Claes Bang

The Northman

by
Alexander Skarsgård

Aryans assemble! Hollywood’s most Nordic get together for The Northman, Robert Eggers’ latest exploration of arcane mindsets, and the sort of film that’s probably on a loop at White Supremacist HQ. The men are tall, blond, hairy and sculpted, the women are fierce, brave and yield only to their liege-lord husband. There is dirt, there are runic inscriptions, there is lore and there are any number of other tokens of authenticity. It’s the hipster version of The Vikings, the one that starred Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, made in the days when no one particularly minded a pair of New York Jews playing characters out of the Nordic sagas (though there were sniggerings … Read more

The Last Vermeer

by
Claes Bang and Vicky Krieps

The Last Vermeer is the true story of Han Van Meegeren, art forger extraordinaire, who knocked out old masters by the likes of Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer, among others, during the Second World War and even managed to sell a “Vermeer” to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring for a fortune. Van Meegeren was initially brought to trial in the Netherlands after the War for having sold Göring what was supposed to be a real Vermeer, as a collaborator who had facilitated the expropriation of the cultural property of the Netherlands. But when he eventually admitted that the picture was fake, those charges were dropped. However, because of the skewed logic of … Read more