Following on from the ideas of last week's blog, listen to Robert Kagan discuss his new book The Return of History and the End of Dreams
on BBC's Nightwaves (22 May) and Censorship on Monday 26th.
Last chance to catch the Tate Modern's Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia and
Tower Bridge Telectroscope peers over Atlantic, New York Times. But isn't it just a bit dated in the age of personal video/computer calling. (watch the video), another link.
Something positive about London transport for once - Travel Assistance Scheme ensures freedom of travel for all for those who have difficulty accessing the transport network.
While BBC Radio 4's Front Row has (Mon 26 May Leonard Cohen special) and Gore Vidal, American novelist discusses the second part of his memoir Point to Point Navigation (1964-2006)-23 May.
And Guardian article on The Litvinenko Case.
Caramel is out on DVD in the States June 16.
Saturday 24 May 2008
Wednesday 14 May 2008
One face, one thousand ships, one bubbling voice below.
Listening to this morning’s Start the Week (12 May,Radio 4) finally gelled (or is that congealed) my latest blog. David Runciman was discussing his new book Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Princeton University Press) conjecturing that hypocrisy is an intrinsic part of democracy. Though I haven’t read his book, this idea could superficially seem to concern one’s simple self-justifications. But then aren’t our entire lives exactly that? We speak of the voice of the people vs. the face in the crowd, the human face of government vs. George Orwell’s notion of the face that we’ve subconsciously longed for and therefore deserve, and the voice of reason vs. the voices of irrationality. Yet reason is as relative as all other things – relative to our personal and collective hypocrisy - I’m extrapolating from the Runciman discussion. The recent world financial meltdown came as no surprise to anyone who believed in hypocrisy. ‘We’ (though not I) aspired to something better, and with all good intention, feigned that it were so in the belief that it would be so. But just as in the comic scene from Mary Poppins where the child withdraws his penny from his father’s bank, a crisis in financial confidence was the inevitable result. Chim chiminy chim chim cherie...
Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain is being repeated on the BBC.
Was the recent election of ‘gaff prone’ Conservative Boris Johnson as London’s Mayor a surprise or a foregone conclusion? The election was exactly what Runciman seemed to be on about in that half of London was totally fed up with its innumerable problems (regularly reported on this site). People ‘hypocritised’ into the feigned hope that things might get better under someone else even though it was ‘bumbling’ Boris. The hypocrisy restored one’s faith in democracy against ‘certainty of mind’s totalitarian alternative, though most of London intelligentsia were quite open in their negative Boris feelings:
Zoe Williams Boris Johnson
London's mayor of the mix
No one was feigning anything in his or her disgust for the democratically elected far-right BNP (British National Party) member. Or is that argument just a little more complex? Richard Barnbrook now has to sit by himself at one end of the council chamber’s table as no other member wishes to be smelt near him. Yet his election was clearly democracy functioning as it should. Was it totalitarian certainty of mind on the part of his constituents or were they ‘feigning’ as much as any other party’s member? New Labour began (or became, depending on your POV) as the most hypocritical government in living memory. It promised exactly what its electorate feigned and hoped for: mortgages for all, equality for all, education for all, so much ALL that it had some left over to export to the people of Iraq. Was most of the British electorate ‘hypocritical’ in opposing that war? Did the war not embody precisely what New Labour espoused? Just as in Iraq, New Labour hadn’t worked out an exit strategy for its ‘war’ on British inequality either. If I’m depressing you a little, watch America’s ‘Oscarettes’ of political marketing The Pollies:
Ticket to the Pollies(Part1)
Part2
Senator Harry Reid tells The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart that the US are spending $5,000 per second in Iraq. Domestic welfare programmes anyone?
John McCain
Part2-
Artist Steve McQueen’s Iraq war piece in stamps For Queen and Country. Also, McQueen's film Hunger about the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands is hotly tipped this week for a Cannes Fest prize. Icon Entertainment Intl are sales agents. (Confirmed: IFC have picked up distribution for America and Pathe, UK and Ireland).
Iraqi artists and singers flee amid crackdown on forbidden culture
Archbishop's PA branded a fare dodger for 20p bus fare slip-up
Was this move by transport revenue officers totalitarian or democratic? Surely common sense must play a part here, unless of course the officers receive a conviction commission in which case reason would find them hypocritically democratic. And I watched this spot about identity 'at risk' on Facebook with gleeful schadenfreude (you’ll remember I was permanently suspended after trying to ‘make too many friends’) – most friendship being the most blatant form of marketing known to man. But indeed I digress. Mayor Boris Johnson most certainly is trying to make friends with the demi-London that didn’t vote for him (36.38%) and keep the ones he has (42.48%) by immediately investigating the finances of city hall and addressing the problems of anti-social youth behaviour in the capital.
A possible watershed in the fightback against crime
Booze ban on Tubes, Buses and DLR
Boris Johnson on police stop and search
In their own words: why young men carry knives
But many members of London’s ‘boys in blue’ aren’t renowned for their subtlety nor intelligence. Is giving them even more power really going to solve anything? It’s that knotty problem of the possessed vs. the dispossessed, the haves the have nots and the have mores, and the workaholic stressed Londoner vs. the delinquent youth. Police couldn’t even get the spelling of my name right when I reported being the victim of recent assaults. Former Mayor Livingston now attends council meetings - one so far - on his own volition (we can only take his word) in the public gallery. Ken did many wonderful things for London including the Oyster travel card (many have not forgiven or forgotten its teething problems, though) - (I gave up my central London bus trip yesterday after waiting 20 minutes –3 times what it should take, and Lower Regent Street had the whiff of a vehicular cattle auction) and Ken also gave us the free travel pass for over 60’s, the Freedom Pass (not that anyone in their right mind would want to live in London after they’re 60! But I guess it eases the pain). But was Ken Livingstone’s certainty of vision his ultimate downfall as it was for his arch enemy former Prime Minister Tony Blair? Will Boris teach those annoying bus provocateurs playing loud music to wear headphones? And didn’t Ken attempt that? Can solid compromised oatmeal concenus ever get the better of a thin slice of rich fascism gateaux? Clotted cream tastes very nice doesn’t it?
What fascinates about Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy , screening from Friday at the ICA, are the uncertainties and possibilities that the shooting was yet another CIA ‘stitch up’. Since 1968, Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan has been serving a life sentence as the sole assassination gunman. But O’Sullivan’s investigations, first aired on BBC’s Newsnight in 2006 and The Guardian, suggest Sirhan was hypnotically programmed to kill presidential candidate Kennedy or at least act as a decoy for the real assassin. One witness sitting outside on the fire escape was told her evidence could not possibly be true. And there’s enthralling audio evidence of Sirhan post-relating the event whilst under hypnosis. Most chilling of all is extant documentary evidence of the CIA’s ‘Manchurian Candidate’ mind-control operations such as Artichoke (YouTube) and declassified MK-Ultra Project documents.
The fact that they tried to control human will is far more interesting than the supposition that they ever achieved anything. The doco forms part of the ICA’s Conspiracy Theories. Winter Soldier (re-issued in the States 2005/6) films the 1971 Detroit investigation into war crimes conducted by the Vietnam Veterans Against War (VVAW) with 100 vets gathering in a hotel one long weekend to tell of the atrocities (including the young future Presidential candidate John Kerry): “We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which they are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.”. One former Marine captain notes: “Since no senior did anything to stop [Standard Operating Procedure (S.O.P.)], the policy was promulgated, and everybody assumed that this was right.” The other conspiracy flic is Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case the former Russian agent in London who was radioactively poisoned in 2006. Not seen that yet.(Just seen this and it's far more fascinating than any future 'movie' will probably be). Makes interesting comparison with Jonathan Dimbleby's current BBC series Russia and the 'glitterati' of St.Petersburg who seem indifferent to the fact that there is no 'democracy' these days. Austrian writer Hermann Broch is quoted about people's indifference letting dictators come to power. But is it really indifference or something far more unspeakable? Go see this doco.
Cleared - the artist the FBI branded a bio-terrorist
Morgan (Super-Size Me) Spurlock’s Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? unashamedly aims his doco travelogue in the Middle East at those Americans (young and old) who know nothing of a Cannes Film Festival let alone even a vague notion of what all those religions on the other side of the world are fighting about. On this level it certainly does succeed and put me in mind of Iron Man’s rather simplified politics. And that’s not meant to be a backhanded complement. But as Iron Man star Robert Downey Jnr recently quipped on a Brit talk show, the actor had to throw the script against the wall every morning and ingest it with a little more protein. Spurlock should have and could have done the same without fear of losing his audience. We get flashes of his pregnant wife back in the States but she needn’t have worried for the only conflict we ever see Spurlock really encountering is a push to the chest from an Orthodox Jew. He relished his first chance of joining the US Army in target practice, though. That’ll come in handy.
Writer/director Nadine Labaki's Caramel about four women (non-pro actors) whose nexus is a Beirut beauty salon may also seem a little lightweight to Western eyes. Far from it if you’re in the thick of religious orthodoxy, though. Layale (Labaki), a Christian, is involved with a married man in a Muslim country. There’s a funny but also frightening lavatory scene where Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri), a Muslim, plants evidence to fool her husband into thinking she’s the virgin she's not on their wedding night. And if that wasn’t enough, Rima (Joanna Moukarzel) is a lesbian (taboo) hitting on a client. The title derives from the ‘caramel’ used in removing unwanted hair (good tip for the girls). Soap opera maybe, but remember the ‘West’ still hasn’t even come to terms with the bare arm and back of a teenage pin-up. The film gains further poignancy when you realise that none of Beirut's filmmakers can even find an exit route out of the country to attend the Cannes Film Fest.
(Addition: Lebanese reach Cannes)
'We like our Venuses young'
How would Cranach feel about the RA using his nude Venus in a giant advert? Mortified Germaine Greer.
Spurlock’s Osama is an amateur holiday video compared to Terror’s Advocate (L'Avocat de la terreur) (French site). Directed by one of the world’s most fascinating entities Barbet Schroeder (ranging from the Idi Amin doco portrait to Hollywood’s Reversal of Fortune), this documentary is so overflowing with information it’s almost better to wait for the DVD (on Magnolia Home Entertainment in the States after its Oct 07 release). But don’t let that put you off the cinema experience because the film is billed as ‘starring’, lawyer to some of the most despised in modern times, Jacques Vergés. And as you wade through the experience (135min) it really does begin engrossing you like a real ‘movie’. Vergés first came to fame when he defended anti French colonialist Battle of Algiers cafe bomber Djamila Bouhired. He even married Algerian guerilla war hero Djamila Bouhired. Vergés raised probably the most important question now haunting the new century: are freedom fighters always in some way terrorists. Does the question sound semantically a little more palatable when reversed? One only has to remember George Washington in America. Vergés went on to defend Carlos the Jackal and the Nazi "Butcher of Lyon" Klaus Barbie arguing that the latter’s atrocities were no morally worse that what the French colonialists were doing in Algeria. Barbet Schroeder shows Vergés as a man of absolute certainty, and of premier cru socialism but also shows a world that by ‘making up its mind’ does nothing of the sort.
In Nicolas Klotz’s Heartbeat Detector (La Question humaine) (French trailer) Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) plays Simon Kessler, a motivational psychologist in the Human Resources department of multinational petrochemical corporation SC Farb for the past seven years. Managing director Karl Rose (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) wants a secret detailed report on the mental health of CEO Mathias Jüst (Michael Lonsdale). Later in the film, Jüst reveals anonymous letters, written to him a year earlier, implicating SC Farb for their allegiance to the Third Reich. Based on the novel by François Emmanuel (2000) and adapted by Klotz’s partner Elisabeth Perceval this an extraordinarily chilling meditation on the idea of new world order. Nicolas Klotz:
Heartbeat Detector is a film about perception...we showed bodies as the cogs in a machine that formats and eliminates as well as eroticizing relations and exacerbating appearances. [The film] questions “us”, those who make the machine work. Free-market competition is also expressed in their bodies. Sexual ambiguity is always present in the corporate world. Between colleagues, this state of arousal produces a whole range of rituals involving humiliation, brutality, coming together and pulling apart. It formats a uniform mass that loves and hates within itself. I wanted to film Simon’s experience like an almost hallucinogenic experience. During his investigation, the past filters up. Images of mass extermination during the war gradually emerge and blur his perception of the present. He is shaken and asks himself, “Am I today’s fascist when my job is to eliminate, liquidate, downsize and turn other people into waste?” The Shoah is one of the founding acts of modernity. It revealed the curse that is an integral part of industrial society. The question is whether its borders are contained in time and space. I feel like the Shoah is fossil light. It is a light that was projected even before 1940. It keeps producing effects on contemporary society and creating the future. We’re not using the Shoah to explain contemporary society. We’re trying to catch sight of reappearances and projections that are part of today in strange manifestations that are no longer like those from the 1940’s.” Another 140 minute film (and another wonderfully politically incorrect release from Trinity Filmed Entertainment) that definitely ‘unmakes’ up your mind.
BBC Radio 4 The Film Programme interview with Mathieu Amalric
Anti-Semitic violence nears record level in UK
Arrow Films, a DVD company who rarely distribute theatrically (in the cinema) in the UK, have given a wider release of two recent films. Un Secret (French site), based on Philippe Grimbert's life-inspired novel (just published in the States), dives into the secrets and lies of Francois’s (Mathieu Amalric again) Jewish family past. Director Claude Miller: "Grimbert clearly shows the emergence in the 30s of a real cult of the body, physical beauty and athletics, even before the usage made of it later by Pétainism and Nazism. In my laic (lay) Jewish milieu, we gladly cultivated this trend: it was a question of fighting against a kind of ...Jewish “dolorism”...to complain, to give up.” In the film, Grimbert’s father is Maxime (Patrick Bruel) encouraging strength in his ill son (Valentin Vigourt) with his mother Tania (Cécile de France) a champion swimmer. Claude Miller again: “As for the bodies of the two who passionately make love, they are anything but scandalous if replaced in the [story’s] chronological context...the couple know nothing about the death camps and Shoah. It’s our own viewpoint, that of today, which is then in question, and not reality as experienced by the protagonists of that day.”
I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále) Czech site (in English) from legendary 60s Czech New Wave director Jirí Menzel (and his 6th adaptation of a Bohumil Hrabal novel) is the rags to riches story of Jan Díte (Ivan Barnev) who rises from sausage seller then medallioned by the Emperor of Ethiopia to 5 star head waiter and whose sperm is also proved 5 star and Ayrian enough to get his German girl Líza (Julia Jentsch) into bed as the Nazis roll into Prague. As with Un Secret, it’s only on flashback historical reflection from an older Jan (Oldrich Kaiser) that his aspirations seem less cold-blooded. Like all Menzel’s work it’s a whimsical, exquisitely detailed film in which his characters, lured by the delights of the banquet table, become trapped in aspic and ignorant of the greed surrounding them.
BBC Radio 4’s Film Programme(9 May)
YouTube trailer
Louis Feuillade’s silent 10 serials Les Vampires (1915), YouTube, is one of French film history’s most important documents for its innovations within popular form. The Ministry of Interior even deemed it too demoralising for wartime. All sorts of crooks inveigle themselves into positions of power and influence in Paris with investigative reporter for Le Mondial Philippe Guérande (Édouard Mathé) on their tail and often in their clutches. Feuillade began his career by adopting the pulp novels of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, published once a month since 1911,Fantômas. Incredibly ‘hip’ box-set packaging from Artificial Eye but alas no booklet or extras (unlike the French Gaumont DVD set) putting the films into context, but AE do include five of his shorts. Éric le Guen’s score is perfectly unswampy.
More archives from France’s most famous studio Gaumont this month too:
Gaumont Early Silents - le cinema premier VOL. 1 (7 DVD, Region 2 France) from 1907-1913.
And Abel Gance’s La Roue(The Wheel 1923) is just out on DVD in the States. One of the innovations of La Roue was the in-the-camera fusing of intertitles and image... transparent intertitle cards superimposed over a part of a moving image so that it wasn’t necessary to cut to a "title card" and the film could keep rolling.
What’s interesting about Les Vampires is the almost ‘revolutionary’ nature of its heroine Irma Vep (an anagram of Vampire) played by Musidora, the underclass getting one over. And one can’t help thinking about whether there’s also an anti-Semitic post-‘Dreyfus affair’ undertone to these films. Les Vampires are a gang of crooks not bloodsuckers but there are many historical precedents even before Hitler’s anti-Semitic appropriation of the Vampire legend.
French critic turned filmmaker Olivier Assayas was fascinated enough by Feuillade’s Les Vampires in 1996 to make his own hommage Irma Vep (DVD). This is another very welcome Second Sight release loaded with extras including Man Yuk: Portrait de Maggie Cheung a 5 minute film by Assayas silently and abstractly filming the actress close-up cleansing her face. In another interview extra, the director and Charles Tesson discuss their 1984 Les Cahiers du Cinéma groundbreaking issue on Asian cinema. But at the time, it was a struggle to get Asian cinema recognised even by Cahiers. Assayas comes across as a French Tarantino and even resembles him! And Irma Vep is a film in French about casting Chinese star icon Cheung who only speaks English as Irma Vep. "It’s a comedy about brilliance...that brilliance is often right under your nose in films or in real life and you’re either capable of seeing it or not,” says Assayas. He was fascinated by Les Vampires because in “the silent era everything was being seen for the first time. All of a sudden people open their eyes and see the world for the first time.” René Vidal plays the ‘old school’ director who’s really ‘new school’ and has a breakdown, Jean Pierre Leaud (of Trauffaut’s The 400 Blows fame) as Cheung’s co-star, Natalie Richard as Zoé the costume designer/wardrobe mistress who takes Cheung under her wing and Lou Castel as seedy replacement director Jose Murano who thinks it’s ridiculous casting a Chinese actress in the part. Shot on various formats including Super 16 and blown up to 35mm the film looks amazing. And there’s even a moody score too from alternative rock band Luna’s cover of Serge Gainsbourg's Bonnie & Clyde, along with Ry Cooder, Ali Farka Toure and Sonic Youth. Above all, Assayas’s ideas are fascinating and hyper-relevant as he speaks of Bruce Lee films being ‘neo-realism’ from the Cantonese street - a character who’s “broken away from his community and fights to exist in the Western world.” And that being ignorant of popular Asian film history is like trying to discuss the movies of Sam Peckinpah without ever having seen those of John Ford.
Somewhere under the rubble of Jieho Lee's feature debut The Air I Breathe (trailer)(co-written with Bob DeRosa) is buried some talent. Based on an ancient Chinese proverb representing "four emotional cornerstones of life" —Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow, and Love—Lee's film embodies these four emotions in the intertwined stories played by Forest Whitaker, Brendan Fraser, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Kevin Bacon. But that’s where any similarity between Asian cinema or Wong Kar-Wai ends. Walt Lloyd’s HD (high definition) cinematography is the survivor of this celluloid crash and burn.
A million times more interesting is La Antenna (The Aerial) from Argentina’s writer/director Esteban Sapir, shot in silent film mode with superimposed titles (characters in their own right) in the spirit of Canada’s Guy Maddin. “Once upon a time there was a city without a voice. Many, many years went by and nobody seemed bothered by the silence,” begin the opening titles. You’re not likely to see a film such as this for many a long time. The city’s evil media mogul Mr. TV has stolen the inhabitants voices replaced by the opiate of a female nightclub vocalist known as The Voice. Only a young girl, her father and a blind boy stand in the way of Mr. TV’s domination. The film also recalls the magic of early French film pioneer George Méliès. An impossible act to follow but Esteban Sapir more than amazes.
Argentina's dirty war: the museum of horrors
Manufactured Landscapes is Jennifer Baichwal's documentary on photographer Edward Burtynsky. Mostly exploring the artist’s environmental work process, it’s a strange experience if you’ve witnessed the stillness of the minutely detailed originals in a gallery now transposed to the moving image and film projection shudder (Super-16mm). But enthralling nonetheless on how man transforms nature in his own image.
An architecture that should be impossible (Financial Times)
Modern Art has moved from the East End to the West End, a move some may deem a bit traitorous while eyeing it with envy. Haven’t yet caught the new show. And my 30 snatched minutes at the British Museum’s The American Scene- Prints from Hopper to Pollock did this wonderful exhibition no justice at all. But it’s free so enjoy until September including a great events programme.
Turner Prize: 2008 Nominees profiled
Interesting to muse upon Robert Bresson’s films after lingering in the world of Oliver Assayas, arthouse film and its relationship to popular culture. The former rarely gave interviews of any sort and there’s an engrossing 1 hour extra on Artificial Eye’s A Man Escaped DVD. Bresson was interested in ‘being’ not ‘seeing’. His actor/models have blank facial expressions, and his observance of minute detail is such that the viewer can “imagine the whole”. Lancelot du Lac (1974) tells the classic Medieval tale as you’ve never felt it told. The severed head of the opening makes one think of Spamalot and the Monty Pythons but knowing Bresson it was probably very close to the actuality. Everything else in the film reaks of ‘reality’ simply through Bresson’s attention to detail and avoidance of film language detritus. Almost no music score, no acrobatic cameras elevating the horses and armour in the jousting tournament from reality to cliche. We’re so used to seeing cinema’s ‘spin’ on reality that when Bresson shows us the DNA of the cliche it’s like a rebirth. I was reminded of Russian experimentalist of the 1920s Lev Kuleshov’s famous editing exercise in which shots of an actor doing nothing were intercut with various unrelated images in order to show how editing changed viewers' interpretations of images. Quite a few YouTube vids on this. Another of Bresson’s last films The Devil, Probably (1977) may be like watching paint dry for some. But when you remember that Bresson was trying out his techniques as long before as A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s'est) in 1956, you have to pay attention.
BBC Four's The Medieval Season including some interesting unearthed facts in Python Terry Jones' Medieval Lives.
Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest out on DVD as mentioned last time.
Bresson used the wrong notes of famous pianist Dinu Lipatti as an example of how the ‘whole’ (the being) mattered more than the seeing. And Krystian Zimerman (on BBC Radio3’s Music Matters) gives one of his rare interviews on the pianist’s art.
Matt Mason's The Pirates Dilemma (Penguin Books) posits that youth culture -whether graffiti, piracy or hacking - has led to the innovations and ideas which change the mainstream for the better. Nightwaves discusses. And Prof Susan Greenfield's new book ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century argues that our individuality faces an increasing threat from new technologies.(Mon 12)
Prof Brian Foster the particle physicist reveals his private musical passions.
And Australian writer Tim Winton on his latest book Breath.
Another French Gaumont classic is the B/W Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) (1960) based on a novel by Jean Redon. Its director Georges Franju (1912–1987) was co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française and English critic Ian Sinclair described him as "a man of torrential vehemence, spitting out excremental expletives like a tracer-stream of olive pits." François Truffaut told Cahiers du Cinéma that when audiences at the Edinburgh Film Festival saw the film seven people fainted. It is an unforgettable and terrifying film almost Bressonian in its simplicity. Franju uses a cheerfully eerie score by Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia) as Paris Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) tries unsuccessfully to graft a new face, using kipnapped girls, onto his car crash victim daughter Christiane (Edith Scob) abetted by his assistant Louise (Alida Valli of The Third Man). Of course, it’s the face of his guilt-ridden soul for which he fruitlessly searches. And it’s the mask that Christiane is forced to constantly wear, and all we ever see of her face, that give her eyes the freedom and window to her soul that her father would never know. This UK release doesn’t have the goodies of Criterion’s release in the States that include Franju's first movie of 1949, the short documentary Blood of the Beasts (Le Sang des bêtes) about Paris slaughterhouses. But the short extra with Franju at the editing desk shows his almost clinical obsession with detail. And long awaited is a release of his Judex (1963) screened recently at a Franju festival in New York.
Italian cult horror director Dario Argento has Mother of Tears out on DVD. Not the greatest gore-chiller by far but nobody quite does it like Argento. The Dario Argento Collection is out on DVD in the States at the end of the month.
And Swedish vampire film Not Like Others from first timer Peter Pontikis has been bought in Cannes by NonStop Sales(worldwide). Two vampire sisters Vera and Vanja, are drifting apart as one wants to leave the other and lead a normal human life. Could be interesting.
[late edition]Argento’s daughter Asia (Mother of Tears) mesmerises again in Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate (released Stateside in March and just out straight to DVD in the UK). The drug smuggling story is nothing to speak of and the film never seems to ‘hang’ on anything – hence its straight to DVD cinema by-pass I guess. But the persistent purring and growling between Argento and Michael Madsen’s businessman always intrigues. As with Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep, Assayas seems to be trying to prise open the shells of Argento and Madsen’s actor masks, succeeding here more with the former rather than the latter. Yorick Le Saux’s beautiful cinematography soufflés Paris and Hong Kong into transient worlds constantly spinning round these two lives as if in one of those animations where two spirits converge and evaporate in the mists of time. And man, is Argento one seductive tigress.
Assayas' latest Summer Hours (already released in France and released July by Artificial Eye in the UK) stars Charles Berling, Juliet Binoche and Edith Scob (from Eyes Without a Face) is winning over friends this minute at the Cannes market ('off-fest'). A return to form some will say (what a useless phrase that is - as if he'd ever left one and indeed had a single entity to leave). And for lovers of the ancien Artificial Eye (who've just acquired select titles of both Wong Kar Wai (reissued rights for Chungking Express, Happy Together & some Jet Tone releases (WKW’s production company) and Hal Hartley (Trust, Henry Fool, The Girl from Monday and some shorts)from Fortissimo), ex-AE founders Robert Beeson and Pam Engel's (and the late Andi Engel) new company New Wave Films has acquired two films in this year's Cannes competition, the Dardennes brothers The Silence of Lorna and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys. And a September release is slated for Johanna Hogg's quietly wonderful 2007 London Film Festival Fipresci award winner Unrelated.
It may be a slightly cult-sacrilegious to say this but Simon Rumley's horror The Living and the Dead (DNC Entertainment DVD) is way more terrifying than the Argento - gruesomely contorted in the British sense of Twisted Nerve (1968). While Donald (Brit stalwart thesp Roger Lloyd Pack) is away, his mentally ill son James (Leo Bill) keeps the on-call nurse at bay pretending to his bedridden mother, adamant and ecstatic that he can manage things. It's immediately gripping and whenever things seem to be getting predictable the film flips on its head again and again. Far from enjoyable but it'll make your flesh crawl.
And 29-year-old Thomas Clay has just surprised industry folk at Cannes with his Soi Cowboy - sex tourism and mafia bloodshed - shot in Thailand. As industry magazine Variety noted "in this age of Google's omniscience the film somehow managed to shoot without leaving a trace on the Web."
Dracula sinks his teeth into Royal Mail history
And for a bit of very well constructed ‘multiplex’ fun you could do much worse than the Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) who pays his way in Hollywood by scoring sonorous crap for a TV crime show (the next Carter Burwell he aint). But spare a thought for his Dracula musical with puppets (Gothic Neil Diamond according to Russell Brand’s Brit rocker Aldous Snow). Great casting (Bretter’s a fairly non-descript guy) and if I were the gal Rachel (Mila Kunis) I’d certainly go out with him after seeing his show.
American indy writer/director/editor John Sayles’ Honeydripper(Trailer) is a ‘Kind of Blue’ Miles Davis jazz solo wafting through the open windows of a summer’s day. It’s 1950 and old boogie-woogie cat Tyrone ‘Pinetop’ Purvis (Danny Glover) runs the ailing Honeydripper Lounge (in aptly named Harmony, Alabama) and lays off old Bertha Mae (Mable John) announcing a one-only gig for famous Guitar Sam. But he don’t show, so the unflappable Tyrone hires young musician Sonny Blake (Gary Clark, Jr.’s impressive screen debut) who’s just been arrested and put on cotton-pickin' duty by Sherrif Pugh (Stacy Keach) for "gawkerry with intent to mope." Sonny is the ‘shock of the new’ with his home-made electric guitar. As in all Sayles films there’s nothing in this film trying to impress or hector you. At last year’s London Film Fest I met Gary Clark at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London and he looked dapper enough to be attending Ascot. Honeydripper is all about appearance and change ‘cause it’s all about music. Clark could have arrived looking ‘black street cred’ but he wanted to look ‘swell’ for his London debut. Sayles film talks difference not through shock but musical harmony. Sometimes that harmony is foreign and strange but oftentimes it’s all so strangely familiar. What matters is that it’s always rooted in the soul.
YouTube: Danny Glover and John Sayles Discuss Distribution (American Museum of the Moving Image )
Liza Minnelli appears at London’s Coliseum on May 25 and 27, and if you’ve never seen her live then you’re missing one of the greatest musical treats of the century. She doesn’t seem to breathe yet she clearly does.
Lunch with a legend
Some Came Running is all about our search for beauty (the Senses of Cinema article on director Vincente Minnelli excellently explores his themes). Frank Hirsh(Frank Sinatra) is a boozy ex-serviceman (egged on by Dean Martin’s Bama) writer unrequitedly in love with Gwen (Martha Hyer). When loyal but dim Ginny(Shirley Maclaine) learns Frank has just had an article accepted by The Atlantic Monthly she waits doggedly on the porch, clutching the magazine waiting for his return. Initially he simply rejects her, but then invites her in. Ginny loves Hirsh and though he needs to be loved he doesn’t want to seem to be so. What follows is one of the saddest 15 minutes in Hollywood cinema. With their bodies trapped and framed in the huge Cinemascope canvas, Hirsh both demeans and cherishes Ginny finally asking her to marry him. She of course accepts and they end up in a fairground where tragedy strikes them down. "You've led me by the hand into a strange, wonderful world, a world to dream of," says Katharine Hepburn to Robert Taylor in Minnelli’s Undercurrent (1946). Michel Chion’s Cahiers du cinéma obituary for the director was entitled "Une certain idée de la beauté" and experimentalist Chris Marker used to watch An American in Paris while shooting his documentary Les Statues meurent aussi about beautiful art being an "instrument of a desire to seize the world." The soulful glimpses and moments of Some Came Running’s utter realism could only exist within Minnelli’s melodramatic framework. If you took away the frame from a door it would never be open or closed simply suspended in time and space. And is fundamentalism a doorframe without a door? And try as one might, you can never take away the edit from the spectator who will always map a point of arrival and departure. And if you take away belief, even an imagining of the nihilistic self or a hereafter, one is left like a sci-fi teleportation gone wrong. Forever adrift in the cosmos neither born nor decayed.
Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain is being repeated on the BBC.
Was the recent election of ‘gaff prone’ Conservative Boris Johnson as London’s Mayor a surprise or a foregone conclusion? The election was exactly what Runciman seemed to be on about in that half of London was totally fed up with its innumerable problems (regularly reported on this site). People ‘hypocritised’ into the feigned hope that things might get better under someone else even though it was ‘bumbling’ Boris. The hypocrisy restored one’s faith in democracy against ‘certainty of mind’s totalitarian alternative, though most of London intelligentsia were quite open in their negative Boris feelings:
Zoe Williams Boris Johnson
London's mayor of the mix
No one was feigning anything in his or her disgust for the democratically elected far-right BNP (British National Party) member. Or is that argument just a little more complex? Richard Barnbrook now has to sit by himself at one end of the council chamber’s table as no other member wishes to be smelt near him. Yet his election was clearly democracy functioning as it should. Was it totalitarian certainty of mind on the part of his constituents or were they ‘feigning’ as much as any other party’s member? New Labour began (or became, depending on your POV) as the most hypocritical government in living memory. It promised exactly what its electorate feigned and hoped for: mortgages for all, equality for all, education for all, so much ALL that it had some left over to export to the people of Iraq. Was most of the British electorate ‘hypocritical’ in opposing that war? Did the war not embody precisely what New Labour espoused? Just as in Iraq, New Labour hadn’t worked out an exit strategy for its ‘war’ on British inequality either. If I’m depressing you a little, watch America’s ‘Oscarettes’ of political marketing The Pollies:
Ticket to the Pollies(Part1)
Part2
Senator Harry Reid tells The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart that the US are spending $5,000 per second in Iraq. Domestic welfare programmes anyone?
John McCain
Part2-
Artist Steve McQueen’s Iraq war piece in stamps For Queen and Country. Also, McQueen's film Hunger about the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands is hotly tipped this week for a Cannes Fest prize. Icon Entertainment Intl are sales agents. (Confirmed: IFC have picked up distribution for America and Pathe, UK and Ireland).
Iraqi artists and singers flee amid crackdown on forbidden culture
Archbishop's PA branded a fare dodger for 20p bus fare slip-up
Was this move by transport revenue officers totalitarian or democratic? Surely common sense must play a part here, unless of course the officers receive a conviction commission in which case reason would find them hypocritically democratic. And I watched this spot about identity 'at risk' on Facebook with gleeful schadenfreude (you’ll remember I was permanently suspended after trying to ‘make too many friends’) – most friendship being the most blatant form of marketing known to man. But indeed I digress. Mayor Boris Johnson most certainly is trying to make friends with the demi-London that didn’t vote for him (36.38%) and keep the ones he has (42.48%) by immediately investigating the finances of city hall and addressing the problems of anti-social youth behaviour in the capital.
A possible watershed in the fightback against crime
Booze ban on Tubes, Buses and DLR
Boris Johnson on police stop and search
In their own words: why young men carry knives
But many members of London’s ‘boys in blue’ aren’t renowned for their subtlety nor intelligence. Is giving them even more power really going to solve anything? It’s that knotty problem of the possessed vs. the dispossessed, the haves the have nots and the have mores, and the workaholic stressed Londoner vs. the delinquent youth. Police couldn’t even get the spelling of my name right when I reported being the victim of recent assaults. Former Mayor Livingston now attends council meetings - one so far - on his own volition (we can only take his word) in the public gallery. Ken did many wonderful things for London including the Oyster travel card (many have not forgiven or forgotten its teething problems, though) - (I gave up my central London bus trip yesterday after waiting 20 minutes –3 times what it should take, and Lower Regent Street had the whiff of a vehicular cattle auction) and Ken also gave us the free travel pass for over 60’s, the Freedom Pass (not that anyone in their right mind would want to live in London after they’re 60! But I guess it eases the pain). But was Ken Livingstone’s certainty of vision his ultimate downfall as it was for his arch enemy former Prime Minister Tony Blair? Will Boris teach those annoying bus provocateurs playing loud music to wear headphones? And didn’t Ken attempt that? Can solid compromised oatmeal concenus ever get the better of a thin slice of rich fascism gateaux? Clotted cream tastes very nice doesn’t it?
What fascinates about Shane O’Sullivan’s documentary RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy , screening from Friday at the ICA, are the uncertainties and possibilities that the shooting was yet another CIA ‘stitch up’. Since 1968, Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan has been serving a life sentence as the sole assassination gunman. But O’Sullivan’s investigations, first aired on BBC’s Newsnight in 2006 and The Guardian, suggest Sirhan was hypnotically programmed to kill presidential candidate Kennedy or at least act as a decoy for the real assassin. One witness sitting outside on the fire escape was told her evidence could not possibly be true. And there’s enthralling audio evidence of Sirhan post-relating the event whilst under hypnosis. Most chilling of all is extant documentary evidence of the CIA’s ‘Manchurian Candidate’ mind-control operations such as Artichoke (YouTube) and declassified MK-Ultra Project documents.
The fact that they tried to control human will is far more interesting than the supposition that they ever achieved anything. The doco forms part of the ICA’s Conspiracy Theories. Winter Soldier (re-issued in the States 2005/6) films the 1971 Detroit investigation into war crimes conducted by the Vietnam Veterans Against War (VVAW) with 100 vets gathering in a hotel one long weekend to tell of the atrocities (including the young future Presidential candidate John Kerry): “We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which they are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.”. One former Marine captain notes: “Since no senior did anything to stop [Standard Operating Procedure (S.O.P.)], the policy was promulgated, and everybody assumed that this was right.” The other conspiracy flic is Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case the former Russian agent in London who was radioactively poisoned in 2006. Not seen that yet.(Just seen this and it's far more fascinating than any future 'movie' will probably be). Makes interesting comparison with Jonathan Dimbleby's current BBC series Russia and the 'glitterati' of St.Petersburg who seem indifferent to the fact that there is no 'democracy' these days. Austrian writer Hermann Broch is quoted about people's indifference letting dictators come to power. But is it really indifference or something far more unspeakable? Go see this doco.
Cleared - the artist the FBI branded a bio-terrorist
Morgan (Super-Size Me) Spurlock’s Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? unashamedly aims his doco travelogue in the Middle East at those Americans (young and old) who know nothing of a Cannes Film Festival let alone even a vague notion of what all those religions on the other side of the world are fighting about. On this level it certainly does succeed and put me in mind of Iron Man’s rather simplified politics. And that’s not meant to be a backhanded complement. But as Iron Man star Robert Downey Jnr recently quipped on a Brit talk show, the actor had to throw the script against the wall every morning and ingest it with a little more protein. Spurlock should have and could have done the same without fear of losing his audience. We get flashes of his pregnant wife back in the States but she needn’t have worried for the only conflict we ever see Spurlock really encountering is a push to the chest from an Orthodox Jew. He relished his first chance of joining the US Army in target practice, though. That’ll come in handy.
Writer/director Nadine Labaki's Caramel about four women (non-pro actors) whose nexus is a Beirut beauty salon may also seem a little lightweight to Western eyes. Far from it if you’re in the thick of religious orthodoxy, though. Layale (Labaki), a Christian, is involved with a married man in a Muslim country. There’s a funny but also frightening lavatory scene where Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri), a Muslim, plants evidence to fool her husband into thinking she’s the virgin she's not on their wedding night. And if that wasn’t enough, Rima (Joanna Moukarzel) is a lesbian (taboo) hitting on a client. The title derives from the ‘caramel’ used in removing unwanted hair (good tip for the girls). Soap opera maybe, but remember the ‘West’ still hasn’t even come to terms with the bare arm and back of a teenage pin-up. The film gains further poignancy when you realise that none of Beirut's filmmakers can even find an exit route out of the country to attend the Cannes Film Fest.
(Addition: Lebanese reach Cannes)
'We like our Venuses young'
How would Cranach feel about the RA using his nude Venus in a giant advert? Mortified Germaine Greer.
Spurlock’s Osama is an amateur holiday video compared to Terror’s Advocate (L'Avocat de la terreur) (French site). Directed by one of the world’s most fascinating entities Barbet Schroeder (ranging from the Idi Amin doco portrait to Hollywood’s Reversal of Fortune), this documentary is so overflowing with information it’s almost better to wait for the DVD (on Magnolia Home Entertainment in the States after its Oct 07 release). But don’t let that put you off the cinema experience because the film is billed as ‘starring’, lawyer to some of the most despised in modern times, Jacques Vergés. And as you wade through the experience (135min) it really does begin engrossing you like a real ‘movie’. Vergés first came to fame when he defended anti French colonialist Battle of Algiers cafe bomber Djamila Bouhired. He even married Algerian guerilla war hero Djamila Bouhired. Vergés raised probably the most important question now haunting the new century: are freedom fighters always in some way terrorists. Does the question sound semantically a little more palatable when reversed? One only has to remember George Washington in America. Vergés went on to defend Carlos the Jackal and the Nazi "Butcher of Lyon" Klaus Barbie arguing that the latter’s atrocities were no morally worse that what the French colonialists were doing in Algeria. Barbet Schroeder shows Vergés as a man of absolute certainty, and of premier cru socialism but also shows a world that by ‘making up its mind’ does nothing of the sort.
In Nicolas Klotz’s Heartbeat Detector (La Question humaine) (French trailer) Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) plays Simon Kessler, a motivational psychologist in the Human Resources department of multinational petrochemical corporation SC Farb for the past seven years. Managing director Karl Rose (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) wants a secret detailed report on the mental health of CEO Mathias Jüst (Michael Lonsdale). Later in the film, Jüst reveals anonymous letters, written to him a year earlier, implicating SC Farb for their allegiance to the Third Reich. Based on the novel by François Emmanuel (2000) and adapted by Klotz’s partner Elisabeth Perceval this an extraordinarily chilling meditation on the idea of new world order. Nicolas Klotz:
Heartbeat Detector is a film about perception...we showed bodies as the cogs in a machine that formats and eliminates as well as eroticizing relations and exacerbating appearances. [The film] questions “us”, those who make the machine work. Free-market competition is also expressed in their bodies. Sexual ambiguity is always present in the corporate world. Between colleagues, this state of arousal produces a whole range of rituals involving humiliation, brutality, coming together and pulling apart. It formats a uniform mass that loves and hates within itself. I wanted to film Simon’s experience like an almost hallucinogenic experience. During his investigation, the past filters up. Images of mass extermination during the war gradually emerge and blur his perception of the present. He is shaken and asks himself, “Am I today’s fascist when my job is to eliminate, liquidate, downsize and turn other people into waste?” The Shoah is one of the founding acts of modernity. It revealed the curse that is an integral part of industrial society. The question is whether its borders are contained in time and space. I feel like the Shoah is fossil light. It is a light that was projected even before 1940. It keeps producing effects on contemporary society and creating the future. We’re not using the Shoah to explain contemporary society. We’re trying to catch sight of reappearances and projections that are part of today in strange manifestations that are no longer like those from the 1940’s.” Another 140 minute film (and another wonderfully politically incorrect release from Trinity Filmed Entertainment) that definitely ‘unmakes’ up your mind.
BBC Radio 4 The Film Programme interview with Mathieu Amalric
Anti-Semitic violence nears record level in UK
Arrow Films, a DVD company who rarely distribute theatrically (in the cinema) in the UK, have given a wider release of two recent films. Un Secret (French site), based on Philippe Grimbert's life-inspired novel (just published in the States), dives into the secrets and lies of Francois’s (Mathieu Amalric again) Jewish family past. Director Claude Miller: "Grimbert clearly shows the emergence in the 30s of a real cult of the body, physical beauty and athletics, even before the usage made of it later by Pétainism and Nazism. In my laic (lay) Jewish milieu, we gladly cultivated this trend: it was a question of fighting against a kind of ...Jewish “dolorism”...to complain, to give up.” In the film, Grimbert’s father is Maxime (Patrick Bruel) encouraging strength in his ill son (Valentin Vigourt) with his mother Tania (Cécile de France) a champion swimmer. Claude Miller again: “As for the bodies of the two who passionately make love, they are anything but scandalous if replaced in the [story’s] chronological context...the couple know nothing about the death camps and Shoah. It’s our own viewpoint, that of today, which is then in question, and not reality as experienced by the protagonists of that day.”
I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále) Czech site (in English) from legendary 60s Czech New Wave director Jirí Menzel (and his 6th adaptation of a Bohumil Hrabal novel) is the rags to riches story of Jan Díte (Ivan Barnev) who rises from sausage seller then medallioned by the Emperor of Ethiopia to 5 star head waiter and whose sperm is also proved 5 star and Ayrian enough to get his German girl Líza (Julia Jentsch) into bed as the Nazis roll into Prague. As with Un Secret, it’s only on flashback historical reflection from an older Jan (Oldrich Kaiser) that his aspirations seem less cold-blooded. Like all Menzel’s work it’s a whimsical, exquisitely detailed film in which his characters, lured by the delights of the banquet table, become trapped in aspic and ignorant of the greed surrounding them.
BBC Radio 4’s Film Programme(9 May)
YouTube trailer
Louis Feuillade’s silent 10 serials Les Vampires (1915), YouTube, is one of French film history’s most important documents for its innovations within popular form. The Ministry of Interior even deemed it too demoralising for wartime. All sorts of crooks inveigle themselves into positions of power and influence in Paris with investigative reporter for Le Mondial Philippe Guérande (Édouard Mathé) on their tail and often in their clutches. Feuillade began his career by adopting the pulp novels of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, published once a month since 1911,Fantômas. Incredibly ‘hip’ box-set packaging from Artificial Eye but alas no booklet or extras (unlike the French Gaumont DVD set) putting the films into context, but AE do include five of his shorts. Éric le Guen’s score is perfectly unswampy.
More archives from France’s most famous studio Gaumont this month too:
Gaumont Early Silents - le cinema premier VOL. 1 (7 DVD, Region 2 France) from 1907-1913.
And Abel Gance’s La Roue(The Wheel 1923) is just out on DVD in the States. One of the innovations of La Roue was the in-the-camera fusing of intertitles and image... transparent intertitle cards superimposed over a part of a moving image so that it wasn’t necessary to cut to a "title card" and the film could keep rolling.
What’s interesting about Les Vampires is the almost ‘revolutionary’ nature of its heroine Irma Vep (an anagram of Vampire) played by Musidora, the underclass getting one over. And one can’t help thinking about whether there’s also an anti-Semitic post-‘Dreyfus affair’ undertone to these films. Les Vampires are a gang of crooks not bloodsuckers but there are many historical precedents even before Hitler’s anti-Semitic appropriation of the Vampire legend.
French critic turned filmmaker Olivier Assayas was fascinated enough by Feuillade’s Les Vampires in 1996 to make his own hommage Irma Vep (DVD). This is another very welcome Second Sight release loaded with extras including Man Yuk: Portrait de Maggie Cheung a 5 minute film by Assayas silently and abstractly filming the actress close-up cleansing her face. In another interview extra, the director and Charles Tesson discuss their 1984 Les Cahiers du Cinéma groundbreaking issue on Asian cinema. But at the time, it was a struggle to get Asian cinema recognised even by Cahiers. Assayas comes across as a French Tarantino and even resembles him! And Irma Vep is a film in French about casting Chinese star icon Cheung who only speaks English as Irma Vep. "It’s a comedy about brilliance...that brilliance is often right under your nose in films or in real life and you’re either capable of seeing it or not,” says Assayas. He was fascinated by Les Vampires because in “the silent era everything was being seen for the first time. All of a sudden people open their eyes and see the world for the first time.” René Vidal plays the ‘old school’ director who’s really ‘new school’ and has a breakdown, Jean Pierre Leaud (of Trauffaut’s The 400 Blows fame) as Cheung’s co-star, Natalie Richard as Zoé the costume designer/wardrobe mistress who takes Cheung under her wing and Lou Castel as seedy replacement director Jose Murano who thinks it’s ridiculous casting a Chinese actress in the part. Shot on various formats including Super 16 and blown up to 35mm the film looks amazing. And there’s even a moody score too from alternative rock band Luna’s cover of Serge Gainsbourg's Bonnie & Clyde, along with Ry Cooder, Ali Farka Toure and Sonic Youth. Above all, Assayas’s ideas are fascinating and hyper-relevant as he speaks of Bruce Lee films being ‘neo-realism’ from the Cantonese street - a character who’s “broken away from his community and fights to exist in the Western world.” And that being ignorant of popular Asian film history is like trying to discuss the movies of Sam Peckinpah without ever having seen those of John Ford.
Somewhere under the rubble of Jieho Lee's feature debut The Air I Breathe (trailer)(co-written with Bob DeRosa) is buried some talent. Based on an ancient Chinese proverb representing "four emotional cornerstones of life" —Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow, and Love—Lee's film embodies these four emotions in the intertwined stories played by Forest Whitaker, Brendan Fraser, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Kevin Bacon. But that’s where any similarity between Asian cinema or Wong Kar-Wai ends. Walt Lloyd’s HD (high definition) cinematography is the survivor of this celluloid crash and burn.
A million times more interesting is La Antenna (The Aerial) from Argentina’s writer/director Esteban Sapir, shot in silent film mode with superimposed titles (characters in their own right) in the spirit of Canada’s Guy Maddin. “Once upon a time there was a city without a voice. Many, many years went by and nobody seemed bothered by the silence,” begin the opening titles. You’re not likely to see a film such as this for many a long time. The city’s evil media mogul Mr. TV has stolen the inhabitants voices replaced by the opiate of a female nightclub vocalist known as The Voice. Only a young girl, her father and a blind boy stand in the way of Mr. TV’s domination. The film also recalls the magic of early French film pioneer George Méliès. An impossible act to follow but Esteban Sapir more than amazes.
Argentina's dirty war: the museum of horrors
Manufactured Landscapes is Jennifer Baichwal's documentary on photographer Edward Burtynsky. Mostly exploring the artist’s environmental work process, it’s a strange experience if you’ve witnessed the stillness of the minutely detailed originals in a gallery now transposed to the moving image and film projection shudder (Super-16mm). But enthralling nonetheless on how man transforms nature in his own image.
An architecture that should be impossible (Financial Times)
Modern Art has moved from the East End to the West End, a move some may deem a bit traitorous while eyeing it with envy. Haven’t yet caught the new show. And my 30 snatched minutes at the British Museum’s The American Scene- Prints from Hopper to Pollock did this wonderful exhibition no justice at all. But it’s free so enjoy until September including a great events programme.
Turner Prize: 2008 Nominees profiled
Interesting to muse upon Robert Bresson’s films after lingering in the world of Oliver Assayas, arthouse film and its relationship to popular culture. The former rarely gave interviews of any sort and there’s an engrossing 1 hour extra on Artificial Eye’s A Man Escaped DVD. Bresson was interested in ‘being’ not ‘seeing’. His actor/models have blank facial expressions, and his observance of minute detail is such that the viewer can “imagine the whole”. Lancelot du Lac (1974) tells the classic Medieval tale as you’ve never felt it told. The severed head of the opening makes one think of Spamalot and the Monty Pythons but knowing Bresson it was probably very close to the actuality. Everything else in the film reaks of ‘reality’ simply through Bresson’s attention to detail and avoidance of film language detritus. Almost no music score, no acrobatic cameras elevating the horses and armour in the jousting tournament from reality to cliche. We’re so used to seeing cinema’s ‘spin’ on reality that when Bresson shows us the DNA of the cliche it’s like a rebirth. I was reminded of Russian experimentalist of the 1920s Lev Kuleshov’s famous editing exercise in which shots of an actor doing nothing were intercut with various unrelated images in order to show how editing changed viewers' interpretations of images. Quite a few YouTube vids on this. Another of Bresson’s last films The Devil, Probably (1977) may be like watching paint dry for some. But when you remember that Bresson was trying out his techniques as long before as A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s'est) in 1956, you have to pay attention.
BBC Four's The Medieval Season including some interesting unearthed facts in Python Terry Jones' Medieval Lives.
Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest out on DVD as mentioned last time.
Bresson used the wrong notes of famous pianist Dinu Lipatti as an example of how the ‘whole’ (the being) mattered more than the seeing. And Krystian Zimerman (on BBC Radio3’s Music Matters) gives one of his rare interviews on the pianist’s art.
Matt Mason's The Pirates Dilemma (Penguin Books) posits that youth culture -whether graffiti, piracy or hacking - has led to the innovations and ideas which change the mainstream for the better. Nightwaves discusses. And Prof Susan Greenfield's new book ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century argues that our individuality faces an increasing threat from new technologies.(Mon 12)
Prof Brian Foster the particle physicist reveals his private musical passions.
And Australian writer Tim Winton on his latest book Breath.
Another French Gaumont classic is the B/W Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) (1960) based on a novel by Jean Redon. Its director Georges Franju (1912–1987) was co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française and English critic Ian Sinclair described him as "a man of torrential vehemence, spitting out excremental expletives like a tracer-stream of olive pits." François Truffaut told Cahiers du Cinéma that when audiences at the Edinburgh Film Festival saw the film seven people fainted. It is an unforgettable and terrifying film almost Bressonian in its simplicity. Franju uses a cheerfully eerie score by Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia) as Paris Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) tries unsuccessfully to graft a new face, using kipnapped girls, onto his car crash victim daughter Christiane (Edith Scob) abetted by his assistant Louise (Alida Valli of The Third Man). Of course, it’s the face of his guilt-ridden soul for which he fruitlessly searches. And it’s the mask that Christiane is forced to constantly wear, and all we ever see of her face, that give her eyes the freedom and window to her soul that her father would never know. This UK release doesn’t have the goodies of Criterion’s release in the States that include Franju's first movie of 1949, the short documentary Blood of the Beasts (Le Sang des bêtes) about Paris slaughterhouses. But the short extra with Franju at the editing desk shows his almost clinical obsession with detail. And long awaited is a release of his Judex (1963) screened recently at a Franju festival in New York.
Italian cult horror director Dario Argento has Mother of Tears out on DVD. Not the greatest gore-chiller by far but nobody quite does it like Argento. The Dario Argento Collection is out on DVD in the States at the end of the month.
And Swedish vampire film Not Like Others from first timer Peter Pontikis has been bought in Cannes by NonStop Sales(worldwide). Two vampire sisters Vera and Vanja, are drifting apart as one wants to leave the other and lead a normal human life. Could be interesting.
[late edition]Argento’s daughter Asia (Mother of Tears) mesmerises again in Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate (released Stateside in March and just out straight to DVD in the UK). The drug smuggling story is nothing to speak of and the film never seems to ‘hang’ on anything – hence its straight to DVD cinema by-pass I guess. But the persistent purring and growling between Argento and Michael Madsen’s businessman always intrigues. As with Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep, Assayas seems to be trying to prise open the shells of Argento and Madsen’s actor masks, succeeding here more with the former rather than the latter. Yorick Le Saux’s beautiful cinematography soufflés Paris and Hong Kong into transient worlds constantly spinning round these two lives as if in one of those animations where two spirits converge and evaporate in the mists of time. And man, is Argento one seductive tigress.
Assayas' latest Summer Hours (already released in France and released July by Artificial Eye in the UK) stars Charles Berling, Juliet Binoche and Edith Scob (from Eyes Without a Face) is winning over friends this minute at the Cannes market ('off-fest'). A return to form some will say (what a useless phrase that is - as if he'd ever left one and indeed had a single entity to leave). And for lovers of the ancien Artificial Eye (who've just acquired select titles of both Wong Kar Wai (reissued rights for Chungking Express, Happy Together & some Jet Tone releases (WKW’s production company) and Hal Hartley (Trust, Henry Fool, The Girl from Monday and some shorts)from Fortissimo), ex-AE founders Robert Beeson and Pam Engel's (and the late Andi Engel) new company New Wave Films has acquired two films in this year's Cannes competition, the Dardennes brothers The Silence of Lorna and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys. And a September release is slated for Johanna Hogg's quietly wonderful 2007 London Film Festival Fipresci award winner Unrelated.
It may be a slightly cult-sacrilegious to say this but Simon Rumley's horror The Living and the Dead (DNC Entertainment DVD) is way more terrifying than the Argento - gruesomely contorted in the British sense of Twisted Nerve (1968). While Donald (Brit stalwart thesp Roger Lloyd Pack) is away, his mentally ill son James (Leo Bill) keeps the on-call nurse at bay pretending to his bedridden mother, adamant and ecstatic that he can manage things. It's immediately gripping and whenever things seem to be getting predictable the film flips on its head again and again. Far from enjoyable but it'll make your flesh crawl.
And 29-year-old Thomas Clay has just surprised industry folk at Cannes with his Soi Cowboy - sex tourism and mafia bloodshed - shot in Thailand. As industry magazine Variety noted "in this age of Google's omniscience the film somehow managed to shoot without leaving a trace on the Web."
Dracula sinks his teeth into Royal Mail history
And for a bit of very well constructed ‘multiplex’ fun you could do much worse than the Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) who pays his way in Hollywood by scoring sonorous crap for a TV crime show (the next Carter Burwell he aint). But spare a thought for his Dracula musical with puppets (Gothic Neil Diamond according to Russell Brand’s Brit rocker Aldous Snow). Great casting (Bretter’s a fairly non-descript guy) and if I were the gal Rachel (Mila Kunis) I’d certainly go out with him after seeing his show.
American indy writer/director/editor John Sayles’ Honeydripper(Trailer) is a ‘Kind of Blue’ Miles Davis jazz solo wafting through the open windows of a summer’s day. It’s 1950 and old boogie-woogie cat Tyrone ‘Pinetop’ Purvis (Danny Glover) runs the ailing Honeydripper Lounge (in aptly named Harmony, Alabama) and lays off old Bertha Mae (Mable John) announcing a one-only gig for famous Guitar Sam. But he don’t show, so the unflappable Tyrone hires young musician Sonny Blake (Gary Clark, Jr.’s impressive screen debut) who’s just been arrested and put on cotton-pickin' duty by Sherrif Pugh (Stacy Keach) for "gawkerry with intent to mope." Sonny is the ‘shock of the new’ with his home-made electric guitar. As in all Sayles films there’s nothing in this film trying to impress or hector you. At last year’s London Film Fest I met Gary Clark at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London and he looked dapper enough to be attending Ascot. Honeydripper is all about appearance and change ‘cause it’s all about music. Clark could have arrived looking ‘black street cred’ but he wanted to look ‘swell’ for his London debut. Sayles film talks difference not through shock but musical harmony. Sometimes that harmony is foreign and strange but oftentimes it’s all so strangely familiar. What matters is that it’s always rooted in the soul.
YouTube: Danny Glover and John Sayles Discuss Distribution (American Museum of the Moving Image )
Liza Minnelli appears at London’s Coliseum on May 25 and 27, and if you’ve never seen her live then you’re missing one of the greatest musical treats of the century. She doesn’t seem to breathe yet she clearly does.
Lunch with a legend
Some Came Running is all about our search for beauty (the Senses of Cinema article on director Vincente Minnelli excellently explores his themes). Frank Hirsh(Frank Sinatra) is a boozy ex-serviceman (egged on by Dean Martin’s Bama) writer unrequitedly in love with Gwen (Martha Hyer). When loyal but dim Ginny(Shirley Maclaine) learns Frank has just had an article accepted by The Atlantic Monthly she waits doggedly on the porch, clutching the magazine waiting for his return. Initially he simply rejects her, but then invites her in. Ginny loves Hirsh and though he needs to be loved he doesn’t want to seem to be so. What follows is one of the saddest 15 minutes in Hollywood cinema. With their bodies trapped and framed in the huge Cinemascope canvas, Hirsh both demeans and cherishes Ginny finally asking her to marry him. She of course accepts and they end up in a fairground where tragedy strikes them down. "You've led me by the hand into a strange, wonderful world, a world to dream of," says Katharine Hepburn to Robert Taylor in Minnelli’s Undercurrent (1946). Michel Chion’s Cahiers du cinéma obituary for the director was entitled "Une certain idée de la beauté" and experimentalist Chris Marker used to watch An American in Paris while shooting his documentary Les Statues meurent aussi about beautiful art being an "instrument of a desire to seize the world." The soulful glimpses and moments of Some Came Running’s utter realism could only exist within Minnelli’s melodramatic framework. If you took away the frame from a door it would never be open or closed simply suspended in time and space. And is fundamentalism a doorframe without a door? And try as one might, you can never take away the edit from the spectator who will always map a point of arrival and departure. And if you take away belief, even an imagining of the nihilistic self or a hereafter, one is left like a sci-fi teleportation gone wrong. Forever adrift in the cosmos neither born nor decayed.
Thursday 1 May 2008
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And for those voting in the London elections the only advice I have to offer is: I wouldn't place too much faith in local council or housing association accommodation. It's made my life a total misery over the past 6 years. Let's hope I live to write that book for the General Election in two years. But like most other social works in London it's so UNBELIEVABLE it's become ever so normal and commonplace.
I was actually going to erase the entry today but I was assaulted again at 12.45pm today in my hallway by my neighbour. Dominion Housing Group is the housing association. Years I've complained and nobody took any notice. Words cannot describe my feelings as I'm sure you can imagine......
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I was actually going to erase the entry today but I was assaulted again at 12.45pm today in my hallway by my neighbour. Dominion Housing Group is the housing association. Years I've complained and nobody took any notice. Words cannot describe my feelings as I'm sure you can imagine......
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