We are the bees of the invisible

‘What’s happening to the world?’ many of us are now asking and mankind has always asked throughout the centuries. Oftentimes, though, the obvious needs to be stated in order to provoke human debate. Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) promulgates this question through the multiplexes with his new film The Happening (trailer). Setting himself the challenge of making a scary movie “outdoors in daylight” and inspired by scary movies based on real events, in particular Hitchcock’s The Birds, the manner in which questions are posed by Shyamalan is far more interesting than any answers responding to ‘is this successful filmmaking?’ The honeybees are disappearing and teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) doesn’t have an answer for his class. "We will fail to acknowledge that there are forces at work beyond our understanding." As the denizens of America’s upper eastern districts start going haywire, forced to suicide by something unknown, Elliot and Alma (Zooey Deschanel) flee New York with a child in tow like fugitives from John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. Seemingly there’s something in the wind blowing ill. As for the acting, the usually impressive Wahlberg is a bit ‘one-note’ here and Deschanel, though well-cast as an ‘everywoman’ figure, has a few too many irritating ‘concerned’ reaction shots. But there’s no mistaking the individual tonality of The Happening even though its score may not enthral one as much as others in the repertoire of composer M. Night Shyamalan.
La Scala to stage Gore's An Inconvenient Truth as an opera in 2011.
Ecotowns: for and against
Last flight of the honeybee?
Bees translate dances of foreign species
Nim Chimpsky: the chimp who thought he was a boy
And yet another proposed 'lease of life' for the London landmark Battersea Power Station that closed in 1983.

The dialectic of man vs natural forces is always the concern of director Michelangelo Antonioni with L'Avventura(B/W-1960) and Identification Of A Woman(Identificazione di una Donna ) [or should that be Identità](colour-1982) out on Mr. Bongo DVD this week (mid-price, no extras). The Cannes premiere of L’Avventura outraged many in the audience who deemed it incomprehensible. But for Martin Scorsese it “gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the movies...[it] changed my perception of cinema and the world around me and made both seem limitless.” A bunch of Italian bourgeois is on a Sicilian boat trip when one of them disappears on an island. Her lover Sandro and her friend Claudia then begin a relationship. And that’s it for the plot. Antonioni said that the film charted a world in which “we make use of an ageing morality, of outworn myths, of ancient conventions” with his characters finding no way to relate to one another except “at a sort of reciprocal pity”. They are weathered like rocks on the coastline; some desolate, some becoming the refuge of other plants and creatures with Antonioni the geologist/oceanographer - goggles on. Personally, I prefer his last film Beyond the Clouds to Identification but it’s nonetheless fascinating with its alluring somewhat androgynous woman, one of whom Enrico Fico becoming Antonioni’s wife. There was outrage when UK’s Channel Four screened it years ago (those were the days). And as far as I know, the film’s first time on DVD either in the UK or the States (Facets issued a 2001 VHS, and there is an Italian sub-titled DVD with extras).
Criterion’s L’Avventura DVD in the States (very 'funny' voice-over on American trailer "a new experience in motion picture eroticism")
Story Of A Love Affair(Mr. Bongo DVD)

In the same year 1960 when L’Avventura opened, American painter Cy Twombly had consummated his love of Italy by occupying a Roman palace and opening another show in the city. And the Antonioni similarities are many. Tate Modern’s retrospective of his work is long overdue. It’s been 16 years since the artists’ catalogue raisonnes (complete works) began emerging and with the exception of a 2004 works on paper show at London’s Serpentine Gallery (touring from St.Petersburg’s Hermitage) and a concurrent show to open London’s Gagosian Gallery, there’s been nothing in the UK. Twombly probably isn’t known outside the art world, but for years he’s been mentioned in the same breath as other American art icons. (He was nicknamed ‘Cy’ after his pro baseball player father’s hero the legend ‘Cyclone’ Young). Why has it taken so long then? Well, as Tate director and co-curator of the show Nicholas Serota said at its opening, he’s often seen as an “intellectual and cerebral artist” whose work “doesn’t shriek immediately”. When his life’s work (he’s 80 this year) is seen in totality like this it engenders something very strange and meditative in the viewer, not unlike an Antonioni experience. So the show needs you to offer it your time.

And from Room 1 it’s easy to see why fellow artist and Black Mountain college grad Robert Rauschenberg was so encouraging. The small DIY sculptures are intriguing in their own right not merely historically so. And here are the beginnings of Twombly’s ‘scribbles’ - his graphic lines with lead and coloured pencil, pastel and house paint and ‘automatic writing’ (the year prior his U.S. army assignment was as a cryptographer). There’s even a concealed “Fuck” in the 1955 Academy. Moving through to the early 60’s of Room 3 his later recurrent themes of water, the sea, life and it’s detritus appear, “the grit of everyday life even when referring to the past” according to Serota. “I have known the madness of my scattered dreams” eddies its way to the bottom of the Herodiade canvas of 1960. Room 4 has the Ferragosto series (1961) inspired by the Roman holiday of fertility and maturity, his hand-smeared paint “flowing through the body...excremental” says the audio guide and Twombly using paint at his most ferocious. More streams, more rivers of calligraphic line glide the show on. Peek at the Aurora sculpture named after the Russian Revolution battleship with its plastic rose prow before sailing through the doomed drownings of Leandro. Respite and seclusion arrive with “my ponds” paintings as Twombly liked to call them or ‘green paintings’ as they’re known from the 1988 Venice Biennale inspired by the Rococo Venice of Tiepolo - one inscribed with lines from Twombly’s favourite poet Rilke. The large Four Seasons (Quattro Stagione) from the Tate’s own collection and New York’s MoMA lobby are re-united in Room 11 and if you know the work of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, Untitled (In memory of Alvaro de Campos) is a memorial sculpture to Pessoa’s fictional personae and a very fitting tribute considering it almost melts away unnoticed. The Iraq war and Homer’s Illiad inspired the last room of enormous red loops (Gagosian, New York) dripping down the canvas. The voyage may be over and though it didn’t seem that eventful, memories of the trip continue flashing through your mind for some time to come.
Slide show, writings on Twombly
Front Row discussion with artist Maggie Hambling(17 June) and Nightwaves(17 June)
Getting the hang of it (Financial Times)
The new Da Vinci Code: Secrets of the Sistine Chapel
Blek le Rat, the man who gave birth to Banksy
Tracey Emin: My Life In A Column- the Royal Academy

The Ruins trailer director Carter Smith started out with gritty documentary-style portraits of teen life in America’s mid-West, fashion photography and then high profile commercials (Lancome, Hilfiger, Tiffany’s). And The Ruins team comes with the sort of pedigree many films only dream of: based on Academy Award® nominee Scott Smith’s (A Simple Plan) other book The Ruins, Darius Khondji (too many amazing credits to mention) as cinematographer, Grant Major (The Lord of the Rings and King Kong) as production designer, Lizzy Gardiner (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) as costume designer, visual effects supervisor Gregory L. McMurray (Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Sphere, Broken Arrow, The Core) and Graeme Revell (too many to mention) as composer. See what I mean! If you didn’t know all this then you’d have an OK time. But if you are in ‘this’ know then the film comes as a crashing disappointment. It’s a serious horror movie about a vine growing on Mayan ruins seeking sustenance from its human visitors: easily a double-bill player with The Happening. Prosthetics designer Jason Baird conjures some fairly gruesome flesh removal it must be said, and the ‘talking’ flowers on the vine aren’t as corny as they sound. The cast, particularly the talented and awarded (Independent Spirit Awards) Jena Malone (Into the Wild, Donnie Darko, Cold Mountain, Pride and Prejudice) keep alive the fear but while the sang-chaud vine terrifies the cast, it just ain’t enough to terrify an audience. There are no jokes, even tongue or genre in cheek, to be had here. And if ever there was a man-eating cinematic plant requiring back-story, this most certainly is one, because none of the characters share any emotional dialectic beyond present danger.
Robert Altman,not the director but the photographer of the 60s, more info has a London show in July.

It’s not very fashionable to admit I know, but I had a far more exciting time seeing Stallone’s Rambo again at a screening of the Sony blu-raydisc due out on Monday (DVD). I’ve always thought it ridiculous that the Rambo franchise should be relegated to some blood-thirsty niche rather than strung up in the lineage of John Ford and Sam Peckinpah. “Fuck the world,” is John Rambo’s greeting to planet earth. “You’re trying to change what is...That we’re animals. Like the war that’s going on up there, anywhere, it’s in the blood. War’s natural, it’s peace that’s an accident. It’s what is.” Emotional subtlety, of course, isn’t what Rambo’s about. You never peer into the soldiers’ souls as in a Peckinpah pic. All you get is the primal urge to survive. Yet Rambo does make clear very early on that one dead person is one too many for him. But he ends up doing what he has to do. And wow, is it a helluva well-made rollercoaster movie. Does the world really need to have its face rubbed in its own violent excrement, though? Sure beats political correctness and the ostriches of both Left and Right and the Centrists who pretend the sands will disappear.

Had a fun chat to John Schoonraad and Alistair Anderson (special effects on the new Terry Gilliam The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Oliver Stone’s Alexander, The Mummy Returns and Vertical Limit) at the screening. The latter’s been unemployed for quite a while (I mention this to stress how hard and precarious a business it is). John (prosthetic and makeup effects on Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, the recent Bond Casino Royale, Branagh’s The Magic Flute and many more including Björk’s Hunter video) was in better spirits as he’s doing prosthetics on the Benicio Del Toro /Anthony Hopkins The Wolf Man. Mark Romanek of the Robin Williams One Hour Photo was to direct but now its Joe Johnston from Jumanji. John’s eyes were bulging (it wasn’t just the hayfever) when enthusing about the production design (Rick Heinrichs) and Del Toro’s star stunt double. Mucho gossip but there’s such a thing as a confidentiality agreement. And we also lamented the passing this week of the great Stan Winston, more, Skinwalkers.
The Times obituary

Optimum releases the Ultimate Rambo Collection with all four films in a blu-ray box set including Sony's great array of extras (most on the DVD too): Rambo IV has audio commentary with Sylvester Stallone, Courage and Inspiration: The Musical Legacy of Jerry Goldsmith (the composer), and audio commentary with branching featurettes on all the film’s special effects.

Teeth (official trailer) is another first time feature writer/director on a microscopic budget - actor turned helmer Mitchell Lichtenstein and oh, does he impress with this film. I began by wondering if it was just a ‘one-gag’ movie based on the female vagina dentata myth Lichtenstein had picked up in literature class from prof Camille Paglia. But this film’s right up there in the ‘Shakespeare’ pantheon of religio-comedic-horror. Dawn (Jess Weixler) has a toothed vagina and attends a local chastity group. She meets nice boy Tobey (Hale Appleman –his real name!) who [Spoiler alert] in an idyllic waterfall cave can’t resist any longer his urge for the Eve in front of him, losing his ‘member’ in the moment of bliss. (Great prosthetics in this film too). Thus arises the tip of Dawn’s iceberg on its voyage of discovery. Bear in mind that a Virginia school board were still censoring textbook drawings of the inner vagina (never the penis of course) in the year 2000 and the US government spends an estimated $100 million annually to fund sexual abstinence programmes (a throw back to the Adolescent Family Life Act of the 1980s).
Front Row discussion (18 June)
Understanding... Vagina Dentata
The doco Jesus Camp (ICA DVD) about exactly that for pre-teenage Christians must be seen to be believed (trailer).
Girl goes to court over her 'silver ring thing'. She lost her case.

[Addition]
The Cement Garden (DVD) harks back to the radical experimental days of Brit cinema in the early 90s. Its sensitive cross-dressing scene prompted Madonna to pen a fan letter to writer/director Andrew Birkin and use the scene in one of her videos. Ian McEwan’s [YouTube Part 2)books (Atonement) on our dark, unspoken urges aren’t ever easy to adapt for the screen and Birkin won top directing prize at the Berlin Film Fest for incest themed Cement Garden. After this success (and irksome Hollywood experiences) Birkin has never made a film since (although he still writes screenplays e.g Perfume (2006) with Cement's producer). The DVD’s loaded with fascinating extras: compelling full commentary with cast and crew (unfortunately not including Charlotte Gainsbourg), screen tests, designs, and a short pre-screening Q & A from this year. Listen out for the score by a then unknown Edward Shearmur who stepped in to replace the Charles Ives and Wagner Birkin initially had in mind. Using young child and early teen actors also raises interesting moral questions that many would prefer to remain hidden and unanswered.

Worth checking out too is Simon Rumley’s recent low-budget socio-horror The Living and the Dead (DNC DVD) with its ‘how to make one of these yourself’ audio commentary plus one of his early shorts.
And the hitherto untold story of the British 'B' movies, Truly, Madly, Cheaply on BBC Four TV with films: so far the unmissable seriously warped Psychomania (1971) (flower-power bikers anyone?)and Cover Girl Killer (1959)showing how wonderful actors often get stuck with their TV roles, in this case Harry H. Corbett (Steptoe and Son).

In Search of a Midnight Kiss (trailer) is an indie B/W pic set on Los Angeles’ New Year’s Eve with nice guy Wilson (Scoot McNairy) forced to post on Craig’s List ‘Misanthrope seeks misanthrope’. Depressed but definitely not dissolute actrine Vivian (Sara Simmonds) replies. The film’s a bit of a throw back to indie relationship movies of yesteryear (Woody Allen’s ghost still looming), but there’s never a false note here from writer/director Alex Holdridge. Predictable? Well, maybe, but human life is most of the time. And Holdridge’s mastery of traditional dialogue and pacing is quite refreshing after years of meandering ‘mumblecore’ in the cinema. And if you haven’t got Wilson’s ‘blag’ to get into the magnificent, crumbling old picture palaces of LA, make sure you buy a ticket for one of the tours and hope there’s a girl for you in the group. You can’t help but fall in love once inside these magical pleasure domes.


Mouth to Mouth , US site, (trailer) (now on DVD)is Alison Murray’s indie film that brought Ellen Page to the world’s attention. She plays a young runaway kid Sherry who joins SPARKS (Street People Armed With Radical Knowledge) on its journey across Europe. They find their utopia in a remote Portuguese vineyard, even joined by Sherry’s ‘right-on’ reformed mum. But like all utopias they begin resembling the workaholic rat race they despised. “You know you can’t go on living the same so called life you’ve been living.” Exec produced by Canadian director Atom Egoyan, Mouth to Mouth, though a nice little film, has none of Egoyan’s acute ‘strangeness’.

Ellen Page in Juno with audio commentary from director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody is out on DVD. And
Ellen Page on David Letterman’s show
And the now classic American indie gem Variety is out on (Kino DVD) in the States. IFC Films article

Writer/director Rupert Wyatt has been on the horizon for a while developing features and directing TV so The Escapist arouses a lot of interest and thankfully doesn’t disappoint too much. Frank (Brian Cox) wants to jail break to see his daughter and the escape is told through flashback. Therein lies the problem. Cox plays crims standing on his head (see Michael Mann’s Manhunter that pre-dates the more successful Hannibal Lector films) and he’s well supported by this crème Brit cast. But they’ve been some pretty stunning prison break movies out on DVD lately e.g. Runaway Train for a Hollywood take and Jacques Becker’s 1959 art-house Le Trou. Wyatt’s escape scenes are really riveting (you could be watching a Hollywood budget), so much so that when you return to the prison’s mundanities you feel quite deflated. You wonder whether it’s all been a dream for Frank. A touch of Polish director Andrzej Wajda is needed here to balance out the film. Impressive Brit filmmaking nonetheless.

Painter/writer/director John Maybury has been a long-time darling of the Brit art-house through his work with director Derek Jarman and his brilliant evocation of painter Francis Bacon’s world in Love is the Devil. The Edge of Love is the world of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas according to playwright Sharman MacDonald (Keira’s mum) and seen through the eyes of two woman Vera (Keira Knightley) and his wife Caitlin (the very impressive again, Sienna Miller). As you’d expect from Maybury it’s beautifully filmed but lacks the sensory smells, tastes and touch of Love is the Devil. Alcohol was like an intravenous drip for Thomas yet you never get a whiff of it in this film. High hopes as David Lynch’s composer Angelo Badalamenti writes the score but there’s none of the woozy eraticism that might characterise Thomas’ world. And though the film is more about his women rather than Dylan Thomas himself, the sense of him as their ‘D.H. Lawrencian’ anchor becomes rather lost amid cinematic design reverie.

Another problem, without giving the plot away, is the fact that Thomas is portrayed to be something he wasn’t- a bastard of a friend to Vera’s husband Captain Killick. Poetic license with his love-life (did Vera really have an affair with Thomas?) is one thing, but as the script rather prosaically notes, poets “feed off life”. So by promulgating to a possibly new readership in a major film that Thomas the man couldn’t condone Killick’s actions obviously gives the wrong impression of Thomas the poet. Exactly the opposite was true. While art doesn’t always imitate life, Thomas’ most certainly did. One of my favourite Thomas quotes comes from a lecture he was giving in the States when blind-drunk he began his address by asking the audience, “If every hermaphrodite was a schizophrene, which half would you choose?” Maybe Sharman’s script should have used that quote to at least defend her case.
Aeronwy Thomas on The Edge of Love and her father, Dylan Thomas
Sienna Miller: a sense of theatre
Once we had Britten and Bacon; where are the cultural giants now?

Zeitgeist in New York have released some Derek Jarman on DVD, Caravaggio , and Wittgenstein
Bill Douglas Trilogy (BFI DVD) and Julie Christie talks about her career in a rare interview.

What was supposed to be Britain’s New Labour tropical cruise of a lifetime has somewhat turned into an Antarctic fact finding mission. A wee chilly on the deck of the unruly Britannia as its captain Chancellor Alistair Darling calmly assured passengers of the country’s financial stability at a Mansion House dinner Wednesday night. He must have been pleased at Thursday’s announcement that the retail spending index had its biggest monthly gain in 22 years (or possibly a bit perturbed that passengers might be about to don life-jackets and jump ship with as much bounty as they could carry). Anyone seen the stoker from the boiler room?

Brown wins 42-day detention vote by a whisker

And another of the banes of London life its local councils are also circling the ship. A bit like the seagulls – I’m sure they do some good in life but all we see are their droppings on the poop deck.
Teabags banned from compost
Now bin police get tough over... a teabag
Councils send in bin snoopers

And I more than commiserated with the woman who thought that a refund she received was odd but after checking it out by telephone started celebrating only to be brutally told to repay it:
Littlewoods demands return of £700 refund
Victory in Littlewoods battle
I received a council demand the other day for several hundred pounds they overpaid me dating back 6 years. Could it be that I started rocking the boat? Surely just a co-incidence. And when things like this happen:
Oyster ordeal
you wonder why we can’t easily sue Transport for London for all the delays and signal failures tube commuters still suffer every second day. Flowers and chocolates just won’t cut that mustard. And with all the budgetary stress of the Olympics, have a listen to BBC Radio4’s The Archive Hour The Ration Book Olympics on how the 1948 Olympics was staged on a shoestring. Maybe I could stage an alternative LucresLondon Olympics. Competitors could dress like tube trains and ‘bendy’ buses. The hurdling events would be fun.

British troop presence (many of whom will be advisors rather than combatants) in Afghanistan was increased (just after President Bush had made his last visit to these shores) only to see more deaths including the first female casualty. And a glass/steel sculpture by artist Jaume Plensa, situated on the roof of the new wing of BBC Broadcasting House in Portland Place (adjacent to the spire of All Souls Church), entitled Breathing opened this week. It commemorates the journalists who have died in the war zones and every night a light beam extending one kilometre into the sky will illuminate the sculpture for 30 minutes, in tandem with the BBC's ten o'clock news bulletin.

The Independent’s stalwart war correspondent Robert Fisk reveals the classical music that consoles him- BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions last Sunday. Only 1 more day to listen again to this.

Based on Michael Rudman’s 1984 Broadway production of Arthur Miller's 1949 play Death of a Salesman (now out in a Special Collector’s edition in Metrodome’s Classics DVD) was directed for TV by radical German Volker Schlöndorff retaining the artificiality of the stage. The extra is a riveting feature length making of doco. Willy Loman (Dustin Hoffman) is an Every ‘American’ Man figure who having worked all his life as a travelling salesman is too proud to retire and take a job offer from his old (now successful) friend Charley (Charles Durning). For many, Miller’s plays will be a new experience and watching this DVD is an experience you are not likely to forget in a hurry. You could watch this film as a late teenager, middle-aged, or old as the hills and all would be moved to tears. I must have seen this play dozens and dozens of times (including a remarkable Biff from a then unknown Mel Gibson opposite Warren Mitchell- YouTube of his 1996 performance) yet it never fails to lose its relevance or devastating power. Willy has such hopes for his sons Biff (John Malkovich) and Happy (Stephen Lang) but ends up suffocating them. He has apparitions of his successful Uncle Ben who advises Biff, “never fight fare with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.” For all their faults, the Lomans are one of the most honest families you’ll ever find. And therein lies the tragedy. Willy only wants to better them all out of suburbia, “you’ve got to break your neck to see a star in this yard”. Biff: “Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous begging fool of myself when all that I want is out there waiting for me the minute I say, I know who I am...I’m just what I am that’s all...Would you take that phoney dream and burn it before something happens. ” The play is about following your own dreams and not those of others or America:
“Willy Loman never earned a lot of money, his name was never in the paper, he’s not the finest character that ever lived, but he’s a human being. And a terrible thing is happening to him, so attention must be paid. He must not be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention. Attention must finally be paid to such a person...a small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.”

[Addition]
Couscous (La graine et le mulet- The Secret of the Grain) – with the last word a play on the mullet fish and the stubbornness of a mule)- is written and directed by former actor Abdellatif Kechiche and set in the sleepy French seaside town of Sète. Like most cities on the southern French coast, Arabic immigrants and French inhabitants rub along as best they can. (Trailer in French)Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares) is a 60 year-old divorcee who’s repaired ships all his life, and like Willy Loman, is being forced into semi-retirement or else. But he has a dream to open a restaurant on an old cargo ship in the harbour specialising in the unbeatable coucous cooked by his female relatives. Shot mostly in documentary close-up style with a script that seems effortlessly improvised (but isn’t), this film is surprising gripping even at 2.5 hours. The comparison would be Kechiche’s fellow director based in Marseilles, Robert Guédiguian, but Kechiche is funnier, less depressing though no less poignant; Coucous never lectures, preferring to ooze with the esprit and sun of the South. Like Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Couscous is rooted in the precise nature and locale of its characters yet it’s these qualities that allow the film to resonate universally for a wider audience.

Great Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) live video singing his song Hurt
Johnny Cash's haunting version

Ikiru (Living) (B/W 1952){Criterion YouTube trailer) is Akira Kurasawa’s magnificent Japanese classic given a new print for its BFI run next month. Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) is an ageing civil servant (he likens himself to an Egyptian ‘mummy’) who's given his life to his job in town planning when one day he learns he has inoperable cancer. His son is not too pleased about his ‘friendship’ with young toy maker-ess (Miki Odagiri) but it gives him a lease of life prompting him to build a kids’ playground on a disused plot of land. “If his zeal cannot be understood then the world is dark indeed,” reflects a colleague after his death as they join in a sake wake debating who actually created and thought of the playground. Still as haunting and relevant today as it ever was. Treat yourself to this one summer evening at the BFI.
Japanese Gems BFI season
Tatsuya Nakadai tribute at New York's FilmForum
Syndromes and a Century BFI DVD (trailer)
blog on the Thai censorship of this film
One of the best American family dramas in a long-time, The Savages is out on DVD.
Killer of Sheep (1979)written, directed, produced and shot by Charles Burnett exploring urban African-Americans in Los Angeles' Watts district. Often likened to Italian neorealism, it was selected for preservation in the United States Library of Congress for its cultural importance.

Irish Film Season 2008 at the Riverside Studios in West London including Alfred Hitchcock’s rarely seen film of Sean O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock (1930) and Poitin the first feature to be made entirely in the Irish language.

The relatively unknown Italian school of late C20th painting Italy’s Divisionist Painters opens at the National Gallery. More on that in a couple of days when I’ve seen it. There’s an excellent accompanying film season all with shorts (cheap seats, though some will be DVD projections): L’Avventura, Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers, plus the rarely seen Bertolucci La Commare secca (The Grim Reaper) and Olmi’s Il posto (The Job) .
Italian Divisionists bring Radical Light to National Gallery

And for a funny take (and totally revolutionary filmmaking) on daily life, watch out for the cameo of depressive Dane Lars von Trier in The Boss of It All (out on DVD), IFC (US trailer) and Zentropa's really wacky trailer.
Lars Von Trier's funny turn
I'm a control freak - but I was not in control

Interview with classical music’s bad boy Nigel Kennedy:
'I didn't want to be the Des O'Connor of the violin'
And Jonathan Miller directs Purcell's opera Dido & Aeneas for the Chelsea Festival (Tues 24 June) conducted by Philip Pickett and New London Consort with some recently discovered new material. As always with Miller I'm sure it'll be quietly provocative.
And BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time Music of the Spheres gives you much to think on’t.