The wolves who learnt to swim

On the kerb outside Gimpel Fils the other night, I got talking to a couple of curators from Canada’s National Gallery of Art. Inside the darkened London gallery played the full screen world premiere of Guy Ben-Ner’s Stealing Beauty, a family sitcomkunst starring himself, his wife and two kids, and filmed secretly in the living spaces of German Ikea stores. It’s so stunningly simple, you wish you’d thought of it yourself. Ben-Ner seemed totally unstressed and que sera sera when I asked him about legal rights and Ikea. My kerb mates wafted their own Ottawan stresslessness. Downstairs in Gimpel Fils’ more experimental space, T.Kelly Mason’s 40 Steps mused on the nature of stairs, ascent and descent, by using sound, blankets, teasing Hitchcocky sound, photos, text and a computer video. He and his gallery dealer both breathed calm, confident, astute LA’ness. And there was I, hospitalised with champagne and crisps and still smarting from my battles with transport and my neighbours (or rather the 14 year old kid downstairs egged on by his manipulative mom (or was it all a stitch up by my landlords?) Am I being too Tracey Emin now?

Said family had me arrested, can you believe, because this streetwise kid had felt threatened by some unspoken ‘f’ words! My eyes can now manifest sounds! Hmmm. Maybe I could get employed by the America’s National Security Agency like that general who tries to stare goats to death (read Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare At Goats ). Wish now I had whipped him with my lippy lexicon. It’d be a great cause celebre court case as most Certificate 15 films in the U.K. now have every motherlovin’ word in ‘em. They’ve even stopped bleeping out the ‘f’ word on Jonathan Ross’s late night BBC One TV talk show. The police aren’t going to pursue it all but the 24 year-oldish PC gals did seem rather over-eager to make my recent arrest. Is my political incorrectness getting in anyone’s way? No wonder I still haven’t mustered the energy for this year’s Frieze Art Fair. Elsewhere in the kingdom, police even took some poor girlguide leader all the way to court for having her feet on a train seat. The court dismissed the case as ludicrous, thank heavens. I do wish those police would devote more time to understanding frictions in their neighbourhoods rather than meeting government targets. And, of course, the following unforgettable tunes are getting played but too easily forgotten:

London police lawyer says de Menezes killing was mistake, not a crime
Dispatches:Nice Work If You Can Get It
Cash for honours
However, does anyone remember a lead article front page) in The Sunday Times, 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

I’m prattling on like this because of two of the plethora of artistic events at this London moment: Julie Gavras’ debut feature film Blame it On Fidel (Faute à Fidel)and Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth at the Tate Modern. Unveiled last Monday, Shibboleth is a manmade, and in this case womanthought, crack stretching the entire length of the Turbine Hall’s concrete floor. I only wish all concerned had been a little crazier and performed a hoax like Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio dramatisation (1938) on Britain’s No.2 tourist attraction: ‘Tate Modern sinking into Thames’, ‘Tate Modern structural disaster’. As it is, I’m sure a lot of people will think that anyway begging the question, should we do something about it, and if so what? I certainly hope some health and safety nerd don’t erect a sign saying ‘Mind the crack’. They certainly haven’t done it on the much wider and much more widely used gaps on London’s Underground.

Salcedo is Colombian and all her work concerns aesthetics and politics. Shibboleth (loyally sponsored by Unilever who backed the Turbine Hall series way before Tate Modern became a hit) is a word originating in the Old Testament describing the Bible’s largest massacre, and now used to describe exclusion from a particular group or class. The exhibition catalogue is packed with essays and quotes such as Paul Celan’s deprivation of humanity ‘death-in-life’, or references to Gordon Matta-Clark’s interventionist cuts to buildings. One could also cite Hans Haacke’s 1993 hacked-up marble floor Germania at that year’s Venice Biennale German Pavilion. But Salcedo’s crack goes way beyond this. Like Ben-Ner using Ikea ‘living dead’ rooms as sets, the astonishment of Shibboleth is in the simplicity. As Tate director Nicholas Serota said at the press conference “a scar will remain as a reminder of the issues touched on by the piece, and subsequent artworks will have to live with it.” As in Welles’ War of the Worlds, Shibboleth asks what is it you fear? “The experience of victims to pierce through to the viewer, when one’s presence isn’t exactly welcome...this bottomless division of humanity. The experience of the tragic hero is to do with silence...art is a prophecy of language,” said Salcedo at the press conference.

Julie Gavras is the daughter of Greek political film director Constantin Costa-Gavras: State of Siege (1973), Z (1968) and Missing with Jack Lemmon (1981). His daughter’s Blame It on Fidel has to be one of the year’s best films, a pretty big claim I know. Lucky ICA, but why this film hasn’t a wider release is baffling (released in August by Koch Lorber at New York’s Cinema Village). Based on the novel by Domitilla Calamai, it’s about a 9-year-old girl in 1970 whose family uproots her and her little brother from a bourgeois Paris lifestyle to a leftist one. Are we in Spain, France or Chile? Anna's a bit confused too. Her parents ban her from the divinity class she adores and impress upon her that Mickey Mouse is fascist. It has Del Toro’s (Pan’s Labyrinth) fascination with childhood without his cinematic pyrotechnics. And what is utterly enthralling about Gavras’ film is Nina Kervel’s performance as Anna. We see politics, the fall of Franco and the rise of Chile’s Allende, through her eyes and she is always questioning often to comic effect. Her parents keep mantra-ing ‘esprit de group’ or solidarity, a concept Anna is grappling to understand, that’s in addition to communism and all the other ‘isms', of course. In the final scene she is uprooted to another school and the film cuts from Anna’s brave little shoulder shrug at the new school gates to an aerial shot of the playgrounds’ groups, one of which lets her join hands. Anna is surrounded by absolutes of action and language only to find out for herself that there don’t seem to be any. Anna is the sort of character we’d watch another movie about every 10 years of her life.

Two years younger than Anna, claims her desperate working class mum Maddalena (Anna Magnani), is the Maria (Tina Apicella) of Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima (1951). Rarely seen and with a pristine transfer for Eureka DVD, this B/W Italian neo-realist film ages somewhat in theme, but must have been pretty shocking at the time with its candid film screen-test cruelty. Though full price, there are two in-depth interview extras and a 32-page booklet. The performances alone are worth the viewing and the actor Gastone Renzelli didn’t even do a screen-test- Visconti discovered him working in an abattoir! In the interview extra Renville marvels at young Tina Apicella never once having made a mistake. Visconti, of course, is better known for the operatic canvas of his films, The Leopard (1963), Death in Venice (1971) but all his films share that struggle for existence against loaded political odds.

Still no let up in the missing child story of Madeleine McCann. The UK tabloid witchhunt contines. And still no UK release for that film Alice, the Portuguese film along the same lines that I’ve mentioned a recently, and that aired at last year’s Raindance Film Festival. The Ben Affleck directed film Gone Baby Gone has been dropped by Miramax from this week’s The Times BFI 51st London Film Festival (and possibly any UK release) because of the McCann controversy not wanting to “[inflame] anybody’s sensitivities”.

And what of this year’s 15th RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL? Thankfully, there were hardly any late starts or projection problems and festival director Elliot Grove kept up his usual ‘rallying the troops enthusiasm’ intros. Overall it didn’t seem quite as lively as last year, but then, I wasn’t quite as lively as last year either. The basement Rex preview cinema/club proved an oasis of retreat from London’s West End and the Cineworld hub around the corner, with Adobe masterclasses in the cinema throughout the festival. As for the prize winner verdicts, I’d pretty much agree with all of them. Best Debut film Ex-Drummer, about Belgium lads forming of a sort of Flemish Sex Pistols, already had UK distributor Tartan Films in place, and the film plays as if the mob from Tartan’s release Sheitan had gone partying with in the bleakness of the Dardennes brothers’ films. Koen Mortier’s writing and direction is impressive, totally assured, full on and quite hard to take.

Also nominated for Best Debut was Mario Iglesias’ Drink Up (De bares)! (Spain) shot on DV. A young man eyes the photos on the wall of a local Spanish bar and ten stories come to life. The film’s denouement of a skeleton rattling his bones in the living and downing a beer is treated almost as a religious epiphany. While the rest of the film isn’t as startling, Iglesias is definitely a talent to watch. Best UK Feature deservedly went to writer/director Dom Rotheroe’s Exhibit A. Shot on Mini-DV, a pubescent girl films the doings of her middle-class family in much the same way vein as the camcorder footage of TV wannabes. Rotheroe’s talent is to make a Ken Loach style mockumentary with its devastating consequences. The casting of the parents is so clever because you realise that they probably got together in the first place through their exuberance and enjoyment of being the life of the party or indeed just at the breakfast table. The father even collects comedians’ memorabilia. This film is a sad and devastating observation of the everyday in certain British middle-class lives and no doubt around the world.

Best Documentary went to GJ Echternkamp’s Frank and Cindy about his parents, Frank Garcia an ageing pop star whose group Oxo had a hit record on Geffen’s label, and Cindy Brown who looks after him in a love/hate relationship. This is familiar territory but it isn’t as easy as it looks to pull off such a doc as successfully as Echternkamp does here.

The standard of shorts was uniformly high this year with Szymon Kluz’s very Polish lensing of Dragonflies winning both the Canon Cinematography Award and Best International Short for its director/writer Justyna Nowak. I missed Tom Tagholm’s The Truffle Hunter, alas, that picked up the Diesel prize (winner gets to make next year’s festival trailer) and Best UK short. And like last year, the American shorts tended to be more showreel shorts than exciting entities in their own right.

Anthony Dod Mantle, cinematographer of Lars von Trier and The Last King of Scotland fame, wowed us with a session on high definition. Stunning footage (admittedly with high-end post-production) of his Berlin Philharmonic/Simon Rattle Asian tour and something more experimental using scratchy old Zeiss lenses. He’s just discovered, and in love with, a new HD camera he’ll use on the latest Danny Boyle pic. But he wouldn’t say which one. And Roger Pratt of early Mike Leigh, Terry Gilliam and Harry Potter fame, gave the annually enthralling Kodak masterclass.

A film you’d definitely not see anywhere else but Raindance was Ryuichi Hiroki’s Bakushi: The Incredible Lives of Rope...about the Japanese S&M art of rope binding women. Hiroki stated that he had made it for that cult market, so if you weren’t into the actual act of Bakushi the film could drag at times. Very interesting to hear the women interviewed, though, and how they felt emotionally free and liberated through Bakushi. Hiroki also had two other films that sounded interesting in the festival M, and It's Only Talk, but I missed them.

Though Michael Mongillo’s paparazzi victim mockumentary Being Michael Madsen wasn’t that interesting or original, the talk Madsen (the ear cutter in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs) gave the following evening was worthy of a one-man theatre show for its humour and candour. Trundled home into London’s underground after Madsen’s film and waiting for my train I turned round and there was the original Reservoir Dogs poster on the wall doubled with the original Man Bites Dog (Belgium’s Rémy Belvaux). Spooky palimpsest. When I told Madsen this tale he said that coming home from the set of Reservoir, he turned on the radio and what should be playing but Stuck in the Middle With You (Tarantino hadn't yet got rights permission for the song). I’ve left a lot of Raindance stuff out including the fun though slightly disappointing opener Weirdsville (UK release November) and Gus van Sant’s closer Paranoid Park (Tartan Films UK).

But what of Best International Feature? Well, let’s start with a couple of nominees. The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters (Mamoru ‘Ghost in the Shell’ Oshii) tells post-war Japanese history through fast food stand ghosts! The film uses a new technical process superlivemation rendering still photographs as flat objects in a 3D space and animating them like shadow puppets. Enthralling piece of work, but it helps if you know Japanese as the subtitles move fast and frequent. Azazel Jacobs’ (son of New York experimental legend Ken) The GoodtimesKid was shot on dodgy 35mm stock pilfered by friends from a Hollywood blockbuster shoot. Starring himself, his quirky girlfriend Sara Diaz, and Geraldo Naranjo (Mexican director of Drama/Mex), it’s 24 hours in their LA lives after the two guys, who share the name Rodolfo Cano, turn up at the same army recruitment office. It’s a film with all the poetry of the 60s/70’s New York film avant-garde and the dodgy stock works to Jacobs' advantage. It was perfect late-night weekend offering.

And the winner of Best Feature was: the Irish low-budgeter Once, out on UK release this week through Icon. I had another look at this yesterday and really wish I could share everyone else’s enthusiasm. Written and directed by John Carney, street busker Guy (Glen Hansard) meets Girl (Marketa Irglova) in street and he fixes her Hoover (day job). Funny shot of Girl dog walking Hoover down Dublin street. They start a band and well, the story’s fairly predictable. The songs aren’t that great either, “When your mind’s made up there’s no point trying to change.....raise your hopeful voice you have a choice” etc. When they apply for a bank loan, guess what, the bank manager whips out his own guitar and starts strumming. After their first recording session the studio manager, distracted from reading his magazine, sincerely asks, “It’s nice, did you write that?” I’m very glad I didn’t write that dialogue. There’s even the habitual ‘stab at romance’ cliff scene between the protagonists. The film has loads of heart and a captivating performance from newcomer Marketa Irglova. But as far as I can see, the only reason the Americans (and I like Americans :) have gone wild about this film is that it confirms their quest for the aspirational. No bad thing, I hasten to add and I guess I won’t be able to ever show my face in Dublin after writing this. But stay tuned ‘cause in the Part 2 of this blog there’s a couple of much better music themed flics.