bare ruined choirs

Further up river at the Tate Modern is the must-see London art show of recent years -huge claim I know given London’s prolific traffic. Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia though, were artists who not necessarily the 'greatest' of their time, were arguably the most influential. The ones asking what is art, and what is great? And in Picabia’s case sabotaging even the very notion of an ‘ism’. I listened with great interest to what artist Richard Wentworth had to say on BBC’s Nightwaves (last day to listen I think). I too had been thinking along his lines, reminded as I walked in, of attending the Sotheby’s London auction of Man Ray’s widow’s estate many years ago. So wonderful about that experience was a show totally uncurated except for price and space availability. One object jostling another - Man Ray’s own work with that he’d collected. It was all very: Man Ray. And with a large public gallery such as the Tate, the question is always how far should it go in ‘educating’ its public, if indeed at all. It’s a mammoth show with around 350 works and I spent close to 4 hours (including 30 min of the films) and that was barely enough for someone reasonably familiar with the period. The revelation for me was Picabia, whose works when seen in periodic isolation can appear derivative even uninspired but here rose like a Golem as 20th Century art’s mirror to the future. When Duchamp’s Fountain (1917 replica 1964), a urinal signed R. Mutt, was rejected by the Society of Independent Artists Picabia crowed “Artists of Speech /who have one hole for mouth and anus,” in his poem Medusa. "Vegetables are more serious than men and more sensitive to frost."

[Addition: Spooky co-incidence, I’ve just seen this great Frieze article on Rocky and Duchamp. On the other hand, not so strange at all considering that there are still a few people left in the world who see beyond the one-dimensionality of Stallone bashing.]

Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia: An unholy trinity

I Am a Beautiful Monster. Picabia’s, only very recently, collected writings (France in 2002).

Also try George Baker’s The Artwork Caught by the Tail and
Geoffrey Young’s translations also .

Dada exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA , 2006)
Man Ray short films

No criticism intended, but the Royal Academy’s From Russia resembles a polite samovar party for vicars in comparison to the Tate Modern show. Even the audio guide proudly trumpets in its first utterance that the show is anti-bourgeois and anti-ART. I know what Richard Wentworth means about this show: how do you conjure that original fire and folly that must have burnt bourgeois hair to its very follicles? On the other hand, isn’t that really the job of one’s imagination rather than a curator? And there isn’t an uninspiring room in the whole show. Early on, Duchamp’s Chocolate Grinder (1913) is an oil throbbing with latent energy in cinematic close-up, and his famous Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912) that astonished Man Ray when first shown in New York, hasn’t been seen in this country since 1966. Man Ray’s The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Own Shadows (1916) is a playful collage in oil almost inviting audience participation and Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-14) explores space/time and the ‘preserved chance’ by dropping 3 one-meter threads from 3 meters and ‘mapping’ their impact. This comes to artistic fruition in his The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) – sexual attraction reduced to physics and viewed as if through a child’s glass ant farm. This culminates (if indeed there ever was a trajectory) in Duchamp’s secret work, unveiled only after his death, Etant donnés, 1946-66 (spoiler alert: inside view). This piece has never been shown in Europe.

Picabia’s mechanical drawings were first published in 1924 (and don’t miss the wonder watercolours of New York), the year his ‘riposte to surrealism’ scenario Ballet Instantanéisme titled Entr'acte was performed watch all of it on YouTube. In the program he wrote "I would rather hear shouting than applauding". This website excellently explains all.

Picabia may have lead the ‘high-life’ but he was no ‘lap-cat’ gently pawing the changing terrain for a good retirement nap. In the early 40s he was way ahead of his time using popular culture’s cheap postcards of glamour models for his oil on cardboard nudes. Duchamp later arranged an exhibition for his unheralded friend who’d started monochromatic paintings with small dots and spheres, I Don’t Care (1947), The Earth is Round(1951): “We need a lively, childlike, happy art if we are not to lose the freedom we value above everything,” he wrote. It was almost as if, unconsciously, he was perversely positing ‘but consider the earth as flat’, a spatial/temporal hypothesis currently crucial for quantum astro-physicists and harking back to Duchamp’s experiments.

In Our Time (BBC Radio4)

William Blake: 'I still go on / Till the Heavens and Earth are gone'

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is by American artist Julian Schnabel (Best Director last year’s Cannes Fest) from Ronald Harwood’s (The Pianist) adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s (Mathieu Amalric) autobiography. Editor of French Elle, Bauby suffered a cerebrovascular stroke and developed “locked-in syndrome” - in 1995 at the age of 43 – which left him physically paralyzed save for one blinkable eye but with his hearing intact.
Using ‘blink-speech’ his book was transcribed letter by letter from his blinking over 14 months. Bauby died two days after it was published and Schnabel has filmed on location in the exact same hospital room. The film was further inspired by the recent death of Schnabel’s own father, "I wanted to know what my father was seeing when he was dying," he says, "and not just what I saw watching him...It just seems so fundamental. It's not about making the movie. It's trying to understand life. It's using film as a utilitarian tool, not really to entertain people or to sell tickets. It's something that's useful to understand why we're here."

'I Tried to Get Inside My Dad's Head' (YouTube vid), Reasons for making Diving Bell, working with the cast

Schnabel quotes Russian director Tarkovsky in an interview: ‘Art, unlike life, doesn’t contain death. Therefore art is optimistic.’” What is so engulfing about the film is that the reality of Jean-Do’s condition is his imagination not an artist’s representation of it. It’s a mesmeric ensemble cast including Marie-Josée Croze (Bauby’s main therapist) and Celine (Emmanuelle Seigner) ‘mother of my children’. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski amazes.

Bluebell Films, so small they still don’t have a website, live up to their name radiantly peeping out through the crowded DVD release fortnight with their 3 Jacques Rivette discs, a world DVD premiere for them with excellent disc transfers, but no extras. Criterion DVD's chat forum about this and a forthcoming German box set. Rivette is best known for Celine and Julie Go Boating (Celine et Julie vont en bateau) and according to film historian David Thomson “the most innovative film since Citizen Kane…whereas Kane was the first picture to suggest that the world of the imagination was as powerful as reality, Celine and Julie is the first film in which everything is invented.” Quoted in: Jacques Rivette (Senses of Cinema)

Rivette’s film’s are all do with our imagination, very theatrical but of the slow (160 min is normal), quiet, intimate kind, so much so that like a theatre audience we enter into the film and become complicit rather than simply sitting back. In L'Amour par terre (Love on the Ground) (1984) a bourgeois hires actors to perform his play to an invited audience. “What you secretly fear always happens.”

Hurlevent or Windswept (Wuthering Heights-1985) updates early chapters of the Bronte novel to 1930s isolated French Cévennes and failed on release. Music is used sparingly in Rivette films and here it is the plaintive, primal Bulgarian voices (Le mystère des voix bulgares)long before they became more widely known. Lucas Belvaux is Roch (Heathcliffe) and Fabienne Babe (Cathy) for once the right age for Bronte’s lovers.

Wonderful Hurlevent article and Rivette interview by Valérie Hazette in Senses of Cinema.

My favourite of the three, though, for there is no ‘best’, is Gang of Four (La Bande des quatre -1988) in which four young actresses are studying Marivaux’ s La Double Inconstance (The Double Infidelities -1723). After tearing shreds off one actress their teacher Constance (Bulle Ogier) declares, “destruction, that’s what you have here all the time, that’s what you have to build with, create invent with, destruction and doubt.” Through her boyfriend, one of the girls is involved in a terrorist conspiracy but like all Rivette’s films reality, invention and imagination become fused into one. I’m still haunted by seeing many a staging in Paris of Marivaux, Racine, Claudel - and Rivette truly gives a visual equivalent to Paul Valery’s poetic line “Il faut etre léger comme l’oiseau, et non comme la plume"(One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather)” No actor could ever find this film uninspiring. It’s a shame, though, the French expletives frequently used by the girls are so tamely translated in the subtitles given the contrast with the beauty and withheld emotional fire of Marivaux’s language.

YouTube clip with Spanish subtitles La banda de las cuatro
His most recent Don't Touch the Axe (Ne touchez pas la hache)


Egalité! Liberté! Sexualité!: Paris, May 1968

Disappearing tortoises: Playing God in the Galapagos

Andrew Graham-Dixon’s approach to art is very similar to Attenborough’s and nature (Life in Cold Blood out on DVD this week). As with his Art of Eternity, in The Art Of Spain (BBC Four, repeated for a while and thence to BBC2) Graham-Dixon delights in sharing his constant surprises and fascinations with his audience. No whistle-stop art tour here more a meditation on man’s existence beginning with the tolerant benign 10th century Cordoba with Islam and Christianity in harmony to the censorship and Spanish Inquisition of Philip II’s reign where the sun was the centre of the earth. Then onto Philip IV’s Velázquez’s commission Las Meninas (1656) in which Graham-Dixon sees none of its received mystery more the overt transience of life and power. Zurbarán, Ribera

Brit exile Peter Greenaway plans a Las Meninas project at the Prado in Madrid in 2009.
Greenaway prepares to create Da Vinci coda and two essential DVDs now out from New York’s Zeitgeist:
The Draughtsman's Contract, A Zed and Two Noughts

For the talented, no film should ever prove to be a complete waste of time. The redeeming feature of Wong Kai-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights is Darius Khondji’s cinematography. A favourite of the ‘art-house’ set, not even Wong Kai-Wai’s most fervent admirers could rescue this effort with excruciating dialogue like “she loved the sunsets more than the keys and ended up falling into one”. Poor Jude Law (who I happen to like as I duck the slings and arrows of most Brit crits), but this film that seemed promising on paper, does him no favours (cut considerably from the Cannes Fest version). David Strathairn is a bit like Jack Palance in that whatever he’s in he shines (or rather rumbles like an approaching thunderstorm, here with a wonderful monologue about measuring his sobriety with gaming chips). The gals are good too but it’s an uphill struggle.

Khondji worked along side his mentor, the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro on Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty (1996). And one of Storaro’s earliest films, Bertolucci's The Conformist (Il conformista-1970) (New York revival 2005 ) Spoiler warning (the murder scene on YouTube - Warning: doesn't do justice to the cinematography.) is re-released in a new print this week by the BFI.

In the unlikely event I would make a list of my all time top 10 films The Conformist would most certainly be there. Bertolucci sculpts Alberto Moravia’s 1951 novel exploring Italy’s Fascist past into his modest Guernicapainted by Storaro, art director Ferdinando Scarfiotti and editor Franco Arcalli in luscious bourgeois ‘Renoir’ oils. A poetic parable of social conformity as the doomed means to human survival and a film far more succinct and resonant than his fascinating later epic 1900 (1976). So much has been written about The Conformist, suffice to say it also has perhaps Georges Delerue’s finest film theme, a simple little arpeggio - an echo of a stolen childhood moment.

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor is just out on Criterion DVD in the States in a magnificent 4-disc set.


Paul Pfeiffer’s haunting Live from Neverland (Thomas Dane) had a ‘Greek tragedy’ Filippino children’s choir reciting Michael Jackson’s TV confession on a large screen with a TV in a corner playing the original broadcast.

Les Petits Vacances (Stolen Holidays) Dogwoof DVD out March 10.

Tsai Ming-Liang's The Wayward Cloud and I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Trailer)are now out on DVD. The latter, in particular, could be considered a wildlife film on humans. It’s the first film of Tsai Ming-Liang’s set in his native Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur) and was commissioned as part of Peter Sellars’ New Crowned Hope Festival celebrating Mozart. An aria from The Magic Flute (Dies bildnis) is the first and one of the only things you hear during the entire film apart from the urban rumble. “Why don’t your characters speak?” he’s asked in an interview extra, “When I’m alone I don’t speak,” he smiles. We the audience, become David Attenboroughs placidly watching the nest, or in this case, the mattress being carried across deserted nighttime streets. Some animals are protectors others invaders. A street vendor’s fibre-optic lamps nestle on the road kerbside like a bird’s nest of man’s shiny detritus or a cluster of sea anemones out of place, out of time. One character night fishes in the lake formed by a half-built and abandoned building with man’s nests as vertiginous as Escher’s never-ending stairways.

The Wayward Cloud (2004) is one of the rare instances where watching the interview disc extra before the feature would help. This again stars Tsai regular director/actor Lee Kang-sheng (YouTube) as a porn actor in drought struck Taipei where the only relief comes from watermelons and the only dialogue that of the porn director. The taps are dry yet they still manage to lubricate the scenes with bottled water. Interspersed are musical routines using popular 30s Chinese songs. “I’m possibly the first Chinese director to show masturbation, “ laughs Tsai.

Kinky (very grainy) YouTube clip, and from Axiom.

The transcendent final image of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is accompanied by a Chinese version of Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight theme (Xin Qu), “Can you hear the canaries sing of love?” Tsai: “ The strange thing is that love comes when you don’t believe it,” and filmmakers like Tsai Min-Liang are a bit of an endangered species themselves these days.

Senses of Cinema interview
Tsai Ming-Liang in Venice (2007)(YouTube)

Mathieu Kassovitz is also observing man’s primal instincts in Assassin(s), 1997. Best known for his controversial La Haine (Hate), Assassin(s) was his follow-up that disappointed many. (No extras, but one of the shortest trailers ever at 38 sec) From the opening moments Kassovitz proves that he’s a fine actor and master of cinema image (he edits and writes too). Not much happens in this film apart from a couple of murders by Mr.Wagner (Michel Serrault) an ageing contract killer trying to pass on the baton to young Max (Kassovitz). What makes this film so disturbing (much more than the genre histrionics of Rambo) is Kassovitz’s observation of these acts as ‘normality’. There’s no Luc Besson Leon clever artyness to remind us we’re only watching a movie. Kassovitz is more interested in Ken Loach social realism or the world of Claude Chabrol (I was still chilled by Le Boucher seeing it again the other day) where deep down we all seem somehow silently implicated in these little everyday deaths. Assassins(s) is even more topical 10 years later given the rise of gun crime in Paris and London. Coen Brothers regular Carter Burwell provides a melancholy score. Étant Donnés.

Happy Accidents (2001, out this week on Arrow DVD, no extras) is from the equally talented writer/director/editor (though he doesn’t act in his films) Brad Anderson and is a ‘heart-warming’ comedy without the usual cloggy cholesterol. Sam Deed (Vincent D'Onofrio) ventures 471 years back in time from the future in a Terminator scenario to prevent the death of Ruby Weaver (Marisa Tomei). The script works because you’re never quite sure until the very end from D'Onofrio’s performance whether Sam is psychotic or the real thing. “Why must they always be drawn to me,” sighs Ruby in New York singleton despair about to add Sam’s photo to her large box of ‘X-Files’. You really feel for Tomei’s Ruby, and the supporting cast is equally great including a cameo from director Tamara Jenkins (The Savages). And Brad, if you’re reading this, I never did find my Ruby after that chilly night in the Hamptons all those years ago. The ‘preserved chance’.

Marc Quinn just closed at the White Cube. What will the future make of his monolithic human foetuses hewn into stone?

Walter Benjamin’s archive (Verso), fragments
Stanley Kubrick - 2008: A Film Odyssey (Barbican retrospective)
Sci-Fi London

And the smallest cinema in the world La Charrette closed with the never ever ever seen before world premiere of Danny Boyle's short Alien Love Triangle brokered by Culture Show's Mark Kermode. A shame there's no vid on the site of this (last show Sat 1 March).

a bit more ruin

Vivienne Westwood's Red Label at London Fashion Week. Saw her on a recent talk show being as feisty as ever.

From the Margins to the Mainstream - Government unveils new action plan for the creative industries

Northern Rock nationalisation in turmoil over offshore trust, news we hadn’t heard about until now that also includes Sovereign Wealth Funds (BBC's Newsnight).

169 local Post Offices may close, BBC link. I’m not against modernistaion but my sympathies here are with the elderley.

Head to the East End advice to London tourists, if only the transport links were better says I.

Pina Bausch and her company Tanztheater Wuppertal have their final show tonight at Sadlers Wells with her two most famous pieces Café Müller (1978) and Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring- 1975). It’s a shame she wasn’t well enough to perform herself in Café Müller such is her primal, haunting stage presence. She totally transformed my vision of dance when I saw both these shows in her Wuppertal theatre many moons ago. And her Sacre is one of the most extraordinary stage works of the 20th century and the closest one will probably ever get to the spine-wrenching experience envisioned by its creators Stravinsky and Diaghilev.
No substitute for the real thing but quite a few good YouTube vids including the amazing Nelken with its stage bursting of red carnations.
Pina, Queen Of The Deep

Daniel Day-Lewis’ Daniel Plainview spine-wrenches you for pretty much the entirety of There Will Be Blood Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! It’s a strange experience that almost feels more like watching, I was going to say Lawrence Olivier on the National Theatre stage, but probably even more akin in bravura, going further back in time to the great tragedians of their day Garrick and Burbage. You feel like you’re riding within the gushing Plainview oil wells with this man rather than merely being a spectator. As wonderful as are his co-stars Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) and H.W. (Dillon Freasier), Plainview has little interaction with them beyond the mechanical; for here is a man whose veins now run with oil not blood –a ‘Futurist’ machine finally plummeting off the rails and sucked back into the earth from whence gushed this demonic force. Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead provides the tectonic score along with the strange but perfectly chosen Brahms Violin Concerto for the film’s finale with all its turbulence within an earthed classical structure.

A reminder that The Complete Coen Collection is out this week at unbelievably good value and a primer for No Country for Old Men in Sunday’s Oscars.

Survival finally came to a head in my mind this week after watching Sylvester Stallone’s (writer/director) new Rambo movie and David Attenborough’s reptilian Life in Cold Blood in close succession. As in nature’s survival of the fittest, Stallone has keep his career ticking through the decades without stamping the sell-by date many of his detractors would wish him (he’s now 61- and Rocky Balboa (2006)wasn’t that bad. He wisely chooses a civil rights violating country as a backdrop to his violence that unrelents until the final ‘homecoming’ shot of green fields and horses, a wowsy end to the cinematographic and editing rollercoaster ride. No lingering Terence Malick wildlife shots here. “Who are you boatman?” asks one of his crusading Brit mercenaries as he stolidly helms up river to Burma, the closest he’ll probably ever get to playing a Bergmanesque figure of death. A shame his production team weren’t braver in pushing through a more inventive, innovative score for the film giving it more of a redeeming feature. Rambo is probably far less a cultural time bandit than the mindless video clips of ‘farting female fannies’ and everyday human mishaps that attract millions of hits on the internet.

And the word misanthropic takes on new resonance when watching Attenborough’s animal kingdom. A salamander who didn’t stock up on enough food for the breeding season is seen marauding his fellow sal’s eggs. And the golden tree frog, on the brink of extinction, gives a slow wave of its arm (well, leg) to indicate sexual interest. Like many humans, the little frog is fooled by his own image waving on a video screen and even fooled by a manipulated plastic replica. At least animals don’t kill for pleasure but watching killer whales toss baby dolphins (no, seals I think -it was in a far away other series) between them like salad might make one ponder further upon the cosmic evolutionary chain.

Another contender for saddest music of them all is Attenborough's now famous Oz Lyre bird vocal impersonator who even mimics the chain saws decimating its forest.

Attenborough sparks reptiles sales boom, that’s humans for you!

So who are you calling fish-face?

The animated Ratatouille deserves a mention even though I haven’t seen these DVD’s bulging with extras. deservedly won a Best Animated Feature Film BAFTA for its director Brad Bird and a delight to recently catch up on screen watching its star, Rémy (Patton Oswalt) a rat with a taste and nose for haute cuisine, save the world of cordon bleu and leave the viewer simmering over the narrative’s sociological piquancy .

The body count of Inglorious Bastards (Quel maledetto treno blindato) 1978 (DVD), being re-made by Tarantino, is probably more than equal to Rambo (I’m no good with an abacus) but has characterisation close to the work of late Sam Fuller (The Big Red One 1980)but a touch more tonge in cheek. Bo Svensson (the Steve McQueen type) leads a motley crew of army badboys including Fred Williamson (the Samuel L. Jackson type), and Nick (Michael Pergolani) the roughneck hippie, to hijack a Nazi train with a new V2 rocket gyroscope aboard. This film is so bloody good it’s really a shame to re-make it - as good if not better than more well-known war movies – and absolutely gripping from the opening blue and red title sequence more than compensating for the lack of disc extras (except for trailer).

More of Tarantino’s favourites in Italian Kings of the B’s: Secret History of Italian Cinema 1949–81 (Tate Modern, 2006)

Wacko Spanish director (are there any who aren’t) Álex de la Iglesia has two older films out on DVD: Acción mutante (1993, his first feature) and 800 Bullets (800 balas, 2002), official trailer, both with Making Of doco extras. “Enough of colognes, car commercials, mineral water. We don’t want to smell good or lose weight,” declare Acción mutante’s space-ship rebels as if defying Brit New Labour’s nannying policies. They kidnap an heiress with a sympathetic Stockholm Syndrome ear whose dad tried to “buy her off with a pink pony”, and the film hurtles forward like an episode of Dr. Who on acid. If that’s all a bit much, 800 Bullets is a lot of fun for a Saturday night in and centres around a kid from Madrid on a mission to find his Spaghetti western actor grandpa - a stunt double for Clint Eastwood. The background is fascinatingly true. Spanish Almeria “Texas Hollywood” is where American studios shot scenes for their westerns in the 60s and 70s later surviving only as a tourist sideshow and the film’s end, though a touch cheesy, is quite touching.

Toshiba hits eject for HD DVD

Black Water is an Oz film with man-wrenching crocodiles. The structure is all too familiar – nice day out suddenly turns into hell on earth (or in this case hell on tree trunk) in the blink of an eye. It does what it says on the tin very well (and that’s not as easy as it looks on a low-budget –editing, camera angles, a revolver still able to fire underwater etc) but I kinda preferred the film Adrift (2006) where the youngsters carelessly forget to leave someone on the deck of the yacht consequently having no way to get back up – the so near and yet so far agony. But neither film utilises fear and blame as an existential cinematic coathanger.

Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite) won best screenplay at last year’s Cannes Fest and is Germany’s Oscar entry this year. It also won the Ecumenical Cannes prize and I did feel I was being gently preached at for most of the film as good as are all its elements. The solitary beach shot lingering under the final credits made me wonder whether the whole idea would have been better served if done as some sort of triptych video installation. But that wouldn’t reach a wider audience. While life is full of good as well as bad coincidences, there are a few too many happy accidents here to offset the bad ones. The film is devout, though beautifully observed social realism. But whenever Schygulla’s mother appears on screen, her face full of gentle ‘former zeitgeist’ fascinates us. Asylum seeking in Germany remains a difficult subject to broach there so a non ‘arty’ more middle-stream film like this can only further the debate to good ends. It’s simultaneously released on Sky pay TV.
Scene on Youtube with Susanne (Hanna Schygulla) and Ayten(Nurgül Yes¸Ilçay).

Orhan Pamuk interview (for 7 days only)

Good Newsnight vid on the currect state of Kosovo independence.

Robert Siodmak's B/W The Killers (1946) is on re-release in a new print (Opening scene on YouTube), and if that doesn't wet your appetite nothing will! Based on a Hemingway book, this is Burt Lancaster’s debut film where he exhibits all the haunting vulnerability of a young Henry Fonda in strong contrast to Lancaster’s later tougher persona. This too, is a great film that repays repeated viewing. It has all the artifice of film noir including a big Miklas Rosza score (ingenius demonic boogie-woogie piano in the penultimate bar scene) yet the characters and plot motivations are 100% believable. Without fact checking, I’m sure this must have been on the list of Jean-Pierre Melville’s favourite flics and Ava Gardner is, well, the woman all men dream of.

Another couple of historic gems in Eureka’s Master of Cinema DVD series Der Letze Mann (YouTube) and Frau im Mond (YouTube).

F. W. Murnau's 1924 Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh , retitled for the US because of a similairly named film) stars Emil Jannings as the head doorman of the Atlantic Hotel demoted to a washroom attendant when he starts huffing and puffing over the suitcases. Image and appearance are everything here with the film hinging on his gold buttoned uniform that both portrays depressed post-war German sociology and precursors the importance of uniform in nurturing Nazi image. Like most Eureka releases, the Making Of doco alone makes it worth getting hold of this disc. As Luciano Berratúa’s 40 min doco shows, fascinatingly, there were three negatives shot - the best for domestic German release, and one each for Europe and America that differ radically in quality. The other fascination is Murnau’s ‘early CGI’ use of cut-out figures instead of background extras and tiny model cars and other props to create depth of field and perspective. Brilliant release.

Fritz Lang's 160 min 1929 Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) bills itself as “the first Utopian film based on scientific fact” filmed 2 years after Lang’s iconic Metropolis. Lang worked closely with the very young Hermann Oberth, author of The Rocket into Planetary Space (1923) and the Making Of doco compares Oberth’s ‘spot on’ theories with actual footage of the first manned Cape Canaveral launch. Though the plot becomes quite daft resolving in a battle of greed for gold and love, Frau im Mond shouldn’t be missed by anyone who loves cinema. As with all Eureka releases, the transfers are beautiful and both DVD’s come with booklets.

Interesting to compare this with the quintessentially English daftness and eccentricty of The First Men in the Moon (1964) directed by former art director Nathan Juran and based on H.G. Wells’s 1901 novel with ‘ancien Dr. Who-esque’ stop-motion animation aliens by legendary Ray Harryhausen speaking before a LA screening of this movie in 2007 (YouTube). An ‘anti-gravity’ molten composite of helium is painted on the wings of the ‘garden shed’ space vehicle.

How to catch a falling star (Channel Four)
Lift off for UK space missions
US missile blasts dead satellite

At their most ‘triffid’ entangling, the paintings of Brit Peter Doig at Tate Britain (thence Paris and Frankfurt) represent human society at the mercy of nature and the cosmos’ enervative power. As Doig says, his interest is in "peripheral or marginal sites, places where the urban world meets the natural world. Where the urban elements almost become, literally, abstract devices" and how there "are a lot of 'voids' in the paintings." Equally, they have a lot to do with our social contract with the natural world. One of his very early paintings Hitch Hiker (1989/90) is painted on postal bags found outside his studio and shows a red lorry on a rural road trapped like an animal in the headlights within horizontal planes of colour. There’s something very eerie about this and Doig’s later Canoe series visually quotes a still from the film Friday the 13th. Moving through the exhibition it becomes apparent that man and his markings are being seen through nature’s palette. His Concrete Cabin(1994) (Sotheby's auction 27 Feb) series was inspired when driving across France for the first time, “I drove through graveyard after graveyard after graveyard from the First World War. . . Whereas other buildings had represented a family or maybe a person somehow, this building [Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse] seemed to represent thousands of people" Built in 1957, the Unité d'Habitation development in Briey, France was a utopian, urban project built in the middle of a forest but left abandoned in the 70’s.

Man’s corporeal form then enters the picture in Doig’s first skiing paintings “made as a reaction to things I had made previously, paintings with a proliferation of matter on the surface of the canvas. I had wanted to get away from that device of always 'looking through'..” White Creep (1995/6)(Sotheby's auction 27 Feb). Blotter (1993) has man in a pond rippling with ice and Reflection (What does your soul look like) (1996) with feet and ankles atop his image in the water subsumed by an autumnal reflective sea of colour. In one of the last rooms we’re confronted with Girl in White with Trees (2001/2), her image bleached white like a fly caught in the red veins of nature's web.

Intermission

Just announced this afternoon on a Sunday Northern Rock to be nationalised,
Chancellor Alistair Darling has said.

Probably the the most important financial decision - first nationalisation since the 1970s - and first run on a bank for more than a century. This decision will go down in history as the economic indicator of the era. Northern Rock: is time starting to run out?
(Channel Four news , and a report to watch from last September :the Northern Rock bank run. I think those hedge-funders will be more than a bit miffed.

By the way, not that I'm taking sides, but in the 2005 election only 36% of the Brit population voted for the current government. That's democracy for you.

Don't feel so bad. Imagine how this poor guy felt:
Virtuoso's trip destroys priceless Stradivarius

Some classical links to calm the waters: Music Matters (BBC Radio3) has a spot on the little known Vivaldi's operas (he was more than just the Four Seasons and seductive slow movements. His Tito Manlio is on Tuesday (19 February) at the Barbican Hall. (Try some Haydn operas too, sometime: Haydn the opera composer (BBC Music Magazine) Page 1, Page 2

Or what about a South African version of Mozart's The Magic Flute (The Times article)

CD Review (BBC Radio 3) had a great spot on downloads. Try Linn Records and Gimmell. Or the fantastic historical recordings at Pristine Classical, especially the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.

And BBC-Later with Jools Holland, has Sheryl Crow vid of God Bless this Mess. She got to hug one of her musical heroine Liza Minnelli who has her London date at the Coliseum, May 27.

Or, 6 days more to listen to Glenn Gould's spoken word radio collages(BBC Radio 4).

A bit of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit,

Is a social contract implicit in our daily social contact? Is the ‘r’ simply a formality? While Facebook and other social networking sites are a fantastically democratic way of raising issue awareness, is social contact simply being reduced to lists and categories? We’ve all been to those ‘media folk’ parties masquerading as mia casa, sua casa social gatherings where many guests barely even know the host. Walking and riding the streets and underground of London most people would probably think that the ‘r’ is now defunct. Many know nothing of the unwritten social contract in cities such as New York where personal space is respected (most-times). Londoners are so bad at keeping ‘A’, let alone ‘THE’ social contract on the underground that a loudspeaker voice has to remind them of letting people off the train before pushing themselves on.
And this week we were reminded of contracts that for commuters don’t seem to be remotely worth the paper they’re written upon:

Metronet to cost taxpayers £1.7 billion
Every family in Britain has been saddled with an extra £3,000 debt because of the Government's promise to shore up Northern Rock, opposition MPs claimed.

Multi-billion pound funding package to invest in London's transport network confirmed

Underground resistance (Alex Clark in The Observer)

And the Mayor's plan to tax fuel guzzling cars in the capital £25 per day. They'll be some angry denizens now but a greener city sometime in the future.

This week, BBC Radio 4's In Our Time focussed on great minds that have grappled with the notion of the greater social contract - Rousseau, Hobbes, Grotius, Locke, Plato and Hume – and the conflict between obedience a citizen owes to the law and State versus individual freedom. Hot on its aural heels (ear lobes in earthling speak) was The Trial and Death of Socrates (BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves).

And with the demise of the cheque, I guess there’s no back up to the digital age when the Stone Age hits us again:
It's farewell to the cheque as cards rule

But even I’m getting excited about the mobile web and Opera Mini that reduces your download (like video compression) to the essential 20% of the original content, downloading in 6-7 seconds with standard GPS (BBC's Click) . And check out the embryonic 3D TV on the site. The Richard Gregory/Polanski project lives on! (see last blog)

Channel Four’s ever provocative Dispatches Heat or Eat: The Pensioners' Dilemma
showed further failing contracts in the British welfare state. The people featured here were poster pin-ups of pensioners that a welfare state should indeed help as they could barely help themselves.

Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography shows how multi-talented Rodchenko espoused the wrong kind of socialism in Stalinist Russia. And I guess socialist overtones vibrate in Transport for London’s current scheme of piping classical music in its tube stations. “We want to give people a greater feeling that someone is in control, making things secure and safe,” said a spokesman. I heard Wagner in one, but as you’ll learn if you read the following article, it’s only because he was out of copyright. Years ago the autumn/winter unintended joke on delayed train commuters was ‘leaves on the line’ amended by the commuter as ‘wrong kind of leaves on the line’.

You can buy a double ticket for Rodchenko (upstairs) and the Laughter show (downstairs) but head upwards first, as this is really an extraordinary show deserving of some time. In a very socialist move the Hayward provides you with a 32 page free Rodchenko booklet. The show resonates with even more fascination if one sees it in close temporal proximity to the From Russia show at the Royal Academy, with its final room of artistic revolutionaries including Rodchenko’s painting. It was a trip to Paris and viewing the Eiffel Tower that began Rodchenko’s troubles but art history’s gratitude. He started thinking too much about how we see things, a spanner that usually clogs up the workings of most social contracts. “I saw [it] from a distance and didn’t like it at all. But one day I was passing on a bus, and when I saw the lines of metal receding upwards, right and left, this perspective gave me an impression of the mass and the construction.” In the same year, Rodchenko had continued the photo-montages concurrent with his early painting, probably the best known being the woman in a headscarf shouting out the word BOOKS (KNIGI) in the shape of a mega-phone (made famous on the Franz Ferdinand album). Returning from Paris, he began photographing his apartment block in odd angles (using a fixed ‘hyperfocal’ focus lens) that continued into his 1930’s photos of a Pioneer camp outside Moscow. The extreme angles, such as right under the chin of a young trumpeter, provoked outrage and he was accused of being a ‘formalist’ - too avant-garde. “Why does the pioneer look upwards? It is not ideologically correct. Pioneers and the youth of the komosol must look forwards,” his detractors shouted. The irony was that Rodchenko really was a socialist pioneer wanting to make documentary not artistic photos. Art for art’s sake was “useless” art to him.

It’s a point that has thundering resonance even these days. The ostracising of American Noam Chomsky, essentially a linguistic semiotician, still amazes me as he was only pointing out in his writings that oftentimes hidden views (if not truths) about government foreign policy are freely (if not always readily) available if you choose to seek and compare sources. He never even advocated revolution!

John Pilger's The War on Democracy (DVD) is another in his tireless efforts exposing the shortcomings of the United States social contract in its Latin American foreign policy: “In the CIA we didn’t give a hoot about democracy...if [a government] didn’t co-operate then democracy didn’t mean a thing to us. And I don’t think it means a thing today,” says Philip Agee, CIA agent from 1957-68. Another CIA op tries to convince you that there were negligible deaths under the Chilean dictatorship. Familiar if ever harrowing stuff from Pilger.

Australian photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson has repeatedly returned to Iraq.

Latest Errol Morris film at this week’s Berlin Film Fest S.O.P. (Standard Operating Procedure) on the media coverage of the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison by the US military.

Rocket Science (Optimum UK DVD), (HBO DVD)
is directed with a consummate indie tone all its own by Jeffrey Blitz (known for his doco Spellbound on American spelling competitions). Hal Hefner (Reece Thompson) is a stuttering 15-year-old kid of Plainsboro, New Jersey. As Blitz recounts on the interview extra, Thompson proves that luck is often everything in entertainment as the original Hal dropped out after a 6 month casting search and Thompson was on an audition tape destined for the trash as HBO breathed down Blitz’s neck for a decision. Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) persuades Hal to join her debating team (reminiscent of a cruel Neil LaBute character). For the Brit viewers, the art of ‘spreading’ (speed talking your arguments) will be completely new and possibly explain the often-empty rhetoric spewing from American politics. Nifty score by Eef Barzelay.

Rodchenko wrote in 1928: “since photographic documentation became available there can be no question of any single, immutable portrait. Moreover, a man or woman is not a single summation, but many, sometimes totally contradictory sums... record a person’s life not just with one ‘synthetic’ portrait, but in a mass of momentary photos.” Another Rodchenko irony is that almost every photo equally resonates as a single entity. A well-known critic at last week’s viewing asked me what I thought the woman (bottom of frame) was up to in Gathering for a Demonstration (1928). And what fascinates about these photos is that there is indeed an objective reality e.g. the woman seems to be dustpan and brushing her balcony. While on the balcony above, a more foregrounded but more shadowy woman looks down at the demo. But there is really no real foreground or background to this photo only multiple planes of seeing as in his friend Tatlin’s Constructivist sculptures. And it’s this genius that puts Rodchenko decades ahead of many other world re-known photographers. It must also be remembered that photography was not considered a ‘serious’ art form on par with painting until decades later. Concurrently in America, Paul Strand was photographing people almost trapped and made powerless by the big city its capitalism whereas Rodchenko was celebrating people as pioneers rather than victims. Hounded out of Moscow he reluctantly undertook an assignment to document the slave-labour construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal in 1933 yet it changed his life, “I just photographed without thinking about formalism.” Truly remarkable photojournalism. The final irony of Rodchenko’s life, and another example of his ‘making the most it’, were his photos of sport and circus movement allowing him to placate the Stalinist authorities. For most of the 1940’s circus photos he uses his ‘30s Leica but with a soft-focus Thambar lens. As he wrote in his 1939 autobiography Black and White, “Surely the country of socialism still needs ventriloquists, magicians and jugglers, flying carpets, fireworks, planetariums, flowers, kaleidoscopes?”

Aleksandr Rodchenko retrospective 1998(MOMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Excellent quick link overview.

Is Roman Signer (Hauser & Wirth) a latter-day anti-Constructivist - Signer’s objects are given a Frankenstein existence? I could do without the ballet for electric lawnmower and chairs Stühle, but his video work with everyday objects taking on lives of their own is intriguing.

The Bridge (More 4 TV Tues 12 Feb 10pm)(my blog review) has been staunchly criticised for sickly voyeurism in documenting the suicides from San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge. Decide for yourself.

Rachel Howard’s How to Disappear Completely (Haunch of Venison) creates quite stunning large paintings on the theme of suicide using household gloss and acrylic on canvas. Gloss paint is traditionally a ‘presentational’ paint for doors and window frames. Howard traps and preserves her inhabitants and abstract presences in the beautiful shiny amber of gloss for all eternity.

The photos of Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens (from Fri 15 ICA) have now reached ‘la circus’ fantastical dimensions. This doco, directed by her sister Barbara, is a good overview of the highs and lows of her career. No dissenting voices though (that’s a loyal sister for you). I happen to be a fan of her celebrity photos where subjects are captured in a visual dialectic of their fame

NPR (National Public Radio) interview

Julie Taymor (The Lion King fame) has been experimenting with the dialectics created by stage masks for almost as long as Liebovitz’s photography. Across the Universe, MySpace, New York Times article.
had a rather unfavourable Brit reception on its cinema release. But this DVD is worth considering even though the film’s great failure is its lack of dialectic. In the wake of 9/11 and Iraq, Taymor chose a young, talented cast singing their way through Beatles songs in her evocation of the 60s - a fantastical way into the future when every reality in the new millennium present seems rootless. Amazing production design from Kyle Cooper (title credit ‘guru’ on Seven, Mimic and too many other films to mention). Good disc extras, too.

Extraordinary isn’t it that women still have to fight a socialist campaign in the new millennium for equality. They can even run companies and write dissertations with a family of kids and a grumpy hubby nipping at their heels.
The glass ceiling isn't broken - in fact, it's getting thicker (The Observer), Glass elevator (Financial Times)

Jerry Garcia (The Grateful Dead) was a Liebovitz capture and there’s still a chance to catch his favourite fantastical 3 hour B/W film Wojciech Has' The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) re-issued in the UK by Mr.Bongo

Cambridge Picturehouse (11-15th February)
Edinburgh Filmhouse re-scheduled screenings 15 & 16 March

Garcia put up the initial restoration funding with Martin Scorsese bankrolling the final project after Garcia's death and making a new negative from the only existing print of the full-length film. Francis Ford Coppola assisted in distributing the film re-released in 2001. The film’s based on the early 19th century novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1813) written by Polish nobleman Jan Potocki with hints of Spanish Renaissance dramatist Calderon de la Barca’s Life is a Dream. This site tells you all you need to know. Back in December at the BFI Southbank, there was a one-off screening with live score by The Recording Angel Ensemble: Aleksander Kolkowski, Sebastien Buczek with his ‘robot musicians’ and automata and Zbigniew Karkowski’s electronic compositions. I’ve only seen heard a DVD of that performance and while the live score sounded overwhelming, it probably was fairly true to the hallucinogenic initial 60s screenings. The spooky, spare original score was by contemporary ‘classical’ Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. This film is rarely if ever seen, so if you get the chance, go! Vertigo article

Jerry Garcia was also the force behind getting the gigantic symphonies of British ‘classical’ composer Havergal Brian recorded.

Rock photographer Anton Corbijn's film Control (Momentum DVD)
about Joy Division’s young suicide Ian Curtis (riveting newcomer Sam Riley) is out on DVD with a dry if informative director’s commentary and Corbijn’s video of Atmosphere as extras. It would have been nice, though, to have had more of Corbijn's personal reminiscences from the 70s. (His fetish for old telephones is quite funny). I read somewhere that though it was always intended to be shot in B/W, it had originally been filmed on colour stock to lessen the graininess. (Don’t remember hearing anything about that on the commentary). Almost all the band’s photographs from the period were in B/W. But the sense of graininess is exactly what I liked about it when I saw the cinema screening in all its widescreen anamorphic glory. The DVD transfer obviously looks cleaner and less grainy on the smaller screen. The film becomes far more than just a bio-pic and more a meditation on that vibrant period of music history in grey northern England. Samantha Morton is brilliant, as always, as Curtis’ first love wife through thick, thin but not quite coping with another woman. And Control's writer Matt Greenhalgh won the Carl Foreman Award Special Achievement Award BAFTA Sunday night. As I said when I first reviewed it, you emerge from a viewing shaken but inspired. And when funding fell through, Corbijn used his own money to finish it.

Paul Morley new book Joy Division Piece by Piece and Kevin Cummins's photographs capture the band (Sean O'Hagan, The Observer)

More B/W in The Frightened City(1961), one of the best of Optimum’s British Thrillers series. This is London B/W gangland 60’s noir with petty crim Paddy Damion (Sean Connery) falling in with the big boys directed by a relatively inexperienced John Lemont but helped by very accomplished cinematographer Desmond Dickinson. This is Connery the year before he became James Bond and he’s one of the few actors that can believably threaten violence while in the next scene suavely seducing Yvonne Romain (Circus of Horrors) with a ‘tongue-in-cheek’ line like: “Do you have a pain in your head?” she asks, to which Connery replies, “No, it’s a bit further down.” Herbert Lom (Peter Sellers’ foil in the Pink Panther films) is great too. The catchy, twangy score is by Norrie Paramor responsible for The Shadows and Cliff Richard No.1 singles and scoring 26 No.1 hits in the UK.

Payroll(1961) set in the rarely seen Newcastle (Mike Figgis chose the city for his atmospheric debut Stormy Monday) is a little disappointing as it comes from director of classics Night of the Eagle and Circus of Horrors (also on Optimum) Sydney Hayes. But women get their own back and get in on the act with Brit treasure Billie Whitelaw (Samuel Beckett’s preferred actress for his plays) always worth watching. But it hasn’t the classiness of Melville’s French thrillers.

The Long Arm (1956 - British Thrillers) was Ealing’s last film before moving to the Borehamwood studios and one forgets that its portrayal of police work ‘reality’ (assisted by the Met Police) ushered in the hitherto new Brit ‘cop’ TV shows of the 60’s.

Samantha Morton really exudes the aura of a River Queen YouTube trailer in Vincent Ward’s latest film that was beset with production problems (Ward was fired, the cinematographer took over with Ward returning in post-production) and has taken awhile to reach Brit shores. Set in Ward’s native New Zealand in 1868 it’s a fictional story but based on many real incidents in which Sarah O’Brien (Morton) of the British colonial camp bears a Maori son who is kidnapped but re-united when Sarah breaks ranks to heal the Maori chief only for him to wage war on the colonials. To make matters worse she falls in love with the boy’s Maori uncle. It’s a far from satisfying film and though disjointed, as in all Ward’s films (his early Vigil, and The Navigator are must sees), there are pearls worth waiting for but they take quite a few dives before being revealed. His Map of the Human Heart (1992) was beautifully flawed too and Ward spent 3 years developing The Last Samurai before passing it over to Edward Zwick. I really liked, too, his Robin Williams vehicle What Dreams May Come (1999 Oscar for Best Visual Effects). Whatever failings his films exhibit you know you are always being shown the world through the eyes of a poet.

For multi-faceted opposing politics and art of battle Shinobi is also well worth a look. Over an hour of extras on the special effects and weapon history.

And London Fashion Week has begun:

Savile Row (3-parter on BBC Four) about London’s street of tailors surviving new millennium retailing and the arrival on their corner of jeans and T-shirt American mob Abercrombie and Fitch.

How ethical is your fashion? (BBC's Newsnight)

Cocaine Cowboys about the rise of the Miami drugs trade out now on DVD

Taskforce for fair fashion

BAFTA Red Carpet fashion highlights

Lagerfeld Confidential, YouTube(DVD-out 18 Feb) on the ‘Futurist’ French designer is refreshingly inspirational for a fashion doco, though there are a few too many ‘atmosphere’ takes of hotel lobbies, airplane and car interiors, and Paris but thankfully no voice over. He loves “piss [ing] off the bourgeoisie” and his other quotes say everything:
“I hate people who can’t be alone.”
“The best things I’ve done have come from dreams.”
“If you want social justice become a civil servant.”
“Fashion is ephemeral, dangerous and unfair.”
“There’ a German proverb that says you can’t borrow from the past. I love the futurism of the job.”
“I have no roots, that’s all bullshit.”
“I don’t want to [be] reality in anyone’s life. I want to be an apparition. That’s the secret of it all.”

to be continued ...

[Addition]

Jools Holland's birthday Later with.. BBC TV prog with great music and video from wonderfully inventive Canadian singer/writer Feist touring Oz later this month and London's Royal Albert Hall in May, New Yorker Cat Power (who performs like her name and acts in the upcoming My Blueberry Nights as Jude Law's Russian ex-girlfriend) plus the greats of Radiohead, Dionne Warwick and Mary J. Blige.

And hopefully they'll repeat Summerhill about the radical Brit school. whose pupils and teachers took the government to the High Court in London and won.

Cat Power's Sea of Love is also part of the way-cool soundtrack of Juno that also includes Antsy Pants' Vampire, and Adam Green and The Moldy Peaches. If you don’t enjoy this film then it probably really is time to take some form of medication. Juno (trailer)(will teenagers start text messaging in Greek myth?) is an indie that is very Hollywood. But a movie promoting teenage pregnancy awareness is no bad thing. It recouped its $7.5 million budget in only 20 days. I kept thinking would it still work without Ellen Page’s irresistible performance and Jason Reitman’s (Thank You for Not Smoking) finely tuned direction? The story may be predictable but the rhythms and dialogue of Diablo Cody's her MySpace blog script are in a time signature far sassier than regular Hollywood.
Cody also wrote of her 'alternative' experiences Candy Girl: A Year in The Life of an Unlikely Stripper
One could be cynical and say it’s too full of Republican political ‘right to life’ values with none of the contrary argument. Tony Kaye's doco Lake of Fire
(seen in London’s Raindance ’06 Fest, still hasn’t had another UK airing). Then there was the very brave US distribution of Mike Leigh's Vera Drake(Fine Line, a quintessential movie for them) many years ago. And, of course, more recently the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile).

Juno, though, is quite unashamedly leafy middle-classdom where everyone is reasonably nice to each other; 16 year-old Juno doesn’t even get taunted as she walks through school heavily pregnant, and parents are kind and supportive human beings. And truth be told, that’s what much of America aspires to rather than the excesses of rampant capitalism and corporate greed. And surely that can be no bad thing either! And aren’t these ‘middle-class’ individuals entitled to a voice as much as the ‘oppressed’? There are hints of family dysfunction in both Juno’s clan and the prospective adopting duo but these are more delicate wind instrument scoring woven into what is essentially a cheeky Mozart symphony of love. Little Miss Sunshine is more like a boisterous Bernstein ‘Candide’ overture in comparison.

Ellen Page goes from geeky unknown to star of this year's most talked-about film (Independent on Sunday)

It’s hard not to like Cloverfield, too. I actually enjoyed the technical expertise of its Godzilla takes Manhattan antics more than The Blair Witch Project (but I know I’ll be in the minority there). My gripe is that there’s some very important small print that gets obscured in the publicity frenzy. Unlike Blair Witch, this was no low-budget camcorder pic but one with a budget of close to $30 million. Seen in perspective that’s several Junos or one and a half Dancer in the Dark’s (also shot on digital). Cloverfield was shot using an expensive high-end high-definition digi camera but with the illusion that its all shot on hand held camcorder, complete with auto-focus indecision. Knowing that rather takes the spin out of Cloverfield and you long for the unseen menace of early Spielberg. Dom Rotheroe’s (so far undistributed) gem of last year’s Raindance Fest Exhibit A is far scarier for my money, with its ‘normal’ dysfunctional characters and monstrous ending. It’s probably just co-incidence but did Cloverfield borrow Exhibit A’s (my blog review)device of exposing flashes of narrative on the videotape that had been recorded over? It would have been far more daring to shoot Cloverfield directly in the wake of 9/11 and opinions such as those of Susan Sontag. But as we know, that would have been indigestible for most people. (Remember how some distributors were asked to remove the Twin Towers from their films). The Korean movie The Host(Gwoemul) does a better job, I think, of portraying collective fear.

Overlord (Allied code-name for the 1944 D-Day liberation of Europe) is a re-issue of Stuart Cooper’s 1975 B/W Brit pic made under the auspices of the Imperial War Museum and the MOD (Ministry of Defence). Metrodome UK DVD (with director's commentary out March 4). Also available on Criterion DVD (in the States), its meditation on preparing young Tom (Brian Stirner) for the invasion is strangely and effectively anti-war. The actual bombardment footage seems newly born in this film due to John Alcott’s stunning cinematography (DP for Stanley Kubrick amongst others). And Brian Stirner went on to be an un-sung hero of new Brit theatre directing. Most recently he helmed an evocative stage reading of a play written by actor Erland Josephson (as part of Tarkovsky celebratory events in London).

Previews of Morgan Neville's The Cool School-The Story of the Ferus Art Gallery this weekend at the Tate Modern (part of the Revolver Arthouse Films' output distribution deal (new label) for U.K. and Ireland). This is the surprisingly hitherto untold story of the LA art scene. We usually get only the New York perspective. Ed Ruscha's paintings (BBC Front Row interview)are at the Gagosian Gallery but I haven't seen them yet.

And a new David Attenborough series on reptiles Life in Cold Blood starts BBC One (Mon 4 Feb). Far more interesting than watching politicians change colour.

[Addition] Attenborough interview (I've never heard him utter one boring word) in tonight's (Thurs 7 Feb BBC's Front Row)

And ITV London news have a good piece (look at the emission crap on the handkerchief) on the Mayor's Green Emission Zone for London this week. (search for the title, but it isn't always easy to find spots on that site, sorry)