The two artforms that are most important to me are film and literature. When I'm not watching a film, I'm usually reading a book and vise versa. I consider myself somewhat of pseudo-intelligent on both subjects.
Late last year, we lost two giants of both the literary and film world when filmmaker Eric Rohmer, and author J.D. Salinger both past away. When artists like that pass away it's customary for fans of their work to do a retrospective. For me, when I heard these two men died, I was amazed with myself that I have never read a word of Salinger's prose, nor seen a piece of celluloid from Rohmer's films.
Salinger of course is best remembered for writing "Catcher on the Rye" which is still considered the main book on teenage alienation. I guess I got past my teenage alienation stage which made me not jump up and read it right away, I decided to wait. Salinger has also written "Nine Stories" and "Fanny and Zooey" both of which I'm even more interested in reading.
Rohmer was one of the founding fathers of the French New Wave. He started out as a film critic along with Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Louis Malle. He's probably best known for his "Six Moral Tales" series of films all of which I have failed to see so far. Rohmer continued to make films well into his eighties, his last one was made not long ago in 2007, and he remained a critical success throughout his career.
When I heard of the deaths of these two artists, I was sad, mostly because I've heard of them and they were well respected, and now I find the urge to explore their work now more than ever.
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