Eszter Balint (born 7 July 1966) is a Hungarian-American singer, songwriter, violinist, and actress. [1]
Eszter Balint (born 7 July 1966) is a Hungarian-American singer, songwriter, violinist, and actress. [1]
Eszter Balint was born in Budapest, Hungary, to Marianne Kollar and Stephan Balint. [2] She was living with the avant-garde Squat Theatre troupe in New York City, founded by her father, when she first met Jean-Michel Basquiat. They became involved while he was filming Downtown 81 . [3]
In 1983, Balint was brought into the studio by Basquiat to play violin on the influential hip-hop record "Beat Bop" by Rammellzee and K-Rob. [4]
Balint made her cinematic debut in 1984 in director Jim Jarmusch's independent film Stranger Than Paradise . [2] In 1985 she made her TV debut in Miami Vice as Dorothy Bain in the episode "Buddies". She appeared in the 1990 film Bail Jumper. [5] Roles in The Linguini Incident (1991), Woody Allen's Shadows and Fog (1991) and Steve Buscemi's Trees Lounge (1996) followed. [1]
Balint's albums, Flicker (1998) and Mud (2004), both produced by J. D. Foster, were praised by The New York Times , The New Yorker , and Billboard . In his review of Mud, Jon Pareles writes: "Miss Balint has her own film noir sensibility as a songwriter. She puts arty twists into back-alley Americana... but the cleverness is not the point. She slips inside her characters to project their restlessness and longing." [6]
Balint has appeared on recordings by Michael Gira's group Angels of Light, Marc Ribot's group Los Cubanos Postizos, John Lurie's album The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits, Dayna Kurtz, and with the Swans. She was a featured guest member of Marc Ribot's group Ceramic Dog, touring Europe throughout 2009 and is featured on their 2013 release Your Turn.[ citation needed ]
In 2014, Balint appeared as Amia, a violin-playing Hungarian love interest for Louis C.K. on the latter's FX sitcom, Louie . [7]
In 2015, Balint released her third album Airless Midnight, produced by J. D. Foster. [8] That same year, Paste magazine premiered Balint's first official music video, "Trouble You Don't See". Josh Jackson wrote: "Paste named Eszter Balint an artist to watch back in 2004 after she released her second album Mud. And while she stepped back from music to focus on parenting soon after, she’s delivered on that promise with this year’s long-awaited follow-up Airless Midnight, which comes on the heels of a recurring role as a Louis C.K.'s love interest in the most recent season of Louie." [9]
Balint played Fern in the 2019 film The Dead Don't Die . [10]
James Robert Jarmusch is an American film director and screenwriter. He has been a major proponent of independent cinema since the 1980s, directing films such as Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Down by Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989), Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), Broken Flowers (2005), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), and Paterson (2016). Stranger Than Paradise was added to the National Film Registry in December 2002. As a musician, he has composed music for his films and released three albums with Jozef van Wissem.
Stranger Than Paradise is a 1984 American black-and-white absurdist deadpan comedy film directed, co-written and co-edited by Jim Jarmusch, and starring jazz musician John Lurie, former Sonic Youth drummer-turned-actor Richard Edson, and Hungarian-born actress and violinist Eszter Balint. It features a minimalist plot in which the main character, Willie, is visited by Eva, his cousin from Hungary. Eva stays with him for ten days before going to Cleveland. Willie and his friend Eddie go to Cleveland to visit her, and the three then take a trip to Florida. The film is shot entirely in single long takes with no standard coverage.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is a 1999 crime drama film written, produced and directed by Jim Jarmusch. Forest Whitaker stars as the title character, the mysterious "Ghost Dog", a hitman in the employ of the Mafia, who follows the ancient code of the samurai as outlined in the book of Yamamoto Tsunetomo's recorded sayings, Hagakure. The cast also features Cliff Gorman, Henry Silva, Isaach de Bankolé, Victor Argo and Camille Winbush.
Squat Theatre (1977–1991) was a Hungarian theatre company from Budapest which left Hungary for Paris and then New York City, where they performed experimental theatre.
Pamela Adlon is an American actress, writer and director. She is known for voicing Bobby Hill in the animated comedy series King of the Hill (1997–2010), for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award. She also voiced Baloo in Jungle Cubs (1996–1998), the title role in the Pajama Sam video game series (1996–2001), Lucky in 101 Dalmatians: The Series (1997–1998), Margaret "Moose" Pearson in Pepper Ann (1997–2000), Ashley Spinelli in Recess (1997–2001), Otto Osworth in Time Squad (2001–2003), and Brigette Murphy in Milo Murphy's Law (2016–2019), among numerous others.
Louis Alfred Székely, known professionally as Louis C.K., is an American stand-up comedian, actor and filmmaker. C.K. has won three Peabody Awards, three Grammy Awards, six Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award as well as numerous awards for The Chris Rock Show, Louie, and his stand-up specials Live at the Beacon Theater (2011) and Oh My God (2013). In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked C.K.'s stand-up special Shameless number three on their "Divine Comedy: 25 Best Stand-Up Specials and Movies of All Time" list and ranked him fourth on its 2017 list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.
Rammellzee was a visual artist, gothic futurist "graffiti writer", painter, performance artist, art theoretician, sculptor and a hip hop musician from New York City, who has been cited as "instrumental in introducing elements of the avant-garde into hip-hop culture".
Sara Miller Driver is an American independent filmmaker and actress from Westfield, New Jersey. A participant in the independent film scene that flourished in lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s, she gained initial recognition as producer of two early films by Jim Jarmusch, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Driver has directed two feature films, Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993), as well as a notable short film, You Are Not I (1981), and a documentary, Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2017), on the young artist's pre-fame life in the burgeoning downtown New York arts scene before the city's massive changes through the 1980s. She served on the juries of various film festivals throughout the 2000s.
¡Muy Divertido! is a studio album recorded in New York City by Marc Ribot with Los Cubanos Postizos. It was released April 25, 2000 on Atlantic Records.
Péter Halász was a Hungarian actor, director and playwright. In 1993 he won the Hungarian Film Critics Awards for Best Actor. He founded several theater companies in Budapest and New York City including the Kassák Haz Studió, the "appartement theatre", Squat Theatre, Love Theatre and Varosi Szinhaz. As a film actor he appeared Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), Sunshine (1999), and The Breed, among others. In February, 2006 his terminal liver cancer led to his final performance: lying in an open coffin in a Budapest art museum. He died a month after at the age of 62. He had four children: Judith Halasz, Cora Fisher, Gabor Halasz, and David Halasz.
Louie is an American comedy drama television series that premiered on FX on June 29, 2010. It is written, directed, created, edited, and produced by comedian Louis C.K., who also stars in the show as a fictionalized version of himself, a comedian and newly divorced father raising his two daughters in New York City. The show has a loose format atypical for television comedy series, consisting of largely unconnected storylines and segments that revolve around Louie's life, punctuated by live stand-up performances. The show's comedy consisted of such styles as surrealism, satire, absurdism, and gallows humor.
"Beat Bop" is a song by American hip-hop artists Rammellzee and K-Rob. It was produced and arranged by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Initially, it was made as a test pressing by Tartown Inc. in 1983. That same year, the song was released as a single by Profile Records, and featured in the hip-hop documentary film Style Wars (1983).
Only Lovers Left Alive is a 2013 fantasy comedy-drama film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, starring Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska, Anton Yelchin, Jeffrey Wright, Slimane Dazi and John Hurt. An international coproduction between the United Kingdom and Germany, the film focuses on the romance between two vampires and was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
The fourth season of the American television comedy series Louie premiered on May 5, 2014, and concluded on June 16, 2014. It consists of fourteen episodes, most running approximately 23 minutes in length. FX broadcast the fourth season on Mondays at 10:00 and 10:30 pm in the United States with back-to-back episodes. The season was produced by 3 Arts Entertainment and the executive producers were Louis C.K., Dave Becky and M. Blair Breard.
J. D. Foster is an American record producer, bassist, multi-instrumentalist, composer and songwriter. He is known for working with country and Americana performers including Dwight Yoakam and Patty Griffin.
The Dead Don't Die is a 2019 American absurdist zombie comedy film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. It features an ensemble cast including Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton, Tom Waits, Danny Glover, Caleb Landry Jones, Rosie Perez, Iggy Pop, Carol Kane, Austin Butler, and Selena Gomez and follows a small town's police force as they combat a sudden zombie invasion.
Stephan Balint was a writer, actor, theatre director, and playwright. Balint was co-founder of New York's Squat Theatre where he wrote, acted, and directed L-Train to Eldorado and Full Moon Killer.
"Elevator" is the fourth through ninth episodes of the fourth season of the American comedy-drama television series Louie. They are the 43rd through 48th overall episode episodes of the series and they were written and directed by Louis C.K., who also serves as the lead actor. It was released on FX; with "Part 1" airing on May 12, 2014, "Part 2" and "Part 3" airing on May 19, 2014, "Part 4" and "Part 5" airing on May 26, 2014, and "Part 6" airing on June 2, 2014.
"Pamela" is the tenth, thirteenth and fourteenth episodes and season finale of the fourth season of the American comedy-drama television series Louie. They are the 49th, 52nd and 53rd overall episodes of the series and they were written and directed by Louis C.K., who also serves as the lead actor, with Pamela Adlon receiving co-writing credit for "Part 2" and "Part 3". It was released on FX; with "Part 1" airing on June 2, 2014, and "Part 2" and "Part 3" airing on June 16, 2014.
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