Infinity

Five years to London’s Olympics yesterday. That should be fun if the floods continue every year, and this dismal Decemberish weather is a permanent apocalyptic cloud chaque Juillet. Transport’s still a nightmare in the capital. Tried saving a few pennies the other day by catching a bus to and from home to the West End. Bollocks to that! Waited 15 minutes, then the horse-drawn vehicular was only going half way (an extra £1 on the Oyster card in order to continue the journey I suppose) so I gave up and got the tube instead. And I shan’t inflict my housing woes upon you beyond a sentence (too shattered to compose an Alexandrine). But now the Housing Association (bit like the US co-ops) is portraying me as Anthony Perkins in Psycho, only I use water to terrorise my neighbours. Never mind the crap subcontracted plumbing work and lack of proper sealant. No. I suppose I did rain dances in my room to cause the floods as well! Wish I had a voodoo doll. It’s OK to use crap, by the way, ‘cause it’s used in The Simpsons and its rated PG - more of those yellow animates Bart and Homer later. Bullshit’s OK too, ‘cause it’s in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (PG too) - about the most commendable thing in the movie, at least the half I stayed for.

I stopped my rain dances this week and
(15th Raindance Film Fest is Sept 25-Oct 7 with a fantastic jury this year including Iggy Pop and Mick Jones)
after meditating on a preening pelican in St.James’ Park for an hour, dragged myself to a free donut and preview of Sherrybaby written and directed by indie American Laurie Collyer. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Sherry who, out of the clink (slammer) after drugs offences, gets a second chance to cleanup her act in the Genesis programme. I really wanted to like this Sundance mentored movie, but can’t honestly say I did. If you’re the person who sees an indie film maybe only once a month or so, then you might be OK here. And not that Gyllenhaal isn’t great in the part. But what comes across is Gyllenhaal (and we see a lot of her fantastic naked body as she manipulates the men in the system) acting a drug addict. The script may be based on a true story but it isn’t that surprising or nasty. I haven’t had experience of drug or prison programmes (there goes my street cred) but I have had to live with people in shared and so-called supported housing that under normal circumstances I would never choose or accept. The neighbour harassing Sherry for simply making a phone call as she attempts to win back her daughter “You think you’re too good for us?” rings very true. “It’s like being in prison all over again, I can’t stay in that place,” Sherry pleads. Really fine cast, though, and particularly the little daughter Alexis (Ryan Simpkins).

A film you won’t have heard much of is The Minus Man (1999)produced by now defunk New York indie outfit The Shooting Gallery and just out on Optimum DVD. Hampton Fancher, writer of Blade Runner, has directed his own script about a blondish ‘guy-next-door’ serial killer Vann (Owen Wilson) who rents an upstairs room from a couple (Doug: Brian Cox and Jane: Mercedes Ruehl) in a West Coast seaside town. Junkie (Sheryl Crow) is his first victim. He’s befriended by Ferrin (Janeane Garofolo) his new work mate at the post office. “You know why in the old days sailors and fisherman never learned how to swim?” he asks her as they look out over the cliffs, “Because if you knew how to swim it would take so much longer to drown.” This is a really fantastic, honest, depressing film that weaves a tapestry with all shades of grey. Doug and Jane’s relationship has never been the same since their daughter became estranged. “You’re the daughter now,” says Cox’s character to Vann. Vann is shadowed in his hallucinations by two cops who almost taunt him with the dark side. The ending is a chilling, bizarre liberation for all concerned. Marco Beltrami’s score with Bryony Atkinson’s haunting songs is available on Varese Sarabande.

Another dysfunctional family is the documentary subject of Running Stumbled showing at the ICA when director John Maringouin returned home in 2002 to suburban Terrytown, Louisiana after 30 years. Shot on DV and Super 8, his acknowledged influence was the Maysles Brothers’ observance of reclusion and decay in Grey Gardens. Here, the home is lathered with his dad’s art work from years ago, while his stepmother lies in bed prattling and rattling with pills. Their daughter committed suicide. In the end, the irony is that New Orleans’ hurricane Katrina brought them a new house. Maringouin is an actor who made the documentary Just Another Day in the Homeland (2003) about American apathy during the Iraq war invasion. DV docs about families aren’t easy to successfully bring off but this one does with the sad humour of an old music hall.

Another must see depressant DVD release is a restored B/W print of Lord of the Flies (1963) based on William Golding’s novel. A plane load of school boys crashes on a desert island and they slowly turn feral. Directed by Brit world theatre guru (then as now) Peter Brook (now sort of exiled in his Paris theatre Bouffes du Nord), the film has one of the most fascinating audio commentaries I’ve ever heard. None of the crew, including cameraman Tom Hollyman, had ever made a feature and all cast were non-professional. According to Hollyman Brook’s favourite phrase was “what if we were to...” Brook wanting to achieve a documentary reality for the fictional realisation. “The book is not pessimistic about mankind but about culture and civilisation and what we call education,” says Brook. “Man, in his nature, has the finest and the worst.” Incidentally, Brook’s assistant director Toby Robertson gave me my first London job acting on the West End stage with Vanessa Redgrave and Tim Dalton. And interestingly, when the kids in the cast were asked if they thought other kids their age should be able to see the film (given an X rating by censors) they said no. “The horror is there is no longer any horror as you watch the news,” says Hollyman at the end of the commentary.

If I ever receive my copy of the If (1968) DVD from Paramount I’ll let you know (after requesting it many times...the independent distributors with the least resources often give the most help). Commentary by Stephen Frears, apparently. Directed by left-wing disgruntled humanist Lindsay Anderson, it’s about Brit public school (i.e. private school) kids blowing up a school. They didn’t even have to visit a desert island. Sorry to name drop again, but Lindsay, now dead, was a difficult but very generous man. I once gave him an unsolicited documentary style script, written by a colleague, about the falsely imprisoned Birmingham Six bombers and it was swiftly returned with detailed notes on every page.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s pessimistic existential world got a DVD outing last month (budget price no extras). He was criticised for making films during the WWII Occupation with a German company he’d been associated with pre-war, in particular Le Corbeau (The Raven). He wasn’t supposed to have been very nice to actors either. But The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur, 1953) really gets under the skin of desperados at the edge of the world. (Hitchcock unsuccessfully tried to buy the rights to Georges Arnaud’s source novel.) In a desolate Latin American town, four greedy men are hired to ‘Russian roulette’ wheel two trucks of nitro-glycerine over mountainous terrain to help extinguish oil well fires. It’s a 144 minute film that takes a whole engrossing hour to establish its characters before they embark on the task. The print’s a lot better than the one I remember seeing at the cinema years ago, too. I’d be great, too, to see a decent DVD transfer from somebody of his first feature, the bleak1y humorous 1942 L’Assassin habite au 21 about a serial killer. But we do get is, Quai des Orfèvres (1947- literally street of goldiggers/prostitutes) with Inspector Antoine (French stage legend Louis Jouvet) as a Columboesque cop traipsing the seedy music halls and hookers.

Optimum also just issued a must have Alain Delon set, the French star with the beautiful but dangerous face. I mentioned Melville’s Un Flic last time, but it also includes the gloriously restored print of Plein Soleil (remade as the 1999 The Talented Mr.Ripley) and based on Patricia Highsmith’s book. Music by Nino Rota. Say no more. There’s also Antonioni’s last B/W film L’Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) that includes an interview with critic Jose Moure.
Criterion US DVD
His take on Antonioni is less existentialism but more “he films the death, a petrification, of time through the transformation of space.” I’d agree with that. Antonioni films figures trapped in a landscape slowly being consumed by it. In his famous English language film Blow-Up (1966) the photographer becomes obsessed with extracting what he saw in the park’s terrain by constantly enlarging the image. In L’Eclisse there’s the socio-economic background. As the stock market crashes, Monica Vitti embarks on an affair with Delon the broker. In the final minutes of the film is the newspaper headline of L’Espresso ‘The Atomic War’ as the camera prowls the streets, not as a predator but as an insidious fog.

The surprise of the Delon set is Alain Jessua’s Traitement du Choc (Shock Treatment, 1972) in which Annie Girardot (a huge French star at the time) visits a Brittany (?) island rehab health clinic the Devilers Institute run, of course, by doctor Delon. Apparently at the time, French girls fainted at the sight of a naked Delon running along the beach and his butt entering the waves. Without giving the plot away, Girardot discovers that the clinic hides a dark secret beyond the seaweed steaks that facilitate its clients juvenescence. Reminded me a bit of Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety but with bleak satire not humour and without Delon being a hero. He gets away with it, though: how very lifelike. Frank, funny interview extra with director Jessua too, “They [French film industry] saw me as a UFO.” I bet they did.

And what do we make of the new Harry Potter movie (HP and the Order of the Phoenix) and The Simpsons Movie? Well, for a PG movie the latter is pleasantly anarchistic with only a few saccharine bits for the more pinky boys and girls. HP is 12A certificate and hopefully puts to bed New Labour’s ‘everyone has equal talent’ crap [sic]. I’m not an expert in either genre - a few eps of The Simpsons occasionally, and I’ve never read an HP. Have seen the rest of the HP movies, though, and this, the fifth, is by far my favourite. “If it’s just you alone you’re not as much of a threat,” says a mesmerising Irish albino girl to Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) who’s been suspended (or rather set up) from Hogwarts magic school pending a formal hearing. [I know all about that (hello my former Iyengar Yoga Institute)]. The divide and rule of the dark arts is definitely order of the day here. Director David Yates has been a bit of a lefty director over the years, and has really given this HP some spunk, even if it isn’t always subtle and there’s a bit of a lull half way through for novices like me. The entrance to the Ministry of Magic is a huge Orwellian galleria, Michael Gambon’s Big Brother looming aloft. The newspaper headline of the Daily Prophet malevolently changes in front of Harry’s eyes like a covert government hacker playing games with your mind and computer. “Nothing’s pulling the carriage,” says Hermione (Emma Watson) to Harry, though he knows and sees quite clearly better through his glasses. This movie must be so empowering for kids young and those of heart old. The revolution is open to all without exception, but you must work hard for it against the lazy dark forces, is the message. And what a message. Those kids from Lord of the Flies really learnt something from that desert island experience in not wanting other kids to see that film.

The Simpsons Movie has Homer causing environmental chaos by dumping his pig crap in the Springfield lake. Great excuse for the federal government and President Schwarzenegger “I was elected to lead not to read” to try out their new isolate and control (I mean save) environmental protection dome. Homer and family, meanwhile, have hot-tailed it to Alaska but return to save the day. Who cares if the film’s not a total masterpiece? It’s composed and played by master musicians, has revolutionary tunes aplenty, and like Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, where all the instruments gradually sneak off by the end, it’s the composer who really has ultimate control and not the Emperors with their new clothes. Except here it feels like the Springfield Symphony Orch is banging out Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture against the Simpson family’s revolutionary fff Beethoven.

A lot of the Royal Albert Hall BBC Proms are on BBC Four, by the way if, like me, you can’t always face the crowds at the real thing. But it is a live experience not to miss. And only £5 to hear the best musicians in the world.
Richard Fairman's guide to surviving the Proms
American readers must get their Brit friends to send them DVD’s. Ozzie ex-Berlin Phil violist Brett Dean’s BBC co-commission Vexations and Devotions was stunningly inventive and contemporary with its call centre “we know you are waiting, your call is important to us” electronic sprecht gesang, orchestral textures of monotonous ringing telephones, and the Oz kids mixed choir Gondwana Voices (who all paid their own way to visit Europe) who are better than any Vienna Boys Choir with their faultless juxtaposed intonations and quiet mousy squeaks against high violins. Contemp music flame thrower David Robertson was steering the BBC Symphony Orchestra fire truck.

A week earlier, John Eliot Gardiner with his Monteverdi choir and English Baroque soloists had South African kids Buskaid Soweto Strings playing and dancing to his Rameau opera excerpts after the witty ‘I’m just a coat-hanger’ choreography of Compagnie Roussat-Lubek. Way to go Sir John.

No hope now...

London's transport in meltdown (as if that was a surprise to anyone with a gram of intelligence)

Livingstone steps in as Metronet faces financial collapse

Isn't real life boring? Oh, and while we're on the subject...

Blair 'pleased' at honours ruling
No charges over cash for honours, CPS confirms

However, does anyone remember a lead article in The Sunday Times Jan 15, 2006:

Revealed: cash for honours scandal

"Des Smith, a council member of the trust that helps recruit sponsors for academies, disclosed that if a donor gave sufficient money, he could be nominated for an OBE, CBE or even a knighthood." The Sunday Times Jan 15, 2006

.... --- .--..

"Does the universe make moral sense?" is the provocative question director Neil Burger of The Illusionist hopes his film asks. I don't understand why this film was so under rated on its initial release here. Perhaps some critics are too like politicians and policeman: let the people shout as much as they want about football, but keep an eye on those who rebel with equal decibels against dreadful transport and injustice or who quietly subvert political cultural correctness. When I first reviewed The Illusionist it seemed to inhabit the revolutionary world of a Verdi opera. And Burger's DVD commentary confirms this. Visconti's melodrama Senso (1954), also released on DVD this week, opens with Verdi's opera Il Trovatore performed at La Venice in the last months of Austrian rule in pre-war 1866 Venice. Seemingly gallant Austrian officer Franz (Farley Granger) seduces Alida Valli's Countess only to squander her money and squelch her heart after she bravely crosses enemy lines in search of him. Franz quotes Heine to her as they court in the dead of night: "It is Judgement Day the dead rise again to eternal joy and suffering/and we remain in an embrace/and nothing matters to us, neither heaven, nor hell." The Countess' cousin, fighting for the Venetian underground, has been sent into exile by the Austrians. For some tastes, there might be too much of Bruckner's music underscoring the doomed passion. Burger chose Philip Glass for his film to help ask his question "what is the true threat to the Empire?" in 1900 Vienna. (Giuseppe Rotunno is Visconti's cinematographer but the Technocolour print is fading - compare to the glorious colour of The Leopard restoration a few years ago. Cannily, Burger has Dick Pope of Mike Leigh social realism fame as his DP).

Eisenheim's (Edward Norton) magic tricks are sparking the imagination of audiences garnering for him the popularity of a politician. Too threatening for the Crown Prince (Rufus Sewell) plotting the overthrow his father, though and he assigns his chief of police (Paul Giametti) to spy on him. Fascinatingly, the whole story is told from the Inspector's conjectural perspective while Philip Glass's music conjures an operatic inevitability. Yet as Burger muses on his source material Steven Millhauser's short story: "Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate to our dreams. We must embrace illusion to find the truth." All the magic tricks of the film are based on real tricks from the era (Ricky Jay and Michael Weber consultants) and of course the illusion of film itself was the latest world invention. The love interest is the unlikely but perfect casting of Jessica Biel (she fought for the role), the lost childhood amour of Einsenheim and now, he discovers at a performance, the mistress of the Crown Prince.

Manuele Crialese's new film Golden Door (for once the English title is better than the original Italian, Nuovo Mondo, literally 'new world’) is also set around 1900. Salvatore (Vincenzo Amato, also a well known Sicilian sculptor) sells all he has, follows the dream, and takes his family on the arduous sea voyage from Sicily to the New World of America. It's an absolutely stunning film this, knocking most other fare so far this year off the screen. Sumptuous cinematography is by Agnès Godard, (The Dreamlife of Angels)and who worked with Wim Wenders and Peter Greenaway to name but a few. She helps create what is less a drama about certain individuals and more, ironically, a Marxist choreographic work of art where the individuals are subordinate to the whole. Or rather, the philosophical world of Leibniz and the monad in which each entity is "distinguished from other monads by its degree of consciousness. Monads have no true causal relation with other monads, but each contains within itself a principle of change. As a result, each monad spontaneously mirrors all of changing reality without actually being affected by other monads" so summarises Encyclopaedia Britannica, as an old girlfriend seems to have made off with my Leibniz one night. Quite what the English speaking Charlotte Gainsbourg (Lucy) is doing on the same boat as these Sicilians we never really know. The camera slowly pulls back sweeping over the immigrants like the long sustained down-bowing of a violinist as the ship departs. A surreal orchestral interlude of the immigrants swimming in a milky soup, as the protagonists cling to a giant carrot, is reprised at the end after the immigrants are microscopically examined by the American authorities. A sustained up-bowing is counter pointed by Nina Simone's Sinnerman.

Nina Simone's rhythmic song was also brilliantly used in The Thomas Crown Affair remake having taking its impetus from a simple foot tapping scene in the Steve McQueen original. Jean-Pierre Melville was also fascinated by such simplicity - never using style over content. His first film Le Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea), just out on Eureka's Masters of Cinema DVD, accentuates the ticking of the clock in the French farmhouse where an old man and his niece take a resistance vow of silence in having to accommodate a Nazi officer. The film explores the notion of attentistes, those who just waited for the war to end. Melville's resistance film 20 years later, L' Armée des ombres (Army of Shadows), also has the ticking clock just before Lino Ventura's escape from Gestapo HQ and his running footsteps, as does Belmondo running in the opening credits of the 1962 Le Doulos (French slang for police informer) and just re-released in New York. Melville's choreographing of his characters' relation to time and the sound of silence is one of the qualities that make Melville a cinema master. "I learned then that the hands, if you observe them well, can be as expressive as the face as they more easily escape the control of the will,” says the narration.

Essay on the 2004 great restoration of Army of Shadows cool blues and browns in the latest American Cinematographer. But that's not free to read.
Army of Shadows (US DVD), recent (BFI DVD)
Les enfants terribles (recent US DVD) (BFI DVD)

Le Doulos (BFI DVD)
Le Cercle Rouge (BFI DVD)
(US DVD)
Le Samourai (US DVD)
Bob Le Flambeur (US DVD)

Save our film heritage from the political vandals (The Observer)

Le Silence (1949) was an extraordinary first feature and one of the most important and controversial in world cinema. Melville had no film training, didn't wish to be part of a union, and persuaded the writer Vercors not only to allow him to adapt the most important novel of the resistance, but also to film it in Vercors' house. But it was only on the condition that the finished film be screened to a jury of eminent members of the resistance for approval. "The thing I liked enormously about Le Silence was the anti-cinematographic aspect of the story. I wanted to attempt a language composed entirely of images and sounds, and from which movement and action would be more or less banished," Melville says in the fantastically revealing interview with Rui Nogueira reprinted in the DVD's booklet. There's also an interview, as an extra and the booklet, with Ginette Vincendeau. Narrated in voice-over, the only word spoken by the couple in the film is the niece's adieu, an acknowledgement of the arrival of their voyage of understanding of what it is to be human.

Melville's last film from 1972, Un Flic (The Cop), has just been re-issued as part of Optimum's Alain Delon set and is another masterpiece. It opens with the stormy sleet greys of a seafront bank heist, the sea battering man's ramparts. In fact the whole film looks like it's shot in the depths of a London winter. Delon plays Coleman the cop: "This job makes you sceptical," says his partner. "I'm sceptical about scepticism," says Coleman, "The only feelings man has ever inspired in a police officer are ambiguity and ridicule. Ridicule", he repeats his face now in darkness. Melville chooses a building location for police HQ where all the office windows are each seemingly askew only combining to form faceless architecture. Coleman's office window faces a brick wall and a drainpipe. This is the underbelly world of Abel Ferrara or Cassavetes, the big difference being that Coleman is a good cop with a totally dispassionate eye. "I sometimes read," says Melville, "Melville is being Bressonian. I'm sorry but it's Bresson who has always been Melvillian." Un Flic's methodical ingenious train heist by helicopter is a great example of this. The sustained close-up in the patrol car of the almost blank but beautiful eyes of Delon in the film's final moments reminds one of Albert Camus's doctor and his dictum in his novel La Peste (The Plague): that the only certitude we have is in the daily round.

La Passion de Simone is French based Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's oratorio about French philosopher Simone Weil. I saw several rehearsals of this last week directed by my long-time mentor Peter Sellars. Arguably, without Sellars' simplicity of direction the piece wouldn't have the same power, and also arguably without Sellars, Saariaho might not have written such a work in the first place. The set for La Passion is a table, chair and door on its frame - Weil's 'golden door'. Sellars is infamous for his 'modern dress' productions particularly of Mozart, but when a stage needs to sit still and quiet in order for a character to open their inner life to us the audience (e.g. the Countess' 'cri de coeur' Porgi Amour from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro), Sellars has few equals as a stage director.

La Passion premiered last November in Vienna as part of Sellars' New Crowned Hope project (substantial £18 catalogue available from the BFI and Barbican bookshops). Summarising Weil's philosophy isn't easy, although I tried in an earlier blog). She died in England in 1943 after refusing to eat more than her compatriots in the Nazi death camps. (There was also one of the worst famines in Bengal in 1943, unaided by Churchill. Read Mubashar Jawed Akbar founder The Asian Age on this). Weil struggled to find a philosophy of being human. Was she Christian, agnostic or even Buddhist? I would say secular more than anything else (see also Bill Viola's new transcendent Tantric video piece Bodies of Light in the Barbican foyer). Saariaho's orchestration together with soprano (written for the ever luminous Dawn Upshaw), choir, very subtle electronics (she studied at IRCAM in Paris), has a post-Debussy feel without the inner turbulence and rip tides of that composer. Her orchestration (conducted by Atlanta Symphony's Robert Spano, but here with the ever amazing forces of the City of Birmingham Sym. Orch.), often with sustained strings and brass, seems more meditative and less doubtful than Debussy. The texts by Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf create a mystical sister to Weil, and Sellars adds the incredibly fluid dancer Michael Schumacher (ex Wiliam Forsythe's company) as sort of personification and corollary of the '21 grams' of the soul's weight. Together with James F.Ingalls lighting, it's an exquisite and deeply moving work. There's also a series of six New Crowned Hope film commissions in the cinema most of which get a later London release. I tried making it to Garin Nugroho's Opera Jawa but London transport once again let me down. (People were almost spilling off and you could barely move on the Green Park Piccadilly line platform at 18.30 last night). The Thai Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) is tonight. A funny, truly amazing film about doctors where not much seems to happen but somehow you're able to breathe a whole lot differently by the end. More of that when it's on general release.

FINNISH RADIO BROADCAST LIVE
October 5-7, Los Angeles performances

They said women couldn't write music (Daily Telegraph, London)

Over at the Southbank Centre this week was another piece concerning 1943, the world premiere of Heiner Goebbels' Songs of Wars I have seen based on Gertrude Stein texts (her WW2 memoir from 1945). The first half was a brilliant prelude with the UK premier of an earlier piece Schlachtenbeschreibung (Battle Description) for baritone (Roderick Williams) and orchestral ensemble plus sampler and Heinrich Biber's Battalia a 10 in D. Biber was Germany's first violin anarchist and genius (a kind of Jimi Hendrix of his day), and his works are astoundingly contemporary. He extensively used re-tuning techniques scordatura as in his Mystery Sonatas, and in Battalia (1673) they sound like your kid's worst violin practice nightmare. The battle is depicted through stamping feet, instruments played con legno with the wood not string of the bow, drum rolls evoked by paper slipped between the strings of the double bass, and a kind of Baroque 'feedback' of violently plucked strings so they rebound against the fingerboard. Schlachtenbeschreibung is originally a solo number from Goebbels' 2002 opera Landshaft mit entfernten Verwandten (Landscape with Distant Relatives) describing from Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks how to paint battle scenes. Some of Wars I have seen comes from this opera that also mixed in The Beach Boys with traditional Japanese music.

Wars is a wonderful, wacky and soulful creation from Goebbels mish-mash mind of music theatre. Extracts from the incidental music Matthew Locke (supposedly the first composer to use dynamic volume markings and tremolos) wrote for The Tempest are interspersed by members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment from the first half, who join players from the London Sinfonietta ( legendary purveyors of contemporary composition) after interval. Each gets a chance to read aloud a portion of Stein's text (lit by domestic table and standard lamps). Except, of course the men, who sit with their brass instruments on their raised platform. "This is it. It's funny about honey, you always eat honey during a war, so much honey there is no sugar, there never is sugar during a war, the first thing to disappear is sugar, after that butter, but butter can always be had but not sugar...", so begins the flautist. There's a gossipy, typically contradictory Stein, villagy feel to these texts that gradually become very much like the attentistes meditation inside the minds of the couple from Melville's Le Silence as they sit by the fire; the German officer, out of uniform, politely requesting to warm himself by the hearth. In 2003, Stein was initially accused in a letter (later exonerated) of being silently complicit in the death of children in a Jewish orphanage nearby to where she had stayed in Culoz. "History does repeat itself, I have often thought that that was the really soothing thing that history does...nobody wants to learn either by their own or anybody else's experience, nobody does, no they say they do but nobody does. Yes nobody does.....Well just now I cannot remember just how it is when there is no war...And so the world is medieval just as medieval as it can be. Medieval means, that life and place and the crops you plant and your wife and children, all are uncertain. They can be driven away or taken away, or burned away, or left behind, that is what it is to be medieval....Nevertheless you stay, and if you stay you do not go away....Yes everybody has had enough of it everybody's wife and everybody's husband and everybody's mother and everybody's father and everybody's daughter and everybody's son, they all have had enough of it." The final texts of the piece are spoken; the lights dim and all the woman lay down their instruments and begin turning the handle of a kind of hurdy-gurdy come glass harmonica as the male trumpeter plays a Last Post like lonesome solo.

Listen to the John Tusa Interview with Heiner Goebbels or read the transcript

Addendum:

The Rembrandt catalogue for the show arrived too late in my mailbox for inclusion in the last blog. But it's well worth the £19.95 (paperback). The DVD written by Rebecca Lyons is only 30 min long including a picture gallery but at £15 isn't nearly as good value as the catalogue. Astonishingly, this is the first proper exhibition in the world of Dutch portraits since 1952! As you'd expect from the National Gallery, the essays and picture plate notes are excellent covering everything from the painters' techniques, to manner of seating and costume, and so relevant to today's Britain and the rise of the upper middle-class and how they wished to be seen. Not that they are commissioning too many artists, though, as London property values soar and the credit card is king. Having rhapsed lyrically about Rembrandt's talent, Frans Hals fares just as well as you pore over the catalogue. The movement he conjures within the frame, with only a seated or stood subject, is unlike almost anything from his contemporaries: 18- Willem van Heythuysen (1625), 20- Willem again with his riding crop (1634/5), and 27- the seemingly effortless simplicity of the dabs and strokes in his Portrait of a Man (1660-5) painted when he was 80.


Global Cities (Tate Modern) is a saturating show scaffolding the main Turbine Hall concerning the architecture of major capitals. When I visited an hour before closing, the small theatres for the various videos and films were crowded and stuffy. One that did catch my eye was Yang Zhenzhong's 14 minute Let’s Puff (2002) about Los Angeles in the exhibition's Speed theme. One screen of the room has a young female puffing and jiving then taking a breather. When she 'puffs' the video of the busy street on the opposite side of the room speeds up. So simple and incredibly effective.

The eye-catcher of the commissions (Richard Wentworth's Scape/Ccratch/Dig is typically quietly subversive) is Brit maverick Nigel Coates Mixtacity. In a display case he's created models to transform the Thames Gateway, not literally but metaphorically, out of Bourbon Cream biscuits, lumps of sugar, and tiny plastic guns like the children's toy playground of a bow-bird. The end result of the show, for me, was wanting to move to a hut by the sea and build sandcastles with Coates' toys on the beach.

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.

...Are men still, catch a wheel within a wheel,
See more in a truth than the truth's simple self,
Confuse themselves. You see lads walk the street
Sixty the minute; what's to note in that?
You see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack;
Him you must watch—he's sure to fall, yet stands!
Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist, demireps
That loves and saves her soul in new French books—
We watch while these in equilibrium keep
The giddy line midway: one step aside,
They're classed and done with. I, then, keep the line
Before your sages,—just the men to shrink
From the gross weights, coarse scales and labels broad
You offer their refinement...

British novelist Graham Greene said of Browning's poem "Bishop Blougram's apology" that it could be the epigraph for his life's work. And it was a doco on Greene that lead me to this poem in the first place many years ago. It once again sprang to mind while reading Mike Davis' latest book Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb: finally, after it had sat quietly on my desk for many months eyeing me with unread review copy guilt. I'd wanted to review it because of the almost daily reports of car bombs in Iraq over the years and how these reports somehow became nothing more than items in a long list of other news. The car bombs in London and Glasgow last week highlighted the fact that unless things happen to 'us' directly or they're thrust down our retinas, people tend not to care. And even then, a few days later, the streets and transport seem unbothered by the attacks except for slightly more ground police presence, the nearby National Gallery barricading its entrances and introducing security checks. (The government demanded it but I bet they didn't pay for it!, and of course more summer chaos at the airports.) I wonder how much right-wing flak hit Davis for writing his book. But essentially it's no different to his others on urban development. I'd urge you to read his history of Los Angeles City of Quartz, a history of the have-nots and the 'haves and have mores' to quote current President Bush from an address to New York's powerful Carlyle Group some years ago.

In Buda's Wagon, Davis uses his urban theory to trace the car bomb from the Italian anarchist Mario Buda and his horse drawn wagon attack on Wall Street in 1920 to the present where it "has become the hot rod of the apocalypse". He quotes from Greene's The Quiet American in the Saigon chapter: "A woman sat on the ground with what was left of her baby in her lap; with a kind of modesty she had covered it with her straw peasant hat." And I thought of the Breughel (mid C16 Flemish) copyists who subtly sanitised the master's depiction of village invasion by painting away a dead child with something slightly more decorative and peasantry. Davis also covers (by no means decorously) the terrorist collusion of various world governmental elements over the years. No surprise there. Overall he is saying that the car bomb has become and will continue to be part of the fabric of urban life for many major cities rather than just a 'foreign' anomaly.

The explosive ending of The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970) is off screen. What we do see is a close-up of Peter Cook's opportunistic glance as Rimmer, the PR guru turned Prime Minister. It's a strange and fascinating British film previously unavailable on DVD or video. Comedian Peter Cook, famed for his deadpan line delivery, plays Rimmer as a kind of Nick Leeson (he of the Barings Bank demise). Like Leeson, the political old guard of the film are only too happy to have the smiling, youthful, presentable, resourceful Rimmer sought out their problems while watching the money roll in. Cook delivers his lines as if reading an auto-cue of what people want to hear. This is exactly why he’s rising and rising. "He's ruthless, opportunistic, dishonest, shallow, evasive and unprincipled but I'm still not sure whether he'd make a good leader,” says one of the selection committee. In the illuminating commentary by director Kevin Billington he stresses how they wanted the 'newness' of everything by using top notch production values to emphasise the seriousness of the satire. Now does that ring any current political bells? Loads of classic Brit acting talent here: Harold Pinter (the playwright), Ronald Fraser as PM, Ronnie Corbett waylaid by John Cleese and a busload of opinion poll riggers as they all pretend to be Buddhists, and Arthur Lowe as Mr. Ferrett (Dad's Army) who's reduced to menial duties in Rimmer's new world order.

Channel Four's The Insider: Should You Trust The PM? Sir Alistair Graham, the former Chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, argues that changing the fundamental political culture and the way MPs behave must be absolutely central to Gordon Brown's premiership.

In Thomas Sutcliffe's The Independent Friday opinion column What the people really want, he reflects on audiences wanting more BBC programming innovation, and publisher Simon and Shuster's new democratic publishing collaboration with the Media Predict website: ProjectPublish. Read, in particular, paras 4 and 7: the latter in which he quotes HL Mencken "no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." And remember a lot of the greatest artistic endeavours were shunned by the world at birth.

A 'descent' movie for the week is Edmond, adapted by David Mamet from his play. William H. Macy's corporate man of the title begins questioning his life after visiting a fortune teller. He is an innocent of the inner city who gradually takes on its character eventually murdering a waitress and discovering the ways of prison. "When we fear things I think we wish for them." If you don't know Mamet's work you might be transfixed by this film's distillation of experience. Having seen the brilliant National Theatre production with Kenneth Branagh back in 1993, I found it hard to divorce the film from that stage experience. When Mamet directs his own screen adaptations you become immersed in his dialectic of filmic rhythm and language. The director of this film, Stuart Gordon, is versed in the horror movie genre, most notably for his cult classic Re-Animator. And getting him to direct Edmond was quite an inspired choice. He began his career in theatre and more importantly in Chicago where Mamet's verbal rhythms were born. But the trouble with the film is almost that Gordon hasn't stamped enough of his own rhythm in addition to Mamet's. For example, from memory, the opening fortune telling scene was longer on stage than in the film. Mamet's choice, I guess, but the theme of 'can we control our own destiny' doesn't quite gain a filmic equivalence. Monday's Nightwaves has a spot on Edmond (not listed on the website)as well as a discussion about the myth of the northern England, and a not so glowing review of Katie Mitchell's Glyndebourne St.Matthew Passion.

Still unreleased in the UK is Day Night Night Day (last year's Times BFI London Film Fest)directed by American artist Julia Loktev, having opened in New York a few months ago. As Robert Bresson's French classic Pickpocket showed its subject with documentary accuracy, Day Night scrutinises the preparations of a young unnamed female suicide bomber before her failed mission in New York's Times Square. It's another haunting, harrowing unforgettable film "on the dangerous edge of things" that the rulers of our urban environment wish wouldn't be made. But why is this subject any more or less taboo than abortion, serial killers, or paedophiles? Could it be because of the dictum in Mamet's Edmond? 'When we fear things I think we wish for them'. Or in the case of Loktev's film and Davis' book perhaps understand too much and begin to fear and condemn too little. It was the same with John Adams' opera The Death of Klinghoffer when I covered it for the BBC amidst the protests in Brussels accusing the work of sympathising with the cruise ship's Palestinian highjackers (which it didn't). Glyndebourne Opera, one of the co-commissioners, never staged it here. It was directed by American Peter Sellars, who's in London next week at the Barbican (New Crowned Hope season)with slightly less controversial material, but no less a controversial protagonist, Simone Weil: Kaija Saariaho's opera La Passion de Simone with a libretto by Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf. Bill Viola video work as well in the foyer.

Similar to Day Night in tone and just released on DVD is the remarkable US indie film Keane about a schizophrenic man (Damian Lewis)who finds calm and meaning when asked to mind a near-stranger's child (Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin)staying in the same 'down at heel' hotel.

And while we're on the subject of the effects of children, Les Petites Vacances (director Olivier Peyon's first feature) opened last week. Grandmother Danielle (Bernadette Lafont) plans to take her grandkids to their father's for Easter holidays. When Dad doesn't turn up, she 'borrows' them for her own holiday. This is one of those many beautifully observed French films where little happens but everyone's lives change. Another is Olivier, Olivier (1992) by writer/director Agnieszka Holland out on DVD through small distributor Bluebell Films. Based on a newspaper report, Serge Duval (Francois Cluzet) and Elisabeth (Brigitte Rouan) have two children, 10 year-old Nadine (Faye Gatteau), and Olivier (Emmanuel Morozof), 9. One day Olivier goes missing from their farmhouse never to return. Six years later in Paris, a street boy claiming to be Olivier is found by police. It's a little like Depardieu's character in The Return of Martin Guerre where the husband returns and the wife, though suspecting pretence, goes along with it because he's nicer than was the real one. The details of family life are engrossing and original as is the portrayal of father/son, mother/daughter bonding. Bluebell have also just re-issued Jean-Charles Tacchella's L'Homme de ma Vie (The Man of My Life) also from 1992. A bookseller Maurice (Thierry Fortineau) ,about to be evicted from his shop, is waylaid by the irresistibly cute Aimée (Maria de Medeiros) who realising he's not the financial catch she thought, befriends him and makes him her wedding's best man. "He's a bit basic. Like a removal man in bed, all over the place. Sometimes I'm almost flattened," she confides to Maurice of her new hubby. It's all quite slight, filmed in fading pastel colours and reminds one of unrequited love walking in the rain along the Seine only to get more than kissed the next morning. It really does cheer you up, though, this film.

More urban dilemma now with two architects. Sketches of Frank Gehry is Hollywood director Sydney Pollack's filmic sketches of his long-time architect friend, he of the Guggenheim Bilboa. One reason for their bond is "bemoaning the difficulties of trying to find personal expressiveness within disciplines that make stringent commercial demands. You find that small percentage of space in that commercial world where you could make a difference" Gehry's only detractor in the film is Hal Foster who wrote a book Why all the Hoopla?, 'genius or mess'. Gehry found more in common with artists than architects when starting out. Pollack recalls one of his own teachers who said, "talent is liquefied trouble...a frustration with something that exists that you try to improve on". Gehry's therapist notes: "When an artist comes to me he wants to know how to change the world." Gehry has quite a lot in common with Brit trained Zaha Hadid through architecture give them a glimpse of another world" who was the subject of Sunday night's South Bank Show. Both have designed one of the Maggie cancer care centres in Scotland. And both had recent retrospectives at New York's Guggenheim.
Frank Gehry Guggenheim exhibition
Zaha Hadid exhibition
Guggenheim Exhibition (New York Times review)

Zaha's career has been even rockier than Gehry's. Her winning design for the 1994 Cardiff Bay Opera House was pulled, re-instated after a board review then finally denied Lottery funding getting caught up in arguments of elitism. It was the Americans who got up her first building up with the Cincinnati Art Gallery. She even designed the 2001 Pet Shop Boys tour, currently is designing the 2012 London Olympics Aquatics Centre and has an exhibition running at the Design Museum.
At the peak of her powers (Financial Times,June 29 2007)
FT (2004)

And what of London's big summer art shows? Well, they're pretty impressive. Firstly, Tate Modern’s Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour (in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), a Brazilian artist who died in 1980, aged 42. A relatively obscure figure of the 20th century art world (a 1969 Whitechapel Gallery show) it's a good exhibition for the Tate and the gallery has bought some of Oiticica's work for its collection. And he should, indeed I feel, be up there with the modern art greats. The horrible word that pops out is accessible. But, like most Brazilian artists he wanted to be an artist for the people rather than the studio. Oiticica trained as a dancer and wandering through the show you certainly feel colours and shapes surging you around. There have been some criticisms of the Do Not Touch of some pieces but that's usually inevitable. Beginning with his Malevich inspired paintings, the exhibition moves through the strange and striking dimensionality of the black, white, red and blue Metaesquema to his White Series paintings of the late 50's and ceiling hung white double-sided Bilaterals. In the 60's he bursts into colour "a supreme order similar to the supreme order of architectural spaces," as he wrote in his 1960 Colour, Time and Structure creating spaces akin to gardens of colour. He then moved on to construct a fantastic series called Bólides (Fireballs), large jars containing pigment, everyday materials, little houses of colour, all with the cumulative effect of being in a perfumery of colour. This leads to the room for the Grand Nucleus, an architecture garden of hanging colour and finally his Parangole of wearable (though not for the exhibition, would copies have been possible for the children?) materials for the samba dance. "The body is not a support for the work, it is total incorporation". If you feel a touch of modern art déjà vu after the show, check the permanent galleries, compare the dates of the famous American artists working with similar ideas and you'll see that Oiticica was just as groundbreaking. It's just that he didn't live in the commercial arenas of America or Europe.

One of Oiticica's Bólides is a 1965 Hommage to Mondrian. In 1960, Salvador Dali poked fun at Mondrian's grids in Chaos and Creation, the first time an artist had used video (I guess the Tate is right). In collaboration with photographer Philppe Halsman, he built grids that housed four Pennsylvanian pigs, a motorbike and a woman. It's the last room in the Tate's Dali and Film show that also has Dali's screen-tests for Warhol. The sound on Chaos is so poor, though, that you might need to read the catalogue just outside to get the jist of it. Dali too is a great show for the Tate and much of this material is rarely if ever seen such as made for TV (1975) Impressions of Upper Mongolia - Hommage to Raymond Roussel. But you have to be dedicated to stay the 70 min course. Could the logistics have worked out to have free screenings in the cinema? There are the popular, familiar works such as Sleep, the melting clocks of The Persistence of Memory, the Bunuel collaboration Un Chien Andalou where the eye gets slashed by the razor, and Dali's segment for Hitchcock's film Spellbound. And one that could easily be a You Tube hit is his Disney foray Destino (1946) with animator John Hench, revived in 2003 using computer technology. It repays repeated viewing. Room 1 has an example of the early Dali that fascinates me, a 1928 untitled oil, white except for simple black shadows at the edges of the canvas reminiscent of spooky De Chirico. There was a pen and ink (if I remember rightly) from the same period up for auction a few years ago with a tiny angel at the edge of a vast lake, like the quiet ppp dynamic marking in the universe of a Mahler score. Dali may have been an unashamed self-publicist but, boy, did he have a genius and wit to crow about. The scenarios for his 1937 Marx Brothers collaboration Giraffes on Horseback Salad are here too, along with his cheeky present for Harpo: a sketch of him playing a barbed wire harp.

Over at the National Gallery is Dutch Portraits: The Age of Rembrandt and Hals. In 1579 the Dutch provinces began declaring independence from Spanish Hapsburg catholic rule, but not officially recognised until 1648, and a new social structure started emerging. The idea that portraiture was now opened up to social classes hitherto excluded such as doctors and wealthy merchants is well argued by the juxtapositions in the exhibition. What is extraordinary about the show for the non art historian, though, is how Rembrandt seems centuries ahead of his time. One of the first pictures to hit you with this is The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholas Tulp (1632) painted when he was only 25. The visceral contemporary nature of the cadaver with almost a modern lamp illuminating the corpse, the unearthly glow of the surgeons’ faces, and of course, devilish Rembrandt detail. The fine previous picture Nicholas Pickenoy's The Osteology Lesson of Dr. Sebastiaen Egbertsz (1619) alas gets left behind in the memory after the Rembrandt. His The Syndics (1662:5 years before his death)who were the powerful board of the clothmaker's guild, loaned by Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, has us looking up towards the fore grounded table covered with a painted cloth that on closer inspection could be abstract expressionism. Rumour has it that people at the time thought it wasn't decently posed and was allowed to gather dust. Room 5 has the National Gallery's own Rembrandt's, the 1661 portraits of Jacob Trip and another of his wife Margaretha de Geer equally out of their time. Frans Hals' fast and loose brushwork is argued to be indicative of a more relaxed social domesticity as the new century wore on. If you thought Old Master portraits a bit of a chore to pretend and enjoy, this exhibition will really change your mind. There is also a series of £4/3 screenings Virtue and Vice (often they've been DVD projected in the past, but finely so - I'll check this out) of films influenced by the C17 masters, including The Godfather, Visconti's gorgeous The Leopard and the contentious Black Narcissus (1947) of Powell and Pressburger that won the 1948 Oscars for art direction and Jack Cardiff's cinematographic re-creation of India in Pinewood studios.

Another taboo subject was spotlighted on TV in ITV's Tonight last week.
Tonight: Immigration Housing Row
A lot of people who are absolutely not rascist are getting very angry, especially when the government tries to massage the figures by 500%.

Lastly, there was a tube derailment this morning near Bethnal Green on the Central Line with 800 people having to evacuate through the tube tunnels.
Tube derails after hitting loose tarpaulin in tunnel
ITV local news coverage and video
Metronet warned in May over derailment danger
But no one was killed; only one injured leg (as of Friday 11 taken to hospital), so it'll fade away even though they've been previous warnings about this stretch of line. Never mind the psychological stress that for some will never go away.