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"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.