Optronica transforms the BFI IMAX into a cauldron of sound and vision,” says the National Film theatre brochure. It’s indeed a very seductive brochure. Flicking through it really makes you desire cinema. And that’s coming from moi who’s supposedly jaded from watching Fassbinder, Visconti and Wertmuller as a teenager. Peter Greenaway is featured - screenings of all the Tulse Luper films, a lecture by him, and his live video disc jockey performance where he mixes Tulse Luper stories. Over the road, the South Bank Centre has its 100 Ideas talks about how culture can shape our life. Hayward Gallery’s new director Ralph Rugoff gave a talk elsewhere the other night about the exhibition A Brief History of Invisible Art he curated at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco November 30, 2005–February 21, 2006. On the same day I read this article by Robert Lanza:
“The central mystery of knowledge is that the laws of the world were somehow created to produce the observer. [Life creates the universe not the other way round.] There is something very unusual about them [time and space]. We can't put them in a marmalade jar and take them back to the lab for analysis. Space and time are not objects or things -- they are forms of animal sense perception.”
...........and if that grabs you...2+2=5 Can we begin to think about unexplained
religious experiences in ways that acknowledge their existence?
In his San Francisco exhibition, Rugoff had a roll call of guilty invisible pleasures. Yves Klein’s ‘air architecture’ - houses with roofs of air jets alongside a fountain of fire where his Five Fundamental Acts (Life, Education, Ceremony, Love and Death) could be experienced directly. There was Mauricio Cattelan’s Italian police report documenting the theft of an invisible sculpture from his car before a 1991 exhibition. Or Gianni Motti’s national telepathy event organized in Colombia in March 1997, in Bogota, to urge President Samper to resign. The artist also staged his own burial in July 1989, after announcing his death in a local paper and then parading the streets of Vigo in an open coffin. Sounds like Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa who not only faked his death but being an avid astrologer he predicted his real one to within a day. (I had a commission to evoke Pessoa for a South Bank Centre audience some years ago and became hooked). ‘Life is the hesitation between exclamation and a question. Doubt is resolved by a period,' he wrote in The Book of Disquiet. Or rather Bernardo Soares did, one of more than seventy other identities that Pessoa called ‘heteronyms'. These ‘heteronyms’ not only published their own poetry and prose, but also interacted with each other in their philosophical work. Pessoa invented them not as pseudonyms, but as real characters not needing an author. Alvaro De Campos, another one of Pessoa's heteronyms writes: ‘Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, does not exist.'
US Life: In the Berkshire Hills, globalisation faces a challenge
Germans get by without the euro
Is French philosopher Baudrillard permeating the Berkshire hills I wonder?
“It [globalisation] is pitched as the endpoint of the Enlightenment, the solution to all contradictions. In reality, it transforms everything into a negotiable, quantifiable exchange value. This process is extremely violent, for it cashes out in the idea of unity as the ideal state, in which everything that is unique, every singularity, including other cultures and finally every non-monetary value would be incorporated. See, on this point, I am the humanist and moralist. The universal values, as the Enlightenment defined them, constitute a transcendental ideal. They confront the subject with its own freedom, which is a permanent task and responsibility, not simply a right. This is completely absent in the global, which is an operational system of total trade and exchange. I think that human rights have already been integrated into the process of globalization and therefore function as an alibi. They belong to a juridical and moral superstructure; in short, they are advertising.”(From a Der Spiegel interview in 2002)
The Illusionist doesn’t have the panache of The Prestige, (DVD out today)but both films concern the illusory nature of power. The Illusionist unfolds like an opera, the die’s been cast and there are no surprises. And there’s that Philip Glass music again incessantly pushing the narrative to the cliff, much more subtly here than in Notes on a Scandal. Edward Norton’s self-knowledge is that his rags to riches life of creating stage illusions has existed only to win back his childhood soul mate from the aristocratic world she now inhabits. It’s not a perplexing film by any means but writer (based on Steven Millhauser's story)/director Neil Burger (his latest) really knows how to illicit the best from a top notch composer and cinematographer (Dick Pope). There’s a strangeness as if an opera’s characters have stopped singing and some invisible force conjured by Glass’s music has taken over the proceedings. Time dissolving - a cross between a Glass opera production from theatre director Robert Wilson and Visconti. (Glass’s Satyagraha opens at English National Opera in April). Also, there's an uptodate radio interview with him BBC Music Matters.
The first feature from indie American filmmaker Andrew Bujalski Funny HaHa opens this week, having taken two years to get here. To say it’s like fellow indies Cassavetes or Richard Linklater doesn’t say much at all. Strangely, if anything, the confined space created by Bujalski’s slices of life is more European than American. (I’m sure he could create the same effect on 35mm as on 16mm film) Even when the characters are having lunch in the middle of a park they seem confined and in a state of stasis. Bujalski is writer/director/editor and the latter talent for timing really shows. The framing’s great too. Beautifully observed has become such a film poster cliché but it’s exactly this film. The kind of ‘much ado about nothing and everything’ film so many film school students and indies try to make and end up botching. His second film Mutual Appreciation opens in May.
“There is enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything”
writes Pessoa’s shepherd character Alberto Caeiro:
What we see of things is things
Why would we see something if there were something else?
Why would seeing and hearing be there to deceive us
When seeing and hearing are seeing and hearing
What matters is knowing how to see,
Knowing how to see without stopping to think,
Knowing how to see when it is obvious,
And neither thinking when it is obvious
Nor seeing when it is thinkable
Translated by Keith Bosley (Carcanet Press)
..........you must be exhausted now dear reader and long to sit on a hill grazing with the sheep............................
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