Crime and punishment, forgiveness and perpetual remembrance, pacifism and revenge. Are these feelings any different in London to any other ‘Western’ capital in the world? I can vouch of New York, Los Angeles, Sydney and Berlin with assured comparison and answer Yes: London is different. Very different. As the jury
verdict in the Jean Charles de Menenzes (the innocent but suspected terrorist shot dead on the Underground some years ago) inquest was handed down I, like many, heaved a sigh of relief. Relief that some justice seems possible in this city. Even for die-hard cynics. And yet equally there was a sense of frustration. Frustration that overall the sensibilities of this city never seem to change.
The Menenzes family doesn’t have that sense of ennui. They will continue to fight and find someone to blame for their son’s death. And in their position I would probably do exactly the same. I certainly feel the same way about many of my injustices. But in England the pot can boil over as long as the house doesn’t burn down. And even then...
The world admires the fact that justice is often seen to be done in England as in the Menenzes case and not plea-bargained by market capitalism. But it’s a long, arduous road to that legal comfort. And if you fall within the middle-class poverty trap then you’re basically stuffed. No free legal aid for you in the UK! The Menenzes jury were told that a verdict of “unlawful killing” would be unacceptable. Yet everyone hearing the judgement handed down knew full well that is what it amounted to.
Initially after the shooting, police spokesmen denied there ever was a shoot to kill policy. Much evidence since shows exactly the opposite: indeed a police officer interviewed on Channel 4 News recently admitted exactly that. Something he would have been raked over the coals for three years ago. And given the state of terrorist alert in the city of London such a policy did indeed have reasonable cause. Scapegoating is always an easy option but often senior members of staff in any organisation should be held to account for their actions. Only death or multiple people being severely injured ever lead to inquiries and inquests. But what about the myriad number of wrecked lives, professions, relationships, enthusiasms all caused by organisational negligence? ‘That’s life’ is usually the only answer for those individuals. Incidentally, Britain is one of the only European countries where students didn’t demonstrate in support of their Greek counterparts over a police shooting. Rather embarrassingly, More 4 News interviewed students at the Kings College London student union bar and most didn’t have a clue about events in Greece.
There was a film loosely based on the Menenzes shooting released by Metrodome in the slowest week of summer, Shoot to Kill. A much quieter, more chilling Ken Loach-like film is yet to be made about this story, though. Or perhaps it should be a comedy/drama with Ricky Gervais (The Office...do we need parentheses any more - Ricky hasn’t been obscured by the mindless more ‘famous’ ‘social networking crowd’?) as a senior honcho manifesting order and control. While all the while a hapless Jack Dee – too bright to be promoted – carries out the commands all along secretly wishing he’d accepted that ‘quick drink offer’ from the ’Brian Paddick’ (the gay policeman/unsuccessful London mayoral candidate) character. Yet only really finding solace in choosing colours for his new tiny one-bedroom flat in Belsize Park (des res North London) painting out of his mind the violence he encounters on Southwark (south London) council estates by day.
Jack Dee’s Lead Balloon still isn’t loosing its advent calendar periodic table even though The IT Crowd won all the Emmys. Or was it only half-a=one as Rick Spleen (Lead Balloon’s character would say) would say. Strange: as a former comedy script reader (I might as well blow my own trumpet ‘cause I don’t trust anyone else’s saliva) Lead Balloon seems more Channel 4 (though it’s on BBC 2) and The IT Crowd (on Channel 4) feels more BBC 1.
The IT Crowd: Series 2 on DVD
Britain sweeps the board at Emmys
BBC One and BBC Two now streaming live online
The world is topsy-turvy anywhere. Who is Mike Leigh somebody asked me the other night! Oh, how times have changed. See
Happy Go Lucky on DVD.
The Man from London (Trailer) is possibly an art house film approach to such ‘Menenzes’ things. A man, a crime, a suitcase of money, the foggy waterfront. Director Béla Tarr is known for his lengthy camera takes, abstruse stories and his latest film is no exception. Most certainly it wraps itself around the viewer fog-like and inescapable. Based on a Georges (the great crime writer) Simenon novel L’Homme de Londres, though not having read it, it’s most probably a brilliant literary adaptation precisely because the film doesn’t try to explain the plot - opting instead to envelope one in the psychological aura of the characters. Shot in breathtaking black and white by director/cinematographer Fred Kelemen, a week later you actually want to see this film again. And the Menenzes connection? What Béla Tarr achieves (directors Jim Jarmusch and Gus van Sant are fans) is a questioning of human motivation, frailty and indecision without external judgement. Someone was obviously murdered, money stolen but human action is usually more translucent than transparent. One’s frustration with Tarr’s film is more one’s frustration with real life. The blood is always going to be there even if you’ve chosen to ignore it. The lead actor’s English dubbing is by James Fox further adding to the gravitas and strangeness.
Interview made during the 12th Sarajevo Film Festival
Renior Cinema in London (20 min),Part 1 , Part 2
Trailer
For many though, this film will move at a pace that not even the laziest London postman would ever consider:
Royal Mail's 4mph marching order gets a postman's knock
The Times
Producer/writer/director Steve Barron’s Choking Man, trailer released by indy UK distributor Soda Pictures (soon on DVD) is a great sensitive date movie for London’s foreign workers who wonder why they bothered toiling away in the first place. Catchy opening titles (Marina Zurkow) and music (Nico Muhly) take us to a diner in New York borough Jamaica where owner Rick (Mandy Patinkin) boasts there are “more languages spoken per square foot than anywhere else in the world.” Performances are strong and while the film never transcends a certain feelgood ‘parochial indyness’ it’s not a film you’ll forget.
No relation is Clark Gregg’s literary adaptation Choke. We’re in surreal Charlie (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) Kaufman territory here and if you happen to share that view of the world (which you no doubt do by reading this blog) then it’ll be a zingy experience warming your cockles with weird is good.
After Hunger and Man on Wire (now out on Region 1 Magnolia DVD),Philipp Stoelzl’s North Face almost forms a pre-Christmas trilogy. Retelling the true story of the first successful 1938 ascent of the Eiger North face (the ‘Murder Wall’ of the Alps), I almost left 20 minutes in and was ultimately horrified that I even considered doing so. What begins as a period ‘bio-pic’ with dinner parties etc at the Eiger resort transforms into a harrowing gaze into man wrestling with the indomitable world. The production team consulted on mountaineering with Touching the Void ’s director but I preferred Stoelz’s film precisely because it never ‘pretended’ a documentary reality. In some ways it reminded me of the ‘reality’ von Stroheim tried to create in his 1919 Blind Husbands shown in last year’s London Film Festival (out on DVD). North Face too has ‘love interest’ with one of the climbers’ old flames Luise gritting her smile and penultimately trying to blow the last wafts of life into her beau. And it’s these fictional constructs that make the mountaineering scenes so viscerally devastating and more akin to a horror film than a ‘bio-pic’. All the more so because of the event’s Nazi politicisation. Everything begins so charmingly, innocent and brave and though you know there’s horror looming you’re still whipped back in your seat when it happens. The ‘fiction’ is that you still believe the climbers will reach the summit, and the viewer hangs onto that hope for dear life, even though one knows they will never achieve it.
The many faces of evil (Guardian article)
Sunday Feature: How Far Would You Go For A Dance?: The Puppet Masters
Who Wears the Red Shoes? (21 Dec)
That’s why the award winning Trouble the Water didn’t effect me as deeply as it did for others. So inundated already by reality footage of Hurricane Katrina that Kimberly Rivers Robert’s home video footage of the already poverty stricken 9th Ward devastation just didn’t have the impact it should have for me. I’d already seen on news outlets how bad things were that there remained no ‘fiction’ with which to create a dialectic. Hearing Kimberly’s rendition of her aspiring rap song just didn’t do it for me. Yet it was an event that should never be forgotten. The question is how do you repeat such a story so that you feel the need to hear it again. And again. And again.
Lakeview Terrace is that very rare breed - a Hollywood film handling race and neighbourhood dispute with subtlety, though it never really borders on wonderment. Dystopian writer/director Neil LaBute is a gun for hire here but with scripting ammunition from ‘lift that rock up and see what’s beneath’ Los Angeles playwright Howard Korder. This may not be Shakespeare but there’s more nuanced inflection and observation than you’ll see in your multiplex for quite some time. Again, you expect the worst to happen and it does: mixed-race couple move next-door to single black dad cop Abe (Samuel L. Jackson). What makes the film work as ‘entertainment’ is that you think - that’s me, or that almost was me. Do you be nice to your neighbours or keep a safe distance? Does one have a choice? Is there ever a middle-ground?
What makes the film work as more than just scary entertainment is the character complexity - the friendly white neighbour Chris (Patrick Wilson) is potentially just as strung out and up tight as the tough cheerie hard-working, single dad Abe. His LAPD precinct is not the leafy-green poolside bonhomie of this middle-class neighbourhood. And there’s an upward mobility that Abe both resents in himself and takes pride in. Is that where his ex-black wife comes in? We hardly see her but she eats away at him until there’s nothing left. Essentially he’s a good man and a good cop – better at least than most. Yet like most of us, if you put up with the shit of ‘the other’ for long enough - whatever race or creed - it starts seeping into your veins. In Abe’s case the Othello catalyst, though not the jealous cause, is Chris’ black wife Lisa (Kerry Washington): that female black power has married white wimpy liberal (he’s management in organic retail). The film’s bitter irony is that neighbourly dispute is exactly what the police have no control over - no control over human disposition. In London noise nuisance is handled by the local council not the police as are other disputes. Not until there’s blood on the carpet or emotional damage done do they/can they step in. Los Angeles is slightly different and the neighbourhood is glad to have Abe ‘on site’ but while they welcome him he’ll never feel ‘one of them’.
Paris mega-rich raise barricades against urban poor neighbours
Demolition of the Aylesbury Estate: a new dawn for Hell's waiting room?
Why wealthy children are giving their inheritance to charity
Malcolm Gladwell interviewed in The Observer
The mix-matched neighbours of Eran Riklis’ Lemon Tree (Trailer) are Salma, a Palestinian widow on one side of her lemon grove and the green line border between Israel and the West Bank, and on the other, Israel’s Defence Minister and his wife. The Lemon trees imposition on sightlines pose a security threat but Salma isn’t about to give up on them and takes her case all the way to the Supreme Court. Like Lakeview Terrace, this is a film with broad appeal, tremendous performances, and though you can sense the ending of this one too, it goes a long way in showing how ordinary ‘nice’ non-politicised people can gradually be prodded into activism. Moreover, how simmering hatred has the potential to boil into all out violence.
Ari Folman’s film Waltz with Bashir uses the abstraction of animation to comprehend the conflict of the 1982 Israeli-Lebanon war, particularly the massacres of the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps - revenge for the death of Christian Phalangist leader Bashir. Folman fought in that war and his film surprisingly conjures a meditation on memory, loss and retribution. You’d think the use of Schubert in one scene would mire the experience but it only serves for further reflection on the inexplicable. The cavil is the ultimate switch to live-action documentary footage when what we most needed was to remain reflective.
Beaufort giving an Israeli perspective is out on Kino DVD
Syrian wedding lingerie: veils of the unexpected
'Don't call me eccentric' - Vivienne Westwood interviewed for The Guardian
Is water the new oil?
Based on a novel, The Secret Life of Bees (LFF) was probably just too sweet for many tastes in spite of its attractive talented cast but its sensibility is certainly from the hive and not the supermarket.
Medicine for Melancholy, that I mentioned last posting from this year’s London Film Festival (LFF hereon), managed to say far more about racial history, boundaries and transgressions. Wyatt Cenac (better known from his wacky The Daily Show appearances) proves just how good comedians can be in straight roles as they’ve felt the pain but don’t often get to show it.
The plight of the honey bee
A Life in the Day: Gloria Havenhand, beekeeper
Kent Mackenzie's 1961 The Exiles documenting urban native American Indians was restored for this year’s LFF.
A French take, not so much on neighbourly behaviour but certainly about social fencing, was Conversations with My Gardener released in cinemas about a month ago and directed by Jean Becker. Who he? Well not Jacques of classics Touchez pas au Grisbi and Le Trou but Jean who helmed, decade or more ago, Depardieu and Vanessa Paradis letting loose on each other in Elisa, a revealing Isabelle Adjani vehicle in One Deadly Summer (Césars 1984 – French BAFTA’s- for Best Actress), and some Belmondo pics in the 60s.
Daniel Auteuil, originally Algerian, plays a reasonably successful artist (Auteuil’s third wife is a sculptor) maybe brushing for the first time with reality in the form of his gardener (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) who he treats as somewhat of a surrogate brother and is in fact an old school friend. The film passed by without barely a whisper in London but is one of those many French films that oozes with honesty, fragilty and warmth. The ending may seem somewhat contrived yet you wish at least more of the world would aspire to such simplicity. One definitely to catch on DVD for a ‘family affair’. And whoever did the subtitling is a true connoisseur of the English language e.g. the Cockney rhyming slang berk (Berkeley Hunt for cunt). Better than most French expletive subtitling that settles for what often amounts to a lazy equivalent of ‘oh bother’.
Another man coping with loss is Italian actor/political comedian and director Nanni Moretti in (LFFQuiet Chaos (Caos calmo) ), relinquishing the directing job to Antonio Luigi Grimaldi. Everyday a recent widower waits in his car outside his daughter’s school attempting to reassure and comfort her. She learns the meaning of a palindrome, which in a sense, is also the meaning of the film. That life can be read the same forwards or backwards, or in Shakespeare’s words in The Tempest “our little life is ‘rounded by a sleep”. It’s what we do and feel in between that really matters. Or as Zorba the Greek said (or sung in the musical version, yes really): “life is what you’re doing while you’re waiting to die.”
Moretti 2001 interview
More intriguing work from New York writer/director David Auburn with The Girl in the Park (Trailer )and a young daughter Maggie who suddenly disappears from Julia Sandburg (Sigourney Weaver) in Central Park one day. 16 years later wayward teenager Louise (Kate Bosworth) whirs into Julia’s life and strangeness ensues. The film’s eliptical quality and incisive performances shimmer with touches of novelist Paul Auster’s New York.
Manga’s DVD of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time - Manga Entertainment is now out.
The Rivals (Les Liens du sang), Optimum stars Guillaume Canet and François Cluzet of the arthouse thriller director and lead actor of Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne) that became somewhat of a hit in London. Set in late 70s grey Lyon (setting for Tavernier’s first pic The Watchmaker of St Paul), Canet plays workaday police inspector François obsessed with another man’s wife, whilst Cluzet is his just released jailbird older brother Gabriel trying to go straight. Based on real life characters Jacques Maillot’s film can be quite intense to follow if you know no French and must resort to subtitles. But the DVD is out soon and well-worth one’s attention.
Let's Talk About the Rain (Parlez-moi de la pluie) (LFF) rather divided the Brit critics. (The title originates from a Georges Brassens song lyric, “Fine weather drives me mad and makes me grind my teeth.”)
This is Agnes Jaoui’s third film as actress/director and co-writer (with Jean-Pierre Bacri) and given that, lacks no attention to character detail nor indeed to using the cinematic canvas (she opts for wide-screen Cinemascope to create a theatrical dialectic for the intimacy of the story). Jaoui plays a politician forced to return to her family home and sister after her mother’s death and what is for her a bête noire- the South of France. The sun just doesn’t shine there like it used to in August. If that wasn’t enough, the Algerian housekeeper’s son is trying to make a doco about her for a series of programmes on ‘Successful Women’ saddled with a dull as dishwater producer (Bacri). “The problem is that everyone thinks they’re more of a victim than the next person,” said Jaoui in an interview, “we will have more sympathy for the weak, even if their complaint is unjustified, rather than for the strong who put them in the situation to complain.” “Working 15-hour days for [constituents] who’ll be disappointed anyway,” according to Jaoui’s character Agathe. Great use of music, too.
Also from Artificial Eye and out now on DVD is Couscous (La Graine et le Mulet- The Secret of the Grain) [here’s my blog review some months ago of the film]:
– 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. 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 Guediguian, 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.
Jean Cocteau’s classic 1950 Orphée about the muso who journeys to the Underworld to reclaim his wife from Death is now out on BFI DVD
France on the crest of a new New Wave
The films of Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (still alive and directing at 100 years old) are rarely seen in Britain either in the cinema (not since early 90s) or on DVD. “Oliveira's Portugal is an idea predicated on singularity, isolation, loss, memory and eclipsed glory,” writes Jonathan Romney in his recent Sight and Sound article. During the Salazar dictatorship Oliveira was forced to give up feature filmmaking for 21 years and become a farmer. Like Bela Tarr, Oliveira’s films are an acquired taste but his latest proves he’s never lost his individual sense of cinematic pace. In Belle Toujours, Michel Piccoli reprises his sadistic and vengeful character Husson from Luis Buñuel’s 1967 Belle de Jour. Definitely a film for the cineastes but worth seeking out.
Very different paces from another 100 year-old, as of 11 December, is contemporary ‘classical’ composer Elliott Carter interviewed by the indefatigable Stephen Johnson for BBC Radio 3’s Discovering Music in a 2 hour special. One not to miss (but only for 7 days). A French coal-miner on hearing one of his works penned him a letter saying who he thought Carter’s music sounded just like digging for coal.
Highly original French director Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours is out on Artificial Eye DVD and his Irma Vep (Essential Edition) on DVD in the States.
Yet another fine Artificial Eye release Times and Winds is also out on DVD
9th London Turkish Film Festival
Adapted from Émile Zola's novel, L'Argent (1928) is the 40th in Eureka's Masters of Cinema DVD series. Marcel L'Herbier’s silent film is a real treat: transferred at the correct speed (20 frames per second), in a beautiful print and with Jean-François Zygel's intricate piano score.
Some silent films can seem like a moral duty to watch but the 164 minutes of this fly by. Saccard (Pierre Alcover) and his rival Gunderman (Alfred Abel) are the money gods fighting over their spoils in the Bourse (Paris's stock exchange, and L’Herbier filmed on location over one Easter break with dozens of cameras). The aviator Jacques Hamelin (Henry Victor) is the foil in Saccard’s greedy plot to inflate share prices using an oil hoax in Guyana. He then attempts seduction (it’s actually a rape scene!) on Hamelin's wife Line (Marie Glory). Notorious ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ playwright and actor Antonin Artaud also pops up along the way and Brigitte Helm from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis also stars. As always, Eureka’s DVD extras are great: including an inventive ‘making-of’ from the time by 20 year old amateur Jean Dréville Autour L'Argent (40:11) and a 50 min doco Marcel L'Herbier: Poet of the Silent Art along with the 80-page booklet. “Everywhere around me I saw a deep-seated lack of regard for filmmakers at that time,” L’Herbier says in a 1969 interview. “Cinema was an art of the fairground – it’s fine for circuses but not anywhere else.” And as one critic put it L’Herbier wanted his cinema “to endow humanity with an entirely new way of expression ...that should be seen in the context of modern art.” And though some critics have argued that L’Herbier was not so much inventive as more a champion of modern cinematic techniques, yet the excitement of his vision still wipes the floor in comparison to much of today’s Hollywood entertainment.
L'Herbier's El Dorado
The battle for the soul of microfinance
I buy therefore I am
Arguably more innovative than L’Herbier, Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 sound film of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is re-released by the BFI. The director claimed that his 360-degree pan of Jekyll turning into Hyde was the first of its kind in Hollywood and even used a recording of his own heart-beat to overcome soundtrack problems. And it’s a film far more terrifying than many a modern horror flic and more on par with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). Indeed, in 1935 several cuts to the film were ordered by the censor. “For me, art abhors the obvious,” Mamoulian said in a 1972 interview. “ There is nothing wrong with the appeal to the eroticism in us any more than there is to an appeal to beauty, goodness, to anything of that sort. But then eroticism is always indirect...and much more interesting.” The director also stresses that Hyde is the animal in Jekyll “not the evil but the animal...he knows no evil he simply gives vent to all his instincts...gradually Hyde changes from an innocent animal into a ...human monster, a monster that is part of us but which we usually keep under control...I think the destiny of mankind lies in our ability to control certain basic elements in our nature...we fail to dominate ourselves which is why we have murders and wars.” Extraordinary is not a description one can very often use about a film but Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is most certainly that and in spades. Jean Renoir’s Le Testament Du Docteur Cordelier (1959) fascinating though it is just isn’t a patch on it. Architects, scientists, doctors – everyone will find something in Mamoulian’s film to grip their mind.
Stop using 'dearie', nurses told
Black God, White Devil (1964) (DVD) is Glauber Rocha’s film about remote Brazilians surviving in the country’s 1940 drought with B/W poetry reminding one of Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St.Matthew of the same year. Many deaths occur on their way to the ‘promised land’: “the horses eat flowers, children drink milk out of the rivers. Dust becomes flour..the abundance of heaven.” On the other side of the mountain “the land will become sea and the sea will become land.” A wholesome double-bill with Mr. Bongo’s Cuban release Memories Of Underdevelopment (1968).
Spanish director Albert Serra’s Birdsong (El cant dels ocells) (LFF) follows the pilgrimage of the Three Wise Men to the birth of Jesus with a cast of non-professional actors including Canadian film programmer and critic Mark Peranson as Joseph (he made a feature-length doco Waiting for Sancho about the production). Shot in the volcanic mountains of the Canary Islands it looks stunning in black and white and the pace is often numbing. But it’s a fabulous film with almost a touch of Jim Jarmusch humour at the end. Still no word of a UK release.
BFI interview
Tigrero (1994) (DVD) by Aki Kaurismaki’s Brazilian based older brother Mika follows directors Jim Jarmusch and Sam Fuller into the Brazilian jungle as they unearth memories of Fuller’s aborted 1958 John Wayne/Ava Gardner film for Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox Studios. The opening and closing titles would be “crocodile eats bird, piranha eats crocodile, another bird comes down and eats piranha.” “The story of mankind, not civilisation,” says Fuller. It’s a fascinating tale and as always Fuller is rivetingly opinionated and compassionate. Watching the tribe’s ceremonies Jarmusch notes that “the laughter and joy of their religious experiences is so different to the ‘seriousness’ of Western religion.” Fuller: “In the war [WWII] every dog-face [soldier] was only worried about one thing- death. I never met one that wanted to go to heaven. I never met one in that three years that believed in heaven...the only thing that can save him is that the guy [next to him] gets hit instead of you! There’s nothing wrong with religion- if somebody really believes it and there is a heaven then I think it’s wonderful. So if you can convince me that I’m going to go to heaven and see girls in bikinis [then] you’re going to have a tough guy to convince.”
YouTube: Part 1, Part 8, Part 9
German artist Thomas Demand has a new show in London. His thing is to create simulcrae of reality out of cardboard, photograph them then destroy the models. This time it’s a commission from The New York Times to ‘re-create’ the U.S. Presidential Oval Office. Is their impact greater in singularity than in multiple? Once one shifts the dialectical relationship with one image dispersing it amongst other representations does it lessen the impact of the enterprise? “I look for a way of re-privatisating that which is constructed as a public opinion,” Demand has said. “I wanted to have one image which shows the cause not the effect of an incident,” he said of his 2005 piece Attempt “constructed from photographs of the studio of an artist whom Baader-Meinhof terrorists targeted in the ‘70s in order to blow up the house of the state's prosecutor next door.”
The Independent article
As well as a recreation of Saddam Hussein's hidden kitchen, Demand made a photograph about the destruction of three Qing-dynasty vases by a wayward Fitzwilliam Museum visitor in Cambridge. The museum is celebrating Sir Sidney Cockerell’s centenary, "I found it a pigsty; I turned it into a palace," he declared having taken the helm in 1908.
Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni went so far as to repaint reality even grass. Good DVD’s and prints have been hard to come by over the years and Red Desert is now out on BFI DVD (also Blu-ray which I’m told looks stunning)
Caught the last day of Wallace Berman’s very impressive retrospective at the Camden Arts Centre last month. Little known outside his Beat peers he was featured in a Whitney Museum of American Art Beat Generation exhibition as the ‘father’ of Californian assemblage. Peter Blake included his portrait on the cover of Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Much of his work uses an early form of photocopying the verifax with inscriptions from the Kabbalah and his use of these reproductions is often more fascinating than much Andy Warhol. His only film Aleph (16mm) was also screened on a loop.
In February, the BFI are releasing 9 hours of Jeff Keen's 45 short films. A self-taught pioneer of Brit independent film in the 1960s, a preview screening the other night of selections confirmed the BFI National Archive’s interest in him. Do they stand the test of time, though, apart from their historical interest? For the internet generation the innovation of the later video work obviously pales in modern comparison. But some of Keen’s relatively unknown work certainly deserves to be discussed in the same breath as his American counterparts.
GAZWRX: The Films of Jeff Keen
The Street Art Awards in London
Stone of Destiny written and directed by the multi-talented actor Charles Martin Smith tells the true story of four Scots uni students who in 1950 broke into Westminster Abbey to steal back Scotland’s stone symbol of nationhood. The film breaks no cinematic boundaries but the cast is good (Robert Carlyle yet again – does he ever sleep) in a solidly made film that’ll send you out of the pre-Christmas cinema with fire in your sporran. Thank heavens there’s an antidote to the festive ‘credit crunch but biscuits are really OK’ propaganda: denizens with dentures not welcome near the mistletoe.
Tough with the smooth: Robert Carlyle
Edinburgh Film Festival Red Carpet
Scotland's iconic Stone of Destiny is a medieval forgery, claims minister
Times article, opens in Canada Feb 20.
Andre Tchaikowsky's skull was dropped from the RSC production of Hamlet - David Tennant’s ‘Dr.Who Hamlet’. And now he’s off with a back injury disappointing his fans until the New Year. Spooky...
Brit archaeologists have unearthed an Iron Age brain
The living dead
Last chance to see Richard Serra’s amazing sculptures at the Gagosian Gallery by the way. But perhaps the very last word this week should go to Hunter S. Thompson whose life is the subject of Alex (Taxi to the Dark Side) Gibney’s film Gonzo : “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” and “Buy the ticket take the ride. Inspiring advice for Christmas.
Our crazy gonzo life
Alex Gibney in the Sunday Times
One more posting to come before Christmas...the woods are dark and deep..promises to keep...arghhhh..
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