Gerard

‘Khovanshchina’ Is Finished in Time to Be Newly Resonant

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‘Khovanshchina’ Is Finished in Time to Be Newly Resonant

Instead of finishing his masterpiece “Khovanshchina,” Modest Mussorgsky is drunk in a ditch. His friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov urges him to compose, using a walking stick to tickle him awake. But Mussorgsky would rather stay in the ditch, drunk. That’s fiction: a scene from “Moscow-Petushki,” a 1969 satire by the Soviet …

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Bertrand Blier, Acclaimed Director of Sexually Blunt Films, Dies at 85

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Bertrand Blier, Acclaimed Director of Sexually Blunt Films, Dies at 85

Bertrand Blier, an acclaimed director whose films scandalized, captivated and entertained 1970s and ’80s France with their sometimes brutal projections of French men’s sexual imaginations, died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 85. His death was confirmed by his son Léonard Blier. For two decades Mr. Blier …

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