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).