As attention spans keep getting whittled down, intellectually impish Romanian satirist Radu Jude continues to go longer and longer, his latest act of cinematic disobedience the nearly three-hour mythbuster “Dracula.”
But you will not be getting a worshipful retelling of author Bram Stoker’s horror classic. For that, call Francis Ford Coppola. Rather, Jude has Frankensteined together a grab bag of notions about the vampire saga that is his country’s most well-known cultural export — originating with real-life medieval slaughterer Vlad the Impaler but most famously immortalized by a 19th century Irish author. Jude turns it into a vaudeville that, even at its most entertaining, is best described by a common bat-related term that’s more scatological.
Halfway between an endurance test and a mad romp, “Dracula” is still proof he’s cinema’s brainiest, raunchiest crank: Eastern European’s own X-rated Monty Python. “Dracula” was birthed initially as a jokey response to his anti-commercial tendencies — as if Jude could ever make a conventional horror movie. But it still managed to percolate (fester?) until he’d found a unifying idea across a dozen or so vignettes of prurient humor and social commentary: the twinned legacy of a bloodthirsty despot who still stirs national pride, and an invented, Hollywoodized legend. All of it is engineered around the brutality of capitalism, which bites, slurps, then discards. It’s economics and entertainment.
As for that sucking sound in Jude’s antic organizing concept, it’s artificial intelligence: His proxy narrator is a creatively blocked filmmaker (Adonis Tanţa, in one of many roles) turning to an AI chatbot to generate ideas for his vampire film. The film’s cheeky opening is a succession of AI-generated Vlads/Draculas of all genders, colors and ages. From there, the intermittent interludes of hilariously nonsensical AI slop visuals — whether inoffensively ugly, as when inserted into a doomed peasant love story, or pornographic, when the prompt is sexing up Coppola’s 1992 version — are a consistently funny middle finger directed at a grotesquely vampiric, art-leeching technology.
The various “generated” stories and sketches, meanwhile, break up a narrative about a sleazy Dracula dinner theater in Transylvania that, when its underpaid, slave-labor leads decide to bolt mid-performance, gives dissatisfied customers a (ahem) stake in the outcome. The punchy bits work best, as when a reincarnated Vlad interrupts a modern-day tour of his home to clap back at rumors (“I didn’t kill rats!”) or a very Jude-like scenario in which Dracula is a ruthless video game company head exploiting his workers. Less effective is an overlong adaptation of the first Romanian vampire novel, its phone-shot cheapness and amateur theatrics eventually grating, and a Chaucer-adjacent fable about a cursed farmer’s harvest of phalluses that is more obnoxious than clever.
With Jude, of course, vulgarity is often the point, and maybe, as two hours becomes three, the excessiveness is part of the point too. When will we all be worn down by stupid consumerism? It doesn’t make the devilish, insane and extreme “Dracula” any easier to take as a skewering of sensibilities and conventions. As often as you may be tickled by its fanged silliness, you’ll also be drained.
‘Dracula’
In Romanian and English, with subtitles
Not rated
Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes
Playing: Opens Wednesday, Oct. 29 at Alamo Drafthouse DTLA and Laemmle Glendale
Authors, readers and publishing industry experts lament the underrepresentation of Hispanic stories in the mainstream world of books, but have found new ways to elevate the literature and resolve misunderstandings.
“The stories now are more diverse than they were ten years ago,” said Carmen Alvarez, a book influencer on Instagram and TikTok.
Some publishers, independent bookstores and book influencers are pushing past the perception of monolithic experience by making Hispanic stories more visible and discoverable for book lovers.
The rise of online book retailers and limited marketing budgets for stories about people of color have been major hurdles for increasing that representation, despite annual celebrations of Hispanic Heritage Month from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15 in the U.S. There’s been a push for ethnically authentic stories about Latinos, beyond the immigrant experience.
“I feel like we are getting away from the immigration story, the struggle story,” said Alvarez, who is best known as “tomesandtextiles” on bookstagram and booktok, the Instagram and TikTok social media communities. “I feel like my content is to push back against the lack of representation.”
Latinos in the publishing industry
Latinos currently make up roughly 20% of the U.S. population, according to Census data.
However, the National Hispanic Media Coalition estimates Latinos only represent 8% of employees in publishing, according to its Latino Representation in Publishing Coalition created in 2023.
Brenda Castillo, NHMC president and CEO, said the coalition works directly with publishing houses to highlight Latino voices and promote their existing Latino employees.
The publishing houses “are the ones that have the power to make the changes,” Castillo said.
Some Hispanic authors are creating spaces for their work to find interested readers. Award-winning children authors Mayra Cuevas and Alex Villasante co-founded a book festival and storytellers conference in 2024 to showcase writers and illustrators from their communities.
“We were very intentional in creating programming around upleveling craft and professional development,” Cuevas said. “And giving attendees access to the publishing industry, and most importantly, creating a space for community connection and belonging.”
Villasante said the festival and conference allowed them to sustain themselves within the publishing industry, while giving others a road map for success in an industry that isn’t always looking to mass produce their work.
“We are not getting the representation of ourselves,” Villasante said. “I believe that is changing, but it is a slow change so we have to continue to push for that change.”
Breaking into the mainstream
New York Times bestselling author Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a Mexican-Canadian novelist known for the novels “Mexican Gothic” and “The Daughter of Doctor Moreau,” is one of few Hispanic authors that has been able to break to mainstream. But she said it wasn’t easy.
Moreno-Garcia recalled one of her first publisher rejections: The editor complimented the quality of the story but said it would not sell because it was set in Mexico.
“There are systems built within publishing that make it very difficult to achieve the regular distributions that other books naturally have built into them,” Moreno-Garcia said. “There is sometimes resistance to sharing some of these books.”
Cynthia Pelayo, an award-winning author and poet, said the marketing campaign is often the difference maker in terms of a book’s success. Authors of color are often left wanting more promotional support from their publishers, she said.
“I’ve seen exceptional Latino novels that have not received nearly the amount of marketing, publicity that some of their white colleagues have received,” Pelayo said. “What happens in that situation (is) their books get put somewhere else in the bookstore when these white colleagues, their books will get put in the front.”
Hispanic Heritage Month, however, helps bring some attention to Hispanic authors, she added.
Independent bookstores
Independent bookstores remain persistent in elevating Hispanic stories. A 2024 report by the American Booksellers Association found that 60 of the 323 new independent bookstores were owned by people of color. According to Latinx in Publishing, a network of publishing industry professionals, there are 46 Hispanic-owned bookstores in the U.S.
Online book retailer Bookshop.org has highlighted Hispanic books and provided discounts for readers during Hispanic Heritage Month. A representative for the site, Ellington McKenzie, said the site has been able to provide financial support for about 70 Latino bookstores.
“People are always looking to support those minority owned bookstores which we are happy to be the liaison between them,” McKenzie said.
Chawa Magaña, the owner of Palabras Bilingual Bookstore in Phoenix, said she was inspired to open the store because of what she felt was a lack of diversity and representation in the books that are taught in Arizona schools.
“Growing up, I didn’t experience a lot of diversity in literature in schools.” Magaña said. “I wasn’t seeing myself in the stories that I was reading.”
Of the books for sale at Palabras Bilingual, between 30% to 40% of the books are Latino stories, she said.
Magaña said having heard people say they have never seen that much representation in a bookstore has made her cry.
“What has been the most fulfilling to me is able to see how it impacts other people’s lives,” she said. “What motivates me is seeing other people get inspired to do things, seeing people moved when they see the store itself having diverse books.”
NEW YORK — Scientists have identified the origins of the blue color in one of Jackson Pollock’s paintings with a little help from chemistry, confirming for the first time that the Abstract Expressionist used a vibrant, synthetic pigment known as manganese blue.
“Number 1A, 1948,” showcases Pollock’s classic style: paint has been dripped and splattered across the canvas, creating a vivid, multicolored work. Pollock even gave the piece a personal touch, adding his handprints near the top.
The painting, currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is almost 9 feet wide. Scientists had previously characterized the reds and yellows splattered across the canvas, but the source of the rich turquoise blue proved elusive.
In a new study, researchers took scrapings of the blue paint and used lasers to scatter light and measure how the paint’s molecules vibrated. That gave them a unique chemical fingerprint for the color, which they pinpointed as manganese blue.
The analysis, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first confirmed evidence of Pollock using this specific blue.
“It’s really interesting to understand where some striking color comes from on a molecular level,” said study co-author Edward Solomon with Stanford University.
The pigment manganese blue was once used by artists, as well as to color the cement for swimming pools. It was phased out by the 1990s because of environmental concerns.
Previous research had suggested that the turquoise from the painting could indeed be this color, but the new study confirms it using samples from the canvas, said Rutgers University’s Gene Hall, who has studied Pollock’s paintings and was not involved with the discovery.
“I’m pretty convinced that it could be manganese blue,” Hall said.
The researchers also went one step further, inspecting the pigment’s chemical structure to understand how it produces such a vibrant shade.
Scientists study the chemical makeup of art supplies to conserve old paintings and catch counterfeits. They can take more specific samples from Pollock’s paintings since he often poured directly onto the canvas instead of mixing paints on a palette beforehand.
To solve this artistic mystery, researchers explored the paint using various scientific tools — similarly to how Pollock would alternate his own methods, dripping paint using a stick or straight from the can.
While the artist’s work may seem chaotic, Pollock rejected that interpretation. He saw his work as methodical, said study co-author Abed Haddad, an assistant conservation scientist at the Museum of Modern Art.
“I actually see a lot of similarities between the way that we worked and the way that Jackson Pollock worked on the painting,” Haddad said.
Julio Torres is always in search of the next challenge. The writer, comedian, actor and producer is adding the title of playwright to his ever-growing, multi-hyphenate list of occupations. Since his days as an Emmy-nominated writer for “Saturday Night Live,” Torres has written and starred in the Peabody Award-winning HBO Max original series “Los Espookys,” wrote and starred in the HBO Max original series “Fantasmas” and directed, wrote and starred in his first feature film, “Problemista,” co-starring Tilda Swinton.
For his latest venture, Torres made his way to the stage — admittedly not knowing exactly what goes on in the theater, but willing to take a shot with his first comedic play, “Color Theories.” In it, the audience gets a closer look at the eccentricities that frame his imaginative inner world.
As the son of a civil engineer and architect/fashion designer, Torres’ knack for world building comes as no surprise. In a recent feature for Architectural Digest, Torres opened the doors to his wonderland Brooklyn studio apartment, which contained escapist daydream corners and custom futuristic furniture made of glass, chromatic metals and mirrors, all cut and shaped into squiggles and sharp edges. With elements of retro-elegance and the ambiance of a playhouse, Torres’ vision is nostalgically absurdist and highly refined.
The same can be said about most of his work, including his vision for “Color Theories.” In order to bring his ever unpredictable vision to life, Torres teamed up with longtime scenic design collaborator Tommaso Ortino to create a fantastical surrealist stage for his live theatrical debut, which took place Sept. 3 at the Performance Space New York, located in downtown Manhattan.
Julio Torres performs in “Color Theories” at the Performance Space New York.
(Emilio Madrid)
Before Torres begins his performance, the audience is greeted by a giant book doused in bold, mostly primary colors, a grandfather clock with the numbers melted off its face à la Dalí and tall, blank scrolls. On top of the book lies a giant lipstick-stained wine glass, and an actor lying face down in a bubble-shaped, burgundy satin cloak — or, Drew Rollins playing the role of spilled wine. Rollins is accompanied by Nick Myers, who sits on the side of the stage dressed as a music box in silver foil and oversized pearls. They both play the roles of Torres’ stagehands and narrative helpers. Costumes were designed by Muriel Parra, best known for her work in “A Fantastic Woman” (2017), “Neruda” (2016) and “The Settlers” (2023).
Once the lights come down and the play begins, the whimsical characters crack open the giant book, revealing a stark contrast of blank pages. They proceed to open a flap where the comedian emerges, from the cushioned interior of his own creation. He begins by describing the abstract personalities of different letters of the alphabet, referring to them as staff with “wants, needs, hopes and dreams.” From there, he seamlessly transitions into the definition of the first color on the list: navy blue, which represents (American) bureaucracy, policing and control. Throughout the play, this “law and order” blue encroaches on the existence of every color selected by Torres.
Upon noticing that Torres is spending too much time discussing navy blue, his robotic buddy Bebo — also a recurring character in “Fantasmas” — pops out of the giant clock and serves as a colonel of time and color story order. (He also happens to be blue.)
What Torres dubs as “relaxed” green, “commercial-portrayals-of-joy” yellow, “lusty and ragey” red, “teenage” orange, “soft” beige and “mysterious” purple are all accompanied by playful examples of behaviors, objects and societal conditioning that represent each color. The operatic sound effects paired with each color were created by Lia Ouyang Rusli, who was tasked with the important role of not only composing the sounds for each color, but their respective emotions. Torres explained in a separate interview: “Green should also sound like we combined the sounds of yellow and blue, and so that’s fun.”
One of the most poignant moments of the play is during his green monologue, when Torres reminisces about the video store he grew up visiting in San Salvador. He unashamedly admits he never returned a movie on time, so the owner would bargain the late fee with him based on if the movie was requested during the days it was off the shelf or not.
“This was all working perfectly fine until Blockbuster came in and suddenly we were in a navy blue system,” he explains — with a nod to the U.S. influence on El Salvador, namely in the way American capitalism infringes on countries within reach of its empirical tentacles.
Immigration status is a recurring theme in much of Torres’ work. In his directorial debut, “Problemista,” Torres plays the protagonist Alejandro, who scrambles to find a work visa in 30 days after being fired from his job — and makes desperate attempts to earn quick cash in an effort to pay his legal fees. In “Color Theories,” Torres describes several run-ins with airport immigration authorities and the complications of traveling with a Salvadoran passport.
He recounts being turned away from entering Costa Rica because his passport was too wrinkled — and of being taken to an interrogation room for not knowing he needed a travel visa to enter the U.K. While detained, he noticed authorities had branded the interrogation area as a pseudo-mental wellness safe space — messaging that contradicted the reality of his experience.
Torres uses blue and red to exemplify his anti-capitalist stance by endearingly explaining how those with extreme wealth maneuver tax evasion, how governments allow and excuse war crimes, and how pervasive individualism prevents progress. “Color Theories” reaches its apex when Torres begins discussing the space between the shades black and white — neither representing good nor evil, but rather the known and the unknown.
Julio Torres’ new play “Color Theories” at Performance Space New York.
(Emilio Madrid)
It’s a beautiful way to take what have become very divisive points of view and create an atmosphere of shared humanity among the audience. From here, the colors that become the focal point are bright, airy mixes of pastels, which highlight the beauty in all of our differences and ranges of knowledge.
In just over an hour, Torres delivers a concise portrait of how he navigates and experiences the world in terms an elementary schoolchild can understand — which he jokes about by saying the play will be taken to schools across the U.S. His character development transitions from a justified frustration to the conclusion that humans behaving as though they know it all is the ultimate act of hubris.
“Color Theories” does not communicate as a pessimistic rant about the world but rather examines how government and institutions of power shape our society — and how that power complicates and often oppresses the everyday reality of the average person — by using humorous, universally relatable vantage points and lighthearted pop culture moments.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries are alive with sound and activity. Voices echo through the vast, concrete space and a cacophony of drills and electric lifts beep, buzz and blare. A unique colored glaze is being applied to gallery walls, and paintings and photos are being installed throughout.
That gritty whir? It’s the Hilti TE 4-22 cordless rotary hammer drill. “A very fine product,” says senior art preparator Michael Price with a sly smile. He’s been drilling holes in the concrete walls with the large red contraption, which comes with a small attached vacuum that sucks up concrete dust as it penetrates the wall. The work is simple and done in a matter of seconds.
Senior art preparator Michael Price drills into concrete walls to hang art in LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries. He jokingly calls the Hilti TE 4-22 cordless rotary hammer drill “a very fine product.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Some of the first holes were drilled a little more than a week ago for the installation of a photo sculpture LACMA commissioned for its entrance by Los Angeles-born artist Todd Gray, titled “Octavia Butler’s Gaze.” Last Wednesday, Gray, along with LACMA director and Chief Executive Michael Govan and curator Britt Salvesen, watched the final panel of the 27-foot-long assemblage being hoisted onto the wall and put in place using wooden cleats that fit together much like a jigsaw puzzle.
“This is another thing that concrete makes possible,” says Salvesen, the head of the photography, and prints and drawings, departments, noting with satisfaction how flush the photographs sit against the wall. “The traditional sheetrock drywall used in many museums have been painted and repainted so many times, they’re not exactly pristine when it comes to leveling.”
Gray steps back and looks at the finished product, nodding with quiet pride. The L.A. native attended Hamilton High School and CalArts and felt deeply honored to have been tapped for a permanent commission. He was therefore among the first people to take a hard-hat tour of the building when it was under construction so he could familiarize himself with the space. The new building opens in April 2026.
“I was kind of overwhelmed,” Gray says. “I had never been in an architectural space like this so I was just really curious. But I must admit, I was much more concerned about this wall.”
The wall is big — a blank, concrete slate — and Gray’s piece will be the first work of art guests see when they walk up the broad staircase leading to the new galleries. In Butler’s portrait, which Gray took in the 1990s, the influential writer looks contemplatively off into the distance — whether near or far, one can’t be sure. Her expression is unreadable, at once thoughtful, curious, interested and detached.
A portrait of Octavia Butler, taken by Todd Gray in the 1990s, anchors the 27-foot-long photo sculpture commissioned by LACMA for the entrance of its new David Geffen Galleries.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Her face is in a gold, oval frame and the viewer’s eyes follow hers to other aspects of the piece — an assemblage of large and small photos taken by Gray in places around the world, including Versailles, Norway and Ghana. It includes an image of an idyllic-looking path through bright green foliage that leads to a slave castle in Cape Coast, Ghana. There is also a striking image of stars in the cosmos, a lovely fresco from a church in Rome, a picture of traditional sculpture housed at the AfricaMuseum in Belgium and a series of stoic Greek columns.
“A lot of my work is contesting art history, or talking about art history, or photography’s place in history, my history, various histories culturally,” said Gray, explaining why he likes that LACMA’s collection will not be exhibited chronologically, or by medium or region, but rather in a series of interwoven exhibits that connect vastly different art in dialogue. “So it was really a commission made in heaven.”
The new galleries, explained Govan, will focus on “migration and intersection, rather than American art over on one side of the museum and European art in a different wing.”
Gray’s photo sculpture, for example, will be adjacent to a gallery featuring African art and near another with Latin American art.
It will also be directly across from a floor-to-ceiling window. These giant windows are a key part of Zumthor’s design — and a flash point for controversy, with critics arguing that too much sunlight could harm fragile art.
Translucent curtains are being designed for some of the windows, but won’t be used throughout, and not in the entrance across from “Octavia’s Gaze.” For that reason, Gray said he employed a relatively new technique called UV direct printing that was developed for outdoor signage. The process involves intense ultraviolet lights that cure and harden the ink, ultimately searing it into the printing material. These prints won’t fade, Gray said.
Todd Gray, left, oversees the installation of his photo sculpture “Octavia Butler’s Gaze.” The piece used a new UV printing technology to ensure it won’t fade in the sunlight coming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows across from it.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Delicate and old art will not be put at risk by light, Govan said. The interior of Zumthor’s building is dotted with boxy, windowless galleries that Govan and Zumthor call “houses.” And like houses, the interior of galleries are being treated to color — not in the form of paint, however.
Zumthor conceived of three colors that he wanted used in the galleries, explained Diana Magaloni, senior deputy director for conservation, curatorial and exhibitions, who has been mixing the glazes and working with a team of four trained artists to apply them. The colors are a reddish black, a Renaissance ultramarine blue and a blackish burgundy that Zumthor hoped would conjure a cave-like dimness. Overall, Magaloni said, Zumthor wanted the color to look as if it were emerging from darkness.
There are 27 galleries and the colors will be divided by section: Nine on the south side are red, nine on the north side are black and the nine in the middle are blue.
The glazing technique was conceived by a friend of Zumthor’s who lives in Switzerland, and LACMA is currently the only organization to employ it, Magaloni said.
Pigments made of minerals including hematite and rocks like lapis lazuli are ground into nanoparticles and suspended in silica, resembling “melted glass,” as Magaloni describes. The glaze is then applied to the walls, a process that must be done at once in order to prevent any impression of brushstrokes, and also because the glaze hardens quickly. Once it’s dry, the team applies a second coat of glaze pigment infused with black carbon nanoparticles. The effect is dark and mottled — it looks as if the concrete has swallowed the color.
“The concrete has all this life in and of itself,” said Magaloni. “You can walk through the building and you can see that those surfaces are not really homogeneous. The material expresses itself with no artifice, and we wanted to preserve that.”
Painting the concrete would erase that life, she added.
A gallery blushing in a deep wine color, with the theme of “Leisure and Labor in the American Metropolis,” is almost ready. Work by George Bellows, James Van Der Zee, Mary Cassatt and Robert Henri adorn the walls, and there is a table ready to receive a Tiffany lamp. Govan points out that such paintings would not have been originally displayed on white walls but rather on walls of richly colored fabric.
“She’s asking you something,” Todd Gray said of his portrait of Octavia Butler.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Gray’s piece will also be in dialogue with this room, calling to it from another time and place — asking viewers to turn their gaze to history, slavery, transcendence, salvation, power and so much more.
At this moment in time, when arts institutions are grappling with the implications of the Trump administration’s claim that the Smithsonian Institution presents “divisive, race-centered ideology” and vow to monitor what other museums around the country are putting on display, Gray’s piece feels like a small bit of resistance.
“She’s asking you something,” Gray says of Butler.
The day before our interview, cinematographer Darius Khondji tells me he went to see a Pablo Picasso exhibit in uptown New York City. And though he would never compare himself to the Spanish painter, Khondji says he found a kinship in the way he described his artistic practice.
“About his style, he said that he was like a chameleon, changing completely from one moment to another, from one situation to another,” Khondji, 69, recalls via Zoom. “This is exactly how I feel. When I’m with a director, I embrace that director completely.”
Backlit, with natural light coming from the large windows behind him on a recent afternoon, Khondji appears shrouded in darkness, at times like an enigmatic silhouette with a halo of sunshine around his fuzzy hair. The Iranian-born cinematographer speaks animatedly, with hand movements accentuating every effusive sentence.
“Sometimes I talk in a very impressionistic way,” Khondji says, apologetically. “I might be confusing but I try to be just honest and say what I feel.”
Khondji’s eclectic resume flaunts an exceptional collection of collaborations, some of the best-looking movies of their moments: David Fincher’s gruesome but gorgeous “Seven,” Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s darkly whimsical and richly textured “Delicatessen” and “The City of Lost Children,” Michael Haneke’s unflinching love story “Amour,” James Gray’s old-school luxurious “The Immigrant,” the Safdie Brothers’ nerve-racking and kinetic “Uncut Gems,” and now Ari Aster’s paranoid big-canvas pandemic saga “Eddington,” in theaters Friday.
Khondji stands simultaneously as a wise member of the old guard and a hopeful champion for the future of film. Sought in decades past by the likes of Woody Allen, Roman Polanski and Bernardo Bertolucci, he’s now lending his lensing genius to a new generation of storytellers with ideas just as biting.
“Darius understands the human soul and he masters the tools to express it,” says filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu via email. “All the technical choices — framing decisions, uses of color and lighting techniques — he is able to apply them, but always subordinated to the director’s vision and, most importantly, to the needs of the film itself.”
Khondji, left, with director Alejandro González Iñárritu on the shoot of 2022’s “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.”
“Darius is kind of a poet — everything is feeling-based with him,” says Aster via video call from Los Angeles. “He is an intellectual but he is also decidedly not.”
If you were to dissect the pivotal memories that shaped Khondji’s creative mind, the array of touchstones would include a photograph of Christopher Lee as Dracula that his brother would bring him from London. Also in prime of place: an image of his older sister, Christine, whom he considers an artistic mentor.
You would also find the intense orange color of persimmons squashed in his family’s garden in Tehran during winter — the only sensory memory he has from his early childhood before his family moved to Paris when he was around 3 1/2 years old in the late 1950s.
“Sometimes I look at my granddaughter and grandson and say, ‘OK, they are 3, almost 3 1/2, so this is the amount of language I had, but it was probably mostly in Farsi,’” he says. Khondji returned to Iran only once, as a teenager in the early 1970s, with a Super 8 camera in hand.
He has been watching movies since infancy. His nanny, an avid moviegoer, would take him to the cinema with her. And later, his father, who owned movie theaters in Tehran and would source films through Europe, brought him along to Parisian screening rooms as a kid.
“These are all stories told to me and a mix of impressions and feelings of things that I remember,” Khondji explains. That visceral, heart-first way of perceiving the world around him might be the defining quality of his approach to image-making. It’s always about how something feels.
“Cinema is a strong force,” he says. “You cannot limit it only with aesthetic taste or things that you like or don’t like or rules. You just have to go with the flow and give yourself to it. You need a lot of humility.” At that last thought, Khondji laughs.
Cinematographer Darius Khondji, photographed in France in 2021.
(Ariane Damain Vergallo)
When he started making his own Dracula-inspired short films on Super 8 as a teenager, Khondji had little idea about the distinct roles of a film production. Slowly, he started noticing that the directors of photography for the movies he liked were often the same artists.
“I was discovering that some films looked incredible — they had a very strong atmosphere,” Khondji recalls. “Then I found that the same name of one person was on one movie and then another movie, and I thought, ‘OK, this person really is very important.’” He mentions Gregg Toland, the legendary shooter of Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.”
But it wasn’t until Khondji attended NYU for film school that he dropped his aspirations for directing and decided on becoming a cinematographer. His film exercises leaned more toward the experiential than the narrative. He refers to them as “emotional wavelengths.”
“It’s really the director and the actors that trigger my desire to shoot a movie,” says Khondji. “The script is, of course, a great thing, but once I want to work with the director, I really trust them.”
Hearing Khondji speak about directors, it’s clear that he puts them in a privileged light — so much so that he makes a point of creating what he calls a “family” around them to ensure their success. This means he ensures the director feels comfortable with the gaffer, the dolly grip, the key grip, so that there’s no one on set that feels like a stranger.
With Aster, for example, their bond emerged from a shared voraciousness for film. The pair had several hangouts together before a job even entered the equation. Khondji is a defender of the polarizing “Beau Is Afraid,” his favorite of Aster’s movies. “Eddington” finally brought them together as collaborators for the first time.
“Ari and I have a common language,” he says. “We discovered quite early on working together that we have a very similar taste for dark films, not dark in lighting but in storytelling.”
Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in the movie “Eddington.”
(A24)
While scouting locations in Aster’s native New Mexico, he and Khondji came across the small town where the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” was filmed. And though they both revere that arid 2007 thriller, they wanted to get away from anything tied to it, so they pivoted again to the community of Truth or Consequences.
Khondji recalls Aster describing his film, about a self-righteous sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) in a grudge match against the mayor (Pedro Pascal), as “a European psychological thriller on American land.” For the cinematographer, the movie is “a modern western.”
“We wanted the exterior to be very bright, like garishly bright, like the light has almost started to take off the color and the contrast a little bit because it’s so bright, never bright enough,” explains Khondji about shooting in the desert.
For Khondji, working Aster reminded him of his two outings with Austria’s esteemed, ultra-severe Michael Haneke, with which the cinematographer made the American remake of “Funny Games” and “Amour,” the latter on which he discovered a “radically different kind filmmaking” where “everything in the set had to have a grace of realness.”
“‘The color is vivid in a way that it isn’t in any of his other films,” says Aster about the quality that Khondji brought to “Amour,” Haneke’s Oscar-winning film.
Still, after working with some of the world’s most acclaimed filmmakers on features, music videos, commercials and a TV show (he shot Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2019 “Too Old to Die Young” and became infatuated with the San Fernando Valley), Khondji prefers to be reinvigorated by younger artists challenging the rules.
“‘Uncut Gems’ was like turning a page for me in filmmaking,” he says, calling out to Josh and Benny Safdie. “These two young filmmakers were making films in a different way. And the fact that I could keep up with them — they are in their 30s — psychologically, it gave me a lot of strength.” Khondji also shot Josh Safdie’s upcoming “Marty Supreme,” out in December.
Is there a visual signature that defines Khondji’s work? Perhaps, even if he doesn’t consciously think of it. A lushness, a preference for olive greens and blacker-than-black shadows. An intense fixation on color in general. There are also aesthetic preferences that Aster noticed from their work on “Eddington.”
“Darius and I hate unmotivated camera movement,” Aster says. “But there are certain things that never would’ve bothered me compositionally that really bothered Darius, and now they’re stuck in my head. For instance, Darius hates it when you cut off somebody’s leg, even if it’s at the ankle. A lot of Darius’s prejudices have gone into my system.”
Khondji concedes to these particularities, yet he doesn’t think in rigid absolutes.
“You have a rule, and then you decide this is the moment to break the rule,” he says, citing the rawness of the films of French director Maurice Pialat or how actor Harriet Andersson looks directly into the camera in Ingmar Bergman’s 1953 “Summer with Monika.”
He recently watched Ryan Coogler’s box-office hit “Sinners” without knowing anything about its premise beforehand. “People who know me know that I don’t like spoilers,” he says. “I’m very cautious with film reviews. They are very important, but at the same time, I don’t want to know the story.”
Khondji had never seen one of Coogler’s films, but was impressed. “I really enjoyed it,” he says. “After I watched it I wanted to know who shot the film, but I enjoyed the actors so much and I love just being a real member of the audience.”
It might surprise some to learn that Khondji’s initial interest in seeing a film is unrelated to how it looks or who shot it.
“When I watch a film people say, ‘Oh, did you notice how it was shot?’ And I don’t really go for that,” he says. “I mostly go to watch a film for the director.”
These days, his wish list includes the opportunity to shoot a proper supernatural horror film (Aster might be handy to stay in touch with) and for a company to make a modern film-stock camera. Khondji is not precious about format but believes shooting on film should stay an option as it is the “natural medium” of cinema.
He tells me how much he loves going to the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. “It’s really like a shrine for me,” he says, recalling seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” there on true VistaVision.
“It was an incredible emotion,” he adds. “Like the emotion I had when I grew up with my dad, when they would take me to see big films in the cinemas where the ceiling had stars to make you dream even before the film started.”
That dream is what Khondji is still chasing, in the cinema and on set.
The House Oversight Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services held a hearing recently about diversity, equity and inclusion. Fewer than five of the 90 minutes were spent talking about healthcare or anything related to money. Instead, conservative lawmakers wasted time and taxpayers’ dollars advancing an anti-DEI agenda with which they have become obsessed. Anecdotes were more interesting to them than were evidence-based truths about the Americans whom discrimination most harms.
Because the GOP comprises the majority in the House, all but one of the four expert witnesses in the hearing were theirs. Like the three other times I had testified on Capitol Hill, I was the lone Democrat. The Republicans’ strategy was familiar: ask a series of yes/no questions that would require contextualization to answer adequately, then interrupt as the witness attempts to provide a nuanced response.
One question for me from Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas): “Should people be treated differently based on their race?” As I had done in my written testimony, I tried to explain to him that Black, Indigenous, Asian American and Latino American people have long been mistreated because of their race, which has led to persistent and pervasive racial inequities that disadvantage them relative to white people. But he apparently did not want to hear any of those facts, because he kept cutting me off, repeatedly declaring that this was a yes or no question.
Gill posed another question to which he did not allow an informative answer: “Do you believe that race should be considered in employer hiring practices?” For centuries, racism and white supremacy have been powerful determinants of who works where, what they are paid, and their opportunities for advancement to leadership in workplaces across industries. Race should not influence employment outcomes, but it too often has and still does.
Because of both implicit and explicit biases, race influences hiring processes across industries. Research makes painstakingly clear, though, that it is white applicants who most often and most lucratively benefit from preferential treatment. People of color and job seekers with ethnic-sounding last names have long been and continue to be routinely discriminated against, a highly cited University of Chicago study shows.
I do not believe that the remedy for discrimination is more discrimination. Instead, strategy and intentionality are both necessary and required to right past and present wrongs in hiring processes. Because the inequities are racialized and gendered, programs and practices ought to deliberately address the mindsets, structures and systems that have routinely locked irrefutably qualified people of color and women out of well-deserved opportunities. Perhaps had I been allowed to answer fully, Gill and I would have found common ground in our opposition to unlawful workplace discrimination.
Corporations, universities and other organizations need high-quality professional learning experiences that help employees who are involved in hiring processes understand how and why white job applicants are typically presumed to be smarter and more qualified than applicants of color. Gill and other opponents of diversity programs need to learn about these particular manifestations of white supremacy too. They also could benefit from exposure to research that shows how workplace racial stratification systems cyclically route the majority of employees of color into the lowest-paid, lowest-authority jobs and lock them out of leadership positions.
Federal statistics show that 77% of managers across all industries are white. Furthermore, 84% of executive-level leaders at Fortune 100 companies are white, according to a Heidrick & Struggles report. If our positions had been reversed and I were the one posing questions, I would have asked Gill about those statistics: Is it that most white people are just that much more talented and deserving than people of color, or could it be something else? In the midst of our chaotic crosstalk, I was able to make the point that I do not believe that white candidates are the only qualified people for jobs.
“I didn’t say that, nobody said that,” Gill replied. “And you’re not going to intimidate me by slandering me as a racist.” I did not say or imply that he was. However, his mistaken presumption is revealing and unsurprising. It sometimes happens — especially among white people — when simplistic or otherwise problematic positions on race are challenged. I was able to make this clear: “And you’re not going to intimidate me by insisting that I called you a racist.” I reminded him that a hearing transcript confirming what I actually said would be made publicly available.
Gill was in search of yes/no responses to his questions. Racism and racial inequities in employment, university admissions and other processes are far more complicated than that. But if he was indeed only interested in simple truths, there are at least two. First, professionals of color and women are systematically passed over for job opportunities and promotions because of their race and gender considerably more often than are their white male counterparts. Second, diversity policies and programs aim to redress such inequities accrued to employees because of their skin color, nationality, ethnicity, sex, gender, disability, weight, accent, sexual orientation and other traits.
Shaun Harper is a professor of education, business and public policy at the University of Southern California and the author of “Let’s Talk About DEI: Productive Disagreements About America’s Most Polarizing Topics.”
A legal group co-founded by Stephen Miller, the White House chief of staff and architect of the Trump Administration’s harsh immigration policies, filed a federal civil rights complaint against the Dodgers earlier this week, accusing the team of “engaging in unlawful discrimination under the guise of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion.’”
The lawsuit, filed Monday with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by America First Legal, was first reported Wednesday by The Athletic. The Dodgers declined comment about the complaint, which also named their ownership group, Guggenheim Partners and the Dodgers’ professional groups for employees, such as the Black Action Network and Women’s Opportunity Network.
In a press release, America First claimed the Dodgers’ actions violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.
American First claims the reigning World Series champions, who visited with President Trump at the White House earlier this season, have violated the law by sponsoring programs geared to women and people of color and by “[e]mbedding diversity, equity and inclusion strategies” into every aspect of the organization.
The group also points to the biography of Mark Walter, the majority owner of the Dodgers and CEO of Guggenheim Partners, in which it calls Walter a “social-justice advocate.”
The Dodgers and Guggenheim Partners are just the latest organizations to find themselves in the crosshairs of American Legal over their diversity efforts. The group has pursued cases against IBM, the world’s largest industrial research organization, and Johnson & Johnson, a multinational pharmaceutical company, among others.
America First’s complaint focused heavily on a page on the Dodgers website that defines the team’s mission “to create a culture where diverse voices and experiences are valued.” The site outlines efforts to recruit women and people of color, partner with community groups to support racial and social justice and promote heritage events for staff and fans.
“The DEI mission statement indicates that the Dodgers are incorporating DEI into its workplace in quantifiable ways with identifiable goals to achieve ‘success,’ which appears to entail engaging in unlawful discriminatory hiring, training, and recruitment,” America First stated in its complaint.
Jared Rivera of Pico California, one of the groups that have called on the Dodgers to do more for immigrants, told the The Athletic the complaint amounts to retaliation.
“Stephen Miller’s group is dressing up vengeance as legal action,” he said. “Retaliating against the Dodgers for their compassion shows Miller is threatened when the team and its fans stand up for what is moral and right.”
SACRAMENTO — California’s state Democrats are shaking up leadership, with the Senate Democratic Caucus pledging unanimous support to Sen. Monique Limón (D-Goleta), who will take over as Senate president pro tem in early 2026.
Limón, who was elected to the state Senate in 2020, is chair of the Senate Democratic Caucus and the Senate banking committee. The 45-year-old Central Coast native served in the Assembly for four years before her Senate campaign and worked in higher education at UC Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara County School Board before entering politics.
She highlighted the importance of the moment, noting that the caucus, amid ICE raids led by the Trump administration targeting minorities in Los Angeles and across the state, elected her — the first woman of color to hold the position.
The uncertain times, she said, were “a reminder of why leadership today, tomorrow and in the future matters, because leadership thinks about and influences the direction in all moments, but, in particular, in these very challenging moments. And for me, it is unbelievably humbling to be here.”
Recently, Limón has been vocal on the Sable Offshore Pipeline project, which aims to repair and reopen a pipeline off the coast of Santa Barbara County that spilled 21,000 gallons of crude oil in 2015. This year she wrote a measure, Senate Bill 542, in response to the project that would require more community input on reopening pipelines and better safety guidelines to find weak points that could lead to another spill.
“No one has fought harder to make college more affordable than Monique Limón,” said current Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg), who also applauded her work on wildfire recovery. “She is a tireless voice for the Central Coast in rural parts of this great state.”
McGuire took leadership of the Senate in a unanimous vote by Democrats with former speaker and gubernatorial candidate Toni Atkins’ blessing in February. He pledged to protect the state’s progressive ideals ahead of a problematic state budget that continued to bubble over, with the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress supporting cuts in federal aid to the state for heathcare for low-income Californians, education and research and other essential programs.
The Sonoma County Democrat’s takeover was part of a wider change — both legislative houses were led by lawmakers from Northern California this year, leaving Southern California legislators with limited control. Limón’s district covers Santa Barbara County and parts of Ventura and San Luis Obispo counties.
McGuire terms out of office next year and may be planning a run for insurance commissioner in 2026 but wouldn’t confirm his plans despite collecting more than $220,000 in contributions so far this year.
