Anais Nin Observed: From a Film Portrait of a Woman As Artist

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful companion to the 1976 film
Review: ANAIS NIN OBSERVED is a companion to the 1976 film of the same name. It is 115 pages of dialogue from the movie, text from Anais Nin's diaries, and black-and-white pictures of Anais Nin and the people in her life, as well as her greatest influences (Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, Martha Graham, etc.). We also get pictures of Nin from her early childhood up to her days in the limelight as a famous diarist, author, and college lecturer. And that is my favorite part of the book: the portrayal of Anais Nin as a popular college lecturer. One of the first pictures we get is a full length portrait of her standing on stage before an audience at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s. This is a woman who began her literary career in the 1930s in a small town outside of Paris. She was ignored by the literary world for three decades. Finally, she got the acclaim she'd always desired. I find that very moving. Oh, how I would have loved to have been one of the dozen or so students who got to visit her home and sit on the plush pillows on her livingroom floor and talk about literature (picture enclosed). The pictures of a solitary Nin in her Zen garden are equally poignant.

Andrew Parodi