Bookloving Traveler
Awesome Places • Awesome Books
Another happy place - Powell’s Books in Portland, OR
Pride and Prejudice (2005) → Locations
“Pride & Prejudice is a love letter to the English landscape from its director Joe Wright. It is a glorious rebuke to any underestimation of the power within our countryside. There are many smaller notes, where the film exults in the quieter glories of England. There are long wet meads with small tufts of reeds; modest rivers weaving through flat meadows; small woods perched on ridges over long fields; all moist, green and rich. It is a landscape in sympathetic participation with the human, and pleasantly unique to us. It is, as Hardy would put it, “majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity”.”
This scene will forever be the most important scene in any movie to me. This is a little girl who has been told all her life by her parents that she is a mistake and that she is worthless. This is a little girl whose family life is so horrible that books are her only escape. This is a little girl whose parents constantly belittle her for reading, the only pleasure in life she has. And in this scene, this little girl answers very shyly, because she has been conditioned to be embarrassed of her own existence. At first, she answers slowly, and without making eye contact. And in this scene this little girl is beginning to realize that maybe she is special. Maybe there are kind people in the world. Maybe she is worth something.
Germany Around 1900: A Portrait in Colour
The turn of the 20th century seemed full of promise for Germany. The suburbs may have teemed with tenements to house the new industrial proletariat, but on spacious new avenues in the city centres, people strolled proudly past magnificent bourgeois residences. The economy was booming, the aristocracy and the military enjoyed unlimited social prestige, and most of the population revered the Kaiser.
Through some 800 color pictures, this book presents turn-of-the-century Germany as it liked to see herself: self-confident, glittering, patriotic but also with a belief in progress and – for those who could afford it – a cosmopolitan flair. As in the critically acclaimed An American Odyssey, the images are all rare examples of the historical photochrom process, a printing technique that allowed black-and-white photographs to be reproduced in colour.
(via archatlas)
