British polymath Stephen Fry in his BBC series Stephen Fry in America,roped in to address Houston’s glitterati assembled for a charity benefit,quoted Oscar Wilde: “All art is useless,” thence adding his own epithet “but so is love and wine but [we wouldn’t want to be without those either]”. Such uselessnesses make life not only bearable but human or indeed humane. Such thoughts have been swimming round my addled brain for weeks stirring the memories of 68 films I’d seen in this year’s London Film Festival, art fairs, exhibitions of Babylonian and Byzantine, DVD’s and heavens knows what else. Young, attractive aspirant journos suggesting how this web-site could be zipper, zappier and zoppier. Wise mortals suggesting that I change the site’s title, change my attitude, be calmer, be less me and moreover - more like them. I even heard a contributor on last night’s BBC Radio 3 Nightwaves (Tues 11 Nov) suggest that “we have to forget to still be open and go on living our lives.” The very quality that Brit documentary filmmaker Molly Dineen believes harbours the seeds of England’s demise.
The latest Bond movie Quantum of Solace hit an all-time UK box office record for its opening weekend. Obviously ‘normal’ people haven’t given up going to the cinema. Did they find solace in the ‘reality’ of the film? Did they learn the meaning of the word quantum? The new Bond is a ‘real’ Bond. Craig’s Bond rarely smiled in last year’s film. Now his face is like a stone. The franchise has started resembling a recruitment film for the SAS. Yet even they manage to share a laugh in ‘real life’. Bond’s Achilles' heel in Quantum is that he can’t forget. Can’t forget his lost and murdered love. Can’t forget the reality. Director Marc Forster is clearly attempting to inject mega-psychology into the veins of the Bond franchise. But if it goes any deeper, we’ll be watching something akin to Righteous Kill rather than James Bond. And given the opening weekend gross perhaps ‘people’ (the demos) don’t care about Bondness. The thrill is all the thing and being the first to see it the bling. When will James start swearing: ‘forget the shake, hand me the f**king bottle’?
Soviet diehards see red over 'betrayal' by 007 girl Olga Kurylenko
The ICA have released Michel Hazanavicius’ Bond spoof OSS-117: Cairo, Nest of Spies that is more Bond than Bond and even pre-dated him by four years (created by Jean Bruce in 1949 and the hero of 265 novels). Would Bond work if it were more like the Get Smart remake? OSS plays as if Steve Carell was Bond, though in fact it’s the fantastically funny suave dimness of Jean Dujardin. Shot in Cinemascope period colours it is very funny indeed including some politically incorrect jokes that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Bob Hope Road to movie. And there are ‘real’ Bond girls. Though Quantum’s demure yet quietly racy Miss Fields (Gemma Arterton) did make a modern day Bond girl most members of the public could relate to and long to get up close and personal with at the office Christmas party.
Quantum’s Bond girl is Olga Kurylenko who can be seen in her full feminine glory in Diane Bertrand’s French art-house movie The Ring Finger(L'Annulaire), made in 2005 out on Second Sight DVD, I did initially wonder whether they were just ‘cashing in’ on Kurylenko’s sudden Bond ‘fame’. After seeing this intriguing film I regret ever having the whisp of such an idea. Second Sight do as their name implies and with it have had a world-class reputation for the thought they put into re-presenting a film. Though no extras on this disc, it’s almost better that there aren’t given the film’s haunting mnemonic nature. A bottling factory accident slices off part of Iris’(Kurylenko) ring finger but accidentally she stumbles upon a receptionist job at a chateau converted into a clinic for preserving and closing memory’s door for a client on anything from a piece of music to the bones of a pet sparrow and things even more bizarre. The film’s simple eroticism is refreshingly enthralling and its subject will live to haunt you. Beth Gibbons original songs and score are well worth getting hold of.
Mr Bongo Films, distributor of Wojciech Has’ The Saragossa Manuscript, now releases on DVD his Hourglass Sanatorium (DVD) based on the writing of Bruno Schulz. If there’s a deja vu about this film it’s only because it was a Polish precursor to the imaginative film worlds of Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton and the Quay Brothers. A second ‘date’ DVD for us more weird mortals.
More conventional and less enthusiastically welcomed than their Oscar hotcake No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers Burn After Reading is such a quiet, subtle, finely tuned and outright funny pic, that it’s take on Washington goings on and the Iraq war becomes almost a subliminal whisper in you ear as you sail along in its screwball comic breeze. A performance we’ve never seen from George Clooney, nor Frances McDormand, and a John Malkovich whose left-over cold-plate middle-management CIA angst he’s never shown us. If our own real lives aren’t quite like this they often almost approach it in their own way. No wonder then that the world’s still stuck in the shitter reading the sports pages for some modicum of comfort!
O Brothers! The Coens in Context
If it’s real reality you’re after then Hunger by artist Steve McQueen is it. Much praised at this year’s London Film Festival (and Cannes Film Fest winner) it’s a film that boldly makes one question the place of art in our society. Hunger’s tasteful buff brown posters prevalent on the London Underground catch your attention but bear little relationship to the film’s wall ‘art’ of dark excrement made by imprisoned IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands or the pools of eddying urine sculpted by the prisoners to piss off their guards. The MOD (Ministry of Defence) took offence last year at McQueen’s art work For Queen and Country - philatelic drawers of stamps depicting dead British soldiers from the Iraq war. I can’t imagine the British establishment is too pleased by McQueen’s new film either. So, does it only preach to the converted? Or is it asking a bigger question of what drives ordinary people to do extraordinary things? Is this urge the same for those like Sands who break and tear at our moral laws desperately trying to show how immoral are some of our governments’ other laws? The same urge stemming from the same bodily core as those humans who defy the laws of normality and are then later lauded for their actions e.g. Man on Wire? All artists are filmmakers of some kind but not all filmmakers ever become artists. Some art provokes us quietly like the Coens new film; McQueen’s is quiet, intense rage. One may disagree profoundly with the content of Hunger, of making Sands out to be some sort of hero. But the film is never simply that. It’s asking you to deeply consider what your relationship to this world really is, rather than go along with the one you’re continually told is ‘good for you’. And that as we all now is a deeply unpleasant experience but oftentimes a transfiguring one.
John Pilger Heroes - The Films of John Pilger 1970-2007 out on DVD
One of the most important DVD releases (also Blu-ray) of recent years is the BFI’s Salò, Piero Paolo Pasolini’s final film from 1975 with an orgy of debauchery so provocative that the film only received UK film board certification in late 2000 after being banned and censored throughout the world over the years. The title derives from the tiny lakeside town on Lake Garda, northern Italy and the last place where Mussolini held power. On the 2-disc set there are three versions of the film: the complete re-master, the original Italian and the original English and a plethora of extras that once viewed won’t be easily forgotten. Here are a few extracts:
The film is about “the way we fall silent in the theatre of power”-playwright and director Neil Bartlett.
“Let’s look at what happens to the human body and consumption, of false values”
“Pasolini spoke of a corruption whereby culturally speaking the consumer society has an interest in destroying all popular culture in order to sell more. In a desert everything is a mirage. What are the perversions of a society that considers itself free but which on the contrary is dominated by dark forces.”
David Forgacs (UCL Italian prof): “the visible face of democratic society. Everybody having free access to consumer goods was the acceptable face of something very unacceptable: concentration of power in a few hands which needed the consent of the ordinary people through consumer society to keep itself going.”
Chomsky: “by WW1 the power could no longer control the population by force...drive them to consumption, drive them anywhere, just keep them out of our hair it’s none of their business,” and Chomsky quoting from a leading sociologist: “you impose necessary illusions on the people to keep them in line.” “Goebbels was very impressed by American commercial advertising that repeated the same slogans over and over.”
Pasolini never really aligned himself to any party or cause over the years: neither gay, nor Communist, nor Fascist, nor the student revolutions of 1968. He was simply a humanist and poet. And interestingly he sided with the young carabinieri in the ’68 riots – young, vulnerable, working men who weren’t representing any power structure just eeking out a living.
Criterion's American Region 2 DVD
Several photographic shows this week make you consider the notion of captured ‘reality’. How do you photograph buildings and what in fact are you photographing when you do are questions raised at the Architectural Association and Iwan Baan. Formalism versus ,say, the pics of sculptor Richard Wentworth.In the East End, Flowers East have beautiful photos from Nadav Kandar. One can’t escape the feeling of beautiful ‘exoticism’, though, and some photos follow through that dialectic of the observed reality more than others particularly on his website.
Financial Times article
Frith Street Gallery have colour photos by well-regarded Dayanita Singh showing how the night transforms what seems ordinary by day. She is better known for her B/W work of less obvious Indian life published by Steidl. Samit Das has created intriguing montages and marquettes at Delaye Saltoun exploring notions of a city’s topography. The sub-text city feel is full of shadows, missed opportunities and possibilities. This central London gallery is always finding a show that is just that extra bit different to the rest around it.
Optimum have released a special edition DVD of Akira Kurasawa’s classic Rashomon with its differing versions of the same story and there’s a comprehensive hour long documentary featuring many of Kurasawa’s collaborators on the project.
So how do you represent the biography of a civilisation? Babylon: Myth and Reality at the British Museum is a sort of living Wikipedia guide. And that’s not meant to be a put down by any means. At the launch, the show’s curator enthused about the ‘audio showers’ that visitors, standing beneath, can very clearly hear (even in the crowded tiny corridors) English translations of the clay inscriptions. One of these is the Cyrus Cylinder from 539BC purporting to be the world’s first declaration of human rights – a copy of the original has been on display at the United Nations in New York since 1971. Nearby is an extraordinary tiny tablet no bigger than a large broach with 4 columns cataloguing all the plants found in The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. When I first saw the glazed brick panels of lions from the Ishtar Gate in Berlin’s then Pergamon Museum in the days of the Berlin Wall and grey Eastern Germany it was quite an extraordinary experience. But within the pre-fab walls of this exhibition they lose a lot of that out of place/out of time lustre. The show sits in the ‘attic’ with the grandeur of the Hadrian show below. If you manage to find a quite time without crowded corridors then Babylon could be quite edifying and the catalogue is tremendous value. Roughly 40% of the exhibits are from the British Museum itself (for free) and I’d urge anyone to enjoy the museum’s downtime and seek them out if the show’s not your thing. Given the context, the final room showing examples of contemporary artists, musicians etc influenced by Babylon seems somewhat ‘crowdpleasing’ and superfluous. Investigations into the damage and problems created by the Iraq War might have been more useful.
Byzantium at the Royal Academy of Arts has to cover a period from AD330 when Christian Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) was founded through to 1453 when the Ottoman Turks swapped it over to their religion. Art historian and critic Andrew Graham-Dixon offered a fascinating new way to see the icons and mosaics of the Byzantines in the BBC’s The Art of Eternity. While the Academy’s show may fall short of a revelation, it’s one of the most stupendous museum appraisals (some 350 objects) of man’s need for an art that does more than simply glorify in an image. This was Graham-Dixon’s argument too. Many of the pieces are difficult enough to get to see in their original museums at the best of times and for many this will be the last time they ever travel abroad given their fragility. It’s been argued by many that Emperor Constantine made one of the savviest political moves in history by legalising Christianity in AD313. Yet Byzantium culture has had an woefully bad press over the centuries- as if lumping all America’s foreign policy blunders and ‘barbarism’ and religious fervour over the century into one pot and claiming all its citizens shared these views and that there’d been no significant art as a result. The icon on wood Virgin Hodegetria and the Man of Sorrows (the Virgin who shows the way) overwhelms by what seems to be her premonition of her son’s death. An incredible plea for tolerance and non-violence. Other objects in the exhibition are simple pieces from daily life or incredibly intricate work by artisans. The famous ‘Holy Grail’ Antioch Chalice from New York’s Met Museum somewhat pales into the rather simple silver cup that it is alongside the dozens of extraordinary examples of craftsmanship. Unless you’re a scholar, to get the most out of the show you really need to purchase the very comprehensive audio guide or indeed catalogue. How do you depict Christ when you don’t know what he looks like asks the greatest Byzantine art? Is this what art is for, to go far deeper than a depiction of an imagined reality? In a sense the more savvy Byzantines knew that art was useless too. If Christ is within your soul, why the need for depiction? The final room has the priceless treasures from the monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai. The late C12 Icon of the Heavenly Ladder of St John. Even the strongest and most faithful of the human race gain strength from their mind being reminded or challenged - the contradiction of the Divine and the mortal.
Particularly in Britain, but in many other countries too, there’s a desire that celebrities be both normal as well as ‘divine’. A desire that ‘we’ can reach the top of that ladder too. As PR guru Mark Borkowski said recently when promoting his book The Fame Formula, it’s “a manufactured heaven”. No one is a saint goes the saying. But some people are clearly more saintly than others. Either ‘manufactured’ by the press to be so or in the true sense of the word, naturally so. We are asked by society to be ourselves yet not ourselves whether celebrities or mortal office workers. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott raised this debate as well with his TV series Prescott: The Class System And Me. Prescott (or Prezza as the tabloid newspapers dub him) is in a no-win situation. If you wear the ‘dickie’ bow-tie to the cocktail reception you’re viewed as a traitor to your class and if you don’t, not really aspirant enough or disdainful of the ‘other’ class. “7.5% of the privately educated take 70-80% of the top jobs,” he noted. And that was the downfall of New Labour in spite of best intentions. That it offered not equality for all but achievement for all. But for many achievement just isn’t a possibility and remains a quality sitting uncomfortably with English ‘socialism’ let alone American ‘can do-ness’. The UK housing market crash was a direct result of this (made worse of course by the American market fall but not because of). Most people who had any means to do so, bought into the achievement myth. And the most prudent most certainly did well out of it. But in Borkowski’s words it was a “manufactured heaven”. Some celebrities who are savvy and prudent can survive even if their only talent is being a celebrity. Of course a love of the spotlight helps. So does the realisation that the spotlight offers no real love or security. Much of the housing boom was based on nothing more than mountains and mountains of debt both private and corporate.
Talk show host Paul O’Grady's book is out and so is Michael Parkinson's.
A bit Parky - Michael Parkinson interview
Visitors to www.michaelparkinson.tv are eligible to win a Parky Pod; an i-Pod pre-loaded with 40 tracks from the My Life in Music album.
The world financial meltdown would have come as no surprise to Patrick Creadon director of the American documentary from last year I.O.U.S.A.
Dubbed by Reuters as “the next Inconvenient Truth” it outlines the history of America’s accumulated debt and the future that indeed happened. After viewing this, you’ll think twice or thrice before believing that ‘you too can have it all’ and ignoring the meowing cat.
Thomas Friedman on The Daily Show
The London Film Festival proves to be somewhat a microcosm of the ‘heavenly ladder’ debate. The fest is sponsored by The Times (London) who have a fairly independent editorial board, but the paper is nonetheless owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International conglomerate. Now to probably 80% of artists and filmmakers Murdoch is their bête noire. There’s also a strong non-Hollywood feeling brushing one’s shoulders throughout the festival. Yet the festival proudly associates itself with UK, European and sometimes world premiers of Hollywood product while the majority of the festival’s fare are small, low-budget often ‘making the world a better place’ films. And many wonderful films never see the dim English light of darkness again after their festival screenings. Personally, I don’t have a problem with this ‘seeming’ contradiction of the festival. But you do feel, for want of a better phrase, ‘the winds of socialism’ swirling around you. The John Prescott dilemna.
One very outspoken voice in British cinema is Terence Davies, a self-confessed “born-again atheist” whose new autobiographical film about Liverpool Of Time and the City was much talked about. I’ve always maintained that it’s a national disgrace that he’s not helped more to finance his films. Though I don’t always agree with him he’s one of the few people in Britain brave enough to speak their mind with talent in abundance to back up his opinions. If Ken Loach were a dancer then he’d be in Terence territory. For Davies’ films glide within the celluloid lifting their hopes and dreams in a pas de deux as if King Lear was carrying his dead Cordelia. When Loach made The Wind that Shakes the Barley about Ireland, he hit the socio-political British nail on the head. People are so afraid to lose what little ground they’ve gained up the ladder that they’ll stop at nothing to retain that rung. Even if it means killing off those dissenters who forged the journey with them. Though it’s an anti-crime to say it, Of Time and the City wallows in Davies’ love of Mahler and his ‘Resurrection’ symphony as Davies’ shows us just what became of Liverpool’s glories. But if he wants to use Mahler let it be so. For who else in this time of false hopes shouts the truth at us, questions the government PR of how Britain is being successfully re-juvenated? The housing boom that went bang. We want to dance on that cinema screen with Davies, be part of something that far more resembles a reality for us than the one we are constantly asked to live. We know one of those swans will probably die that we’ll be left to swim the pond alone because we’ve mated to our belief for life. But there were some great times and the music soared. “We leave the place we love and spend a lifetime trying to regain it,” says Davies, “It was always Christmas at the movies.” He quotes Chekhov: “The golden moments pass and leave no trace.” Except of course in Davies’ films.
The Long Day Closes (BFI DVD)
Terence Davies Trilogy (BFI DVD)
Terence Davies: Merseyside and me
From distant voice to great British director
hopefully my conclusion and lots more LFFing soon....
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