the Palme d'Or winner at the Cannes Festival, swept the viewer into the daily life of garrulous, obstreperous Parisian students and their junior-high-school teacher (convincingly played by Bégaudeau himself). Arnaud Desplechin, a specialist in wayward epics of introverted talk, tightened his grip somewhat in Un Conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale), which featured Catherine Deneuve as a dysfunctional family's matriarch who needs a bone marrow transplant. The unexpected French hit of the year was Dany Boon's Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks), a comedy that made fun of regional prejudices. Philippe Claudel's Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've Loved You So Long) told the story of two sisters reconnecting after a gap of 15 years; the director and his actors, Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein, shared the pleasant knack of finding big resonances in small things. A tougher view of life prevailed in Les Hauts Murs, Christian Faure's unflinching drama based on the true story of a teenage boy desperate to escape from an imprisoning orphanage.
Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne pursued their customary spare aesthetic in Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna's Silence), a brooding account of a young Albanian woman (brilliantly played by Arta Dobroshi) caught in a deadly immigration scam. Bouli Lanners's Eldorado offered absurdist comedy with melancholy touches. Bolder entertainment came from Joachim Lafosse's Élève libre (Private Lessons), a subversive comedy about a naive teenager and his dangerously sophisticated summer tutor.
Two Italian films displayed fresh energy and a new confidence about wading into the country's political life. Matteo Garrone's Gomorra (Gomorrah), based on a best-selling exposé, used a chilling documentary approach to strip the glamour from Mafia crime in Naples; the film won the Grand Prix at Cannes. Paolo Sorrentino's jaunty Il divo presented the internecine career of the politician Guilio Andreotti, wickedly portrayed by Toni Servillo. Struggling immigrants came under a sophisticated spotlight in Francesco Munzi's Il resto della notte (The Rest of the Night); the bare life of a Sardinian shepherd took centre stage in Sonetàula (Salvatore Mereu), a film that was a victory for Italian neorealism and the painterly, measured image.
In Germany, Uli Edel's Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (The Baader Meinhof Complex) reactivated painful memories of the Red Army Faction's revolutionary terrorism in the 1960s and '70s. Nikolai Müllerschön's Der Rote Baron (The Red Baron), a biography of the World War I pilot Baron Manfred von Richthofen, looked good but suffered from a poor script. Dennis Gansel's Die Welle tracked the dangerous progress of a school course in fascist politics. In the thriller Jerichow, director Christian Petzold displayed his usual knack for tense psychological drama.
Two Spanish films treated Basque terrorism. Manuel Guitérrez Aragón's Todos estamos invitados painted a flawed but lively portrait of a society accustomed to violence; Jaime Rosales's more forbidding Tiro en la cabeza used formal experimentation to investigate politics in the abstract.
Among Scandinavian countries, Denmark scored with Flammen & citronen (Flame & Citron), Ole Christian Madsen's subtle treatment of life and intrigue during the Nazi occupation. The country's immigrant communities came under the spotlight in Omar Shargawi's intense thriller Gå med fred Jamil (Go with Peace Jamil) and Natasha Arthy's high-quality teenage drama Fighter, which featured a Turkish immigrant family and the martial art kung fu. Painstaking visual craftsmanship stamped the Swedish film Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick (Everlasting Moments), Jan Troell's true story of a dedicated family woman who gradually discovers her gift for photography. Lacerating relationships dominated Himlens hjärta, Simon Staho's raw drama about two couples led toward danger by a dinner-party discussion about adultery. In O'Horten, the slight story of a train engineer at a loss in retirement, Norwegian director Bent Hamer offered another of his offbeat humanistic comedies.
Turkey's cinema industry had a bustling year. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's family drama Uc maymun (Three Monkeys) offered little relief from the clouds of doom hovering over the characters, but the director's grip was impressive; the film won the Cannes Festival's best director prize. Tatil kitabi (Summer Book), from a new director, Seyfi Teoman, was a far friendlier film, deftly illuminating ordinary lives through its story of a family in the agricultural provinces. Another impressive talent emerged in Ozcan Alper's Sonbahar (Autumn), a searching drama about a political prisoner's return home. Veteran actress Tsilla Chelton lent backbone and humour to Pandoranin kutusu (Pandora's Box), Yesim Ustaoglu's film about a country matriarch with Alzheimer disease.
Serbia's biggest domestic hit was Uros Stojanovic's Carlston za Ognjenku (Tears for Sale), an engaging black comedy about two sisters from a war-devastated mountain village who are desperate to find a virile male. Gritty realism dominated the Russian Vse umrut, a ya ostanus (Everybody Dies but Me), Valeriya Gay Germanika's urgent portrait of troubled adolescents in the Moscow suburbs. In Kazakhstan documentary maker Sergey Dvortsevoy made a striking feature debut with Tulpan, a Cannes prizewinner that explored the lives of nomadic shepherds with a potent blend of landscape, humour, and ethnographic detail.
Little of note emerged from Hungary, though Bela Paczolay's Kalandorok ("Adventurers") sent three family members on a road trip with speed and a twist of personality. In the Czech Republic, Petr Zelenka's sophisticated Karamazovi (The Karamazov Brothers) viewed Dostoevsky's novel through various fancy mirrors, including scenes from a powerful stage production. The biggest hit in the Slovak language was Muzika ("Music") by Juraj Nvota, a sad-funny sex comedy set in the 1970s. Slovakia's (and the Czech Republic's) most commercially successful film was Báthory (Juraj Jakubisko), an unwieldy but colourful English-language co-production, featuring Anna Friel as the legendary Hungarian countess.
In Poland veteran director Andrzej Wajda returned after a five-year gap with Katyn (2007), a muted account of the Soviet massacre in 1940 of Polish army officers, intellectuals, and prisoners of war. More satisfying was Cztery noce z Anna (Four Nights with Anna), Jerzy Skolimowski's first work in 17 years; this small-scale film was nourished by the director's feeling for obsessive love and the oddities of human behaviour. Malgorzata Szumowska's German co-production 33 sceny z zycia (33 Scenes from Life) peered into its heroine's troubled life with sometimes uncomfortable dedication.
No Latin American product enjoyed a grander showcase than Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles's English-language production Blindness, which opened the Cannes Festival. A plainer visual style might have drawn audiences closer to the characters from José Saramago's novel, who are trapped in a degrading world and collectively going blind. Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas found an audience with Linha de passe, a slight but humane film about four brothers in São Paulo trying to make their way honestly. In Os desafinados Walter Lima, Jr., a veteran of Brazil's Cinema Novo movement, delivered an affectionate if messy tribute to the bossa nova music boom. No affection warmed José Padilha's Tropa de elite, a high-pressured and violent celebration of Brazil's military police. The film won the Berlin festival's top prize, the Golden Bear.
In Mexico Enrique Rivero made a notable directing debut with Parque vía, a low-key drama about a caretaker's fragile solitary life. Francisco Franco, from the theatre, was revealed as another director to watch with his sharply etched Quemar las naves, excellent in its depiction of a bourgeois family under pressure. In further signs of the region's health, impressive new directors also surfaced in Costa Rica (Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez, with El camino), Uruguay (Federico Veiroj, with Acné, a vivid portrait of adolescent pangs), and Chile, where José Luis Torres Leiva displayed a master's hand in El cielo, la tierra, y la lluvia, a bracing mood piece about isolated lives.
In Argentina cult director Lisandro Alonso moved closer to mainstream tastes with Liverpool, a subtly textured drama about a returning sailor haunted by his past. Prison claustrophobia was vividly depicted in Pablo Trapero's Leonera (Lion's Den), and the film was further strengthened by Martina Gusman's performance as a university student fated to give birth in prison. Elegant reflections and regret dominated La ventana (The Window), Carlos Sorin's marvelously atmospheric film about an aged aristocrat who is waiting for the return of a long-lost son.
Sony Pictures Classics/Everett CollectionNo film from the region tested audiences' resolve more than Asbe du-pa (Two-Legged Horse), from the young Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf. Through stark images the film showed an Afghan youth hired to carry about on his back a crippled boy who is bent on humiliating him. Dramas featuring social issues, an Iranian specialty, included 3 zan (3 Women), Manijeh Hekmat's naturalistic study of women searching for their roots and identities, and Majid Majidi's Avaze gonjeshk-ha ("The Song of Sparrows"), an imperfect but humane story that pits rural verities against Tehran's modern whirlwind. Shot with great care, Panahbarkhoda Rezaee's Cheraghi dar meh ("A Light in the Fog") placed the hard life of a widow under a microscope. Cult director Abbas Kiarostami experimented in Shirin, which consists of the reactions on 113 female faces—112 Iranian actresses, plus Juliette Binoche—to a 12th-century Persian play performed offscreen. The film was for connoisseurs only.
Israel generated the extraordinary and powerful animated film Vals im Bashir (Waltz with Bashir), Ari Folman's often hallucinatory recollection of his experiences as a soldier during Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In Etz Limon (Lemon Tree), Eran Riklis, director of the 1991 hit Gmar Gavi'a ("Cup Final"), renewed his ability to make intelligent entertainment out of the Israeli-Palestinian border conflict. Guy Nattiv and Erez Tadmor also scored well with Zarim (Strangers), a roving tale of star-crossed love.
Commerce rather than art continued to dominate India's teeming film industry. Among Hindi costume spectaculars, Ashutosh Gowariker's Jodhaa Akbar led the field in star power, with Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan top-billed as a 16th-century Muslim emperor and a Hindu princess who are engaged in a legendary romance. For once, character portrayals mattered more than big battles. Veteran director Shyam Benegal also put characters first in Mahadev ka Sajjanpur (Welcome to Sajjanpur), a warmly textured kaleidoscope of life in a central Indian village. The year also brought Roadside Romeo, directed by Jugal Hansraj—the first installment of a proposed series of Indian animated features co-produced with Walt Disney Pictures. The film, about the street adventures of a spoiled Mumbai dog, broke no boundaries, but children left satisfied.
Costing $80 million, John Woo's Chinese production Chi bi (Red Cliff) entered the record books as the most expensive film made to date in the Chinese language. The first segment of a two-part historical epic set during the unstable ancient period of the Three Kingdoms, it balanced tough action scenes with convincing characters, a trick also managed by Peter Chan's Tau ming chong (The Warlords). Director Gao Qunshu showed a bright talent for realism in his thoughtful thriller Qian jun yi fa ("Old Fish"); Cao Baoping revealed promise with Li mi de cai xiang (The Equation of Love and Death), a teasing diversion that intertwines a drug crime with three strangers seeking love.
South Korea maintained its furious level of production. Director Kim Ji Woon outdid himself with a strenuous spaghetti western imitation, Joheunnom nabbeunnom isanghannom (The Good, the Bad, and the Weird). Na Hong Jin's Chugyeogja (The Chaser) supplied serial-killer thrills wrapped up in social criticism. Fans of subtler fare could enjoy Hong Sang Soo's Bam gua nat ("Night and Day"), a surreal-tinged disquisition on self-delusion and the play between the sexes.
Japan's art cinema jewel was Hirokazu Koreeda's Aruitemo aruitemo (Even if You Walk and Walk), a deceptively modest slice of life, alert to every criss-crossing dynamic inside a dysfunctional family. Cheerful and cheeky, Koji Hagiuda's Kodomo no kodomo ("Child by Children") spun a tale about a pregnant 11-year-old girl without giving in to sensationalism.
South Africa delivered three notable films. Ralph Ziman's Jerusalema used glossy packaging and directorial force to make something distinctive from a stereotyped underworld story. The strengths of Anthony Fabian's Skin, a co-production between South Africa and the United Kingdom, lay in the straightforward treatment of its true story about a girl with black skin who was born to white parents. Steve Jacobs's Disgrace, co-produced with Australia, carved sturdy drama from J.M. Coetzee's novel; the film featured John Malkovich as a dissolute Cape Town academic who confronts the upheavals of South Africa and of his own soul.
Several major documentaries of 2008 addressed topics related to the war in Iraq. Alex Gibney's Academy Award-winning Taxi to the Dark Side used a young Afghan's story to examine controversial techniques used to elicit confessions from prisoners. Errol Morris directed Standard Operating Procedure, which looked into the prisoner-abuse scandal of 2004 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; the film received the Jury Grand Prize at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival.
Trouble the Water, directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, won the Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, among other awards. The film explored the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Flow: For Love of Water, directed by Irena Salina, examined the world's water crisis. Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze (2007) chronicled the effects on the populace of the massive Three Gorges Dam project. The film received the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
The subject of Nerdcore Rising, by Iranian American comedian Negin Farsad, was a form of hip-hop whose lyrics centred on nerd culture. The film was screened at events across the United States.
British filmmaker James Marsh directed Man on Wire, a chronicle of tightrope walker Philippe Petit's infamous journey in 1974 between the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The work won the Jury Prize for World Cinema and the World Cinema Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, where the Documentary Directing Award was received by Nanette Burstein for American Teen, a film about high-school seniors in Warsaw, Ind.
A list of selected international film awards in 2008 is provided in the table.
International film awards 2008
International Film Awards 2008 Golden Globes, awarded in Beverly Hills, California, in January 2008 Best drama Atonement (U.K./France; director, Joe Wright) Best musical or comedy Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (U.S./U.K.; director, Tim Burton) Best director Julian Schnabel (Le Scaphandre et le papillon [The Diving Bell and the Butterfly], France/U.S.) Best actress, drama Julie Christie (Away from Her, Canada) Best actor, drama Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood, U.S.) Best actress, musical or comedy Marion Cotillard (La Môme [The Passionate Life of Edith Piaf; La Vie en rose], France/U.K./Czech Republic) Best actor, musical or comedy Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, U.S./U.K.) Best foreign-language film Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) (France/U.S.; director, Julian Schnabel) Sundance Film Festival, awarded in Park City, Utah, in January 2008 Grand Jury Prize, dramatic film Frozen River (U.S.; director, Courtney Hunt) Grand Jury Prize, documentary Trouble the Water (U.S.; directors, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin) Audience Award, dramatic film The Wackness (U.S.; director, Jonathan Levine) Audience Award, documentary Fields of Fuel (U.S.; director, Josh Tickell) World Cinema Jury Prize, dramatic film Ping-pongkingen (Sweden; director, Jens Jonsson) World Cinema Jury Prize, documentary Man on Wire (U.K.; director, James Marsh) Best director, dramatic film Lance Hammer (Ballast, U.S.) Best director, documentary Nanette Burstein (American Teen, U.S.) British Academy of Film and Television Arts, awarded in London in February 2008 Best film Atonement (U.K./France; director, Joe Wright) Best director Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men, U.S.) Best actress Marion Cotillard (La Môme [The Passionate Life of Edith Piaf; La Vie en rose], France/U.K./Czech Republic) Best actor Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood, U.S.) Best supporting actress Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton, U.S.) Best supporting actor Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men, U.S.) Best foreign-language film Das Leben der Anderen (Germany; director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck) Berlin International Film Festival, awarded in February 2008 Golden Bear Tropa de elite (Brazil; director, José Padilha) Silver Bear (Grand Jury Prize) Standard Operating Procedure (U.S.; director, Errol Morris) Best director Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, U.S.) Best actress Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky, U.K.) Best actor Reza Najie (Mohammed Amir Naji) (Avaze gonjeshk-ha, Iran) Césars (France), awarded in Paris in February 2008 Best film La Graine et le mulet (Couscous) (France; director, Abdellatif Kechiche) Best director Abdellatif Kechiche (La Graine et le mulet [Couscous], France) Best actress Marion Cotillard (La Môme [The Passionate Life of Edith Piaf; La Vie en rose], France/U.K./Czech Republic) Best actor Mathieu Amalric (Le Scaphandre et le papillon [The Diving Bell and the Butterfly], France/U.S.) Most promising actor Laurent Stocker (Ensemble, c'est tout, France) Most promising actress Hafsi Herzi (La Graine et le mulet [Couscous], France) Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Oscars; U.S.), awarded in Los Angeles in February 2008 Best film No Country for Old Men (U.S.; directors, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen) Best director Ethan Coen and Joel Coen (No Country for Old Men, U.S.) Best actress Marion Cotillard (La Môme [The Passionate Life of Edith Piaf; La Vie en rose], France/U.K./Czech Republic) Best actor Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood, U.S.) Best supporting actress Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton, U.S.) Best supporting actor Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men, U.S.) Best foreign-language film Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiter) (Austria/Germany; director, Stefan Ruzowitzky) Best animated film Ratatouille (U.S.; director, Brad Bird) Cannes Festival, France, awarded in May 2008 Palme d'Or Entre les mures (The Class) (France; director, Laurent Cantet) Grand Prix Gomorra (Gomorrah) (Italy; director, Matteo Garrone) Jury Prize Il divo (Italy/France; director, Paolo Sorrentino) Best director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Uc maymun [Three Monkeys], France/Italy/Turkey) Best actress Sandra Corveloni (Linha de passe, Brazil) Best actor Benicio Del Toro (Che, France/Spain/U.S.) Caméra d'Or Hunger (U.K./Ireland; director, Steve McQueen) Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland, awarded in August 2008 Golden Leopard Parque vía (Mexico; director, Enrique Rivero) Special Jury Prize 33 sceny z zycia (33 Scenes from Life) (Germany/Poland; director, Malgorzata Szumowska) Best actress Ilaria Occhini (Mar nero, Italy/Romania/France) Best actor Tayanc Ayaydin (Pazar: Bir ticaret masali, Germany/Turkey/U.K./Kazakhstan) Montreal World Film Festival, awarded in September 2008 Grand Prix of the Americas (best film) Okuribito (Departures) (Japan; director, Yojiro Takita) Best actress Barbara Sukowa (Die Entdeckung der Currywurst [The Invention of the Curried Sausage], Germany) Best actor Erick Cañete (El viaje de Teo [Teo's Voyage], Mexico) Best director Goran Markovic (Turneja [The Tour], Serbia/Bosnia and Herzegovina) Special Grand Prix of the Jury Ce qu'il faut pour vivre (The Necessities of Life) (Canada; director, Benoît Pilon) Best screenplay Bienvenido a Farewell-Gutmann (Welcome to Farewell-Gutmann) (Spain; writers, Jesús G. Vilda and Xavi Puebla); Dare mo mamotte kurenai (Nobody to Watch over Me; The Guardian) (Japan; writer, Ryoichi Kimizuka) International film critics award Turneja (The Tour) (Serbia/Bosnia and Herzegovina; director, Goran Markovic) Venice Film Festival, awarded in September 2008 Golden Lion The Wrestler (U.S.; director, Darren Aronofsky) Special Jury Prize Teza (Ethiopia/Germany/France; director, Haile Gerima) Volpi Cup, best actress Dominique Blanc (L'Autre [Occupation; The Other One], France) Volpi Cup, best actor Silvio Orlando (Il papà di Giovanna [Giovanna's Father], Italy) Silver Lion, best director Aleksey German, Jr. (Bumaznyj soldat, Russia) Marcello Mastroianni Award (best young actor or actress) Jennifer Lawrence (The Burning Plain, U.S.) Luigi De Laurentiis Award (best first film) Pranzo di ferragosto (Mid-August Lunch) (Italy; director, Gianni Di Gregorio) Toronto International Film Festival, awarded in September 2008 Best Canadian feature film Lost Song (director, Rodrigue Jean) Best Canadian first feature Le Jour avant le lendemain (Before Tomorrow) (directors, Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu) Best Canadian short film Block B (director, Christopher Chan Fui Chong) International film critics award Lymelife (U.S.; director, Derick Martini); Disgrace (Australia/South Africa; director, Steve Jacobs) People's Choice Award Slumdog Millionaire (U.K./U.S.; director, Danny Boyle) San Sebastián International Film Festival, Spain, awarded in September 2008 Best film Pandoranin kutusu (Pandora's Box) (Turkey/France/Germany/Belgium; director, Yesim Ustaoglu) Special Jury Prize Asbe du-pa (Two-Legged Horse) (Iran; director, Samira Makhmalbaf) Best director Michael Winterbottom (Genova, U.K.) Best actress Melissa Leo (Frozen River, U.S.); Tsilla Chelton (Pandoranin kutusu [Pandora's Box], Turkey/France/Germany/Belgium) Best actor Oscar Martínez (El nido vacío [Empty Nest], Argentina/Spain/France/Italy) Best cinematography Hugo Colace (El nido vacío [Empty Nest], Argentina/Spain/France/Italy) New directors prize Cao Baoping (Li mi de cai xiang [The Equation of Love and Death], Hong Kong/China) International film critics award Tiro en la cabeza (Spain/France; director, Jaime Rosales) Vancouver International Film Festival, awarded in October 2008 People's Choice Award (most popular Canadian film) Mothers&Daughters (director, Carl Bessai) People's Choice Award (most popular international film) Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (France/Germany; director, Philippe Claudel) National Film Board Best Canadian Documentary Award Fiercelight: When Spirit Meets Action (director, Velcrow Ripper) Citytv Western Canada Feature Film Award Fifty Dead Men Walking (director, Kari Skogland) Kyoto Planet "Climate for Change" Award Blue Gold: World Water Wars (U.S.; director, Sam Bozzo) Dragons and Tigers Award for Young Cinema Perfect Life (China/Hong Kong; director, Emily Tang) Chicago International Film Festival, awarded in October 2008 Gold Hugo (best film) Hunger (U.K./Ireland; director, Steve McQueen) Silver Hugo (Special Jury Prize) Tokyo sonata (Tokyo Sonata) (Japan/Netherlands/Hong Kong; director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) Best documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor (U.S.; director, Matt Tyrnauer) European Film Awards, awarded in Berlin in December 2008 Best European film Gomorra (Gomorrah) (Italy; director, Matteo Garrone) Best actress Kristin Scott Thomas (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime, France/Germany) Best actor Toni Servillo (Il divo, Italy/France, and Gomorra [Gomorrah], Italy)
A list of selected international film awards in 2008 is provided in the table.