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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