Sa’ad Choeb, RDS Don Bachardy Fellow
The Royal Drawing School has made a short film about Syrian artist Sa'ad Choeb who was the Don Bachardy Fellow there 2022-2023.
Forster Award Turns Fifty
The E. M. Forster Award was set up by Christopher Isherwood and the American Academy of Arts and Letters with royalties from Forster’s novel Maurice. Honoring Forster’s wishes, Isherwood oversaw the posthumous publication of Maurice in 1971; the E. M. Forster Award was founded the following year. So far, the award has enabled 43 British and Irish writers to travel to the United States. We asked them to share their memories and you can read them here.
Isherwood and Bachardy in Berlin
The exhibition My Dearest Sweet Love: Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy was on display at Berlin's Schwules Museum from June 14 to August 26, 2019. Conceived and co-curated by Joseph Rodota along with Kevin Clarke of the Schwules Museum and Katherine Bucknell, the show considered Isherwood and Bachardy’s thirty-three year partnership as well as Isherwood’s earlier years in Berlin and Bachardy’s later career. It included nudes by Bachardy (generously loaned by Suzelle Smith and Don Howarth), portraits by Bachardy and David Hockney, photographs by Wayne Shimabukuro, and pieces from the museum's archive. The opening was marked by a conversation among Katherine Bucknell, Kevin Clarke, and Edmund White, followed by a reception at the museum attended by Suzelle Smith and Don Howarth, Kevin Clarke, Peter Rehberg and Chris Paxton of the Schwules Museum, and members of the Isherwood Foundation.
On June 13, 2019, Chris & Don: A Love Story, the documentary by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara, had its first Berlin screening at Village Berlin. Mascara answered questions from Peter Rehberg, head of collections and archives at the Schwules Museum.
In affiliation with the Isherwood Foundation and the Schwules Museum, the art organisation Instinct.Berlin invited artists to respond to Isherwood and Bachardy's legacy in The Cat and the Horse, an exhibition at Village Berlin (September 12-15, 2019). The opening featured a performance drawing by Gareth Ernst, based on drawings Bachardy made of Ernst.
Guido Santi
We are saddened and diminished by the death of Guido Santi, a member of the Board of Directors of The Christopher Isherwood Foundation and the documentary filmmaker who, along with his wife Tina Mascara, created the prize-winning documentary film Chris & Don: A Love Story.
Portrait of Guido Santi by Don Bachardy with an Italian notebook presented by a friend. Farmer’s Market Memorial Service, March 3, 2019. (Photo, Chris Freeman.)
As a man Guido was sophisticated, intuitive and gentle. As a filmmaker, he was determined, driven by a curiosity that although intensely passionate was never intrusive or predatory. After long courtship, his subjects always yielded their inmost secrets. The subjects were unconventional, the secrets arresting and inspiring. Guido searched through his camera lens for a storyline that was both true and compelling. Like all great documentary filmmakers, he knew the right questions to ask. He was an obsessive recorder, accumulating enough footage to permit him to narrate with conviction. He knew how to get down to the nerve, to the heart of things. He was a master of his art.
Much of Guido’s best work was done in collaboration with his wife, Tina. In her he found a filmmaker whose talent and sensibility complemented his own. Together they made another prize-winning film, Monk with a Camera, and the company they founded, Asphalt Stars, is currently in production on The Muslim Other and Don Bachardy: License to Look.
Guido Santi, born Genoa, Italy, May 9, 1962; died Los Angeles, California, February 4, 2019.
In Italy, he earned a B.A. in Philosophy, summa cum laude, at the Università degli Studi di Urbino, apprenticed with Ipotesi Cinema, a film laboratory coordinated by Cannes and Venice award-winning director Ermanno Olmi (The Tree of the Wooden Clogs), and produced and directed hundreds of reports about technology, entertainment and social issues for Italy’s national TV, RAI. At RAI, he also produced and directed his first documentary biographies, about Luciano Pavarotti and about the Academy Award-winning director, Vittoria De Sica (The Bicycle Thief), and he wrote and directed Concertino, produced by Monica Vitti and Leo Benvenuti, about four teenagers living in the suburbs of Rome.
In Los Angeles, he earned an M.A. in Film and Television Production at USC, where he won a Tom Bush Scholarship Award for Excellence in Cinematography and a Phi Beta Kappa International Distinguished Student Scholarship Award. Later, he won a Pendleton Research and Production Grant. He produced and directed many more documentaries and TV specials about illegal immigration, gangs in Los Angeles, 9/11, and other topical subjects.
He was an assistant professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts at Ithaca College in New York State, and he taught at USC, the Studio School, UCLA Extension and Columbia College, Hollywood, in Los Angeles, as well as contributing as a guest artist at workshops and seminars around the country. Since 2002, he lectured in Film Aesthetics and History of Cinema and taught cinematography and directing at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, California, where he was Professor and Co-Chair of the Cinema Department at the time of his death.
Chris & Don: A Love Story premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 2008. It won best documentary at the Miami LGBT Festival, the Spokane Film Festival, and the Sulmona International Film Festival, and it was nominated for best documentary by the Gotham Film Award and GLAAD Media Award.
https://zeitgeistfilms.com/film/chrisanddon
Available on iTunes
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/chris-don-a-love-story/id563966412
Monk with a Camera (2013) won Best Feature at the 2017 Rishikesh Art and Film Festival and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in 2014. monkwithacamera.com
A Closer Look
Watch Tina Mascara and Guido Santi's short film about Don Bachardy - entitled A Closer Look - here:
The Animals & A Meeting by the River, The Podcast
The love story of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is told through their letters, followed by an audio performance of A Meeting by the River, the play they adapted together from Isherwood’s last novel. The Animals is based on the book, The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. The series is presented by Katherine Bucknell. Simon Callow is Christopher Isherwood and Alan Cumming is Don Bachardy. Anthony Page directs A Meeting by the River, starring Dominic West, Kyle Soller, Penelope Wilton and Annabel Mullion. The original music is composed by Edmund Jolliffe.
The eleven thirty-five minute episodes are available free. Listen on line at www.TheAnimalsPodcast.com or on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts.
In May 2017, during the David Hockney retrospective at Tate Britain, Alan Cumming and Angus Wright staged a dramatic reading from The Animals and from Isherwood’s diaries in front of David Hockney’s double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy. Alan Cumming and Simon Callow re-staged the reading in February 2018 to a sold-out auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to coincide with the display of the double portrait in the Hockney retrospective there.
Huntington Conference and Gala Fundraiser
On November 12, 2015, at the Huntington Library, Armistead Maupin delivered a lecture about Christopher Isherwood, “My Logical Grandfather.” This charming, ribald, irresistibly personal presentation opened two days of scholarly papers from Isherwood scholars around the world: Lisa Colletta, Robert Caserio, Carola Kaplan, Bidhan Roy, Jamie Carr, Victor Marsh, Lois Cucullu, Jaimie Harker, Barrie Jean Borich, Katherine Bucknell, Doug Armato, and Wendy Moffat offered brilliant new thinking on Isherwood and his achievements. The two-day conference at the Huntington was convened by Chris Freeman and James Berg and sponsored by the Isherwood Foundation.
While the conference was on in Pasadena, Tina Mascara and Guido Santi’s documentary Chris and Don was screened at the West Hollywood City Council Chambers, Friday evening, November 13.
The weekend culminated in Santa Monica on Saturday night November 14 with a gala fundraising dinner, “An Evening with Chris and Don.”
Isherwood in California
The Huntington Library Blog - Posted on November 5, 2015 by James J. Berg and Chris Freeman
In February 2013 Don Bachardy launched a new website, www.donbachardy.com
In September 2013, Chatto and Windus, London, released THE ANIMALS: LOVE LETTERS BETWEEN CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD AND DON BACHARDY. This hardcover edition is edited and introduced by Katherine Bucknell, editor of Isherwood’s diaries. It is available by order from Amazon.co.uk
On May 18, 2014, in honor of Don Bachardy's 80th birthday, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, released THE ANIMALS: LOVE LETTERS BETWEEN CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD AND DON BACHARDY. It is edited and introduced by Katherine Bucknell, editor of Isherwood’s diaries. THE ANIMALS is available as a Kindle book or in print from Amazon.co.uk