Film of Memoirs of a Geisha
Tuesday 10 January 2006 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)
From sacred to profane...Isabel Hilton journeys between the floating world and the world of the pilgrim in this evening’s Night Waves.
Programme Details
A chalk white face and a red bow mouth…in the popular imagination these are the emblems of the secret floating world of the geisha…a world made less mysterious with the publication in 1997 of a novel by Arthur Golden. His Memoirs of a Geisha sold four million copies and was translated into 32 languages.
Now its been turned into a film – directed by Robert Marshall and produced by Steven Spielberg among others. Although the film is only being released here this week it has already managed to divide opinion in America, some hailing it as a bold, innovative Hollywood epic and others describing it as an inauthentic affront to the Japanese. In Night Waves this evening Isabel Hilton will be discussing the controversy and the film’s merits with the critic, Tony Rayns.
She’ll also be joined by the philosopher, John Gray and the neuropsychologist, Paul Broks who’ll be turning their attention to Rising Up and Rising Down, the magnum opus of William T. Vollmann – voted one of the twenty best young writers in America under forty. His book carries the subtitle – Some thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means – a disarmingly modest way to describe a volume which reads like a 21st century version of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.
On a lighter note Isabel will also be talking to one of Vollmann’s peers – the comic writer, Augusten Burroughs whose novel about the perils of consumerism – Sellevision – is published at the end of the week. And to mark the opening of an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford devoted to pilgrimage the lay priest, Martin Palmer and the writer and broadcaster, Jameela Siddiqui will be exploring what the notion means in Islam, Christianity and Buddhism. That’s Night Waves with Isabel Hilton here on BBC Radio 3 at nine thirty this evening.
Additional information:
Memoirs of a Geisha directed by Rob Marshall goes on release on Friday. It’s a certificate 12A
Pilgrimage – The Sacred Journey opens at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford on Wednesday 11th January
Augusten Burroughs’ Sellevision is published by Atlantic Books
William T. Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down is published by Duckworth
