molto e cantabile

Bit of a 'work in blogress' the next few days as blogs nowadays are demanded to have been written even before yesterday to be considered part of the evolutionary chain. So what is the world asking of us pixelphiliacs? How's London Mayor Boris doing - smoozing in New York after falling foul of planning laws by erecting an illegal shed on his balcony? Most probably not the subject on everyone's lips. But always fun to see our Mayor Johnson up and about - easy to imagine him in a cameo on Broadway. But there's still signal failure on some underground tube line every second day to the point where it's so frequent you wonder whether the Tannoy announcers are just making up all this. Money is poured into engineering upgrades but the mind still boggles at the thought of those 2012 Olympic Games passengers. Often it takes a bus 15 min (at around 10am) to crawl the short distance between Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus. Let alone other shenanigans. Tortoise Circus. But one can't really blame Mayor Boris for all that.
Funding fear as Tube passenger numbers fall
UK museums should adopt US-style 'voluntary' fees, says Boris Johnson
Investment in Infrastructure on the Mayor's website
The new map of the London underground hasn't got the river Thames on it. How wrong is that?
Bailey's mobile phone portraits
(he was so inspired by mine that,,,)
Opening night for the Twitter opera

The world is chattering about President Obama commanding the world stage again with a fantastic new script while Colonel Gaddafi (addressing the UN) had housing problems not being allowed by authorities to stay in his tent (apparently on land owned by Donald Trump). The President certainly got the attention even of those who escaped into virtual reality boffindom long ago. But what the boffs and bifflings really wanted to know this week was is the Surrogates movie (adapted from Robert Venditti's graphic comic novel set in 2054) any good? So much anticipated that a security guard patrolled the aisles at Wednesday's preview screening. Unheard of excitement for a London film preview. The morning skies in Sydney began reddening with outback dust the following day. If only we could convince the Martians to visit London and sort out the transport woes. Any chance Mayor Boris?

Go expecting Blade Runner or any number of great classic sci-fi movies then you'll be disappointed with Surrogates. But the story's premise is so strong it still keeps hold. Much maligned and feted Brit director Nicolas Roeg let it be known in a Front Row BBC Radio 4 interview that he'd love to film a graphic novel. And this film cries out for less linear direction. Venditti's inspiration came from people losing their spouses and jobs due to their addiction to the internet and online personas. In the original, Lionel Canter (James Cromwell) had designed surrogates (remotely brain controlled robots) specifically for the physically disabled, but like most inventions, ordinary citizens throughout the world began using them while lazing at home. This could have been a fantastic film but just isn't - and that's no fault of Bruce Willis. But it ain't all bad and what's interesting is that you don't feel it's spoilt the chances of a sequel based on Venditti's latest The Surrogates: Flesh and Bone. Venditti was immersed in literary classicists such as Hemingway rather than comics and began by stacking boxes for the company that a few years later published his work. Here's a normal guy with big, sweeping, interesting ideas that really start eating into our marrow of contemporary society.
Good audio interview on Comic Book Outsiders (about 18 min in)
The teen bloggers who took over the internet

All that red dust over Sydney suddenly makes sense of the manna from heaven. In the 3D animated Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs every food imaginable falls from the sky when kid inventor Flint Lockwood's machine designed to turn water into food goes haywire. Originating from a 1978 children's book, this film is not only enormous fun but will get kids thinking about science, climate change, genetic mutation, bullying and whether bigger really is better. Great designed 3D glasses as well so cool you want to wear them home.

There's more than a scary hint of Robert Venditti's idea that everything can be controlled in The Soloist. Initially, the broad cine brushstrokes used to paint this true story of ex Juilliard classical cellist mentally ill genius now homeless Los Angeles streetperson Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) make one queasy. The feelgood story of how LA Times columnist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) buys the guy a cello, finds him a room, introduces him to the LA Philharmonic and turns his life around. All beautifully and ingeniously photographed by Seamus McGarvey. But Brit director Joe Wright has cleverly made a film that while having commercial sweep also seems to question whether interfering in someone's life is ever the right move.
We are back in Wright's Pride and Prejudice territory here - how frequently people mis-perceive others through social convention. Nathaniel's story isn't an isolated one. In fact quite common. Only a few years ago a bass player who'd worked with all the jazz greats and dropped off the map was found in a Skid Row hotel. He'd not played a note in decades.

And Lopez in many ways is no hero; more veering towards the self-righteous career journalist as his colleagues are being made redundant. Downey gives Lopez complexity. He cares but pulls himself back to society's yellow line. Nathaniel began as just a possible story lead as other ideas got crossed off his shopping list. Does Nathaniel really need or want medication and accommodation questions the head of the homeless unit. Tom Hollander's LA Phil 'let us pray' cellist may seem characatured but he steps into Nathaniel's world from somewhere else completely. Beethoven string quartets are made to sound like Beethoven symphonies in Dario Marianelli's very clever film score. Does it matter the film seems provocatively to ask so long as it sounds good? Quite clearly for Nathaniel it does. He ended up playing Beethoven on the street because he wanted to hear the buzz of the world not the fleeting gossip of music school students and critics. He examines the dead fly in his new room fearing a similar fate. As the LA Phil's real life conductor Esa Pekka Salonen plays out the film with the extraordinary slow movement of Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' 9th Symphony, Lopez's voice-over stresses loyalty and friendship "believing without question that it will carry you home". It sounds sentimental when quoted but so can the simple malady of a distant shore.
Los Angeles Philharmonic website
Daily Telegraph interview with Joe Wright
Steve Lopez on the film

FRIDAY 25 September:

Friendship and loyalty from another side of society in the magnificent digitally remastered print of The Godfather (1971). One forgets Mario Puzo's book and the subsequent film showed how resistant this patriarchal figure was to entering the world of narcotics or indeed a world of betrayal and bloodshed. Brando's Godfather is a warrior who in defending his people, made them happy and for that expected undying loyalty in battle and in maintaining 'the family'. He was never meant to be representative of the Mafia network as a whole. Al Pacino as the son Michael initially tries to maintain a love for his father whilst keeping 'arms length' from the family business. One forgets that Nino Rota's famous music score 'theme' doesn't arrive until half way through the film when Michael must temporarily exile himself to his native Sicily. The ever painful ties that bind. One of those ever more rare films that are both commercial and a work of art.
Very useful Twitter site for the film's UK distributor Park Circus.
The other side of the Mafia in Gomorrah.
BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme has silent film score pianist/composer Neil Brand on The Godfather score plus other items: Sally Potter on her new multi-media platform film Rage and Joe Wright on The Soloist.

Legendary though not so widely known American photographer Steve Schapiro was stills photographer for the film and were shown at Hamiltons gallery in London earlier this year (photo of opening here). (my initial post) 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

Chevolution is a fascinating and revelatory doco on that single iconic photographic image of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. Taken by Alberto 'Korda' Díaz Gutiérrez(originally a fashion photographer) at a memorial service in Havana for victims of an explosion in 1960, it was only one of many photos taken - most showing Guevara brandishing explosives rather than a dove of peace. The photo without which, many believe, the Cuban revolution would never have happened. In fact Korda's previously best known image had been of a young girl clutching as her doll a piece of wood, La Ninja. What makes this doco so interesting for an audience in 2009 and the age of image proliferation, is not so much the politics but more the larger question of how a photo is used and not what it is: the moment separated from history and freed from the moment. BBC Four showed some months ago, as part of their photo season, a doco about the famous Dorothea Lange 30s Depression America 1936 Migrant Mother nestling her two kids. In fact the photo had been cropped from one showing her with a family of seven. Not as tugging at the heartstrings. According to one interviewee in Chevolution: "if we don't have heroes we construct them...Che became the face of Icarus, the boy with wax wings who dared fly close to the sun." "The very thing he [Che] tried to bring down [capitalism] is perpetuating his image."

Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler (1502-1520) at the British Museum uses parchment codices as a vital source "in inviting an interrogation of how history is constructed," according to the show's curator - an exhibition that doesn't so much dazzle as intrigue. "We're not rehabilitating such a tyrant," stresses the curator but investigating "the practice of leadership and comparing this to other traditions" as part of their great leaders series (Hadrian: Empire and Conflict was in here before). "Here no one fears to die in war" is a slide projected poem from the city of Tenochtitlan. Wind, birds and other sound effects eerily waft through the exhibition and upwards to the great dome of the former British Library reading room (Marx ironically wrote his Das Kapital here). Bizarrely, it wasn't until recently that scholars began using the codices to reexamine the divergent interpretations of Moctezuma's death at the hands of the Spanish.
The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH, National Institute of Anthropology and History)
Aztec art website

Creation is the intimate domestic story of Charles Darwin based on the book Annie’s Box by Darwin’s great great grandson Randal Keynes. Not the usual bio-pic. Did the filmmakers succeed in being more than that though? Almost. Images and premonitions of death (including his own child), water, rebirth, are the bedrock of this beautifully lensed film (Jess Hall). As committed as Paul Bettany is to the character of Darwin one still can't get away from an actor acting the man who wrote the controversial On the Origin of Species. And that's no fault of Bettany's. Perhaps if the film went further down the road it's taken into the mind of Darwin and his wife this mightn't seem such a problem. Nonetheless, there's much to admire in Jon Amiel's film.
The Linnean Society of London and their Darwin celebrations.

such Stuff As....

A 2004 article Towards a Perverse Neo-Baroque Cinematic Aesthetic on Raúl Ruiz's book Poetics of Cinema quotes a paper by Laleen Jayamanne. She emphasises that cinema, for Ruiz, is an allegorical system inhabited by ghosts, zombies and the dead, which operates by a "perverse logic" or a "baroque [...] multiplication of points of view, of an object, of a space, [of] a body". The Senses of Cinema article goes on to say, "According to Ruiz it is all the "boring" moments, that is, those moments that contribute nothing to a central conflict and which are nevertheless the most interesting: "central conflict forces us to abandon all those events which require only indifference or detached curiosity, like a landscape, a distant storm, or dinner with friends"

Ruiz's 155min film Time Regained (Le temps retrouvé, d'après l'oeuvre de Marcel Proust) (1999) based on the 7 volumes of Marcel Proust'snovel Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu) (written 1909-1922) is out on Second Sight DVD (alas no extras). Volker Schlöndorff attempted a very different adaptation with Swann in Love (Un Amour de Swann) (1984). Ruiz conjures some other temporal space - the niggles that became our dreams, the space of boredom we forever attempt to keep filling up with distractions. This is a film that will either fascinate or lull one to sleep. Very little of Ruiz is available on DVD with English subtitles i.e. Généalogies d'un crime (1997), Three Lives and Only One Death (1995) with Marcello Mastroanni. The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (L'Hypothese du tableau volé) (1978) (with subtitles) is on Blaq Out DVD.
On filming the unfilmable

Alain Robbe-Grillet's (Last Year at Marienbad soon on Optimum Blu-ray) La belle Captive (1983), like most of his other work, is rarely seen and looks magnificent in this re-mastered DVD release. Robbe-Grillet " goes beyond the two opposites into another continued series of oppositions...he rejects the idea of synthesis creating new meaning by juxtapositioning and re-editing...90% of the time after I've seen [a new film] trailer I don't want to see the movie. The larger public want to be reassured," say the engaging film academics on the audio commentary (one of whom taught with the director at an American university). There's a close-up of Manet's (1867-1869) The Execution of Maximilian Emperor of Mexico, "today we find the painting moving [at the time rebuked by critics] and Robbe-Grillet is suggesting that his own iconoclastic art, itself often criticised as flat and mannerist will bring about an evolution in taste just as the art of Edouard Manet did." The leading actor Daniel Mesguich went onto shock Paris audiences with his highly stylised outré theatre and opera productions.
Have videogames and reality TV given us 'narrative exhaustion', asks legendary screenwriter Paul Schrader

Jacques Rivette's very long La belle noiseuse (1991) is out on Artificial Eye DVD and Eureka have Muriel, ou le Temps d’un retour (1963) - The Auteurs article. Kino DVD has Alain Resnais: a Decade in Film films from the 1980s: Life is a Bed of Roses, Love Unto Death, Mélo, I Want to Go Home.
On Optimum is the fascinating Stavisky as part of their Jean-Paul Belmondo Collection (with a rare film score by musicals genius Stephen Sondheim)
Resnais returned to this year to the Cannes Film Fest after 19 years with Wild Grass (Les Herbes Folles) - a month before his 87th birthday and received a lifetime achievement award: an interview with Luc Moullet at The Auteurs

Entries close Sept 28 for the Jeanne Dielman-Criterion Collection Cooking Video Contest with director Chantal Akerman as special judge. Make a video of yourself (or someone else) cooking (1) meat loaf, (2) cutlets, or (3) potatoes and upload it as a video response on YouTube.
Private Century(Facets DVD) is a 2006 Czech TV series (8 hours) where director Jan Sikl has edited people's home ('private' in Czech) movies into historical testimony.
Facets also have the unmissable Hans Jürgen Syberberg's Karl May and Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King (Director's Edition)

Cine Fest Brasil (17 - 20 Sept) at the Riverside Studios in West London.
cinema of brazil: urban tales at the Barbican
BirdWatchers (La terra degli uomini rossi) (Cambridge Film Fest)is a fictional film (not outstaying its initial welcome) based on the very true facts that Brazil's Guarani natives suffer at the hands of violent ranchers.
Frech website
Almodóvar's Broken Embraces isn't his most artistically successful to date. But there's something very personal here as the director seems to be grappling with his own memories of the cinematic process. And for that (aside from his usual stunning production design) one's attention is held.

The Firm (about football hooligans) was originally BBC broadcast back in 1989. Brave of director Nick Love to remake (set earlier in 1984) a film of his (and most of the Brit cinema world's) hero Alan Clarke. Love's incredible achievement is to raise the film to another heightened almost operatic level without losing any of the original's realistic bite. The HD (High Definition) digital cinematography makes everything bright, foregrounded, energised (in sort of Baz Luhrman fashion but without his crazy spin). It's an art-house film designed look while being absolutely authentic to the period feeling more present, more music video. Nick Love is never mentioned in the same breath as Brit social commentator directors Shane Meadows, Ken Loach, Andrea Arnold yet his goals are very similar: "I'm striving for authentic British working class filmmaking". It's "not just a game of football" says one of the lads in The Firm. For these young men it's the only dream they ever feel able to believe in.

The Agent, based on Martin Wagner's stage play, was shot in 10 days for £26,000. Like the reviews for the play you'll either find this a "riveting portrait of ruthless barrow boys of the soul" (The Sunday Times) or "witless" (The Independent). The film's 'video' look often seems almost wilfully perverse (making little attempt to shed its theatre origins) as if the playwright and his director Lesley Manning have held its cinema audience hostage demanding them, as in the plot, to identify with the writer's desperation in getting published. Strange film this aspiring to tread amongst the psychological verbal riptides of David Mamet.

Tristan Loraine's 31 North 62 East (Too Close to the Truth) had an all-in budget of $3.1 million, a cast of 64 (with no deferred payments) and locations in the UK and Jordan. Now that's entering the boxing ring fearlessly under-weight and emerging a victor (50 screen release). Shot on the digital Viper and HD cam the film lost its DP 2 weeks prior to shooting and Sue Gibson (President of the British Society of Cinematographers(those familiar title credit initials BSC) stepped in creating stunning atmospheres. The film's Brit government conspiracy theory plot is familiar but quiet intensity never allows the script implausibility. Collateral damage is still all too commonplace in war "government with something to hide. As if.". Nor does the central role of John Rhys-Davies' Prime Minister ever seem clichéd or characatured - inklings of a well-known Dep PM but that only adds to the plausibility. On the strength of this film its director looks set to lens his next one Shadows From the Sky (based on his own factual book and documentary Welcome Aboard Toxic Airlines) which many are calling an 'Erin Brockovich of the skies'.

[Addition:] Brit gangster flic Jack Said (out for a limited theatrical next weekend and DVD Oct 5) certainly twists and turns more cleverly than Loraine's film (roasted this week by Brit critics) but too often disappears down into its own gun barrel to be much fun let alone anything else. 31 North 62 East wins that round.
And a writer who was an inspiration for all his colleagues and of course those with conspiracy theories Troy Kennedy Martin has died-aural obit on Nightwaves (first item though not listed on site).

Dorian Gray, whilst a more than adequate adaptation (Dir-Oliver Parker) of the Oscar Wilde novel (1890), retreats somewhat into his attic after comparison with the last film. Great elements (as you'd expect from anything Ealing Studios puts its name to): Roger Pratt's (his great credits won't squeeze into brackets) cinematography, Ruth Myers costumes, Rebecca Hall (as always), Colin Firth (of course) etc etc. But while Dorian's descent into hell is graphically conjured we don't ever really feel it. Yet Wilde's original story is still so powerful (and for many still so close to contemporary living tissue and bone) that a new audience can't help the induced shivers down the spine.

As part of London Design Festival 2009, CHELSEA space presents an exhibition of Scandinavian glass design INTO THE WOODS: An Exploration of iittala curated by the renowned Finnish designer Harri Koskinen and including the work of Alvar Aalto, Aino Aalto, Kaj Franck, Tapio Wirkkala. This small oblong glass display case seems to breath as one entity though each designer's glass ware is layed out chronologically. What do they all get up to at night in the darkness one wonders?
Open House 2009 is this weekend - loads of London architecture that's not usually accessible to the public (but also much that is so choose wisely) - many book up well in advance.

Adventureland, (500) Days Of Summer, Blind Dating, and Away We Go all have happy endings, all have familiar character types, yet are all quite moving in particular ways. And funny for a change!
The band Yo La Tengo feature on the Adventureland soundtrack and have a new album out Popular Songs. Alexi Murdoch's songs are on Away We Go.
[Addition:] Writer/director Stephen Belber's debut romcom Management arrives next week (Metrodome) missing, but only just, being on par with the highly accomplished Adventureland. Though with many laughs, actually it's a quiet little film given Jennifer Aniston's star presence and the broad comedy with Steve Zahn and Woody Harrelson's ex-punk rocker turned yogurt brand king. And while the craft and comic reality of Adventureland is very enviable, there's something silly and insouciant about Management belying its much deeper heart.

Also from Metrodome is the doco of a Swedish mind, body, spirit fest Three Miles North Of Molkom turns a cynical Ozzie ex-Rugby player into if not a different man then certainly one he hadn't met with for a many a long time. Very, very funny and somewhat frightening.

Fame is but a fruit tree
So very unsound
It can never flourish
‘til it’s stock is in the ground
So men of fame
Can never find a way
‘til time has flown
Far from their dying day - Nick Drake

No distance holds you back

Wagner receives a none too flattering Tony Palmer doco to be broadcast on The South Bank Show (Sept 13 ITV).
"The Wagner family and Hitler: it’s time for the truth" (The Times)
Simon Callow on his Bayreuth experience
The last survivor of Hitler's bunker
Jackie Mason - The Ultimate Jew on Arrow DVD (YouTube)
'Russia's Obama' defies racists
Elena Cheah's book An Orchestra Beyond Borders about Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan orchestra.

Judgment Day opens at the Almeida theatre. On this site is memorabilia from my 1989 production (with the 'e' in the title)
Unhappy memories of transport things past (The Financial Times links evaporated in the heat)

Even longer ago was Rosas (1983) the signature piece from Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker now playing at London's Sadler's Wells including a new piece (only until Sept 12).
Last week of the National Gallery's Corot to Monet show that proves a surprisingly fascinating exploration of light even with such familiar material. "Corot's progress through the salon was blocked at every turn by the Count of Nieuwerkerke, head of art patronage during the Second Empire. He dismissed the Barbizon school as "the painting of democrats, of those who don't change their linen, and who want to put themselves above men of the world"."
The gallery's Paradise Lost film season opens with a rarely seen Polish pic Matka Joanna od aniolów (Mother Joan of the Angels). And of course there's Titian's Triumph of Love
And a truly revelatory James Ensor retrospective continues at New York's MOMA. This early C20 Belgian artist is best known for his uniquely grotesque often-colourful carnival figures or visceral anatomical innards. But this show proves how light informed everything that he painted. This quality creates, for even an early work of two ordinary folk in a bar, a universe far beyond its immediate surroundings.

In the commercial realm, director Dominic Sena creates stirring visual imagery - he began as a cameraman and his award winning (AICP Awards) commercials are now part of MOMA's permanent collection. His Antarctic thriller Whiteout is familiar fare but if anyone says that they'd guessed the ending they're fibbing. As you'd expect the film looks stunning (DP-Chris Soos) and, though lacking gravitas, is good entertainment. No plot spoiling by noting that it's hard to believe Kate Beckinsale's 'goody two shoes' U.S. Marshal would be above such temptation. But there are still some of those left in the world. The film's distributor Optimum have a DVD box-set of John Carpenter that includes The Thing -an icy sci-fi blowing in similar territory but ultimately with more psychological substance to its message. Universal UK re-release a digital version this weekend.
Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune: is an exhibition of a film of a book that never was, taking as its departure point the cult Chilean filmmaker's attempted 1976 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel.

Korean sculptor (Goldsmiths grad) Sungfeel Yun creates Chaos and Cosmos in the newly extended and re-furbed Crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields (until Sept 18), Trafalgar Square.
Damien Hirst to show new work in St Paul's Cathedral
The sculptor Richard Wilson is turning art on its head

Drawings That Work is the 17th annual drawing exhibition at Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts one of whom is the very interesting Karen Schiff. "I'll be showing a drawing from "Un-(Agnes)" -- rubbings made from the floorboards underneath each of Agnes Martin's paintings at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico.  Using the titles and dimensions of Martin's paintings (but with some twists), they unearth the unconscious underbelly of Martin's work...The walls of the room do come together at a funny angle: the series of 7 paintings by Agnes Martin are permanently installed in an octagonal room.  (The 8th wall is missing; it's the entrance.)" 


When in The September Issue ( Facebook site if one must, YouTube trailer)(a doco tracing the magazine's preparatory months), Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour is asked what the more 'serious socially concerned' side her family thinks of her job, she replies "amused". Ex-model, Wintour's long-time collaborator and the mag's Creative Director Grace Coddington later says, "you have to have something to put your work in otherwise its not valid," referring to her minute and exquisitely beautiful attention to costume design detail. There's more than a hint of The Devil Wears Prada truth in this doco but the truth equally shows itself in the massive department store queues of 'normal' people whenever someone such as Kate Moss designs a clothing range.
The James Hyman Gallery has Brigitte Bardot and the Original Paparazzi to coincide with
London Fashion Week (18-22 September)
The One dot zero festival hosted a dazed and confused fashion in film screening last night.
The Portobello Film Festival
London Spanish Film Festival

This year's 17th Raindance Film Festival programme was announced last week.
And at The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival launch, BFI director Amanda Neville's welcoming speech stressing how important film was to British industry on a golden global stage, was almost worthy of Engels (Karl Marx's other half). Commerce and art-house film maintaining a bumpy yet sustained and mostly happy marriage through the festival.
Colin Firth's new website project Brightwide showcasing the best of social and political world cinema will get a festival launch and Tiscali will offer screen talks online.

Some of the 146 UK premieres that may not be seen for some time after the festival: a new Reha Erdem (Times and Winds) My Only Sunshine, Andrzej Wadja's latest Sweet Rush; Woman Without Piano (La mujer sin piano), artist Shirin Neshat's first film outside the galleries Women Without Men, Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Nymph, the 100 year-old Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (to be released by New Wave - most of his films were never UK released), and a relatively short (158 min) film from doco master Frederick Wiseman La danse: The Paris Opera Ballet. In the Archive section: Far from Vietnam (restored from 16mm in a 35mm blow up) and a Gala for Anthony Asquith's Underground (1928).
BBC business editor Robert Peston meets Helen Alexander, president of the Confederation of British Industry.

Maurice Pialat is one of France's most respected directors and is too little seen in the UK (and the States for that matter). When his Under the Sun of Satan opened in America, with the director himself in the role of father confessor to tormented young priest Father Donissan (Gérard Depardieu), The Washington Post gave it one of its most damning (but funniest reviews).
Eureka's Masters of Cinema DVD has been giving the director his due, most recently with Passe ton bac d'abord… (Graduate First… / Pass Your Bac First…) (1979) - Pialat's fourth feature shot literally on a shoestring budget after the box-office failure of La Gueule ouverte (The Mouth Agape) (the great Néstor Almendros's cinematography). Eureka offers an extra DVD of Pialat's early 60s mostly B/W short Turkish films shot in Istanbul, the city that "has nurtured wisdom and forgotten nothing". Stunning shot by DP Willy Kurant a "sort of secret agent for television" they look as magnificent as their subjects in Eureka's digital re-mastering and give one a better sense of the stylistic origins of this director's slow yet engrossing pace around his actors. One film commentator has noted that Pialat asks "one essential question: what creates our attachments to others?" He had a "reputation for being uncouth but he was a complete softie," according to one interviewed collaborator.
a tribute
Article on the affinities and differences between directors Maurice Pialat and John Cassavetes.
Film Comment's tribute
great French website devoted to him

Masaki Kobayashi's 9-hour The Human Condition (Ningen no joken) (1959) is out on Criterion DVD in the States.
Modern Life is the third of Raymond Depardon's trilogy about the changes to life in rural France.
The Grocer's Son is the feature film debut of doco filmmaker Eric Guirado now out on DVD (YouTube)
Ursula Meier's Home from Soda Pictures DVD.

Julie and Julia (directed by hit mistress Nora Ephron) is one of those more mainstream Hollywood films where the detail in everything seems so effortless it's easily taken for granted. As is the panache keeping two storylines gently simmering simultaneously for an audience. Amy Adams makes cookery blogger of 2002 (Julie Powell) quintessentially cute New York elfin and determined amidst her more neurotic disdaining upwardly mobile grad friends. Meryl Streep's 6 ft French cookbook pioneer Julia Child of Paris 1948 is faux pas at every turn but with such disarming grace, whimsy and passion that every little slurp of her vino makes us envious. A fun, inspiring film that lives up Julie's musing that the child/the dream/the city "is the one that's in your head".
Nora Ephron profile
Round Jaffa Cakes could become a thing of the past

A Jury Prize winner for director Andrea Arnold at this year's Cannes Film Fest (as was her Red Road of 2006), Fish Tank set in the bleak social housing estates of Barking (outer East London but it might as well be Mars) isn't quite as strong as her first feature - except maybe for 15 year old Mia (the riveting no acting experience Katie Jarvis). While she remains one of the most accomplished, bold and interesting of Brit directors (on the strength of just two features), this film never quite reaches beyond its psychological realism. Mia's sex scene is all too expected by an audience unlike in Red Road. There are moments in Fish Tank that could have been inspired by Antonioni (Mia and her younger sister caught in the lake and wastelands) but taken as a whole they are few and far between.
(sorry for the original messy review ;( - not at all intentional just no f&^%ing sleep.
Arnold Telegraph interview
Sue de Beer's art videoSister (2009) on Art Forum's website.
AADIEU ADIEU APA (Goodbye Goodbye Father) is a new installation at Gasworks by Olivia Plender that delves into the history of mass public spectacle and its relationship to issues of sovereignty, by focusing in part, on the British Empire exhibition which took place in the west London suburb of Wembley in 1924.
Wojciech Kosma - Songbook may be an acquired taste but check his website to decide for yourself. Does Blow Job live up to its sonic expectations?

The Film Programme went all Brit last week including an interview with veteran Brit cinematographer Douglas Slocombe.
Helen needs to be seen on the big screen but is just out on Drakes Avenue DVD.
Jetsam from first-time British director Simon Welsford (recently released by the ICA) will be worth a look when out on DVD.
...more to come

And In It What Although Is

Robert Donington writes in his benchmark book Wagner's Ring and it's Symbols: "At all costs to himself and those around him, Wagner had to go on being Wagner. That meant something more than being egocentric. It meant being centred interestingly on the self, whose purpose it was that he should achieve his creative work. We become more truly individual by becoming more at the service of the self, which is perhaps one of the meanings of the Christian paradox: 'in they service is perfect freedom' (p.266 of the Faber paperback edition). "To live up to our potentialities means to let go our outworn values." Which as Wagner also showed in his music is not the same as ignoring lessons from the past.

It is well known that Wagner wrote a vehement anti-semitic book (under a pseudonym) in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music)(1850). Wagner republished his beliefs under his own name in 1869 so it is clear 1850 wasn't simply a momentary outburst. This was one year after his most famous treatise The Art-Work of the Future (1849)- opera as Gesamtkunstwerk where the composer envisions a total uniting of all the artistic elements. What must also be remembered is that Wagner was a left-wing radical (or right-wing depending on where you're viewing from) and part of the growing nationalist movement against the powerful independent German States. People wanted constitutional reform and they wanted it now. The Saxon King dissolved Parliament in 1849 with Wagner playing his part in the quashed left-wing revolution. Moreover, Wagner had many Jewish friends and supporters. In July 2001 Daniel Barenboim (a Jew himself) conducted the Berlin Staatskapelle in a performance of the Tristan und Isolde overture at Jerusalem's Israel Festival. Wagner had never been played since WWII in that country. In 1985, the Richard Wagner Museum in Bayreuth, Germany, opened an exhibition Wagner and the Jews trying to find the truth of the composer's beliefs.

And it is surprising that whenever liberal minded cultural pundits are broached about questioning Wagner's motives none ever feel very dialectically moody: understandably. Much of the world's great music premieres - Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, Mahler's 4th Symphony to name but two (both recently in the BBC Proms)- were met with derision if not outright disgust by critics. And once again at the Proms this year, Barenboim conducted Wagner with his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra of youthful Jewish and Muslim players soaring beyond the Middle East political divide. History in retrospect gets distorted, politically co-opted, slackened if not downright re-written (as historian and TV presenter Simon Schama is always at pains to show).
Lunch with the FT: Daniel Barenboim

Symphony No 7 as part of as part of David Zinman's Mahler cycle. Symphony No.3 in D minor from Medici Arts and a new issue on DVD of Claudio Abbado conducting Mahler's 4th Symphony.

The Red Baron written and directed by LA based Nikolai Mullerschon but German funded won't go down in cinema history as a great war film anywhere touching Samuel Fuller, Sam Peckinpah or John Ford. But its rarely cine-told WWI story from Baron Manfred von Richthofen's POV (point of view) - the 24 year old legendary German pilot - engages with honesty and passion (and great special effects from Pixomondo) with one lone character representing all the Jewish fighters of that war.

Without sounding like an apologist in any way, could Wagner have spat his venom enraged by a bunch of individuals who in no way represented the whole - as many of us still do? Through half his life he struggled constantly to make money from his music in 'an industry' he believed was controlled by Jews. Historically, French anti-Semitism is always played down but look at the Alfred Dreyfus case (the army officer in 1894 accused of dealing secrets to the Germans). Just as Wagner's reputation never recovered from Hitler's use of his music nor did Dreyfus for being Jewish. The point being that as a human race we still fail to look at both sides, fail to really want to remember, if not a true history then at least one that hasn't been air-brushed if not downright discarded. Much of the Arab world loves Hollywood films just like everyone else - an industry often accused of being run by 'Jews'. Much of the Arab world hates American foreign policy - tenets often reflected in the very Hollywood movies they adore. The dialectic goes on and on and on.

The Last Night Of The Proms is to be broadcast live to cinemas around the world
Samson

Clearly Wagner's writings were anti-Semitic. Rarely (again with good reason) does anyone wish to question why or how. Why is American-Jewish comedian Jackie Mason funny even to most Jews (his last New York show available on Arrow DVD)? Because many entrenched 'norms' are ridiculous and comedy rarely works unless based in truth. Does the new Adam Sandler/Seth Rogan film Funny People make you laugh? Overlong, but its the truisms (many crude) intrinsically resonate with humour (particularly from Eric Bana's jilted Aussie husband).

These thoughts swirled in a week where mentioning last week's funeral of Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy "a champion for those who had none" and the film District 9 (or indeed the last paragraphs of this posting) seemed suddenly bizarrely possible. The Senator was no saint (admitted openly by many at the funeral) but he became one through the humbleness of this ceremony. One could be cynical and say it was all nothing more than political manoeuvring (a skill not foreign to the Senator himself) and the PR public face of humility. But even a cynic would have found it hard to be so. "The greatest legislator of our time," orated President Obama. One could never accuse this Senator of hypocrisy. Kennedy always delivered to his constituents and to many that weren't. With such family wealth his life would have been so much easier if it weren't for being "the kind and tender hero" to those in the world without his privilege. The Senator was a rich swashbuckling pirate who knew well the sea and what it would do if he betrayed it. That it was never his enemy only his friend. And if the sea did rise up against him it was akin to his own temper swaying a man's passions. Whatever the pitfalls of a private life that became so public, Senator Kennedy always listened.

Bobby Baker has been offering up her performance art for years to Britain but few suspected that she suffered acute mental health problems which she captured over a period of 10 years in hundreds of diary drawings.

Kennedy realised that politics began at home. The devil in the detail. That one must needs be conversant with those grievances or else capitalism will begin failing- the reason far right groups (some democratically elected) are currently on the rise in many European countries including the U.K. A liberal press wishes to dispel such groups as society's aberrations. Clearly they are not. Significant minorities, certainly in the U.K., probably feel just as Wagner felt - deprived of their talents, close to poverty and underrepresented. Unable to vent their frustration at an amorphous, impenetrable system, they promulgate racist opinions against individual groups that they might not have done otherwise. No excuse, of course.

Five and the Fascists on BBC Radio 4

District 9, Neill Blomkamp's incredibly impressive debut sci-fi feature (after glowing success in commercials) is one of the few mainstream films in recent years that manages to open up toleration of difference discourse without alienating a broad church. Beleaguered inter-stellar aliens arrived 20 years ago in Johannesburg and the government segregates them in a township akin to Soweto. For the first quarter hour one shifts uncomfortably fearing a sci-fi 'message' movie. But you realise the film's far cleverer than say the recent gung-ho G.I. Joe. The filmmakers (including producer Peter 'Lord of the Rings' Jackson) stress that though it's impossible to divorce the film from its setting, no direct metaphor is intended. "In South Africa, we have to deal with issues that generally people around the world try to sweep under the rug," says Sharlto Copley who plays the lead character Wikus. This guy is the friendly face of corporate greed, charming and cajoling the aliens or 'prawns' into signing eviction papers for their relocation. Men with guns cover his back. What's interesting is that there are no heroes here only survivors. (Without plot spoiling) Wikus becomes the victim of a smear campaign when his mutating body forces him to join the aliens. Little is redeeming only his disturbingly human qualities. He most probably would have joined the NAZI party. Nor does one feel that the aliens are being patronised as saintly. They are as disparate as is humanity. If some could use their weapons they would most probably. Neighbours can be a**holes no matter what their origin. District 9 riffs on the archaeology of sci-fi movie entertainment leitmotifs (themes) - thirst for power, subrogation, subjugation, the alien shadow dormant within oneself: a John Coltrane inspired jazz symphony. Or as Brit poet Philip Larkin disparagingly described modern jazz - like sipping a quinine Martini whilst enduring an enema.
Oliver Hirschbiegel's Five Minutes of Heaven (originally UK broadcast on the BBC) just had a NYC release through IFC Films.

The Thing(released next weekend digitally by Universal across 60 UK screens) is most often deemed one of director John Carpenter's least successful films (1982 - a remake of the 1951 The Thing from Another World) praised mostly for its goulish Rob Bottin special effects squelching from human orifices. Carpenter adept at composing his own synth scores, here enlists Italian master Ennio Morriconi to score symphonic avant garde classical weirdness. Carpenter is also supremely adept at using his lens to engender our trepidation and suspense - even with minimal resources and a well-worn plot. (Looks amazing in widescreen anamorphic too) The Thing is no exception as we try to fathom which one of the ice-station team remains human. And what indeed that means.
Werner Herzog's Encounters at The End of the World out on DVD with loads of extras

After Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker Venice Film Fest premier last year, Sight and Sound's editor, in spite of the film's other merits, found the central character championing jingoistic American heroism. On a very superficial level for some this may be so. But the film's remarkable achievement is exactly the opposite. Where do we retreat in time of war? As Coppola and Brando showed us in Apocalypse Now it is deep into the heart of darkness. New 'EOD' bomb disposal expert (Jeremy Renner) may be gung ho but his actions are totally motivated towards the self rather than patriotism. Ironically, what many people deem to be heroic. Yet he's relatively indifferent when a commanding officer jealously praises his 140 (?) achievements. When his other two team members discover a box of fuses kept under his bed from each defused IED bomb they think he's just plain weird and psycho. Moreover, in their minds he becomes an enemy (to such an extent that they consider blowing him up) because he's deviated from the norm. The entire film explores the somatics of explosion. The young DVD local kid huckster whose dead innards are wired as a booby trap, the innocent man in the Iraq town square a body hijacked to be a suicide bomb, the soldiers punching the stomach shit out of each other in a drunken late-night game. Using four lightweight Super 16mm cameras (DP, Barry Ackroyd - United 93, The Wind that Shakes the Barley), Bigelow offers us documentary style detail after minute detail to foreground Mark Boal's script (a US journo embedded with troops in Baghdad and whose story In the Valley of Elah was based).
Blow for Gordon Brown as defence aide quits over Afghanistan strategy
The Sunday Times article on Kathryn Bigelow

More male bonding in the doco Greek Pete - a young London based rent-boy who wins Escort of the Year in LA's World Escort Awards. It's a thin doco (scenes with clients yet no interviews) and all from Pete's perspective. But his comments about success in Britain not really being admired ring very true. And regardless of what one thinks of his choice of occupation he works damn hard to support a lifestyle others just dream about. The final scene alone makes the film worth a look.

Everyone proffered a different opinion about Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (a loose remake of a good 70s Italian schlocker). And of course Tarantino couldn't make a bad, uninteresting movie even if he tried. So why is this one fascinating (if indeed it is flawed)? Tarantino creates a world poised on the edge of something. Slapstick violence: the reality from which that derives (cf Charlie Chaplin), the memory from which it escapes. A huge close-up of the Nazi's strudel dollop of whipped cream is both comical and terrifying as the sole survivor of a Jewish family, shrouded in French identity, suddenly finds herself feted at Paris table by her tormentors. American G.I. Brad Pitt ridiculously disguised as an Italian movie stunt man at the Nazi propaganda premiere, as ridiculous and obvious as the arbitrariness of passport identity. A world of war movie clichés where the rewriting of history bears no shame only deep discomfort. A world not of escapism but desperation - a desperate hope that film may have the power to change something even though what most of the world wants is to be distracted from itself. Or for the more enlightened, at least subdued from own shadows.
The Observer Tarantino interview

"Man produces evil as a bee produces honey," wrote William Golding whose John Carey biography is just published by Faber.
Peter Brook's film of Lord of the Flies on DVD
Golding also coined the name for James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis (the Greek goddess of the Earth). As the 90-year-old father of Gaia prepares to blast off from Earth on the inaugural Virgin Galactic flight, he reflects on his own mortality, the future of our planet and wind farms.

And for the past year, the eagle-eyed will have seen growing mentions of the honeybees dying off - CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). Who Killed the Honey Bee? on BBC Four TV came to the conclusion that there was no one cause (exploring the possibility of a parasite) whereas The Vanishing of the Bees to be released in the UK on October 9 by Dogwoof and The co-operative felt chemical pesticides to be the real culprits. The BBC doco used Wagner underscoring as swathes of the empty hives resembled coffins. And both docos pointed out that one in three mouthful of our food is dependent upon the survival of the bee. You also learn that it was an English (or was he Scottish) clergyman who stopped the 1,000 year-old practice of murdering the bees for their honey and substituted the idea of harvesting honeycomb frames.
Inconspicuous consumption: they're rich and they love to spend - but they like to pretend they're having as hard a time as the rest of us. The Guardian charts the rise of the 'poorgeoisie'.
Supermarket suppliers 'helping destroy Amazon rainforest'

Renowned Polish director Andrzej Wajda's Katyn (The Katyn massacre in which thousands of Poles were murdered by the Soviets) is re-aired at the BFI and just issued on DVD by Koch Lorber in the States.
More 4 News
Man of Iron from Mr. Bongo DVD
Criterion DVD's Essential Art House has Wajda's Three War Films (as a 3 disc set) while Arrow DVD in the UK has (singles and set) of the director's famous trilogy.
Ashes and Diamonds on Criterion with audio commentary as well as A Generation and Kanal
Andrzej Munk, a giant of the Polish School of the 1950s, has a Trilogy of films out on Facets DVD in the States: Eroica/Bad Luck/Man on the Tracks
Eroica on Youtube (in Polish)
Bad Luck is perhaps the most 'accessible' with its Roberto Benigni-esque quality - the bitter comedy of survival for its lead character.

New Wave's UK release of Tricks apparently offers some sunlight to alleviate the Polish gloom.

"I do feel that the standard of the real, which is the basis of Italian neorealism, must now be met in a wider and deeper sense. In today's return to normal conditions (for better or worse), the relationship between an individual and his environment is less important than the individual himself in his complex and disquieting reality and in his equally complex relations with others," wrote Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni in 1959 and published in Eureka DVD's booklet for the not often seen Il grido (B/W-1957). Also quoted are the out of print observations of William Arrowsmith: "[A] recurrent Antonioni theme [is] of a private shelter - a world of the private self as embodied in a particular house and a specific sentimento della casa, constantly broached and invaded by an external or public reality." "I don't live anywhere," defiantly says the film. As the director is quoted on a doco extra for Second Sight's DVD reissue of Beyond the Clouds (Al di là delle nuvole) (1995): "we always want to live in somebody else's imagination...lighting a candle in a room full of light". American film academic Seymour Chatman says in his audio essay regarding Il Grido that Antonioni felt it was "his job not the actors to formulate character". There's a fascinating doco by the director's wife Enrica To Make a Film is To Be Alive: "it's very much in the eyes in a spite that is played out in the characters' memory...rather than in their gestures...my craving to look is such that my eyes will end up being consumed and this wear and tear on my pupils will be the sickness that will make me die. One night I shall stare so fixedly into the darkness that I'll end up inside it...how often indeed are phantoms more desirable than reality...reason alone cannot understand reality...the irrational."

Und die Leute werden sagen
In fernen blauen Tagen
Wird es einmal recht
Was falsch ist und was echt
Was falsch ist, wird verkommen
Obwohl es heut regiert.
Was echt ist, das soll kommen -
Obwohl es heut krepiert.

And people will say
In far away blue days
It will become clear
What is false and what is true.
What is false will perish
Although it rules today
What is true shall come
Although it dies today.
- Ödön von Horváth (found in his pocket after his death)

Back in the early 90s (actually 1989 - a link for that to come next week) moi produced the UK premiere of Horváth's Judgment Day directed by the then unknown Stephen Daldry. A new production (in a new translation by erstwhile Horváth champion Christopher Hampton) has just opened at the Almeida.
Safety fears could shut District Line
No Sunday drivers could be found for London Midland trains
Campaign for a rail future

La Fura dels Baus, the Catalan ‘total theatre’ company that famously created the Barcelona Olympics opening ceremony, makes its ENO debut with György Ligeti's dark comic masterpiece Le Grand Macabre.
Ligeti's Piano Concerto is spotlit on BBC Radio 3's Discovering Music and well worth the journey.
A solo show opening Sat Sept 12 by Talia Chetrit at New York's Renwick Gallery could also prove a worthwhile visit.