Once upon a time there will always be

For those who survived Christmas and ‘what not’ or were lucky enough to pride themselves on de-stressing from the year, London transport had a late present for them:
"Thousands of commuters were urged to stay away from London today after two major pieces of Christmas engineering work failed to finish in time for the return to work", The London Paper

And with the internet and newspapers full of ‘Best of 2007’s (I plead guilty to reading them too), my former broadsheet (an arcane description for ‘compact’ papers now) arts editor
The Independent’s Thomas Sutcliffe took a refreshingly ‘post-modern’ (arcane now as well?) reflection:
My year of treats and torments

And if there was a TV scheduling equivalent to being sat right next to the restaurant lavatory or the kitchen door (wasn’t that a Danny Kaye sketch?), 9am New Year’s day is probably it and Channel Five allocated it to Tony Palmer's film O Thou Transcendent: the life of Vaughan-Williams also available on DVD. For decades Palmer has flown the flag for TV music biography in Britain, though not always choosing the flagpole many broadcasters (the BBC is a bête noire) would like. The Vaughan-Williams was a 3-hour slot but a rewarding, fascinating one with non-sycophantic interviews as diverse as Harrison Birtwhistle (contemp modern music doyen), Fairport Convention and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. Initially a late Victorian/Edwardian, Vaughan-Williams is essential to 20th century Brit music and while never a ‘modernist’ (his roots were in English folksong tradition), his dark, agnostic but spiritual musical quest certainly was, and he would often stick-up for composers (like Michael Tippett and his pacifism) against prevailing public opinion. Perhaps he was Britain’s Bartok after all.

The ‘high ground culture’ of opera also returned to its ‘popular’ roots over Christmas. In 18th century days instead of the ‘posh’ stall seats at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, ‘commoners’ used to ‘stand at the spikes’ - the spikes there to stop rotten tomatoes et al from reaching the performers. BBC Four (winner of most consistent Christmas ‘neuron enhancing’ programming) televised the ROH production of Donizetti’s opera comedy La Fille du Régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment) directed by Laurent Pelly last year. This was no German staging of updated political resonance but a finely honed comic delight starring currently one of the best singer/actresses around Natalie Dessay as Marie the tomboy regiment’s ‘daughter’. She’s flushed out of her boots by tenor Tonio (the handsome ever-mellifluous Juan Diego Flórez) who has the famous aria with nine high C’s. There was even a turn by roly-poly Brit TV comedy star Dawn French in a speaking role. The conductor who knows his Italian opera inside out was Bruno Campanella. Great widescreen, surround sound TV.

Latest one-name sensation Adele has her debut album 19 (the 19 year-old Brixton Brit Adele Adkins) out in a few weeks:(Radio 4's Front Row Fri 4th) Exclusive BRITs YouTube Channel Launched
and lots of YouTube on dj spyder's site. I first saw her more than holding her own with other guests including Björk on Jools Holland's TV show. There’s a captivating rawness to her style as if she’s just picked up the microphone out of nowhere to sing her soul to you.

Former Midnight Oil rocker named Australia's environment minister

Fascinating discussion on the life of French existentialist Albert Camus: Radio 4’s In Our Time chaired by arts broadcaster supremo Melvyn Bragg. Downloadable podcast too to stimulate the neurons on your morning commute. Is there such a thing as happiness? Why not read some Camus as an antidote to the post-festive season blues? And a meditation by Franophile novelist Edmund White about the no-smoking ban for French cafe culture (Radio 4's Front Row Thurs 2 Jan end of programme, also a Vangelis interview). Gitanes will never be the same.

Michael Moore whose Michael Moore Collection is just out on Optimum DVD, showed his total amazement in Sicko (about health services on both Atlantic sides) that new French mothers could get home help and their washing done all for free by their government. So amazed was he that the doco’s final scene [spoiler warner :) has Moore in front of the White House about to take his laundry basket to them. My blog review. Moore has many detractors but his films certainly raise urgent questions. I thought of this as I handed over my £30 to the dentist as an emergency charge the other day. This wasn’t an NHS (National Health Service) charge but one imposed by the surgery on people they hadn’t seen for sometime (even a regular like me) because the surgery just hasn’t been able to handle the strain placed on the NHS over the last few years in Britain. £30 may not seem much to some I admit, but one of the ‘commandments in stone’ of the NHS is that treatment be free to all people at the point of need. And it wasn’t. So much for me trying not to ‘take up time’ with non-urgent appointments and be self-reliant. I made a doctor’s pre-Christmas appointment (in person), turned up two days later and they could find no record of it. I’m not ‘having a go’ at anybody but that’s what it’s like now. Don’t come and join the Euro-socialist revolution just yet Mr.Moore but please keep on doco-ing and provoking debate.

NHS dentistry in crisis as record number of practitioners defect to private sector (11 Jan addition to this blog)

Ofcom confirms under-16s 'junk' ad ban

A very far from fictional scenario is Will Smith’s I am Legend (BFI Imax) (forget the multiplexes!) in which a doctor (a very convincing one-minute cameo from Emma Thompson) has discovered a cancer cure by ‘piggybacking’ the cure onto the smallpox virus. Every one of the 10,009 trial patients was cured. Fast forward and Will Smith’s war hero Dr.Robert Neville is helping evacuate New York City before a deadly mutant strain takes hold. But too late, they all go mad and die. Fast forward another 3 years and the only survivors seem to be bands of ‘zombie’ mutants who can only survive in the dark, and the immune Will Smith plus gorgeous dog. Oh, and free-range deer (rifle practice wasn’t Dr. Neville’s strongpoint so he’s basically vegan). The film’s basically Will Smith and dog as he continues experimenting (not on dog) to find a cure, so it’s quite an achievement for director Francis Lawrence (and screenwriters Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman) to have fashioned a thrilling pic from what seems the very familiar material of Richard Matheson’s novel (1954). Without spoiling the ending, the logic is somewhat lacking if you know the only escape routes out of Manhattan.

For those with more stamina and good eyes for sub-titles (Mandarin) is the incomparable Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (Se,jie 色，戒) (US DVD Feb 19) – he of The Hulk and Brokeback Mountain.
Sadly, Taiwan removed the film as its best foreign film Oscar entry, because key crewmembers were not locals. Beginning in Hong Kong (1938) drama student Wong Chia Chi (wonderful newcomer Tang Wei) is enlisted by a Japanese occupation ramshackle resistance group to play the lust-object siren (18 certificate rating) to lure top Chinese collaborator Mr. Yee (Tony Leung) to his death. The action (or rather Lee’s masterly grasp of human in-action) switches to 1942 Shanghai. Adapted by regular Lee colleague James Schamus and Wang Hui Ling from Elaine Chang’s short story it’s a long film wrapping itself around the viewer like a python, with an ending some women will find perversely heartbreaking.

Very useful info on Wikipedia:
In the Shanghainese dialect, the words "lust" (色) and "lost" (失) are homophones.
The translation of the Chinese title 色、戒 as "Lust, Caution" misses most of the sense of the original. The meaning of the second word is closer to "warning" or even "renunciation," and also alludes to the ring (戒指) to be worn by Wong Chia Chi.

Sex 'pivotal' to Lust, says Lee

Excellent interview with Ang Lee on Radio 4’s Front Row (Tues 1st)
Observer profile

The siren of Jacques Rivette’s Don’t Touch the Axe (Ne touchez pas la hache) is Duchess Antoinette (the captivating and willowy Jeanne Balibar) of 1820’s Paris for whom the far from exciting general Armand (moody Guillaume Depardieu) is smitten. The title refers to the axe that befell the head of Charles I and is based upon a Balzac novel. It’s a long slow haul of a film but so is most of Rivette’s oeuvre. Yet so strong is Balibar’s allure and so finely tuned is Rivette’s pacing that once you’ve entered Rivette’s world (and it isn’t that easy) you’re in another dimension. Bluebell Films release some Rivette rarities Feb 25 on DVD: Wuthering Heights, Gang of 4 and Love on the Ground

Artificial Eye has also just released the indispensable Vol.2 Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Vol.1. Fassbinder is one of the most controversial directors in German film history leaving disgruntled armies in his wake (he died in 1982 leaving 41 films in 14 years about people who defy social norms!) and staunch supporters in equal numbers. The wendepunkt (turning point) of his career is In a Year of Thirteen Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden) (1978) in the Vol.2 set written and directed as an antidote to his lover Armin Meier’s suicide. It has a towering performance from Volker Spengler as Elvira/Erwin who is neither a transvestite nor post-op (though there was a discrete op in Casablanca) but as simply voiced in the trailer “a human being searching for love and tenderness”. Radical theatre/film/opera director Werner Schroeter has a fascinating interview extra and Fassbinder’s long-time editor and founder of the Fassbinder Foundation Juliane Lorenz notes that Thirteen Moons is “about the source of pain...a film that stabbed into everyone’s flesh”. And a 45 minute panel discussion after a celebratory Berlin screening in 1992 (including legendary East German playwright Heiner Müller and a laconic Spengler) gives a good taste of the fireworks surrounding Fassbinder; 1992 being one of the years with ’13 new moons’ of the film’s titles:
Every 7th year there is a moon year. People whose lives are strongly influenced by their emotions suffer more intensely from depression in these years. To a degree this is also true when a moon year also has 13 new moons, inescapable personal tragedies occur. In the 20th century this dangerous constellation occurs 6 times. One is 1978. A truly extraordinary masterpiece.

Many have criticised the director for using his actors (and crew) as puppets and indeed his films are at many times highly choreographic and stylised. There’s even a surreal scene where they all 'karaoke' dance to Jerry Lewis’ You’re Never Too Young. Veronika Voss- 1981 (Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss literally the longing of VV, a sort of Sunset Boulevard) though shot on film stock is almost an early experiment in doing high definition in black and white (the digital pixels of HD soaking up the white light). As Xavier Schwarzenberger notes in the DVD extra he wanted to create “a white film.. finding the depth of white” although the film is “a dark magical fairy tale” and in most Fassbinder films you could almost turn the colour off and still achieve that ‘glow’.

The opening titles to Fassbinder’s 1979 The Third Generation (Die Dritte Generation) describe it as “A comedy about parlour games in six parts, full of suspense, excitement and logic, cruelty and madness, just like the fairy tales we tell children to help them prepare for death through the changes of life.” A comedy of anarchy and an interesting companion to Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst) (1978) a political melo-dramatic portrait Fassbinder co-directed with other German luminaries.

Criterion's (US DVD) The BRD Trilogy with Veronika Voss

Arrow's The Fassbinder Commerative Collection Volume 1 and Vol2
and Fantoma in the States has some Fassbinder, too. Jim's Film Website is also an enthusiastic source of info.

In a parallel universe is Wim (Wings of Desire) Wenders whose Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten) opens in a new print as part of the Wenders retrospective at the BFI Southbank
.
Axiom Acquires Wim Wenders catalogue
The Independent previews the retrospective
Sight and Sound article, Senses of Cinema

We’re so used to seeing widescreen that the TV box shape of Alice in the Cities (Fassbinder often framed for TV) rivets our eyes with the white light of Robby Müller’s cinematography (I was blessed to be photographed by Robby in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark). Perversely we see the German journalist Phil Winter (Rüdiger Vogler) taking colour Polaroids (the latest thing in the early 70’s) that we obviously see in B/W as he tries to make sense of America. Stuck on his article he’s also stuck at the airport and meets 9 year-old Alice (Yella Rottländer) whose mother (Lisa Kreuzer) vanishes leaving him with the girl who he escorts back to Germany whence they try to find her mother via her grandmother. All they have is a photo of the house and the film becomes an engrossing ‘road movie’ (also the name of Wenders’ company Road Movies). Very little happens but like Ang Lee even when it doesn't happen we’re always interested.

Anchor Bay 10-disc set
One of my Wender favourites is The State of Things receiving a rare outing in the retrospective.

In the DVD War Over High Definition, Most Buyers Are Sitting It Out (New York Times)

Like Wenders, silent movie master F. W. Murnau was lured by the mystery of America but died in car crash shortly before his major deal with Paramount was to commence. If he lived there’d be Murnau ‘talkies’, as it was the studio tried to add some dialogue to his City Girl but later cut it. His silent self-financed Tabu of 1931 in this beautifully frame by frame restored DVD print through Eureka is quite possibly the first time the film has ever been seen in Murnau’s intended version. Paramount wasn’t worried about the naked breasts of South Sea island girls, but the gyrating hips of a fully clothed American just couldn’t be seen. Like Fassbinder, Murnau wanted to choreograph his performers and rejected a documentary approach suggested to him by the cinematography. There’s an excellent very spontaneous (bouncing questions off each other) audio commentary (author experts R.Dixon Smith and Brad Stevens) on both Tabu and the similarly restored Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror from Murnau’s early German years in 1922.

Great YouTube trailer

Based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Murnau hadn’t acquired the rights but changed all the names. The company Prana later lost a court case to the Stoker estate and were asked to retrieve and destroy all prints, so we were lucky that Nosferatu survived at all as many of Murnau’s others have been completely lost. Prints were all hand-tinted using different tints to evoke the psychological states of the character. This is an absolutely enthralling DVD and an excellent introduction to anyone unfamiliar with the processes and psychology of silent cinema.

Phantom(1922)(US DVD by Flicker Alley, the nickname of Cecil Court, London home of the Brit silent film industry)

Look forward in a few weeks to more Eureka gems with Murnau’s Der Letzte Mann (1924) (aka The Last Laugh) and Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon)

To be continued tomorrow...