Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?

"We sometimes photograph things we can never be," notes notorious American photographer Bruce Weber in his idiosyncratic self-indulgent but no-less engaging take on the auto-biographical doco Chop Suey (the word originates from the Chinese Guangdong dialect meaning mixed bits) first released in 2002 and re-released this week in cinemas by Metrodome. Weber is a gay showman of the body rather than the mind, netting such diverse entities into his circus as Brit explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, the singer and lesbian icon Frances Faye, Robert Mitchum, and Vogue fashion guru Diana Vreeland. His beautifully buttocked boyfriend Peter Johnson is the doco’s willing audience to this melee that includes him posing nude with an elephant.

This doco is timely in that it reminds one again of the current debate about celebrity culture (particularly in Britain) and the aspirations of the ‘hoi-polloi’ (discussed BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze (Wed 2 and Sat 5 July). (The political debate about the gay community and gay marriages rages on, of course). Well known American journo-provocateur Lee Seigel has just published Against the Machine in which he questions whether the internet is our both our friend and our foe. Lee Siegel on The Daily Show.

The friend part is obvious but not the Jeckell/Hyde turning point. Personally, my neurones start revolting like the mechanical objects in that early Woody Allen sketch when I’m appended to one of those internet ‘friends’ lists’ that are often (though of course not always) as nutritionless as a boiled plastic boot. Should this blog be read in the same democratic light as that written by a 16 year-old? Should the latter be given the same privileges as moi? Should I have hidden my name and journalistic credentials and remained anonymous? Is admitting to having written for national newspapers now worth less than admitting to a sleep with a famous footballer? Both ITV London news and BBC’s Newsnight Review had ‘junior’ (they looked under 12) panels this week to critically discuss the merits of the stage show High School Musical.
The Guardian Young Arts Critic Competition 2008
The Royal Academy Summer Show may hang unknown artists aside leading names such as Jeff Koons, Tony Cragg and Gavin Turk, but each room is still curated with accepted winners and rejected losers. Is and should cyberspace resemble one big auction room unburdened of curatorship where Monet vies equally for your attention as Jeff Koons, the neighbour’s UpsideDown Bicycle (circa 2008) or indeed my photos on this site? The ‘professionalizing’ of everyone's amateurish impulses as I heard it described on radio the other day. Being one in the many you now have to prove to your peers that you’re many in the one whilst trying not to drop Leibniz in the soup like a falling toupee.
New York Times 2006 Lee Siegel interview

I’m not an Amy Winehouse expert but watching on TV her only full gig this year at Glastonbury was a riveting hour. And when it all boils down to it what you see is what you see and wouldn’t be the same experience for her audience if it weren’t for the many pitfalls of such a recent career. The by-passing of record labels by individuals on the internet has obviously allowed more ‘Amys’ to break through relying on their talent rather than their political agenda. The public has voted. But once through, should one have to carry such moral role model burdens on one’s shoulders? Is Pete Doherty any different to The Sex Pistols or the Rolling Stones in their day? America’s relationship to celebrity is very clear-cut – you can bare a breast just make sure it’s not on national TV. You can smoke a joint as long as you’re related to the Presidential office or as long as you don’t get caught. And you can make fun of everything under the sun if you’re on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. Just not on syndicated TV.

Markers award students for writing obscenities on GCSE papers

Amy Winehouse Glastonbury 2008 losing game/ rich girl, Winehouse Punches a Fan! Glastonbury 08, Winehouse performing Rehab live at Glastonbury 2007.

Nothing new there and obviously Britain’s not dissimilar in most of those ways. What is worrying, though, is Britain’s trend towards an almost Orwellian non-secular Church/State unification of celebrity, politics and morality. In Soylent Green fashion, the populace eat the government’s celebrated Soylent ‘sea’ food ignorant that it is actually the reconstituted flesh of their fellow humans. One becomes a celebrity supposedly because you’re different, something to aspire to (some have ‘real talent’, some ‘talent’ at simply branding themselves). Nonetheless, the celebrity is different - is other than the workaday ‘me’- brightens up the life of commuting though magazines or social interaction though text messages. People aspire to be like them, the possibility of escape (remember the scene in the Sex and the City film where Carrie’s assistant may not be able to ever afford a designer handbag but she can rent one?). Yet in Britain, you’re not allowed to forget ‘where you came from’. You must be the impossible duality of both a celebrity and a ‘normal’ person. And yet you’re not allowed to inevitably ‘trip up’ and err like a normal person. As with smoking a joint in America, it’s OK to have an affair (in all senses of the simile) so long as your wife or significant other doesn’t find out.

The internet masses jeer at companies like Viacom fighting for their internet royalties yet many ‘mortals’ are the first to want to make their own money out of uploading a song or video. But is posting a clip illegally on YouTube really robbing the corporations of profit or free promotion for the product? They could argue that bypassing the official site denies the company of ‘hits’ and consequently advertising revenue. But does it reduce the royalties due to artists who were actively involved in making the product? What is the difference between me creating free but exclusive video/music for my .com and having someone pinch it for YouTube (or elsewhere) and that of a bigger company? Is it a valid argument to say that I need the intellectual property distribution rights to that material more than would a corporation? Passing off or altering another’s product to be your own is one thing (see Creative Commons) but what of controlling the distribution of ‘free’ product? Everyone is familiar with quotations in the press that are out of context and obviously many people wouldn’t wish their video or music to be seen and heard in certain contexts. Could YouTube be seen as a ‘certain context’ for some material? Context has obviously proved to have a financial value not simply a moral one in the past. Should cases be fought on an individual basis such as A Whiter Shade of Pale case in London's high court? The democracy of the internet...hmmmmmm......

Last week’s BBC TV The Andrew Marr Show had an interview with former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, YouTube’s far grainier version.

Met Police chief Sir Ian Blair to hold face-to-face meeting with Tarique Ghaffur

Police chief orders officer to crisis meeting over racism claim
Brian Paddick: Truth, lies and happy pills: sorry, but just how many backhanders do the Metropolitan Police receive? Serves you right, Sir Ian 'Beau' Blair as The Independent might dub you.

In another circus, but on a far off side of the world, is Canadian directorGuy Maddin with his auto biog My Winnipeg (also just opened last month in NYC). “Truths concealed by our decorum are unleashed in good melodrama,” he said this week in an interview describing the film as a “docu-fantasia”. Who seems more ‘truthful’ Bruce Weber in his auto-doc or Maddin? As he self-described, it’s the fantasy that makes us believe this really was Maddin’s childhood, suspending our disbelief. As with all his films, it’s shot like a surreal B/W silent movie using old cinematic techniques, intertitles – and here with his voice-over (he also gives ‘live’ narrations at some performances). “What is this dynamic is keeping me in Winnipeg?” “the coldest city in the world” he asks. As his mother is 92 he gets 87 year-old star of Edgar G. Ulmer's 1945 classic Detour to play his mum. Spanky the dog of an ex-girlfriend's substitutes for the family's Chihuahua, Toby. “My family came pre-mythologised, it was the city that had to catch up,” he said this week. He reinacts episodes from a TV serial LedgeMan about a perpetual suicide who in every episode is cajoled back inside by his mother. He imagines an ‘If Day’ with 5,000 uniformed Nazis pretending to invade and rename Winnipeg as ‘Himmlerstadt.’ A racetrack fire cause horses to stampede frozen into ice sculptures in the Red River that becomes a popular picnic spot for the locals the following year leading to a baby boom in the town. The perfectly functional ice-hockey stadium (where Maddin claims to have been born) gets demolished by private/city commercial greed. And on it goes. "Who is alive anymore?...It's so hard to remember," Maddin finally asks. Well his audience most certainly is thanks to Maddin. Did his mum sleep with an ice hockey celeb or was his dad the guy in the film who de-spooked furniture?
Your Winnipeg short film competition
Guy Maddin BFI season
Maddin interview on BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves (Thurs 3 July) and Front Row (Tues July 1)
Still unreleased in the UK Brand upon the Brain! is out August on Criterion DVD in the States.

Colleague Canadian David Cronenberg directs an opera version of his film The Fly in Paris before its Los Angeles debut in September.

Everyone knows the wacky French film Amélie directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (director of Alien Resurrection 1997) but what about his collaborations with Marc Caro? Optimum puts this right with its Jeunet et Caro Boxset - excellent value at £19.99 and loaded with extras. Delicatessen (1991) includes their rarely seen 25min film The Bunker of the Gunshots (1981). City of Lost Children (1995) has a commentary (English subtitles) by Jeunet alone (Caro hates doing them or even being seen, though he has acting roles in the films) and the Making Of docos are more interesting than usual DVDs and well edited to include screen tests and rehearsals. Each film inhabits a dystopian world - the underbelly sewers of Godard’s Alphaville – with washed out colours, contorted faces, and surreal existences - Terry Gilliam meets Billy Wilder. An ex-clown gets more than he bargained for when he starts work as a handyman for Delicatessen ’s butcher. Imagine Tom Waits re-editing Gilliam’s Grand Central waltz scene in The Fisher King . In City of Lost Children ‘gargoyley’ French actor Daniel Emilfork plays Krank who’s unable to dream so steals the dreams of children. Leader of the orphans is a mesmerisingly confident 9 year-old Judith Vittet as Crumb. When Vittet’s asked about acting she replies, “Well [big pause] you just do it.” Apparently she kept film continuity of her gang as well. Cinematographer Darius Khondji is mind-blowingly experimental with Caro’s designs, Pitof’s special effects (watch his directorial debut Vidocq) and the computer guys behind the morphing and cloning (who teamed up to form BUF Compagnie). You also get Jean-Paul Gaultier’s costumes and Angelo Badalamenti’s (of David Lynch fame) memorably superb score with Marianne Faithful’s haunting vocals over the closing credits. “If we don’t dream we die. We grow old before our time.” The world according to Jeunet.

Camden Arts Centre (not so much Camden as Swiss Cottage/Hampstead) has a summer coup de l’oeil with legendary ‘arthouse’ French filmmaker Chantal Akerman mounting a show. Anya Gallaccio has a room there too with her tree.

Jeunet and Caro managed to transcend the ‘arthouse’ problems of distribution (though City of Lost Children was more a cult hit in the States than homeland France). But spare a thought for Tartan (founded in 1982 by Hamish McAlpine) that went bust a few weeks ago, now in receivership, with its amazing library of films.
Tartan library to Palisades
New York’s ThinkFilm is having financial troubles too (IndieWire article)
But good news that New York distributor
Zeitgeist is still going strong. Happy 20th anniversary Emily.
And indie Brit distributor Dogwoof has launched an interesting ‘democratic’ site TheMoviesClub.
And Brit maverick Alex Cox just had a short Barbican season (now over, sorry) but you can still buy his new book X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker.
He's also this week's guest pundit on BBC Radio 4's the Film Programme.

Hit makers: The real stars of British film
The big exodus: Is the British film industry in crisis?

The annual BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall springs to life July 18. If you’re a couch potato many of the concerts are televised on BBC Four and a few on BBC 2. But there’s nothing like the real experience. Violinist Nigel Kennedy is back if not in favour then at least in tolerance returning from London music scene’s exile to play Elgar and a night with his jazz quintet. London DJ and musician Bishi takes us behind the scenes of her collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra on BBC TV's The Culture Show's slightly revamped website now hosting more video. There’s also an interview with wirewalker extrordinaire Philippe Petit who in 1974 illegally slung a tightrope between the almost completed Twin Towers in New York. Icon UK are releasing James Marsh’s haunting doco of human dream and perseverance Man on Wire August 1. There’s an ICA preview July 22. His first illegal walk was between the spires of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral in 1971. The Twin Towers Port Authority gave Petit a VIP pass to the Observation deck of the World Trade Centre. It was “valid forever”.

The Cars that Ate Paris is considered to be Australian director Peter Weir’s first film (though it was in fact his third) (trailer). Shot in 1974 it’s a weird mix of 70’s B horror movie (the opening akin to a cigarette commercial) and David Lynch psycho drama. The tiny Oz town of Paris has a mayor who takes car parking very seriously indeed and enlists the town’s stranded visitor Arthur Waldo as his man for the job. (Summer screening for Mayor Boris and Ken the former anyone? Make temporary peace with the parking attendants?) Spivved up cars rather than gunslingers rev their revenge on the town. Weir was ahead of the hunt if not the game here: John Carpenter’s novel Christine was written in 1983, Alex Cox’s film Repo Man was 1984, Spielberg’s Duel was 1972, and J.G. Ballard’s Crash was written in 1973. Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Black Top was 1971.

From the same indispensable DVD distributor Second Sight comes Peter Weir’s next film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) in a deluxe 3-disc box set (another bargain set at £19.99). Picnic is one of the first ‘break-out’ films that put the Oz industry on the map (My Brilliant Career was released in 1979). One disc is devoted to a new director’s cut that unusually is 8 minutes shorter not longer (the deleted scenes are included as extras and the original version gets a disc of its own). Initially this extra disc may seem like excess marketing but it raises a very interesting argument: does an audience or the director themselves own the experience of a film? Star of the film Anne-Louise Lambert is quite adamant in her view when people may have seen the film many times, “In a funny way it wasn’t his [Weir’s] to take things away from.” The film’s based on a Joan Lindsay book and the question of whether or not the mystery disappearance of the well-bred boarding schoolgirls on St. Valentine’s Day 1900 at Hanging Rock (in Victoria) was fact or fiction has dogged her ever since. People like solutions. “I’ve never made another story without an ending,” says Weir rolling his eyes recounting an American screening where a man threw a cup of coffee at the screen angered by the lack of closure. There’s an enthralling feature length (2hour) documentary A Dream Within a Dream researched/brilliantly edited/and directed by Mark Hartley with all the creative team and some great stories about Brit doyenne Rachel Roberts who played the schoolmistress (Vivien Merchant was slated to star but fell ill 10 days before shooting).

In the 70s it was fairly unthinkable for Australians to tackle a period film and Weir gives the film all the strangeness of a Joseph Losey pic. Altered frame rates are used to distort the viewer’s perception, and Russel Boyd’s photography captures the imposition of European values on the harsh Oz landscape by softening the lens with wedding veils (in David Hamilton style). When the first painters arrived on Oz shores they painted what they saw in a European style and it took decades for artists to capture the natural ruggedness culminating in Russell Drysdale’s parched figures. Oz novelist Patrick White viewed the film as a teenage Lesbian coming-of-age story, others simply as innocent teenage dreamers and circus riders on the verge of womanhood. Unforgettable, too, is the use of Romanian Gheorge Zamfi’s haunting pagan panpipes- the tall eucalyptus trees singing into eternity- mixed with Bruce Smeaton’s synth that could so easily sound tacky but doesn’t. Teenage kids will like the extra showing the amateur silent film started by 13 year-old enthusiast Tony Ingram in 1968 (he negotiated the rights but had to curtail his project when the feature film came on board). South Australia’s Martindale Hall (the school’s location) is available to hire by the way. Its story, too, is a sad one. The only way a wealthy settler could entice his amour over from England was by building this enormous house. In the end she never came.
Opening 10 min of Picnic on YouTube

Céline Sciamma's teenage coming-of-age Waterlilies (Naissance des pieuvres - with the beautiful French title of Birth of Octopusses)is out on DVD.

When filming, “people treat it [the Amazon forest] as an exterior when it’s really an interior,” explains John Boorman about his 1985 Emerald Forest, “You need to use a lot of lights to create the effect the forest has on the eye.” It’s the true story of an dam engineer’s10 year search for his young son (Charley Boorman) abducted by the Amazon’s ‘Invisible People’ who nurture him as one of their own. It was around this time that Al Gore began preaching his sermons about climate change to empty cathedrals. “Trees communicate producing antibodies when disease is spreading,” informs Boorman in the 30min interview extra (has Shyamalan seen this?), “while it’s a disaster for us [deforestation] it’s not for the forest...Once they’ve shaken off these human fleas they [the forests] can get back to what they were in 1,000 years...we’ve forgotten the symbiosis we have with nature.” The film may seem a little dated now after many other movies but on its release there was nothing else like it and Philippe Rousselot’s photography is breathtaking. The ‘Invisible People’ had no human contact until 1947 and Boorman spent time with them learning their customs recruiting urbanised Brazilian indians for the actual filming (their language is subtitled). The film’s closure still exerts a power on its audience even today and gets one thinking about the communal dreaming that is commonplace in primitive tribes. Would make a good double-bill with Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977).
Emerald Forest on this Latin American film blogsite

There Will Be Blood out on UK DVD

The relatively unknown Italian school of late C20th painting Italy’s Divisionist Painters (National Gallery) took their ideas on colour (as did Seurat and his friends) from Ogden N. Rood, an American physicist who held that light was produced by the oscillation of adjoining colours. It proves to be a somewhat disappointing show, though. Morbelli’s The Glacier (1910-12) catches one’s eye in the first room with its converging fields of colour but then the social realists and symbolists start becoming bland. Some of the paintings of ‘social change’ are indeed striking: the shafts of mordent light in Morbelli’s 1903 The Christmas of those left behind and For Eighty Cents (1893-5) with female rice workers bent over, bottoms up reflected in the water with all the beauty of flamingos. The final room is familiar with the scintillating almost psychedelic light of Balla and Boccioni or Carra’s ominous The City Rises from New York’s MOMA showing the cooling reservoirs of a power station.

There’s also an excellent accompanying film season all with shorts (cheap seats, though some will be DVD projections): 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
slide show from The Telegraph’s site

A quietly stunning show of light is Vilhelm Hammershøi: The Poetry of Silence at the Royal Academy. From memory, it seems slightly bigger than the Guggenheim Museum’s 1988 show- Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture a perfect dialectic for the artist’s Copenhagen interiors. The Royal Academy quotes Rilke on the wall of Room 1: “Hammershøi is not one of those about whom one must speak quickly. His work is long and slow, and at whichever moment one apprehends it, it will offer plentiful reasons to speak of what is important and essential in art.” The slanting bands of colour in his 1883 The Farm prove far more evocative than Mordelli’s Divisionist theory, yet most of Hammershøi’s landscapes aren’t nearly as interesting as his interiors, though his ochre Young Oak Trees of 1907 cling to the hill against the wind in Van Gogh defiance. There’s a must-have DVD doco on sale that ex-Monty Python and traveller Michael Palin made for the BBC. He notes that the artist never seemed interested in painting the extraordinary coastal views that he must have seen every morning when away from Copenhagen. When he paints the city’s docks, he paints the alleyways and grim recesses behind with the ships’ masts peeping out from above.

The Strandgade 30 interiors of his house are myriad shades of grey and grey-blue. Sometimes they’re seen as if through a long lens, furniture foreshortened. Huge doors become enormous entities taking on a life of their own. And always, the rooms seem to slant, to sway ever so slightly like plants growing towards the few hours of Danish winter sunlight or their memory of it. Sometimes his wife Ida is caught – her neck like a swan’s bathing in the rays – every one a still life worthy of Italian painter Morandi. The very thorough free exhibition leaflet quotes Hammershøi from 1907: “What makes me choose a motif are...the lines, what I like to call the architectural content of an image...there’s the light of course...but I think it’s the lines that have the greatest significance to me.” Look at the curved angularity of the Christiansborg Palace Chapel cupola as if through a telephoto lens, and his final double portrait with Ida from 1915. What would Hammershøi have done with a movie camera? A tantalising and quite possibly disappointing thought as he might reject the very notion. But then again...
Photos in the gallery’s Education Guide

Greenaway and Leonardo da Vinci

It’s not really fair to mention Anne Françoise Couloumy’s interiors in the same breath showing at Cynthia Corbett Gallery for a week behind the Academy in Cork Street and now back in Cynthia’s gallery in Wimbledon. Couloumy seems to be a disciple of Hammershøi but her mystery seems staged rather than organic. The same gallery has Klari Reis’s quite intriguing and confrontational ceramic-like paintings of pills with their constituents seen under a microscope.

Want to imagine what eating one’s lunch could be like always and everywhere in London instead of surrounded by architectural crap, then pop down to Bedford Square off Tottenham Court Road and sit under amid the Swoosh Pavilion or the yellow Corus Fresh Flower Pavilion (London Festival of Architecture). Government doesn’t need big bucks for these.

Went to last week’s pre-launch announcement of the Royal Academy’s autumn blockbuster Byzantium 330-1453 - one could almost imagine Russell Crowe leaping through the typeface to rescue the Holy Grail of Antioch (the Chalice will be on loan from the New York’s Met Museum). Does it have life after Dan Brown? (It was believed to be the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper). I was interested as Andrew Graham-Dixon’s BBC Four series The Art of Eternity was so engrossing. Professor Robin Cormack from the Courtauld opened by noting that Byzantium hadn’t a good press over the centuries, “a triumph of barbarism and superstition” spat Gibbons, “a disgrace to the human mind” moaned Voltaire. The curators want to rehabilitate that image and tell the story “all in one space in its totality” before the fragility of many objects will prevent them from ever being transported from their museums again. “You can’t understand Putin’s Russia without Byzantium,” said Cormack, the way “church and state support and supplement each other...it’s an extremely close parallel.” Of particular interest will be items that rarely ever leave St. Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai.
The Siege of Constantinople on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time
Obituary: Harry Lange (Nasa designer and Kubrick recruit to create the look of 2001: A Space Odyssey), BBC Radio 4's oral obituary in The Last Word.
Unveiled: bequest to the public of 18 masterpieces

Boundaries, trangressions and new views of the world are what propel writer/director Tom McCarthy (remember his impressive 2003 debut The Station Agent ) in his latest The Visitor. For some, this film will seem a far too simplistic but UK distributor Halcyon (released in April by Overture Films in New York) believes enough in its wider than ‘art-house’ appeal to run an expensive poster campaign on the London underground. What’s the difference between an indie film and a mainstream film I was asked the other day? Is The Visitor one of those films that irritates the die-hard indie crowd because it’s dumbed down its indie-ness for wider appeal i.e. the mainstream? Yes and no. And let’s face it, most mainstream audiences aren’t confronted very often by a film such as The Visitor . Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins best known from Six Feet Under and his first lead role after playing support for decades) is a Connecticut economics professor and widower in his sixties. Popping into his rarely used New York pad Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Gurira), his Senegalese girlfriend, are more shocked than Walter. They’ve been victims of a rent scam. Here’s where the ‘niceness’ that will irritate many begins. Walter of course lets them stay – rent free. In return he gets drumming lessons from Tarek (Walter’s wife was a classical pianist). Here begin the script strands that will irritate. Tarek’s drum is inevitably his downfall as struggling through the subway turnstiles he’s stopped by NYPD police, falsely, as a faredodger who discover he’s an illegal immigrant. Detention Centre. Visits to this new world must seem Kafka-esque to Walter. Tarek’s mum Mouna (Hiam Abbass) hotfoots from Detroit, bonds with Walter and gets taken to Phantom of the Opera by him. The script’s beginning to grate on indie die-hard nerves. And yet. This is quite a meditative film without any Hollywood ending. It’s the plethora of tiny details that really make this film twirl and subliminally hook a mainstream audience. Walter could so easily become a characature but Jenkins and director McCarthy show us there really are some Walters left in the world. He’s not a do-gooding liberal simply a man with an open, inquisitive mind. When the detention centre’s security guard firmly and politely tells him for the third time to move away from the window, Walter has never before in his life felt like a criminal. He’s probably never even had a lengthy conversation with someone non-white and working class let alone an illegal immigrant. He probably never even thinks a law abiding citizen like him could possibly ever be arrested. It’s these subtleties of filmmaking that peep out beneath the broader brushstrokes of McCarthy’s canvas totally changing their colour.

One of the saddest Irish films in a long time Garage is out on Soda Pictures DVD (My blog review) about a man whose dreams would fit on the head of a pin. And even then the world managed to squash them.

[Addition]
Memories of Underdevelopment(Memorias del subdesarrollo-1968-B/W) is Tomás Gutiérrez Alea fictional solipsism of life in post-revolutionary Cuba (1961) “the inability to relate things to gain experience – underdevelopment”. It’s far more interesting cinematically than you’re expecting and whiffs of Godard and Antonioni in it’s use of the former’s mashy sound and the latter’s ambivalent meanderings through each day (honing in on the details) as the central character Sergio pontificates on women “Cuban woman loose their looks between 30/35 – they are fruits that rot an amazing speed” or spies through his balcony telescope. “Dead animals and books...an American smell” notes one of his woman about the writer Ernest Hemingway’s (“Colonialist and Gunga Din) private Havana study. “I’m 38, more rotten, more stupid. Maybe it’s the tropics, ” moans Sergio. Buena Vista Social Club this movie must certainly ain’t. The director supported the revolution and remained in Cuba until his death. Part of the Barbican’s Cine Cuba season.

Bose Krishnamachari is considered the mentor of the generation of young artists from Mumbai, India known as the ‘Bombay Boys’. The centre-piece of his first solo UK show Ghost is an installation, that wouldn’t look out of place in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or a Jeunet/Caro film, of 108 old tin tiffins (lamps or dabbas) housing tiny videos of everyday Mumbai life interviews. Bose says that behind the face of the average Mumbaikar “is an ocean of anxieties that have arisen from the everyday question of acceptance.” The artist will be curating the India pavilion at next year’s ARCO in Madrid.

And Roy Andersson’s Swedish surrealism em>You, the Living(De Levande) is out on DVD

Mathew Carr’s pencil portraits at Marlborough Fine Art seem to peep out centre stage from their prepared charcoal paper background as if from a mist. The gallery’s painted the same purple as his room at home, and each appears as if Vesuvius had erupted and the faces of the great and ordinary, who only intended to peek out for a second, have been equalised and frozen in time.
Matthew Carr spares no detail

Banned TS Eliot portrait goes on show
A ship in a bottle will be sharing the fourth plinth in London's Trafalgar Square:
Yinka Shonibare: The battle of Trafalgar

Finally, the re-release this week by Park Circus of Billy Wilder’s classic masterpiece The Apartment, winner of five Oscars, including Best Picture and nominated for five more.
MGM DVD in the States Collectors Edition of The Apartment (1960)(grainy YouTube clip)
What can be said that hasn’t already been thunk. For a start Wilder’s film deserves better than the small or even medium TV screen given his collaboration with Joseph LaShelle’s anamorphic widescreen B/W cinematography. (He lost out to Brit Freddie Francis for the Oscar)And your colleagues in the know don’t give an Art Direction Oscar (Alexander Trauner) lightly. This film’s another summer cinema treat then. Jack Lemmon plays the everyman whose heart seems to get him nowhere but his politiking one floor up in the office building every time. That is until scripting serendipity brings him closer to Shirley MacLaine’s elevator operator Miss Kubelik giving us [spoiler] an upbeat ending. But as we all know life is rarely like the movies. The very reason people still flock to them. As with celebrity culture, the movies give us hope that such a quality may still be eeking out an existence somewhere on our tiny planet.