Police identify 200 children as potential terrorists
and freedom of speech continues a pace in Britain:
Anarchist professor Chris Knight suspended after G20 'threat'
Hmmm...
We predict a riot: Meet the anarchists plotting to overthrow capitalism
Think badly managed social housing has anything top do with 'radicalisation'? Dominion Housing could be a good start, though they always deny any wrong doing. Now where have I heard that excuse before?

And anyone still remember this man?
David Kelly: the opera. Kelly had more brain than dozens of those Whitehall jerks and all they did was dub him "a Walter Mitty fantasist".
I haven't finished with you New Labour, not by a long way - nor has the Prime Minister of Australia Mr. Kevin Rudd.

the hidden author

Mahler's Symphony No 9 with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Philharmonia Orch last Sunday night at the Royal Festival Hall will calm...availbale online until Tuesday.

I and i and I

These are films that would never even see the light of a nomination for “silver jock-strap [award] at the Krakow film festival” as one interviewee quipped. The world has heard of classic Australian films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and My Brilliant Career but not the “cinematic era that was unashamedly packed full of boobs, pubes, tubes...and even a little kung fu” enthuses Optimum’s press release.

Not Quite Hollywood (official trailer) has a limited run at the ICA as part of their Ozploitation season, then released on DVD with audio commentary from its director Mark Hartley. Quentin Tarantino, needless to say, is a huge fan of these films such as the horror Patrick (1978). Fuelled by tax legislation that allowed producers a 150% write-off, a lot of junk was also jangled out in this period. But equally (though many would disagree and do in Hartley’s balanced doco), there was some great ‘commercial’ filmmaking going on that would later inspire the teams behind Oz international successes like Saw and Wolf Creek. Richard Franklin’s Roadgames was also released last year on Optimum DVD.

And if you still haven’t had enough of these genres Optimum DVD have also just released Italian horror pic The Antichrist (1974). But anyone who finds this one offensive really should get out a bit more often. There’s actress Alida Valli no doubt paying her rent, composer Ennio Morriconi seizing the opportunity to experiment, and great cheeky (or is that cheesy) art direction from Liberto Bertacca. The rather flat lighting is very el cheapo (the toad’s blood looks straight out of a Dulux paint catalogue) not El Greco but there are some great scenes with levitating wardrobes, disembodied hands and are those EP records flying all around the room during the climatic exorcism? A very fun film for a Friday night in but scary Darrio Argento it aint.
[Addition: First look at Lars von Trier's new film Antchrist]

Or there’s Russ Meyer’s Blacksnake from Arrow DVD. Now you can’t say this website isn’t eclectic now can you?
Jennifer (daughter of David Lynch’s) film Surveillance is an interesting mix too. Some really fine filmmaking here boding well for her next one.
And Tom Tywker’s The International is, as you’d expect, fantastically made. Character development? Well no, but that’s not really what Tywker’s work has ever been about - moral issues are nonetheless always embedded within his commercial cinematic engines.

Not Quite Hollywood just opened this year’s Australian Film Festival at the Barbican that also includes Peter Weir’s 1974 classic The Cars that Ate Paris (Thurs 19 Mar) and the same evening a London screening of Tropfest - the largest short film festival in the world. For more ‘discerning’ punters, Three Blind Mice winner of last year’s FIPRESCI International Critic’s Award at The Times BFI London Film Festival is screening. Matthew Newton directed, wrote and acts in this tense low-budget film and wanted to avoid the cinematic “shorthand of most films...an anti-war film unashamedly about people rather than politics...with each character treating the film as their own story.” Films like this don’t emerge from Oz too often so well worth a gander.
The Femme Fatale BFI season

Last week’s high-school shootings in Germany raised again the question of violence in film and its effects. What frustrates more, is that after such incidents governments always try to convince us that they can instigate preventative legislation when in fact the fault lies more in society itself. Last year’s New Zealand film Out of the Blue showed a man out of control who should not have been allowed to be so. Was the fault psychiatric or sociological? The film never broached that thorny issue remaining a re-enactment. In London last year, a respected lawyer started shooting out the window of his posh Chelsea home before turning the gun on himself. And all along nobody wanted to admit or even discuss whether they (society) were part of this terrible process. The killers are condemned as being outside society. By the same token, and I’m thinking amongst many other examples of the police shooting of Menenzes on the London underground, authorities are rarely found to have made any wrong doing. It was systemic. The system not individuals were to blame, but the system though it can be found lacking, is never allowed to be seen as inherently flawed.

I’d like to know whether the German teenage gunman had been bullied, had been ridiculed by the text messages and emails from fellow pupils. That would not have constituted an excuse for his actions but such enquires might prove more fruitful in understanding society’s flaws and problems. The armies of governments are allowed to exist but private gun ownership is generally frowned upon by society’s liberals. The inherent contradictions of society march onwards.

The BFI’s re-release of the 1950 Gun Crazy (YouTube trailer) directed by Joseph H. Lewis is seen to be the epitome of B-film noir. Director Paul Schrader was a champion of the film in the 70s: “In no film has America mania for youth, action, sex and crime been so immediately portrayed. There are no excuses for the gun craziness – it is just crazy.” And it’s a film that, by accident or design, gets closer to the ‘heart of the matter’ than most others. Bart (John Dall) has loved guns ever since a juvenile offence but has no interest in killing. Laurie (Peggy Cummins) makes her living as an expert shot on the carnival circuit but for her the gun is a penis of revenge upon men. The two misfits become inextricably entwined: she senses dependable but strong femininity in him and he in turn is drawn to her masculinity. “You’re the only thing that is [real] Laurie, the rest is a nightmare,” says Bart.
Senses of Cinema article
and another

Jonah Goldberg’s book on Liberal Fascism:
The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

Out on DVD is the satirical War, Inc. starring John Cusack (also writer and producer) as a suave government trouble-shooter in Tamerlane (a fictionalised corporate Iraq). It’s the only Hollywood film that you’ll ever hear the French writer (no I won’t say ‘any writer at all’ – that’s not quite fare) Céline mentioned but that’s as far as goes the cleverness or complexity of the film’s narrative. Journalists entering Tamerlane are jabbed with “implanted experience” but not the bolshy investigative Natalie Hegelgusen (Marisa Tomei, who’s worked for decades without much due recognition until The Wrestler) whose wiles inveigle her into ‘the empire’. And it’s a film that tries to tread the path of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and fails: an “absurdist comedy...with teeth” explains Cusack on the DVD interview extra. But it’s an honourable enjoyable dental malfunction (nice inventive casting turns from Ben Kingsley and Hilary Duff – don’t often hear those two mentioned in the same breath) that really needed the comic talents of Seth Rogan, Will Ferrell and his bawdy inmates to give the film some chutz.

Lionsgate also have out the DVD and Blu-ray of Oliver Stone’s W. (the George W. Bush biopic) including director’s commentary. As I wrote on the film’s release last year, we don’t really get a glimpse of why stalactites and stalagmites are different but Stone’s caves are nonetheless always worth exploring.

Clint Eastwood should get an acting award for stamina if nothing else from Gran Torino - he’s in almost every scene. The moral debate it raises about gun ownership will no doubt be seen by many as highly dubious. But Eastwood as always - past and present - counteracts that with hoisting and foisting an overriding message of human tolerance into the commercial cinema.
And if that opens the minds of ‘middle-America’ just a fraction that is quite an achievement. The enemy ‘within’.
Lakeview Terrace is out on Sony DVD March 30.

Il Divo (trailer), (official site) is Paolo Sorrentino's latest film about Giulio Andreotti, Italy's seven stint Prime Minister. Melancholy pervades most of Sorrentino's work and, as always too, the film has the magnificent look of a stage set. What is fascinating, though, is that Andreotti (Toni Servillo) is like a lame duck in a ballet of political scandals swirling around him rather than seen as a 'biopic'. There is neither action nor inaction, he is simply the sacrifice in this Rite of Spring; the minotaur trapped in his labyrinth forever condemned, the spectrum forever ripped open. As his other work reveals, Sorrentino’s interest always lies not in politics but with the inner man. We neither collude nor are angered: Sorrentino forces us to stare into an abyss. The abyss of a beautiful damned world.
Making Divo not easy for director (Variety)
BBC Radio 4’s Front Row (Mon 16 March)
The powerful anti-Mafia pic Gomorrah is out on Optimum DVD and packed on 2 discs with extra features.
Quiet Chaos also out on DVD.
Oxford Literary Festival: George Orwell's son speaks for the first time about his father

The forces of English power can be seen in The Duchess and Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day (both out on DVD) while The Young Victoria is out in cinemas. All are flawed in many ways but all worth seeing giving continued hope for a British film industry. No cutting edge here but some really great casting in all three films.
Van Dyck and Britain continues at Tate Britain.
The Independent review
And a wonderful film installation in the Tate’s Triennial Extramission 6 (Black Maria) by Lindsay Seers exploring how we project and formulate our own image from and into history.

Even after missing the first 10 minutes of In the City of Sylvia, the film’s voyeurism held my attention. Was that the filmmaking or human curiosity? Reminded me of Alain Tanner’s 1983 Dans la ville blanche (In the White City) with a man walking the streets of Lisbon sending home to Switzerland super-8 footage of his perambulations.

Çagan Irmak’s contemporary Turkish film Issiz adam (Alone) (literally deserted man) is familiar thwarted relationship fare (this is commercial [top grosser in Turkey] not film festival circuit fare) but has a riveting performance first-time actress Melis Birkan. And great to see a Turkish film playing in four multiplex London cinemas.

Gerhard Richter Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery explore in ‘blurred’ paint “the excess of unimportant information” - the seeming reality of photography long before (1962) such questions were asked (cf Susan Sontag's 1977 On Photography ) “I don’t think the painter need either see or know the sitter. A portrait must not express anything of the sitter’s ‘soul’ essence or character”, writes Richter.
Richter’s website

The almost improvised, instantaneous pictures in Constable Portraits make a great companion exhibition to Richter forcing one to ask ‘what is a portrait’?

In the fictitious Latin American country “a hell called El Dorado...stealing my youth” an idealist and anarchist poet near death, reflects on his struggles. Glauber Rocha’s 1967 B/W Brazilian Entranced Earth (trailer) now out on DVD feels like Kozintsev’s Russian Hamlet from a few years earlier (1964) – mobile soul-searching camera work, voice-over and all, “In this oblivion, horizons sealed by other poets”, “I vomit in the streets...I do the vain excuse of poetry.” And so on. Great depressing filmmaking. Slightly more uplifting (but only just) is Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Cuban Strawberry and Chocolate also out on Mr. Bongo DVD. Its gay theme isn’t exactly radical for 1993 but obviously was and is controversial in Cuba. Good Friday night in for the boys.

"To him, who still would gaze upon
The glory of the summer sun,
There comes, when that sun will from him part,
A sullen hopelessness of heart."

more tomorrow......

I and I

Where is that ‘still point in the turning world’ these days? Was one ever thus? Will it be the Higgs Boson particle? When Jon Stewart was announced presenter of last year’s Oscars ceremony, much of the world must have being asking who HE? Now in 2009, La Stewart has hit international headlines because one of his lampooned subjects hit back. Namely:
The Daily Show host Jon Stewart and stock analyst Jim Cramer from the American network CNBC are in the midst of an angry feud being played out on national television.

The saddest music of them all was when Cramer, in Stewart’s The Daily Show ‘play-off’, lamented that some of his now discredited ‘sources’ were among his ‘oldest friends’. I know exactly how u must feel Mr. Cramer. Believe me, I do. Only I never really trusted them in the first place. They’re only human after all. We must forgive. Yeah right: the lying, greedy, onanistic Sh**bags! And that’s a euphemistic phrase smelling of daisies...

Is London any better? Yeah, right.
Cabinet Office papers reveal Iraq dossier fears
Secret emails show Iraq dossier was 'sexed up'
Nothing compared to the government goings on at Danegrove Primary School. Can we look forward to the film version Revenge of the Hobnobs? (might need re-titling for mass American consumption) starring Owen Wilson as the double agent PE teacher and Jennifer Aniston as the bolshy mum (Paltrow turned it down – didn’t want to blot her Brit copy book ;). What began innocently as a chocolate bar in a kid’s lunchbox became the living hell school of Lindsay Anderson’s If. Didn’t the New Labour government have a schools’ sports deal with Cadbury’s a few years ago? Memories can be so short. Maybe the film could be a horror/musical- High School Musical meets Super Size Me meets Roger Corman with nods to Ken Loach. Danny Boyle could direct, and to ease her mind from Olympic twaddle architect Zaha Hadid could design the lunchboxes for the Dali-esque fantasy scenes: oh, the possibilities for freedom of expression are endless...

The Lost World of Communism is on BBC 2. The first ep on Eastern Germany had great material and food for thought. And BBC Four’s Do it Yourself: The Story of Rough Trade doco about the ‘indie’ London record label really made one ponder marrying independence, business, creativity and happiness. The label recently scored their first Number 1 hit with Duffy (who they’d also nurtured).

I dragged moi out das depressive slime (or was that silicon stasis?) to survey ‘WALL-E’s new world, what with the great political brains (i.e. democratically elected by... “don’t finish that sentence...” – thanks S.S.) meeting in rural idyllic Horsham, England (do I smell Simon Pegg and Hot Fuzz?). (Was anyone beheaded, poisoned, pilloried or beleaguered there in aeons gone Mr. Simon Schama? He’d be the one to know - the unwritten l’histoire,,,- The Madwoman of Chaillot...) But perhaps the best ‘talking fish’ j’arrived recently with Optimum’s DVD set The Jean Pierre Melville Collection), though Optimum don’t seem so keen as I am as they haven’t yet put a link on their website!:) I say ‘best’ because Melville (he took his name from the American writer) was not necessarily one of the greatest cinematic originals of the C20, nor the ‘nicest’ nor the most ‘vile’ director: but he knew far more than most ‘what was what’. And nor is Optimum’s set ‘that’ original with most of the ‘must-have’ DVD extras having appeared on the BFI DVDs and Criterion’s in the States. But Optimum’s is, nonetheless, incredibly good value and consummately informative. Ponder Melville’s life from these discs and you’ll understand a helluva lot about contemporary politics. If only they were able to include the rarely (if at all) available Deux Hommes dans Manhattan (1958) (that starred the director himself in an acting part) then the set would have been unbeatable!

The world doesn’t need me to echo praises for Melville’s work except for the question ‘why do we keep re-watching Melville films’? Because they undoubtedly remain irresistible and re-watchable. As Volker Schlöndorff the film-maker, and assistant on Léon Morin, prêtre noted: “long before the nouvelle vague had been invented Melville had been there”- “ ‘dogma film’ before ‘dogma’ .” (the Danish late 90s new wave ‘no-frills’ style). Melville was “steeped in the milieu of American culture” states Ginette Vincendeau, the author of a new book on Melville and who also offers audio commentary on most of the DVD discs (without even a centime of info fat). Last year, Second Sight gave us the DVD of Le Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea) – Melville’s very first film that explored French silence during the Nazi occupation and French resistance (and its publicly re-iterated myth). Melville observes rather than judges his characters. He even had a commercial hit at the French box-office with Léon Morin, prêtre “commercial cinema with a sincerity and personal style leading to a new classicism” notes Vincendeau, “the uphill struggle of male failure”. Who would think that French star and boxing hunk Belmondo would make a convincing Catholic priest? But he does. In spade-ish cheekbones! And one who prays “only when I can help it”. A filmmaker who also worked with Melville, the great Bertrand Tavernier (The Watchmaker of St. Paul(L'Horloger de Saint Paul)), is interviewed on the DVD discs. “A strong style that re-arranged the world” states his Melville assistant Bernard Stora in one of the most revealing DVD interviews. In some ways it’s hard to believe that the same man who made Le Silence and Léon Morin, prêtre also made the ‘gangster’ movies of later years. But then you begin to realise the similarities between – dare I say...well let’s say ‘Scorsese’ cinema as a moderate example. “America [as] both sublime and abominable,” notes critic Rui Nogueira.

My blog review from last year:
“Nina Simone's rhythmic song was also brilliantly used in The Thomas Crown Affair remake having taking its impetus from a simple foot tapping scene in the Steve McQueen original. Jean-Pierre Melville was also fascinated by such simplicity - never using style over content. His first film Le Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea), just out on Eureka's Masters of Cinema DVD, accentuates the ticking of the clock in the French farmhouse where an old man and his niece take a resistance vow of silence in having to accommodate a Nazi officer. The film explores the notion of attentistes, those who just waited for the war to end. Melville's resistance film 20 years later, L' Armée des ombres (Army of Shadows), also has the ticking clock just before Lino Ventura's escape from Gestapo HQ and his running footsteps, as does Belmondo running in the opening credits of the 1962 Le Doulos (French slang for police informer) and just re-released in New York. Melville's choreographing of his characters' relation to time and the sound of silence is one of the qualities that make Melville a cinema master.

Essay on the 2004 great restoration of Army of Shadows cool blues and browns in the latest American Cinematographer.
Army of Shadows (US DVD), recent (BFI DVD)
Les enfants terribles (recent US DVD) (BFI DVD)
Le Doulos (BFI DVD)
Le Cercle Rouge (BFI DVD)
(US DVD)
Le Samourai (US DVD)
Bob Le Flambeur (US DVD)
Bob Le Flambeur(Optimum)
Le deuxième souffle
L'Armeé des Ombres Senses of Cinema article
good blog Melville mention
Save our film heritage from the political vandals (The Observer)

Le Silence (1949) was an extraordinary first feature and one of the most important and controversial in world cinema. Melville had no film training, didn't wish to be part of a union, and persuaded the writer Vercors not only to allow him to adapt the most important novel of the resistance, but also to film it in Vercors' house. But it was only on the condition that the finished film be screened to a jury of eminent members of the resistance for approval. "The thing I liked enormously about Le Silence was the anti-cinematographic aspect of the story. I wanted to attempt a language composed entirely of images and sounds, and from which movement and action would be more or less banished," Melville says in the fantastically revealing interview with Rui Nogueira reprinted in the DVD's booklet. Narrated in voice-over, the only word spoken by the couple in the film is the niece's adieu, an acknowledgement of the arrival of their voyage of understanding of what it is to be human. "I learned then that the hands, if you observe them well, can be as expressive as the face as they more easily escape the control of the will,” says the narration.

Melville's last film from 1972, Un Flic (The Cop), has just been re-issued as part of Optimum's Alain Delon set and is another masterpiece. It opens with the stormy sleet greys of a seafront bank heist, the sea battering man's ramparts. In fact the whole film looks like it's shot in the depths of a London winter. Delon plays Coleman the cop: "This job makes you sceptical," says his partner. "I'm sceptical about scepticism," says Coleman, "The only feelings man has ever inspired in a police officer are ambiguity and ridicule. Ridicule", he repeats his face now in darkness. Melville chooses a building location for police HQ where all the office windows are each seemingly askew only combining to form faceless architecture. Coleman's office window faces a brick wall and a drainpipe. This is the underbelly world of Abel Ferrara or Cassavetes, the big difference being that Coleman is a good cop with a totally dispassionate eye. "I sometimes read," says Melville, "Melville is being Bressonian. I'm sorry but it's Bresson who has always been Melvillian." Un Flic's methodical ingenious train heist by helicopter is a great example of this. The sustained close-up in the patrol car of the almost blank but beautiful eyes of Delon in the film's final moments reminds one of Albert Camus's doctor and his dictum in his novel La Peste: that the only certitude we have is in the daily round.” Here ends moi blogging from last year.
Worth comparing Leon to Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest

How to follow Melville? John Patrick Shanley’s recent American film Doubt does rather pale in comparison. But look how assembling amazing performances enhances a ‘big brushstrokes’ script. Melville always wanted to work with ‘stars’ when he could. And with good reason. Yet he was also able to achieve very similar ‘parallel’ results with lesser known actors. We’d still pay to see Philip Seymour Hoffman even if he didn’t give his performances those extra nuances. And Meryl Streep seems to do it so effortlessly that her work can too often be ‘taken for granted’.
Doubt is out on Miramax DVD in the States April 6

Eureka DVD has just issued William Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) in their Masters of Cinema (MoC) series-(trailer). The extras on this one are sadly rather slim for an MoC release (outtakes from the original version All That Money Can Buy) as compared to the bulging issue from Criterion DVD in the States. But there is Eureka’s customary 60 page booklet that includes the original story by 1928 Pulitzer writer Stephen Vincent Benet. And it’s certainly an intriguing film that lay somewhat dormant for 50 years. Seeming costume (mid C19) Faustian melodrama finally wends its way into the moral debating arena of It’s a Wonderful Life. Joseph August’s B/W cinematography, Bernard Herrmann’s score, Robert Wise’s editing – well worth a look.

David Thomson discusses RKO’s Orson Welles who used the same creative team as Dieterle on his 1941 Citizen Kane, also a box office failure.
Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon screens tonight at the BFI. Designer Ken Adam and actor Steve Berkoff recall working with Stanley Kubrick on his adaptation of Thackeray's novel
In BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme (Jan 30)

Ole Christian Madsen’s meticulously researched Flame & Citron - (official UK trailer) is another debunking of cosy political myth – here for the first time exploring Danish WWII resistance. It’s undeniably a powerful film but one that for me didn’t quite resonate as expected. Perhaps in trying so hard to tell the unbearable truth there’s the possibility that one can distance oneself saying, well at least that wasn’t me. The unbearable, insidious complicity of politics that Jean-Pierre Melville conjures so well.
Henryk Ross's Jewish ghetto photos that were conveniently ignored for some time after the war.
The dirty war on our doorstep

Bernhard Schlink discusses his novelThe Reader
The Boy In The Striped Pajamas is out on DVD and very strongly recommended for all humans.
Max Ernst? He's out picking tomatoes
Malevolent voices that despise our freedoms
Pet Shop Boys new song: We're All Criminals Now
And this sounds like a catchy song: You’ve brought the Tube to its knees, Gordon, now take the blame. Any dream will do...

more tomorrow.....

slipperydipperydipperydop

As I wrote a while ago, it’d be a relief for this site to have a holiday from political comment for as long as possible. Can’t imagine a UK government policy in a deckchair though can we? I’ll avoid my iceberg jokes from last year as the firma terra finally took hold as predicted on this site. But politics itself took not so much rest as compassion (not a Westminster word in common usuage) when it suspended Prime Minister’s question time last week owing to the death of the young disabled child of Conservative leader David Cameron (PM Gordon Brown himself lost a child). So it’s perhaps an appropriate moment to mention an Australian film about autism The Black Balloon (trailer) winner of 7 top accolades at the 50th Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards last December (more akin to the French Césars awards than the international BAFTAs) as well as a top award at the Berlin Film Fest. So why straight to DVD in the UK without a cinema release? It’s a first feature for director Elissa Down (based on her own army family and cowritten with co-producer Jimmy Jack) and she swore down the Bondi streets with amazement when Toni Collette phoned accepting the lead role of the 15 year-old boy’s mother. The supermodel Gemma Ward (she’s a good actress and began her career as one) also has a lead role. And it’s far from being a depressing 90 minutes, the film full of joy and humour. Perhaps this Oz film falls between two stools for the foreign market (though obviously not Berlin): it doesn’t harbour realistic or heightened tragedy nor qualities of quirkiness and the surreal. Nor those of Hollywood spin as it’s refreshingly lacking in sentimentality. It is simply a beautifully told family story (set in 1991) with the parallel coming of age romance between Ward’s character and Thomas (Rhys Wakefield) - the younger brother of autistic brother Charlie (Luke Ford). The film also looks great in Denson Baker’s ‘scope wide-screen. For DVD extras there’s an enthusiastic and detailed director’s audio commentary and cast and crew interviews.
US website
{Addition] On Radio 4's Midweek (4 March) Rupert Isaacson is a journalist and travel writer and his book The Horse Boy published by Viking is a deeply personal story about his journey with his young autistic son to Mongolia in the hope he can be healed.

For those whose problems are milder but need nipping in the bud, try the BBC series
Grow Your Own Drugs on growing and using natural remedies or learn about The Eucalypt

Iain Burside hosted a Radio 3 Sunday morning: Classical Music in Film Soundtracks including an interview with Ondes Martinot (that spooky electronic instrument) player Cynthia Millar.
Silent film pianist and composer Neil Brand unlocks the secrets of the Casablanca score on The Film Programme (13 Feb)

Birds Eye View Film Festival

Emmy the Great’s First Love album is out this month on her own label Close Harbour. She sings with an endearing ‘teenage’ truth, wit, and angst – think Lily Allen meets ‘grunge’.
Or fancy a bit of Haydn on Haydn

Based on the book Sid Vicious: No One is Innocent, Who Killed Nancy? is out on Soda Pictures DVD - Nancy being Miss Spungen, the Sex Pistols’ groupie and Sid’s girlfriend found dead in a bathroom at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Sid died not long after. Brit reviews on its limited cinema release were luke warm but it is an engaging doco with loads of interesting interviews to paint a fuller picture of Sid than we normally get. Fans will no doubt have heard it all before and still be angry that a more thorough police investigation hadn’t taken place.

The same distributor releases Kelly (Old Joy) Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy this week. As I often moan I’m not one for ‘social realism’ but I’m a sucker for character observation. Something Reichardt is so good at. What’s the difference you ask? I wasn’t going to attempt that answer but I just remembered a great conversation I had at last year’s Times BFI London Film Festival with Ramin Bahrani whose film Goodbye Solo (like Wendy and Lucy) was also in the festival. (It’s yet to be released here by distributor Axiom). I cheekily admittedly to Bahrani that I thought his film was actually ‘quite commercial’ to which he laughed and replied that he’d welcome such an audience rather than preaching to the arthouse converted – my phrase not his. (Goodbye Solo observes two seemingly ill matched yet fated men on their journeys). As Hollywood’s doggy movie Marley and Me hits the screens this week, Wendy and Lucy offers a quieter more reflective take on how an animal (Wendy’s dog Lucy) becomes as important as a human friend. And as with any human relationship it can also weigh one down in the struggle for existence as well as console. Rather than just watching a film you begin participating in a dialectic with Wendy and Lucy. Where am I in relation to these events? Am I part of that landscape? As in her previous film Old Joy, Reichardt ushers us into that debate about friendship, dependency, the present moment of existence conflicting or colluding with the debt of our past memories.
Old Joy Q&A

Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky that got Oscar overshadowed is out on Miramax DVD in the States next week.

And the sad ‘credit crunch’ news that “After 43 years in business, New Yorker Films has ceased operations,” a statement read on their website Feb 23. Founded in 1965 by Dan Talbot, his first release was Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution. They were about to release on DVD the intriguing German film by Christian Petzold Yella (distributed in the UK by Artificial Eye).

The doco detailing the roots of America’s financial crisis I.O.U.S.A.is out on DVD to educate and depress us.

The Great Franquin is a conversation with the veteran showman and hypnotist, Francis (Pat) Quinn. This interview was initially broadcast in 1999.

The first few rooms of the retrospective of American artist Roni Horn aka Roni Horn at Tate Modern may initially seem to the non-art crowd rather too conceptual with its ‘negative space’. But as you move through the show something strange and unexpected starts happening. And pretty much what the artist intended: “The idea was to create a space in which the viewer would inhabit the work or at least be a part of it,” Horn has said. You then return to Room 2 and take a closer look at her student work from 1974-75 Ant Farm –originally presented in her studio as a silent performance which included the artist observing the ants. The galleries were practically empty of people when I visited invoking a strange eerie communion with the work. Whether the works would have the same effect in a crowded environment I’m not sure. Horn has often said that her many trips to work in Iceland were not so much an escape from New York but on the contrary that her relationship with the new landscape quite scared her. There’s a fantastic black and white gelatin silver photo grid wall of 64 prints (Her, Her, Her and Her, 2002-03) taken in an Icelandic changing room that in some ways resembles Peter Greenaway’s recent film work with many narratives swimming toward the viewer in the same frame: “it is a mobius of tactile and spatial continuity...an experience of unseen and sensible infinities.”

“What I like about photographic installation—and I think that what I do with photographic work is very much informed by having been a sculptor, meaning someone who works in the actual—is that you’re working with the image which is the opposite of the actual. You’re working with the thing that you can peel off of something and still have the actual.” In an earlier work from 1999 she took photos of the Thames River (Room 8). As the free brochure points out, “water for Horn is not so much a substance but a thing whose identity is based on its relation to other things. Most of what you’re looking at when you look at water is light reflection.” On the lithographs are tiny numbers referring to historical, philosophical footnotes below the photo.

“The issue of whether or not I am a woman artist is the problem of the questioner — it's not my problem. But who would want to be an adjective. If you can be a noun, be it. Why would you want to be a supplement. To identify the gender of an artist is a way of diluting identity,” Horn said in an interview and hence the title of the show. “Identity is a river...androgyny is the possibility of a thing containing multiple identities. Integrating difference is the basis of identity, not the exclusion of it. You are this and this and that.” The Tate show travels to Avignon, the Whitney Museum in New York and the ICA Boston.
PBS site

Legendary though not so widely known American photographer Steve Schapiro shows some of his movie set stills at Hamiltons (photo of opening here)
His photos for American Radioworks, more, and more.
Woody Allen dressed as a sperm in Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask.
Vanity Fair, Taxi Driver film stills
The Making of The Godfather
On BBC Four TV The Genius of Photography and other related programmes this Saturday night.

Gimpel Fils has a photo show Super Border by Christopher Stewart who walks Spain’s Andalucia coastline and considers the implications of the new ‘vision machine’ spycams SIVE (External Vigilance System) to combat the boat immigrants. Stewart’s concept is probably stronger than the photos in and of themselves but that’s strong enough of an idea.

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas warns of surveillance culture

Radio 3’s Sunday Feature:The Black Cube
Navid Akhtar talks about the Ka'aba, a shrine in the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.(live webcam), (images)
Contemporary art and film of the Arab world
Hamas and the Arab world

Jeremy Paxman’s (BBC TV’s Newsnight anchorman) The Victorians takes his love of Victorian paintings as a very strong basis for a series about Britain’s evolution in that period. Most of these ‘realist’ paintings don’t normally get much of a look-in in art history discussions. The series is fantastically researched and what you’d think would be rather dry historical material has sprung to life in every episode thus far. Did you know that when rioting in London threatened, the roof of the British Museum was loaded with rocks to pelt down and guns were mounted atop the Bank of England? How tame it all seems now in our happy bustling metropolis. Maybe that’s a good note on which to have a little break before I get started...
Writer Peter Flannery speaks tonight of his Royal National Theatre adaptation of
Burnt By The Sun.
BBC to put nation's oil paintings online