Michael Schulman’s piece about Charlotte Zwerin was an important reminder of the overlooked role of women editors in the history of film (“Charlotte’s Place,” January 27th). The first great documentary, Dziga Vertov’s silent city-symphony “Man with a Movie Camera” (1929), slyly undercuts its title—and its male director—by observing the painstaking labor of its editor, Elizaveta Svilova, Vertov’s wife. She is shown whirring through the reels, cutting out celluloid strips of scenes, and placing them on a light box to figure out how to rearrange them. The camera stops, as if in thrall to her, and lingers over a few frames, before the image comes to life again.
Brian GibsonAnnapolis Royal, Nova Scotia
In 1989, I attended the première of Zwerin’s “Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser,” at the New York Film Festival, with my late husband, the filmmaker Christian Blackwood. As Schulman mentions, Zwerin’s film was edited from fourteen hours of footage taken, in the late sixties, for a German TV special that Christian and his brother Michael had produced. Christian, a gifted cinematographer and documentary director, had followed Monk at home and on tour in Europe for more than six months. As I sat in the audience that night, watching Charlotte’s brilliant edit of Christian’s footage, I could not understand why Christian wasn’t given a co-director credit. Although Zwerin was overshadowed by the Maysleses, at least they gave her credit where credit was due.
Carolyn Marks BlackwoodStaatsburg, N.Y.
Ian Parker’s Profile of the architect Norman Foster reminded me of growing up as a soccer-mad boy in London (“The Master Builder,” January 27th). Whenever I took the Tube to my school, there was a thrilling moment when the two white towers of the old Wembley Stadium came into view. For British sports fans, the iconic towers of “the cathedral of football” were as beloved as Fenway Park’s Green Monster or the ivy-covered walls of Wrigley Field. The stadium needed to be updated, but the towers could have been incorporated into a new structure. Instead, Foster, who purportedly regarded them as “dead space,” tore them down. The new stadium is functionally adequate, but it is just one more example of an architectural establishment that chases after innovation at the expense of local communities.
Bernard N. HowardBirmingham, Ala.
Gary Shteyngart equates Canadians with capybaras when discussing his devotion to the animals, but he could have pursued the Canadian connection further (“Capybara, Mon Cœur,” February 3rd). In May, 2016, two capybaras escaped from Toronto’s High Park Zoo; dubbed Bonnie and Clyde, they spent several weeks on the lam in High Park, sometimes frolicking within plain sight while eluding capture, even by a Brazilian capybara wrangler. Many Canadians went from not knowing that such critters existed to becoming capybara-crazy. Months later, back behind bars at the zoo (where they still live as star attractions), Bonnie and Clyde became parents to three “capybabies,” a term coined by Toronto’s then mayor, John Tory. Tens of thousands of Canadians participated in a contest to name them, resulting in Alex, Geddy, and Neil, after the members of the beloved Canadian rock band Rush. Bonnie and Clyde’s saga appealed to the Canadian predilection for rooting for the little guy, central to our sense of national identity.
Christine SharpAylesford, Nova Scotia
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