A shop in Central, Hong Kong

Max Mara shop window

MaxMara, or The House of MaxMara, is a luxury Italian fashion house known for its ready-to-wear clothing. Established in 1951 in Reggio Emilia by Achille Maramotti (7 January 1927 – 12 January 2005). By March 2008, the company had 2,254 stores in 90 countries.^[1]

History[link]

Achille Maramotti began designing couture clothing in 1947, and officially established the House of Max Mara in 1951. The "Mara" came from his surname, while "Max" referred to Count Max, a local character who was seldom sober but always stylish.^[2] Maramotti was one of the first to see that the future of fashion lay in the mass production of designer-quality clothes. He was also keen to emphasise the brand of Max Mara ahead of the names of individual designers, even though he employed future big names such as Karl Lagerfeld, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Dolce & Gabbana and Narciso Rodriguez. The company remains in the hands of the family and they like to maintain a veil of secrecy about the activities of the company.^[1]

Brands[link]

Max Mara has spawned 35 labels,^[2] although Max Mara womenswear remains the core of the company. Other brands include Sportmax, Sportmax Code, Weekend Max Mara, Marella, Pennyblack, iBlues, Max & Co. (the trendy, youth division), and Marina Rinaldi. This last, founded in 1980 and named after Achille Maramotti’s great grandmother, is one of the best-known: in her obituary of Maramotti for The Independent.^[3][4]

Family[link]

Achille Maramotti was born on January 7, 1927 in Reggio Emilia in Italy.^[2] Maramotti was educated in Rome and received a law degree from University of Parma. According to Forbes Rich List of 2005, Maramotti was one of the world's richest men with a fortune of US$2.1 billion.^[2] He was a great patron of the arts, with a great love of the Expressionists, and was also a big investor in Italian banks.

He died in Albinea, Italy 12 January 2005.^[2] Maramotti's two sons and daughter, Luigi, Ignazio and Ludovica, followed him into the business;^[2] Luigi is chairman of the company. After his death, according to Maramotti's will, a large and important collection of contemporary art from Europe and America was made open to the public.^[5]

See also[link]

• MaxMara Art Prize for Women in association with the Whitechapel

Notes and references[link]

External links[link]

• Official site of the Marina Rinaldi label
• Official site of the Max Mara Fashion Group
• Achile Maramotti designer profile at Fashion Model Directory

Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor.^[3] One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute.^[4] His most famous films are the groundbreaking Metropolis (the world's most expensive silent film at the time of its release) and M, made before he moved to the United States, his iconic precursor to the film noir genre.

Life and career[link]

Early life[link]

Lang was born in Vienna as the second son of Anton Lang (1860–1940),^[5] an architect and construction company manager, and his wife Pauline "Paula" Lang née Schlesinger (1864–1920). Fritz Lang himself was baptized on 28 December 1890 at the Schottenkirche in Vienna.^[6]

Lang's parents were of Moravian^{[citation needed]} descent and practicing Roman Catholics. His mother was born Jewish, but had converted to Catholicism when Fritz was ten. His mother took this conversion seriously and was dedicated to raising Fritz as a Catholic. Lang never had an interest in his Jewish heritage and identified himself as Catholic. Although he was not a particularly devout Catholic, he "regularly used Catholic images and themes [in] his films".^[7]

After finishing school, Lang briefly attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied civil engineering and eventually switched to art. In 1910 he left Vienna to see the world, traveling throughout Europe and Africa and later Asia and the Pacific area. In 1913, he studied painting in Paris, France.

At the outbreak of World War I, Lang returned to Vienna and volunteered for military service in the Austrian army and fought in Russia and Romania, where he was wounded three times. While recovering from his injuries and shell shock in 1916, he wrote some scenarios and ideas for films. He was discharged from the army with the rank of lieutenant in 1918 and did some acting in the Viennese theater circuit for a short time before being hired as a writer at Decla, Erich Pommer's Berlin-based production company.

Expressionist films: the Weimar years (1918-1933)[link]

His writing stint was brief, as Lang soon started to work as a director at the German film studio Ufa, and later Nero-Film, just as the Expressionist movement was building. In this first phase of his career, Lang alternated between art films such as Der Müde Tod ("The Weary Death") and popular thrillers such as Die Spinnen ("The Spiders"), combining popular genres with Expressionist techniques to create an unprecedented synthesis of popular entertainment with art cinema. In 1920, he met his future wife, the writer and actress Thea von Harbou. She and Lang co-wrote all of his movies from 1921 through 1933, including 1922's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse the Gambler), which ran for over four hours in two parts in the original version and was the first in the Dr. Mabuse trilogy, 1924's five-hour Die Nibelungen, the famous 1927 film Metropolis, and the 1931 classic, M, his first "talking" picture.

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou in their Berlin flat, 1923 or 1924

Although some^[who?] consider Lang's work to be simple melodrama, he produced a coherent oeuvre that helped to establish the characteristics of film noir, with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity.^{[citation needed]} His work influenced filmmakers as disparate as Jacques Rivette and William Friedkin.

In 1931, after Woman in the Moon, Lang directed what many film scholars consider to be his masterpiece: M, a disturbing story of a child murderer (Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is hunted down and brought to rough justice by Berlin's criminal underworld. M remains a powerful work; it was remade in 1951 by Joseph Losey, but this version had little impact on audiences, and has become harder to see than the original film. Lang epitomized the stereotype of the tyrannical German film director such as Erich von Stroheim and Otto Preminger; he was known for being hard to work with. During the climactic final scene in M, he allegedly threw Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs in order to give more authenticity to Lorre's battered look. His wearing a monocle added to the stereotype.

At the end of 1932, Lang started filming The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, and by March 30, the new regime banned it as an incitement to public disorder. Testament is sometimes deemed an anti-Nazi film as Lang had put phrases used by the Nazis into the mouth of the title character.

Whereas Lang was worried about the advent of the Nazi regime, partly because of his Jewish heritage,^[7] his wife and screen writer Thea von Harbou had started to sympathize with the Nazis in the early 1930s and joined the NSDAP in 1932. They soon divorced. Lang's fears would be realized following his departure from Austria, as under Nazi eugenics laws he would be identified as a Jew even though his mother was a converted Roman Catholic, and he was raised as such.

Emigration[link]

On the set of The Woman in the Moon, 1929.

Shortly afterwards, Lang left Germany. According to Lang, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called Lang to his offices to inform him that The Testament of Dr Mabuse was being banned but that he was nevertheless so impressed by Lang's abilities as a filmmaker (especially Metropolis), he was offering Lang a position as the head of German film studio UFA. Lang had stated that it was during this meeting that he had decided to leave for Paris - but that the banks had closed by the time the meeting was over. Lang has stated that he fled that very evening. ^[8][9]

Lang left Germany in 1934 and moved to Paris^[10] after his marriage to Thea von Harbou, who stayed behind, ended in 1933.^{[citation needed]}

In Paris, Lang filmed a version of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom, starring Charles Boyer. This was Lang's only film in French (not counting the French version of Testament). He then went to the United States.^[10]

Hollywood career (1936-1957)[link]

Upon his arrival in Hollywood, Lang joined the MGM studio and directed the crime drama Fury, starring Spencer Tracy as a man wrongly lynched for a crime he didn't commit. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939. Lang made twenty-one features in the next twenty-one years, working in a variety of genres at every major studio in Hollywood, occasionally producing his films as an independent. These films, often compared unfavorably by contemporary critics to Lang's earlier works, have since been reevaluated as being integral to the emergence and evolution of American genre cinema, film noir in particular.

One of his most famous films noir is the police drama The Big Heat (1953), noted for its uncompromising brutality, especially for a scene in which Lee Marvin throws scalding coffee on Gloria Grahame's face. During this period, his visual style simplified (owing in part to the constraints of the Hollywood studio system) and his worldview became increasingly pessimistic, culminating in the cold, geometric style of his last American films, While the City Sleeps (1956) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956).

Lang found it harder to find congenial production conditions in Hollywood and his advancing age left him less inclined to grapple with American backers. The German producer Artur Brauner expressed interest in remaking The Indian Tomb (a story that Lang had developed in the twenties that was ultimately taken from him by studio heads and directed instead by Joe May),^[11] so Lang abandoned his plans for retirement and returned to Germany in order to make his "Indian Epic". Following the production, Brauner was ready to proceed with his remake of Das Testament des Doctor Mabuse when Lang approached him with the idea of adding another original film to the series. The result was The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), made in a hurry and with a relatively small budget. It can be viewed as the marriage between the director's early experiences with expressionist techniques in Germany as well as the spartan style already visible in his late American work. Lang was approaching blindness during the production, making it his final project.

Death and legacy[link]

While his career had ended without fanfare, his American and later German works were championed by the critics of the Cahiers du cinéma. Lang died in 1976 and was interred in the Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.^[12]

Filmography[link]

Pop culture[link]

• Lang appears as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Le Mepris. During the film, his reputation is discussed, and he somewhat lampoons his own reputation for being a temperamental director.

• An old German director with the demeanor of Lang appears during the filming of a bank robbery in Woody Allen's 1969 comedy Take the Money and Run.

• In David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, Lang is mentioned in tandem with James Cameron on page 48.

• A fictional Lang appears as a main character in the Fullmetal Alchemist movie Conqueror of Shambala.

• In Episode 11 of Season 1 of City Hunter, the antagonist's name is Fritz Lang.

• Madonna portrayed Lang for a sequence in her 1989 music video for "Express Yourself", complete with Lang's signature suit and monocle. The video itself is a tribute to Metropolis (film).

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Michaux, Agnès. 'Je les chasserai jusqu'au bout du monde jusqu'à ce qu'ils en crèvent; Paris: Editions 1, 1997; ISBN 2-86391-933-4
• Friedrich, Otto. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s; New York: Harper & Row, 1986; ISBN 0-06-015626-0 (See e.g. pp. 45–46 for anecdotes revealing Lang's arrogance.)
• McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast; New York: St. Martins Press, 1997; ISBN 0-312-13247-6
• Schnauber, Cornelius. Fritz Lang in Hollywood; Wien: Europaverlag, c1986; ISBN 3-203-50953-9 (in German)
• Youngkin, Stephen (2005). The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2360-7.  - Contains interviews with Lang and a discussion of the making of the film M

External links[link]

Biography portal

• Fritz Lang at the Internet Movie Database
• Fritz Lang Bibliography (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center)
• Senses of Cinema - Biographie
• Fritz Lang at filmportal.de
• Interview with Fritz Lang from 1967
• Bibliography
• Fritz Lang at Find a Grave
• (French) "Symptôme, exhibition, angoisse. Représentation de la terreur dans l’œuvre allemande de Fritz Lang (1919-1933/1959-1960)", un article de Nicole Brenez extrait de De la Figure en général et du Corps en particulier (1998).

Chloë Grace Moretz
Moretz at the Hugo premiere, New York City 2011
Born	(1997-02-10) February 10, 1997 (age 15) Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
Occupation	Actress, model
Years active	2004–present
Website
chloemoretz.com

Chloë Grace Moretz ( /məˈrɛts/; born February 10, 1997) is an American actress and model. At the age of seven, she began her acting career with performances in films and series such as The Amityville Horror, (500) Days of Summer, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Big Momma's House 2, Desperate Housewives, and Dirty Sexy Money, for which she received numerous Young Artist Awards nominations.

She received worldwide recognition for her breakthrough performance as Hit-Girl in the 2010 superhero film Kick-Ass.^[1] Her praise continued with her roles in the critically acclaimed films Let Me In and Hugo.

Personal life[link]

Moretz was born in Atlanta, Georgia. Her mother, Terri (née Duke), is a nurse, and her father, McCoy Lee Moretz, is a plastic surgeon of German descent.^[2][3] Moretz has four older brothers; Brandon, Trevor, Colin, and Ethan. She has described her family as "very Christian".^[4] One of her brothers, Trevor Duke Moretz, is her acting coach and accompanies her on trips and press dates when her parents are unable to attend.^[5]

Moretz moved from Cartersville, Georgia to New York in 2001, with her mother and her older brother, Trevor, because he was accepted into the Professional Performing Arts School; this initially got her interested in acting.^[6] Her Hollywood career began when she and the rest of her family moved to Los Angeles in 2003.

Acting career[link]

Her first role in Hollywood was as Violet in two episodes of the series The Guardian, and her first movie role was as Molly in Heart of the Beholder.

It was not until her second big-screen acting role, in the 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror that she earned greater recognition in the form of a Young Artist Award nomination.^[7] After Amityville, Moretz's acting career progressed further when she received several guest-starring roles on TV, as well as a small role in Big Momma's House 2. Among the most notable of her TV roles to date are as the recurring characters Kiki George in Dirty Sexy Money, and Sherri Maltby in Desperate Housewives. Moretz also voiced the U.S. version of the animated character Darby in My Friends Tigger & Pooh. Moretz also co-starred as Cammie, an abused child, in The Poker House alongside Selma Blair and Jennifer Lawrence.^[8]

After her first film premiere in The Amityville Horror, she has been a frequent guest at film premieres. She has an interest in fashion, and often wears clothes in her own distinctive style.^[9]

With Elias Koteas at the premiere of Let Me In, September 2010

In 2010, Moretz appeared as Hit-Girl in director Matthew Vaughn's superhero film Kick-Ass, based on the graphic novel of the same name by Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr.. Despite controversy surrounding her role in the violent film, she has received widespread critical acclaim for her portrayal. Roger Ebert^[10] gave the movie one-out-of-four stars, but nonetheless wrote: "Say what you will about her character, but Chloe Grace Moretz has presence and appeal." Moretz trained with Jackie Chan's stunt crew for three months prior to filming Kick-Ass and did most of her own stunts while filming on location.^[11] Also that year, she played Abby, a 12-year-old vampire, in Let Me In,^[12] the American remake of the Swedish film Let the Right One In, which was released on October 1, 2010.^[13] She played Ann Sliger in the crime thriller Texas Killing Fields, which was released on October 14, 2011.^[14]

Moretz played Isabelle in Martin Scorsese's Hugo, a film adaptation of The Invention of Hugo Cabret,^[15] and stars in Hick, an adaptation of the novel by Andrea Portes.^[16]

She appeared in the 2012 film Dark Shadows, playing the role of Carolyn Stoddard,^[17][18] a rebellious teenage daughter.

Moretz has signed on to play the leading role in Emily the Strange. The project was first mentioned in 2010, when Dark Horse Entertainment president Mike Richardson announced his plans to bring the character to the big screen. First started as an iconic image in 1991 and used to promote a clothing line from Cosmic Debris, the Gothic teen has developed a back story through a series of Dark Horse Comics, which have been published since 2001.^[19]

In March 2012, Moretz signed on to The Drummer, a biopic about the last six years of the life of Dennis Wilson, drummer for The Beach Boys. She will star alongside Aaron Eckhart, Rupert Grint and Vera Farmiga.^[20]

In 2013, Moretz will portray the title character in an readaptation of Stephen King's Carrie. The film will be directed by Kimberly Peirce and produced by MGM.^[21][22] It is scheduled to be released on March 15.^[23]

Filmography[link]

Awards and nominations[link]

Moretz at Comic Con in 2010

References[link]