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
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