London transport? Well, the underground continues to sing the refrain of signal failure but loathed and loved mayor (elections in 4 months) Ken Livingston’s congestion charge to deter motorists from the West End has seemed to speed up the bus routes (at least the one’s I’m on). But Oxford Street will always remain like salmon spawning up river with buses bumper to bumper in most daylight hours. And no free bus transfers as in New York on your Oyster Card or anything else. However, after 3 journeys on your Oyster the cost is capped at £3 and then you can make as many bus trips as you want. But topping up your Oyster Card with cash or credit from the machine isn’t as self-explanatory as it seems, as I recently discovered. And if I was a car driver I'd feel pretty miffed too at paying the congestion charge without much incentive to catch public transport or cycle with things as they are.
The Court of Ken (Channel Four's Dispatches)
Figgis film leads Ken's politeness push
Personally, I don’t really care if Ken sips scotch all day and has stress relief in his office every afternoon so long as the trains and buses run uncrowded and on time :)
Who'll pay £1.9bn cost of Metronet collapse, ask MPs
Second train fare strike planned
Our Daily Bread finally reaches a wider audience (2006 London Film Festival). Director Nikolaus Geyrhalter lets the documentary footage of vegetable/livestock cultivation and preparation speak for itself with no music or commentary. Very effective.
A site devoted to stories and photos of the contents of people's fridges from around the world e.g. Esmeralda's fridge in Copan Ruinas,Honduras.
The Big Food Fight (Channel Four)
BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth
Filmmaker Mag on two Sundance docs Fields of Fuel and IOUSA.
Cash carrot for obese people to lose pounds
And Jermey Paxman on BBC's Newsnight chairs a debate about food. Footage too of last journos allowed to investigate Silbury Hill.So, is the Hayward Gallery show (part of its 40th birthday celebrations this year). Laughing in a Foreign Language going to cheer you up? And is that really the point? It’s highly unlikely that the ushers will ever act as warm-up men wearing red noses on their knees or ears or taking your tickets in the mouth of a Gordon Brown glove-puppet that asks you for another 20 pence for your free guide booklet (why the Hayward didn’t accept that piece of mine I shall never know :)I guess it opted for the wall scibbles piece instead. The show takes a while to get the hint of a smile before you encounter Martin Walde’s The Key Spirit where keys are strewn in front of a locked door behind which a cat ceaselessly meows. There’s more than a hint from the quotes in the booklet that your experience is going to be more akin to a Pinter play than even one by Alan Ayckbourn: “Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter,” reads the Nietzsche quote. And I’m always aware of film director Billy Wilder’s quote they quote when writing this blog: “If you’re going to tell the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.” But there comes a point (particularly in London) where you only have to present the actualities of experience for things to be hysterically funny. Jack Dee comes close to that and comedian Mark Thomas did it literally (eg oh look, the plans for the MI6 (Brit intelligence) building are available on the internet, truly, or he’d ring up a local council and ask about their nuclear evacuation plans, to which one finally replied ‘we put out plastic road cones’). Thomas is still alive. Just.
Your initial encounter at the Hayward is of Julian Rosefeldt’s large video triptych Clown, a tropical forest with an extra guest. Then its Chinese/Austrian artist Jun Yang with his small video of a Chinese man smuggled into Europe who struggles with the contradictions of the West. South African Candice Breitz has a room to herself for her video of five Japanese actors trying to communicate in only the few Japanese words known by the artist. Marcus Coates’ Journey to the Lower World is him performing a Siberian animal spirit ritual to some residents in a Liverpool tower block. One of the simplest and funniest pieces of the show is what looks at first to be a small crouching figure huddled against the gallery wall Untitle me forlornly reciting the names of London tube stations. You can use him/her as a stool to sit on but the figure is so resigned to its existence that it doesn’t even go ‘ouch’ when you do. Taiyo Kimura’s other piece is laundry basket voyeurism. Perhaps the ‘laughtest’ video comes from the seasoned Guy Ben-Ner who uses himself and his family (in this case his son cast as a feral child) filmed in his own house. (I wrote about his latest IKEA piece some months ago). Other well known names include Jake and Dinos Chapman and David Shrigley. Doug Fishbone mounts kiddies ‘joke machines’ at adult height spewing grown-up jokes when you press and Roi Vaara’s video Artist’s Dilemna twists the Robert Frost poem The Road Less Travelled by having a man on an iceflow vacillating side to side of a sign that points Art in one direction and Life in the other. You can buy the £26 poster for this or the 60 pence postcard in the bookshop to forever remind yourself of your mortal coil. Vaara also has a performance piece Wet Paint Handshakes in the show. And making you feel like you could be an artist too, or alternatively the joke’s on you, is the talking cardboard box as you exit. Not strictly part of the show in the Project Space (free entry) upstairs from the cafe, don’t miss Ed Young and Artemio’s Hollywood Remix where they re-edit Gladiator (well, bits of it) and in another room Marlon Brando’s ‘the horror’ speech from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now edited into Apoohcalypse Now with Winnie the Pooh collecting pine cones and grappling with an air rifle. Maybe kids of today are editing that way in their heads already anyway.
Written in 1908, the first poem of Khlebnikov’s Incantation by Laughter had every word in it deriving from the Russian smekh, the Russian for laugh. So what emotion does the Royal Academy’s new blockbuster show From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870–1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg engender?
Brian Sewell makes no bones about his: What an ugly business in (London Evening Standard)
He’s also in his usual candour when remembering Sir Anthony Blunt (ousted Brit spy for the Russians and keeper of the Queen’s pictures)Unearthing an interview with a spy
But I can’t agree with Sewell about Matisse’s The Dance (1910). After an introductory rather plain Room 1 of Russian art, Room 2 entices you with the French paintings collected by the textile merchants Morosov and Shchukin and now housed in the great Russian gallery collections. Tastes will obviously differ, but for me the Cezannes, in particular the Mont Sainte-Victoire painted in the year of his death 1906, were transfixing. It startles you all the more if you’ve made the journey to see his studio view for yourself. It’s as if he’s transporting Saint-Victoire through the window to within his atelier in ‘Dr.Who time-lord’ brushstrokes. Danse II then envelopes you entering Room 3. This was a Matisse commission by Shchukin to hang at the top of grand Moscow staircase. And it certainly had its detractors at the time. Another version (Danse I) hangs in New York’s MOMA. It’s so often reproduced in tawdry colours that to see the painting in the flesh is truly awesome. Photographs Matisse took of the work’s progress still exist and my one real cavil about the entire show is the lack of poems, letters, photos from the time. The penultimate Room 7 has a wall of enlarged photos so it obviously wasn’t ‘policy’ to exclude them entirely. And the master works are so strong that it really wouldn’t have detracted from them to have some extra stuff around them. You could also argue that if one is relatively unfamiliar with the period this show tantalises you enough to seek more info by yourself anyway. But the period is so much richer in avant garde Russian poetry etc than many of the paintings on show that it does itself a slight disservice. A mid-way rotunda and exit does, however, display a model and video reconstruction of Vladimir Tatlin’s unbuilt revolutionary tower Monument to the Third international from 1920. In whatever he did, Tatlin was an extraordinary figure as a couple of early paintings from 1911/12 show. Tatlin called to artists to ‘take control over the forms encountered in everyday life’ (the Constructivists).
But back to Room 3 and I certainly agree with Sewell that Picasso’s 1908 Dryad (1908)really is a masterpiece. It reminded me of those sci-fi films and HR Giger where the creature somehow assembles itself from its surroundings. Picasso has his Dryad formed as if from the trees and rocks of the forest heading straight toward you but not necessarily aggressively only out of necessity. If the show is trying to convince one that the French influence of the magnates’ collections changed the course of Russian art it certainly fails. Many of the painters went to Paris anyway. Picasso recounts Tatlin visiting his Paris studio, playing the accordion and communicating only through gestures. A photo and a story like this would really benefit the show. Bonnard’s large Summer Dance (1912) radiates across the room opposite Danse II with an almost psychedelic tsunami of flora. And further on lies a Kees van Dongen, Lucie and Her Partner (1911) whose characteristic emerald flashes appear in several Russian imitators. Many of the Russians seem less influenced by the French and more by Italian Futurism (Marinetti had visited St Petersburg in 1914). The poet Filonov is an example of this and his German War (1914) is horrifyingly prescient of the years to come. There was a legend that Filonov's ghost protected his art and anybody trying to steal his paintings or to smuggle them abroad would soon die, become paralyzed, or have a similar misfortune. Room 8 is a fitting final act to this opera with the Suprematism black squares and crosses of Malevich mounted like revolutionary flags, Kandinsky’s crazy ‘psychological effect of pure colour’ collisions, Rodchenko’s ‘alien’ sphere and Mikhail Matyshin’s Movement in Space (1922) whose colour streams launch you out of the show through the Tatlin again and into another orbit, really making you feel you’ve been part of the space race.
The 'first Futurist opera' revisited
Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography (Hayward Gallery Feb 7)
Durov’s Pig
The Guardian article
History of the player-piano industry Rolls, Records and the Return of Myra Hess
Heiner Goebbels’ massive music theatre piece (my blog review of Wars I Have Seen)
[Addition] A shame there's no podcast of Saturday morning's (2 Feb)BBC Radio 3 CD Review piece on Harmonia Mundi at 50. Indy classical label (orig Baroque music niche)still going strong in the digital download age. But there is a podcast of Music Matters Marina Frolova-Walker's new book Russian Music and Nationalism.
Another great show in a string of hits for the Tate is Juan Muñoz at the Tate Modern. I missed what everyone says was a fascinating show in the large Turbine Hall Double Bind (2001) that opened shortly before his death. Otherwise, Muñoz is probably best known for his sculptures of railings, balustrades and balconies that out of context don’t seem like much but in a show like this prove to be at the heart of his exploration of the illusory nature of support of any kind. And this is pretty obvious even to the untrained eye. In Room1, the drawing of a balustraded balcony floats mid-air on brown paper and a sculpture has wooden totems bundling together for support in what resembles an iron firetower. The Wasteland (1987), taking its title from the T.S.Eliot poem, is a whole room with optical patterned floor overlooked by a small bronze figure sat childlike on a shelf. This feeling of undermined assurance is furthered with his First Banister (1987) where Muñoz incorporates a real switchblade hidden from view and ready to strike; nearby a drum has been punctured with scissors. Two Ballerinas (1989) balance on semi-spherical bases like the scales of justice only one holds a pair of scissors in the other hand. Muñoz’s theatre becomes even more pronounced with The Prompter (1988), a room with a raised bare stage populated by a lone drum shrinking way at the back, and foregrounded by the prompter’s box shielding a dwarf. (The Tate hopes to acquire this piece). The show becomes increasingly unsettling with ‘pregnant presences’ looming large. One Figure (2000) has a man almost cradling a mirror; the side of his head pressed against it with eyes closed almost in a despairing ‘please’. Many Times (1999) is a room comprising 100 figures identically modelled on an Art Nouveau ceramic bust from a London hotel. They’re all smiling but the visitor feels more on view than they do: “It’s always been said that statues are blind,” Muñoz once commented, “They are looking inwards, and that looking inwards automatically excludes the receiver, the person in front.” In the penultimate room ‘Wasteland’ resin casts Seated Figures with Five Drums (1999) each cradles his drum in vain hope: one has it propped against his back, one as a footstool, one against his mouth, one at his feet, and one cradled like a dead child. Again, the figures appear to have no eyes. The preceding room has a figure from the car crash of Loaded Car II (1996) with backlit shadow and a mouth open in a ‘Bacon-esque’ scream of despair. The seated power play of Shadow and Mouth (1996) in the last room has one figure whose mouth to the wall is animated by an electric motor, while Staring at the Sea (1997-2000) has two men on tip-toe in cardboard masks in vain animation at the mirror, “They are there to tell you something about your looking, but they cannot, because they don’t let you see yourself,” writes Muñoz. The only figures in the show with any authority or ‘terra firma’ are ironically the Opposite Balconies (1991) mounted high up in the passage between Rooms 7/8. Their integration into society’s norms seems so complete that they look almost ferriferously ossified. And don’t miss the intrigues of Muñoz’s filmed radio play on the cafe’s video screen or those on the headphones as you exit or his Josef Conrad illustrations on Level 3. Take the kids and they may just thank you in their later years for pre-empting the harbouring of any illusions of a balanced society.
Sweeney Todd (trailer) has none of those after suffering almost two decades in Australian penal servitude discharged back to Dickensian London as dissolute and dumb as any Munoz figure.
Tim Burton’s film version of Stephen Sondheim’s (young lyricist for Bernstein’s West Side Story) 1979 Broadway musical could easily vie for an unseen opera haunting Munoz’s Wasteland stage. The musical is often performed in opera houses by big singers but Burton’s film is essentially what most ‘great’ opera aspires to: the intimate revelation of private passions amidst musical maelstrom. Helena Bonham-Carter as Mrs Lovett mothers Todd (Johnny Depp) back into barbering with her tiny almost sotto voce sweet voice and in return is fathered with human mincemeat for her ailing pie shop. (Remember that the red and white pole originates from barbers also being surgeons). The chorus from the original score has vanished and instead we have Todd’s dystopian vision animated by his reflection of the past in the knife blades and mirrors incessantly intoning a mantra of revenge on Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) who once deprived him of his love(Laura Michelle Kelly) and daughter Joanna (Jayne Wisener) now Turpin’s ward. The film is even shot in silent movie mode, scenes tinted in steelish blue-grey or sepia to denote emotional states. “We could have a life,” says Mrs Lovett to Todd, “maybe not what I dreamed and not what you remember but we could get by.” Her jaunty, dreamy By the Sea is the only scene vibrant in colour yet reminiscent only of waxwork dummies in a holiday shop window. Joanna gets rescued, having been incarcerated by the unrequited Turpin in an asylum, and resigned with sage youthful scepticism asks of her boyish suitor (Jamie Campbell Bower), “The ghosts never go away...Run away and all our dreams come true?” The saddest music of them all settles on Mrs.Lovett’s young apprentice Toby (Ed Saunders) who reassures her like a gentle David against Goliath with “no-one’s gonna harm you Not While I’m Around”. Without spoiling the end for you, Toby could so easily ossify into another Todd after the experiencing the horrors yet to come as in Schubert’s song Litany for the Feast of All Souls: “Rest in peace all souls/ Who a fearful torment past/And those who never smiled at the sun/But under the moon lay awake on thorns”. Superb performances all round that must include Timothy Spall’s ‘swamp-creature’ beadle and Sacha Baron-Cohen (Pirelli), Toby’s be-headed master.
South Bank Show on Tim Burton
The Times on the rising stars of the cast
David Mamet’s gory descent into hell play Edmond directed by Re-Animator’s Stuart Gordon is out on Tartan DVD (my blog review).
“Don’t stir up the past,” says one of the characters in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (San Xia Hao Ren-三峡好人), (literally Good people of the Three Gorges) winner of this year’s Venice Film Festival top prize the Golden Lion. Shot sumptuously on HD (high definition video) in the flooded and dammed Three Gorges region along the Yangtze River, Han Sanning and Shen Hong search for their past in Fengjie. The story matters less than the giant fish bowl in which they swim: strange events such as a building rocketing into the sky and a tightrope walker are witnessed as if happened in another world outside the glass bowl. Meanwhile, the minutia of consumption and sustenance, cigarettes, candy, wine and tea are foregrounded in close-up like sediment endlessly circled by the fish.
Jia Zhangke retrospective at the BFI
Nightwaves (Tues 29)
Chinese Wasteland (CinemaScope Mag)
Edward Burtynsky Quarries, not as radical as Cezanne but certainly photographs that heighten our powers of observation.
An architecture that should be impossible (Financial Times)
The Bothersome Man-Den Brysomme mannen (Verve's UK DVD offshoot Drake’s Avenue)
Tough Enough (Dogwoof DVD)
“O that the slave had 40,000 lives, one is too poor, too weak for my revenge,” quotes Orson Welles’ magnate Manderson from Shakespeare’s Othello in Trent's Last Case (1952) “...less that her body and her beauty unprovide my mind again. I’d rather be a toad,” his adulterer John Marlowe (John McCallum) completes the phrase, “and live upon the vapour than keep a corner in the thing I love for others’ uses.” It’s an hour before Welles appears on screen, his American financial tycoon character found dead with reporter Phillip Trent (Michael Wilding)in pursuit of the truth. He was probably the only actor able to steal a scene with a few words in a reverse shot not his own, hidden by an armchair and a haze of cigar smoke. And then he’s only on screen for all of 12 minutes. The plot is familiar but worth it just for Welles and of course Margaret Lockwood as his wife. Directed by Herbert Wilcox who began as a producer and director as far back as the 1920's.
Diana Dors was championed as the busty Brit Marilyn Monroe but few knew her consummate acting ability as seen in Yield to the Night
(1956) loosely based on the Ruth Ellis capital punishment story (Dance With a Stranger). Told in flashback from her prison life director J. Lee Thompson’s camera angles are mordantly off-key. No surprise he went onto direct The Guns of Navarone, 1961 and Cape Fear,1962. Note the opening scene of Trafalgar Square showing that it once had trees.
Dors shows off her trademark curves in a rather small early role Lady Godiva Rides Again. Godiva is Pauline Stroud who eventually gets shot of the beauty pageant lark into the arms of an Ozzie pineapple farmer John McCallum (a slightly less famous Peter Finch bloke). Also Joan Collins in her movie debut as an uncredited beauty pageant contestant.
For something far more sophisticated Lady Chatterley is out on DVD (my blog review)and so is Yella (my blog review).
I had an interesting quizzing from perception guru Richard Gregory on to what extent an actor’s role can inhabit and effect their daily life after a discussion on Gimpel Fils (Wellcome Foundation funded Neurotopographics) In turn he recounted the fascinating story of his unrealised collaboration with Roman Polanski, a huge fan of Gregory’s Eye and Brain back in the 70’s, with the director wanting to make an entire feature in 3D.
Polanski at Sundance (sort of..)
I saw again Gus van Sant’s Paranoid Park and marvelled at Chris Doyle’s stream-of-consciousness cinematography, and had a really fun time listening to the cast of The Shield Channel Five in the UK. The Shield- The Complete Fifth Season ">(4 Discs)DVD commentary. Season 5 is the one guest starring Forest Whitacker who the cast adored. All right, the commentary may be self-congratulatory but they have a lot to congratulate about. And they’re awesome fun to be with! Good story on The Shield’s place in contemporary TV: “One of the editors worked on a network TV show...and he kept on saying ‘why is this character doing this?’ Eventually he got ‘shut down entirely’ and they kept on saying ‘why are you asking these questions?’ He was so used to everything making sense...The Shield and its characters being completely motivated, and editing that way that he couldn’t deal with doing network TV anymore because half the shit was unmotivated and didn’t make any sense.” 7 days a week filming, 9 pages a day. Way to go. (You’re allowed to dig art house movies too). Apologies to the fine talents of Jeff Goldblum and director Frank Darabont, but Raines (ITV3 in the UK) about a detective who sees dead people to solve his crimes is cringingly funny, “Where are we going now? asks the ghost. To check the programme guide for something else is our only reply.
If Man in the Chair were made by a first-time director you’d be impressed but hoping that he’d be less sentimental in his next opus. Director Michael Schroeder is quite a veteran, though, having worked on 45 features and directed nine. Nice punky auto-theft film buff kid Cameron (Michael Angarano) befriends alco-ish old timer ‘Flash’ (Christopher Plummer) who turns out to have been a gaffer on legendary films such as Citizen Kane. Flash introduces the kid to equally legendary screenwriter (M. Emmet Walsh) and Cameron enlists the decaying veterans and others at the retirement home for his film about the state of care for the elderly. The performances are magnificent, Plummer especially, and more than reason enough to see this film. But the script is no where near as nuanced and timely as Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages. Man in the Chair is a great movie if you need some help with your parental reconciliation date.
A wonderful childs-eye view of family problems is Libero (Along the Ridge -Anche Libero Va Bene)
Filmed with inventive simplicity mostly at the eye-level of Renato’s (co-writer/director Kim Rossi Stuart) son Tommi (Alessandro Morace), Renato is drowning in debt, hot-tempered and whose frequently caring but absent wife Stefania (Barbara Bobulova) “is a girl whose pussy’s always itching for more” in Renato’s words. “Adults can make great mistakes (which they hasten to minimize), little kids, in fact, have the capacity to forgive and understand their suffering with disarming force,” says the director. Kim Rossi Stuart has had good acting roles in high profile films such as Michele Placido’s Romanzo Criminale, Antonioni’s Beyond the Clouds, and Roberto Benigni’s Pinocchio (seen only once in a UK festival). Libero proves he’s an enormous talent to look forward to.
The feature debut of Russian Andrei Kravchuk The Italian about an illegally adopted 6 year-old (Kolya Spiridonov, reason to see the film) escaping to find his birth parents seems somewhat staid alongside Libero in spite of excellent production values. Far more haunting is the black and white El Violin(also from the UK indy distributor Soda Pictures) written, directed and produced by Mexican Francisco Vargas. There’s hints of Polanski’s The Pianist here with elderly non-actor Ángel Tavira (winner of Best Actor in Cannes’ 2006 Un Certain Regard) as the one handed violinist (as in reality) Don Plutarco who returns to his military occupied farmhouse, striking a rapport with the steely-eyed music-loving captain (seasoned actor Dagoberto Gama) as a guise to smuggle out the rebel ammunition buried in the cornfield. With Bunuel’s Los Olvidados (The Hopeless Ones) as his benchmark, Vargas tells his tale with unsentimental simplicity.
Marketa Lazarová
is rarely if ever seen on a big screen, though that’s the way it should be seen given the film’s extraordinary poetic imagery. 160 min of black and white mid-13th century power play is not to everyone’s taste but this DVD proves claims of the film’s greatness. The shoot lasted over two years and director Frantisek Vlácil describes the finished film as a “Film-Opera” of the battle between Christianity and paganism: “Recently I’ve come to feel that socialist thinking has in fact stopped developing, and turned into a religion, in which the dogmas and principles are untouchable. If you take a poke at them, you are a heretic.” Actress Magda Vásáryová (Marketa)was originally up for the role in Sophie’s Choice and is now a Czech diplomat and independent Presidential candidate in Slovakia. Another cinema gem beautifully transferred by Second Run DVD. Peter Hames' The Czechoslavak New Wave and The Cinema of Central Europe from Wallflower Press.
If that’s to your taste try Kino (in the States)The Films of Sergei Paradjanov (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors/The Color of Pomegranates/The Legend of Suram Fortress/Ashik Keri).
And finally one of the craziest, most extraordinary plays of post-war British theatre, Edward Bond’s The Sea. Revived at the National Theatre by Sam Mendes a decade or more ago, Jonathan Kent directs a crème de la crème cast at the Haymarket Theatre where I first trod the British theatre floorboards.
The fine Dame Eileen Atkins
Haven’t seen this production but if ever there was a play to inspire a crazy avant-gardist back to directing in the theatre, this would be it. Shakespeare included, of course.
Arts bodies await funding list
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