The glass slipper (2)

Mike Leigh was at pains in his interviews for Happy-Go-Lucky to stress that this was a ‘happy’ film relative to his more morose efforts:
Actress Sally Hawkins speaks about her role
Mike Leigh: 'Me? Miserable? Nonsense!'
BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme (unlike many radio progs, the whole archive is available to listen again)
Mike Leigh Film Collection (DVD)

Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is relentless in her thirty-something happiness and contemporary London primary school teacher heaven. The kind of loveable creature who not so much wears one down mentally but wears out your extant facial muscles left by the smile she has cratered under constant witty bombardment. Everyone except her driving instructor (Eddie Marsan) whose only Left/Right political solace lies in the centre line of the road’s bitumen. Poppy drives him absolutely balmy and he goes berserk on her when she takes the car keys after his mild road rage. And it’s the next couple of minutes of Poppy’s silent ‘screen being’ that proves (if ever needed) Mike Leigh’s status as a world-class director. It’s almost like the debate over the President Bush footage when he learnt of the 9/11 Twin Towers on that school visit. What was he thinking? We ask that of Poppy too. There’ll never be the answer but questions keep flooding our mind. For the only time in the film her smile disappears. She walks home through the high street after returning the keys to her calmed down instructor finding some quiet steps on which to sit. For Poppy, the glass is neither half full nor half empty. It’s just a glass. A glass that if dropped one too many times will disappear back into the grains of sand from whence it fired. But did it need to fall in the first place?

Is technology ruining children?
Much heralded in American indie circles, Colossal Youth has its only London screenings at the French Institute as part of the 1968 Festival.
Very lively Radio 4 debate 1968: The Year of Revolutions
Revolution now! The 1968 Festival of Philosophy

When Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) in Antonioni’s B/W La Notte DVD (1961) walks the streets of Milan and happens upon two young men fighting we, the spectator are again posing questions to the silences we witness on screen. In the excellent accompanying 40-page booklet to this pristine print, the director states: “It really wasn’t necessary to know the protagonist’s inner thoughts [referring to De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves], his personality, or the intimate relationship between him and his wife; all this could very well be ignored. The important thing was to establish his relationship with society...cinema today [1961] should be tied to truth rather than to logic. The rhythm of life is not made up of one steady beat.” Rarely seen, though much written about, La Notte was the centre of his trilogy with L’Avventura and L’Eclisse. It's is a wilfully perplexing film, on the surface observing post-WWII Italian well-to-do ennui. Compare this to his last film Beyond the Clouds and there’s very little difference in style. People’s viewing experience often resembles their daily street experience - one of acceptance, numbed curiosity and artificially stimulated excitement. Antonioni offers us another dimension but one that if given time proves to be all too familiar.

L’Avventura and Identification Of a Woman (1982) are released on mid-price DVD (UK first) by Mr. Bongo June 16.

The Italians weren’t the only ones into post-war ‘bling’. Rationing was still prevalent in Britain but as the Science Museum’s new show reveals so was a new vision:
How the 1950's hero Dan Dare helped shape history with Utopian visions
Guardian article
Nightwaves spot
Front Row(28 April)

“Isn’t there anything that MacroSpace hasn’t turned into a sterile retail opportunity?” asks old inter-planetary hero Captain Eager (James Vaughan) in Captain Eager and the Mark of Voth (final dates at the ICA). “Some people like shopping Ted,” replies his only believer and fan, the demure tweed-skirted Jenny (Tamsin Greig). The critics unanimously gave this film the thumbs down but it’s actually very cleverly conceived and executed. Director Simon DaVision (aka not revealed) films in ‘Card-o-Vision’ and the art department’s materials budget came to £1,438.64 through using toilet rolls and yoghurt cartons. Mr. DaVision has the mad imagination of Canadian director Guy Maddin (he of those highly stylised almost silent sepia pics) with an equally firm grasp on what style and rhythm he wants to achieve. It’s as if seasoned artistic pros are recreating a student sci-fi film. The only difference being it never shares that genre’s embarrassing faux pas (s). (No offence intended to the future George Lucas(s) And to successfully bring off this acting style requires real talent. If you’ve missed it at the ICA there’s another chance at the Sci-Fi Film Fest.

Before your very eyes: Films in 3D are back
American physicist John Wheeler best known for coining the term 'black hole' died.
BBC Nightwaves (no longer online) Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees remembers John Wheeler
Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs: The Question of Alien Minds by David McFarland
German schoolboy, 13, corrects NASA's asteroid figures
On the trail of crooked science
The fall of the machines
Mathematician Robert Hunt on Beyond Measure

“The future had no place for Captain Eager,” nor did Bresson’s conventional Catholic citizens for their new ailing young priest: “You have my sympathy, but I repeat, get out of here,” warns the anonymous letter sent to him in Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne) (1950). Out on Optimum DVD, Bresson’s film set in provincial Northern France is a classic and like all his work embodies a sense of time and image radically different from most other cinema. Even if one doesn’t necessarily enjoy Bresson’s cinema, I defy any film buff not to be fascinated by his theories about film. Notes on the Cinematographer is as good a start as any. It’s a shame the full price Optimum disc doesn’t have an audio commentary like the Criterion US release. Artificial Eye adds a further three Bresson titles to their DVD list May 12:
A Man Escaped , Lancelot du Lac and The Devil, Probably. I’ve only just received these so more on Bresson in more days.
Pickpocket
The Trial Of Joan Of Arc (Procès de Jeanne d'Arc)
L'Argent

Andrei Tarkovsky Elements of Cinema

Land of Promise: the British Documentary Movement 1930-1950 (BFI DVD)
Culture chiefs plead for the art of giving

Mala Noche is Gus Van Sant’s amazing and beautiful first feature from 1985 shot on 16mm B/W (with two flashes and the final credits in colour) for a mere $25,000. Little seen since then in spite of Van Sant’s Hollywood success (Good Will Hunting, To Die For), Mala Noche had a revival at the Cannes 2006 Festival and Raindance Fest last year. It’s now available for the first time in a DVD release from Tartan Video concurrent with Van Sant’s most recent Paranoid Park (also on Blu-ray). For some, it may seem bizarre mentioning Mala Noche in the same breath as Bresson but the former’s austerity, use of luminosity and voice-over aren’t that far from Bresson’s aesthetic. Just as Bresson spent forever casting and coaching the actor for his priest, Van Sant spent ages drafting the 500 page storyboard from the diary novella Mala Noche about a guy working in a liquor store who becomes sexually obsessed with Johnny an illegal immigrant. This came long before Todd Haynes, Greg Araki and the new wave of New Queer Cinema in America. The cinematographer John Campbell was a news cameraman but his work here has all of the beauty of the highly experienced Christopher Doyle in Paranoid Park. In the must-have 30 min interview extra Van Sant admits to a longing for the low-budget reality of Mala Noche: “In the case of Drugstore Cowboy [1989] we had 80 people, trucks...there was so much going on it was no longer the real world. You were in the middle of your own circus, so you had to create whatever reality you could [but] disturbing the people the people that actually are there.”

A quick mention of Chris Kraus ‘s harrowing Four Minutes (Vier Minuten) having opened here last month (Peccadillo Pictures) has just hit New York in one of Autobahn’s (Senator Film’s art-house label) first US releases. Kraus is also directing his first opera with genius conductor Claudio Abbado in the summer.

The Doctor Who Hears Voices on Channel Four TV last week was another welcome challenge to the conventional wisdom of drug medication for schizophrenia. Part docu-drama, the patient Ruth played by an actress had been suspended from her job as a doctor for admitting mental illness and hearing voices. Dr. Rufus May (as himself) advocated talking to Ruth’s ‘voice’ and counselling ‘it’, for this was Ruth’s reality. Whether a world that can’t even tolerate a suggestive bare arm and back photo of Hannah Montana(the famed Annie Leibowitz), can tolerate Dr. May’s almost RD Laing approach to schizophrenia remains to be seen.
Observer review
Schizophrenia and Talk Therapy
Can films change the world?