As Monday night’s 2008 Turner Prize winner was revealed –northerner Brit Mark Leckey', I pondered much about how I was piecing together the next jigsaw of my many cultural rumblings. According to a techno whiz on Start the Week (1 Dec), one of the impossible tasks (and one you’d think was easy) for a computer is constructing a 25 piece jigsaw, which is where quantum computing comes into its own. Like many of his fellow humans, Mark Leckey is involved in what many other humans consider to be the ‘uselessness’ of art. Indeed, even agent art provocateur Mathew Collings deemed this year’s Turner selection “faked braininess” on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row . You can hear Tues night’s (Dec 2) interview on the same programme with Leckey himself. Ironically though for many art novices, Leckey’s work might just be the place to start. We are in a time when nothing in the world seems particularly real, either on TV in the newspapers, in advertising or indeed the act of socialising itself. People would rather have a Facebook or similar social networking relationship than the real thing. When people meet ‘in reality’ the experience is something akin to the idea of simulacra - not originated by but certainly promulgated by Umberto ‘Name of the Rose’ Eco in his ‘waxworks’ essay. When confronted by an original rather than a representation of the person or object, people are ‘disappointed’ because of the déjà vu (already seen). Now many will say what utter rubbish I write. And many of those nay-sayers will be the ones who would rather email a colleague than walk the 20meters down the office hallway stretching their legs in the process. They are on a conveyor-belt of commodity culture, Henry Ford’s dollarisng democratisation. As the great Walter Benjamin pointed out in his unfinished Arcades Project of the early C20th,“commodities were appropriated by consumers as wish images within the emblem books of their private dreamworld.” He goes on to cite the French poet Baudelaire, “he showed not the commodities filled with private dreams but private dreams as hollowed out as the commodities.”
BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves (Wed Dec 3) has an interview with French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy
Turner Prize 2008: runners and riders
The Guardian report
Young British sculptor Roger Hiorns transforms a south London council flat.
The man who made Vermeers: Han van Meegeren was one of the greatest art forgers of the 20th century
Outrage in Venice as giant ads smother cultural jewels
Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle’s London Film Festival’s rousing closer, opening in January):
Film-makers driven to spend a mint removing car brand from slum shots
Akin to the animated film character WALL-E (DVD), Leckey is sifting through the ruins and detritus of our society past and present: “dynamic questionings of the connections between surface and dimension, appearance and self-determination, location and presence,” thus spakes the Tate’s catalogue essay. And while this could said to be true of most interesting art, in Leckey’s case it is actually worth saying. An early work Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) is sourced from TV and fansites about UK’s underground dance culture. Parade (2003) is his take on high street commodity. One of his latest works in the Tate show Cinema-in-the-Round (2006) takes the form of him filming his own art lecture with its musings and collaging of images and ideas from Homer Simpson, Felix the Cat, and artists including Philip Guston and Baselitz. Are you really seeing or simply believing what’s on the can and labels in the art museum?
Are virtual worlds destroying the brains of children?
The death of a Wal-Mart worker who was crushed to death by a crowd in a Thanksgiving Day sale.
Unbelievable! This week, for the first time in British parliamentary history, police arrested a Member of Parliament (MP) serving on the Conservative opposition benches (Shadow Immigration Minister) and raided the MP’s office (without even a warrant) for ‘suspected’ leaks of information. The police then had access to the House of Commons main computer server. Hmmmm....After my experiences with the Metropolitan Police - though I can’t judge - I can certainly empathise. In my case, lack of communication, lack of co-ordination and lack of judgement: none of which inspired much confidence. Particularly as they were investigated unsubstantiated claims when none of mine towards the other party had been taken very seriously at all. Did they have a warrant either? They said they did but I never saw one. I wonder whether I could obtain a warrant to search the police’s computer for my suspected ‘leaks’ – like the man who successfully got a court order against a leading bank to seize their computers because of unfair bank charges. 1968 shaken not stirred with a twist of lemon and a dash of ginger if you please. The stress such incidents cause is always underestimated and never taken very seriously. Particularly in my case when one’s mother had just passed away.
Cameron furious after senior Tory MP arrested
Brown denies role in arrest of senior Tory MP
MP's arrest not Stalinist
Newsnight : watch Tues 2 Dec for a discussion and Wed 3 Dec on this topic BBC iPlayer
Clare Short (Former International Development Secretary in the British Labour Government) and others speak of the compromises they made as they rose through the political ranks
The government finally introduced its much-heralded points system to decide who can and can't come to Britain
In Our Time (Thurs 27): The Great Reform Act (1832) which extended the political vote and gave industrial cities such as Manchester and Birmingham political representation for the first time
Which brings us to the coroner leading the inquest into the police shooting of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes on the London underground some years ago (the grounds of suspected terrorism) advising the jury not to bring a verdict of unlawful killing. I see both sides but as usual in Britain, no one ever seems to accept or be blamed for serious ‘errors of judgement’. We are supposed to forgive and or forget, learn and move on. Yet isn’t that how deeply ingrained hatred is allowed to incubate?
Council chiefs lose their jobs over Baby P death . Not an isolated I’m very sure, just one that saw the light of day or rather death.
Clint Eastwood’s new film The Changeling is so important in this regard. In no way does it break any boundaries of cinematic art: quite the opposite it reinforces them, the complete opposite of Leckey’s art. Yet ironically, like Pixar’s WALL-E animation, it exists in the popular Hollywood medium to help us see through and beyond the received notions of what is constantly presented to us as ‘the truth’. In The Changeling, the case of a boy’s disappearance has been solved, promulgated in the newspapers and closed in spite of the mother’s (Angelina Jolie in her Oscar tipped performance) protestations thence confinement to a mental hospital. Based on a true story, most viewers would also like to close that page of history and pretend that humanity had moved on. ‘Don’t believe everything you read in the newspaper’ goes the old adage. But people still do. And not necessarily because they’re stupid either, though some clearly are. That’s why Eastwood made the film. How could that mother’s side of the story possibly be true, they asked? But it was, and for some of us still could be.
The other side of Angelina Jolie
Blindness is not reality but a moral fable directed by Fernando Meirelles who exposed Brazil’s urban reality in the widely acclaimed City of God. His latest film from hard to adapt Portuguese novelist José Saramago (he’s ultra choosy about giving away film rights). But the film’s problem is that it favours ‘realism’ over fabulation in a city where a virus blinds everyone except Julianne Moore’s character and humans’ basest and best qualities come to the fore.
As the upcoming 2006 first Congolese democratic election draws closer, Victoire Terminus (winner of this year’s London Film Festival Grierson documentary award) follows women who’ve chosen a boxing career as their way of surviving their men and mayhem in Kinshasa.
Divizionz: An authentic portrayal of life in Kampala's inner city, in which four friends set out to make it as hip hop musicians.
The frustration, particularly for women, of being held back and trying to break through the ‘glass ceiling’ of male dominance is at the heart of Michael Radford’s new film Flawless. Critically it didn’t fare well after last week’s opening. Perhaps many responded only to the film’s heist plot. But Radford is too good a director to settle for commercial fare. His Oscar winning Il Postino may have been a stroke of good fortune surprising no one more than himself, yet his whole career has concerned itself with characters who are out of place and out of time e.g. his first feature about WWII Italian POW’s in Scotland Another Place, Another Time. Demi Moore is brilliant casting and all the more so because she’s worked with Michael Caine before. The often much maligned Moore, Hollywood star yet always somewhat at odds with that environment, is clearly out of place in the man’s world of diamond trading where she is constantly passed over for promotion. Her Laura Quinn is prim, edgy, somewhat introspective yet quietly feisty. Radford and his cinematographer frame her as trapped in her modest living room, its contents often claustrophobically foregrounded edge of left frame. Radford also often frames by cutting off the tops of people’s heads as if their whole world was not quite there. The production design is very subtle retro-futuristic though the story is set in 60s London. Could Radford have gone further with the script by newcomer Edward Anderson? The top and tail of the film is rather Hollywood and cringe-worthy and Anderson was lucky to get Radford interested in refining his script. Yet inside this film and many of its predicabilities is something so English and so true to their relationship to history that it morphs from sheen to mould to quiet, ever so-slow burning rage and transfiguration- something in which Michael Caine excels. Not a great film, but a very far from crap one.
At least it's big in Japan: Mike Hodges explains what it's like to make a "lost film"
Radford directed another under-rated film White Mischief (1987) about the decadent self-destructive ‘Happy Valley’ whites in WWII Kenya. Shot secretly in South Africa, the rarely screened first anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa(1959) directed by the amateur Lionel Rogosin shows tonight Thursday Dec 4 as part of the The London African Film Festival . Nightwaves has a discussion with film historian Ian Christie.
The Times BFI London Film Festival (LFF hereon) mid-week-mid-afternoon screening was fairly packed for Kaspar Barfoed’s Danish thriller The Candidate, trailer. And rightly so. Imagine a Hollywood thriller version of dysfunctional family hit Festen turned inside out by a Dogma styled Dane. “It is about a man who has to choose between the easy lie and the difficult truth...combining the disciplined plotline of the American thriller with the more Bohemian European cinematic tradition with its rawness and its edginess...documentary expressionism.” “I don’t see myself as an auteur,” he told me over breakfast, “...but I fought hard [in the production process] to get a strong POV (point of view) [fighting against the idea that you] can’t be too dangerous. It was hard to finance – Euro’s 2 million against the usually low-budget social-realism.” “I started off as an actor [Liv Ullman’s first film Sofia, 1992] but I was thinking too much!” If there was a British equivalent to The Candidate it could be In Bruges (a very different film indeed, though) considering Kaspar’s film in relation to its Danish counterparts.
Lars von Trier's Europa (now out on Reg.1 DVD)
Julia, French site, German trailer, is by
French director Eric Zonca (he of the tragic poetic realism of The Dreamlife of Angels. His latest is set in Los Angeles, normally certain death for all ‘art house’ directors except for perhaps Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. And Zonca’s film does play rather like a Wenders’ ‘road movie’. At almost 2.5 hours it surprisingly doesn’t outstay its welcome. Is this due to Tilda Swinton’s, arguably, best performance ever? I’m still not sure. Absolutely no slight on Swinton’s performance intended, I think Zonca’s direction is so exceptional another actress could have also made it her own. But as Zonca pointed out in an interview it was Swinton’s willowy physicality of the alcoholic black mask pistol toting child abductress character that sold it for him. Swinton is mesmeric supported by a fantastic cast. Try not to read too much in advance about this film. Just go see it. The world doesn’t always have a ‘time perfect’ equilibrium, but in Zonca’s film it does tossing in all the storms. The film also plays on Sky Box Office Friday night (5 December).
Tilda Swinton interviewed in The Guardian ,
and Erick Zonca interview.
Courtney Hunt’s debut Frozen River (LFF) has just earned another award in the States in addition to its Sundance Grand Jury Prize. A woman (another captivating performance from Melissa Leo) turns to smuggling Chinese illegals for a Mohawk (Misty Upham) across the frozen Saint Lawrence River from the States into Canada in order to feed her child pre-Christmas.
The much touted, starry ‘indie/major’ cast of Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married premmed at the London Film Festival and is out in London after Christmas. One thing’s for sure from this somewhat frustrating film, Anne Hathaway is one helluva an actress (Rachel emerging out of alcho rehab realising what her family really are, possibly were, and possibly could be) and manages to be a nice, balanced person (whatever that really is) as well :) Hathaway that is.
Anne Hathaway recently interviewed on The Daily Show
Hathaway in Get Smart out on DVD in the States
and so is the original TV series
The Silence of Lorna (Le silence de Lorna), French site (Best Screenplay at this year’s Cannes Film Fest) from the very socio-realist Belgium Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne brothers takes a while to get going but as the second takes hold with Arta Dobroshi (as Lorna with her unborn child) it’s surprisingly captivating, ultimately leaving you quite numb, silent and introspective as do most of their films. Sometimes ‘art house’ reality, in the right directorial hands, is more interesting than a fiction helping you understand the one outside in the world that you’re about to step back into.
Les frères Dardenne in Cannes
Dardenne Collection out on Artificial Eye DVD
Raymond De Felitta director of Tis Autumn tells jazz singer Jackie Paris' story of unfulfilled promise (mentioned in my last posting)
Kenny Glenaan’s film Summer also musing on survival isn’t quite as Dardennes ‘cinematic’ but deservedly garnered several awards at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival. It sounds ‘worthy’ but the script (Hugh Ellis)and performances transcend that sense of moral duty.
Same distributor Vertigo also releases this week The Children, a sort of Children of the Damned script by London to Brighton’s Paul Andrew Williams raising the question how are we horrified. Is it through identification that by understanding the situation/character we somehow know what might be coming therefore cringing in our seats with prescience? Or is it something out of the blue, the totally unexpected that suddenly grabs us from behind. Early on director Tom Shankland signals to us via the ‘spooky’ score that something’s afoot and you think, oh no, you’ve blown it for us. Then it seems to get cleverer than that, but then doesn’t. And while the end of the film is sufficiently gory for one not to start fondling your date’s elbow in boredom, it never really got beyond that initial spooky music. Perhaps the problem is that we never quite knew which hell the kids were from if indeed they were there in the first place. One leaves the cinema yukky but unperturbed unlike the disgustingly, horribly brilliant Eden Lake (out on DVD in January) that leaves you permanently terrified and despairing of humanity.
Killing children in movies is a definite no-no, right?
The handheld DV first feature of Delphine Kreuter 57,000 Kilometers Between Us(57000 km entre nous) (LFF) is a quite remarkable comment on the dichotomy of our age of wanting to be seen on the internet yet also wanting to retain some privacy: a family putting its ‘happiness’ on spycam while elsewhere a bedridden boy is online (no image) with their pissed off daughter. But there’s an even eerier Brit DV flic that nobody seemed to care much about from last year’s Raindance Fest ’s Dom Rotheroe’s Exhibit A – a tiny poisonous Eden Lake.
Another first time director Antonio Campos’ Afterschool (LFF) has teenage American East Coast Robert masturbating to extremely violent sexual acts online. He teems up with schoolmate Amy to make a video project that goes one step too far. “I was more interested in...how people deal with death,” said the director. “Not the death of a family member or someone you were close to but rather someone you maybe saw from time to time or you knew of but weren’t close friends with. You feel something but you’re not quite sure what.” A very impressive (with haunting use of wide-screen) film picked up for UK distribution by Network next year. In his spare time the director performs comedy stand-up on the New York circuit.
The detachment of Eva Sørhaug’s Norwegian first feature Cold Lunch (Lønsj) (LFF),(trailer, left some critics emotionally cold but it was exactly that Bressonian edge of detailed human observation laced with offbeam Godard humour that intrigued me. Is there hope that it’ll be picked up for UK release?
Norwegian site
Indiewire interview
A new biography of the man behind the company behind the newspaper co-sponsoring the London Film Festival is out by Michael Wolff - The Man Who Owns The News. BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves has an interview with Wolff.
Some belated thoughts on Oliver Stone’s W. :
The Guardian interview with Oliver Stone
Josh Brolin on playing George W. Bush
Ioan Gruffudd on playing Tony Blair in Stone's W.
Dubya's reign is nearly over. What impact did he have on the artistic life of his country? Twelve prominent Americans give their verdict in The Guardian
more vvvery soon...................
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