where trees are actual and take no holiday

"I am screaming you just don't hear it"

It took two decades for Douglas Sirk's 1957 WWII love story A Time to Love and a Time to Die (one of Godard's favourite films) to be re-discovered. His 1956 Written on the Wind was also trashed on release: its ending could not be more appropriate for modern times with the child of an oil magnate caressing an oil well statue. In the final moments of BBC Four's Time, an aerial shot of the Tate Millenium Bridge pulls back with the presenter meditating on "man, a tiny speck" - ironically on a bridge it took London man several structural engineering goes to get right before unleashing. A bridge linking one of London's most visited tourist attractions the Tate Modern to another St Paul's and high finance in the City of London.
Sacred Made Real (National Gallery) moves to the National Gallery of Art in Washington while Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective in Philadelphia travels to the Tate Modern.
We know (as history has proven on countless occasions) that at least for a while, most provocative art is always destined to stay outside the comfort and commodity of gallery walls and that much of what is most celebrated in the present is also often the most forgotten in decades to come.
Michael Landy's Art Bin (South London Gallery)
Michael Landy’s destructive instincts (FT)

A new decade has dawned but are we on the brink of a new world or its precipice perhaps as a US broadcaster might drawl? The Daily Show's Jon Stewart (having despaired 8 months ago after hearing Elizabeth Warren's home truths on the US government bank bail-out) was now so ecstatic interviewing her again (over hopes that President Obama might just be able to wring at least some long-lasting economic change) that he had to control his love-making desires towards Mrs. Warren in front of a studio audience.

Ten years on from actor Kevin Spacey taking reins at the Old Vic theatre, he revives American playwright John Guare's 1990 Six Degrees of Separation (until April 3), in which he believes "this dream of being drawn towards the lives of the rich and famous..I think it's increased rather than decreased since the play was written." (The Culture Show interview, (BBC 2, Jan 28). [Alas for my staging of Guare's equally prescient Landscape of the Body (1977) in the old Spitalfields Market that never materialised back in the 90s.]

And who'd have thought but Brit boxer Alex Reid (not the dead footballer) having entered the final ever Celebrity Big Brother (Series 7) house a month ago to resounding boos (and a newspaper 'tabloid' rating as low as a rat's arse) exited Friday night cheered on as the winner (beating to everyone's surprise with 65% of the public vote even fellow hot-tip housemate Vinnie Jones who'd affectionately dubbed him 'Rocky' Reid). "My whole agenda in here is to be myself," said Reid.

Moreover, Alex was a guy brave enough to have zits of pus on his back squeezed by fellow housemates on prime-time telly. Could that ever be so in the States? (Channel Four were the ones who screened that doco on women surgically altering their labia) One of the reasons for Big Brother's demise is, of course, the internet. Yet what is so intriguing (cultural snobbery not allowing, of course, such an adjective for such a show) about Celebrity BB is that although most members of this house are so used to being surveiled 24/7 in the real world, they are nonetheless human and naturally seek interaction (or not) with each other- many having made ties that will long bind after the show. The irony being that there is far more 'humanity' in a show like this than the seeming 'democracy' of the internet where human connections are often tenuous to say the least, let alone ever able to approach the word 'family'. Auditions as we speak for the final ever series of the 'regular' Big Brother this summer. Perhaps more internet interactivity might have saved the show.
Eric Cantona is acting on stage in Face au Paradis (Facing Paradise) at the Theatre Marigny,Paris (BBC Radio 4's Front Row reported)

BBC 2's The Virtual Revolution (a 4 part history of the internet) began Saturday Jan 30: "how has the web affected us in 20 years...and re-making our world...and how the dream of leveling is played out". "Social misfits who wanted to go on being social misfits" versus "our innate desire to profit and control". "Not a cure for human nature but an amplification of [it]" When in 1989 Tim Berners Lee submitted Information Management: A Proposal, his boss at CERN returned the memo with a note scribbled on the top "vague but exciting" and allowed him to work on it in his spare time: 6 August, 1991 the first website went online at CERN.

Berners Lee: "I think it would be very wrong to assume that if you connect a country it would become equal." "Its early supporters," says presenter Dr. Aleks Krotoski "believed that a space without rules and regulations would be more equal" the paradox now being "the very lack of regulation means those with the most resources can shout the loudest and impose their brands and authority". Lee Siegel (Against the Machine) "You can shatter hierarchies but once you become known you have to sign up with one of the recording studios. The old hierarchies are still there they're just scrambling to adjust themselves to this new situation." Andrew Keen author of The Cult of the Amateur on The Huffington Post: "[Huffington's] an interesting woman but about as revolutionary as my dog", i.e."re-establishing the old hierarchies". The programme also points out that "of the more than 130 million blogs active since 2002 it's estimated over 90% are now dormant.

The 3 year-old LUCRESLONDON blog can most certainly testify to the outright hypocrisy and jealousy with which many still view blogs. And the constant pressure (in Andrew Keen's words) to become nothing more than a dog. [I hasten to add a spoiler alert that a recent BBC Horizon doco showed that some dogs have the spatial awareness potential of a 2 year-old child]. I often think I hear my paragraphs breaking into a teeny distant whine.
Will chimps at Edinburgh Zoo be soon replacing Big Brother contestants (BBC's Natural World: The Chimpcam Project)?
Endomol's Big Brother far scarier 1999 precursor We Live in Public is out on DVD.

Immodesty Blaize, the producer (and one of its stars) of Burlesque Undressed quotes Oscar Wilde: "be yourself because everyone else is taken". It's taken several decades for the art of burlesque dancing to get legit whereas being gayly flamboyant in Hollywood still requires discretion. Way back when Brit pop art artist Sir Peter Blake wrote his Royal College of Art grad thesis Don't Point It's Nude he was awarded the lowest possible grade.
Dita von Teese at Crazy Horse Le temple du nu chic (Optimum DVD Feb 8)
On the West End The Little Dog Laughed

This week also saw the death of adolescent angst author J.D. Salinger aged 91. Living in seclusion the past 50 years his reputation primarily rested on Catcher in the Rye (1951). "Most of us never write one great book," said Paul Morley in a BBC Newsnight's The Review Show discussion: "the invention of the teenager...he branded himself so brilliantly that he could withdraw and still be famous". "He's the last in line where the book - a book - would be important." Newsnight the evening before had authors Jay McInerney and Will Self rather less enthusiastic about an author lacking a true body of work, "the writer's non-writer". However, Salinger's Catcher remains in Amazon's Top 200 monthly list.

We learnt also this week that the UK poverty gap is the widest since the 70s and annual growth slowest since 1921 (according to the BBC). Is there really that much difference between Celebrity Big Brother and Westminster politics cynics might ask? Former Prime Minister Tony Blair spent 6 hours (finishing at 17.10pm) on Friday being questioned by The Iraq Inquiry. (60 countries were represented at Afghanistan: The London Conference on Thursday) Blair slipped in 2 hours early through a back door, as there were rumours of a possible 'citizen's arrest' by demonstrators. The somewhat symbolic protest outside The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre numbered 200 according to police, 300 estimated "generally" by the BBC, and 500 by organisers.

The inquiry panel (2 of whom Jews) had been criticised by a columnist for The Independent as being too pro-Zionist) and therefore putting in doubt impartiality. In actuality, though, it was all rather subdued and insubstantial fare. This was not a trial and none of the panel are lawyers. And at the end of the day one had made notes of which none were very startling - only a longing for a more forensic approach to proceedings. The thrill of legality and the Brit invention of habeas corpus 'beyond reasonable doubt' was the crux of first ep in American legal series The Good Wife. A re-trial proved just how fallible are humans (a lazy security guard) when crucial indisputable security camera footage showed the same plastic bag blowing across the parking lot at exactly the same time code on three consecutive evenings.

The Iraq War and Blair's case was different. As he said himself it was a matter of "judgement" rather than mere fact: the perception of threat was growing rather than an actual one. Blair saw no distinction between disarming and removing Saddam. "The Cabinet weren't interested in becoming part of the legal debate,” said Blair, although the Iraq Inquiry panel seemed to think otherwise. He used characteristic self-deprecation when asked about last year's BBC Fern Britton interview "I would have thought it right to remove him [Saddam]” In summing up the former Prime Minister cited emotive arguments - how Iraq's monthly child mortality rate had vastly improved in the years after Saddam's removal. And how a leader who'd gassed his own people was clearly a danger to the international community.

Twenty relatives of soldiers killed in the war were allowed into the public seating via ballot: "Be quiet please," asked inquiry Chairman John Chilcot as one audience member quietly heckled Blair in his final moments saying he felt "responsibility but not regret" with the world better as that result. Although not visible on the one-minute delay live feed the BBC's Nick Robinson reported a "come on” as Blair got up to leave and "you are a liar" (2 woman?) "and a murderer". One woman was apparently in tears after his exit.

The [quiet] heckler was James Sandry (Farsi speaker) who'd just returned from the Middle East. He believes Tony Blair has a "paranoid interpretation of Middle Eastern politics...not even one regret?!!" "I wasn't really planning to heckle...[the event was] something so removed from the reality of the situation...Blair has such incredible ignorance about what is thought in the region." One father in the audience who'd lost a son said Blair just recited "lines he's practiced...he had the opportunity [for]soothing balm to the open wounds....the world maybe a better place with the absence of Saddam...[but] the incompetence...the local darts players at the pub could have told him that ". And that is the problem of the war and the inquiry. The Kosovo intervention (without legal backing) is cited as precedence for the Iraq invasion. The panel members ask for the reflections of its interviewees in summation but the ground between humanity and legality is bedrock for some and quicksand for others. As Britain's Prime Minister Blair became the consummate 'performer' he'd always dreamed of. Even perfecting the impossible double-act with the United States.

If in a decade or more Iraq proves stable, then Blair will be seen by many as a liberator rather than the present villain. I wonder whether as a lawyer Mr. Blair ever saw a Michael Douglas film The Star Chamber (1983)? Ever frustrated by a plea-bargaining system, a panel of 'law lord' Supreme Court judges meet sporadically in total secrecy to meat out justice to those whom they feel were truly guilty but whom the law has let slip. The 'Supremes' are rarely wrong. And if they are does it matter because the culprits are scumbags anyway and there is no collateral damage?
Julie Walters plays Mo Mowlam in Mo (Channel 4, Sun Jan 31) - the female politician (former secretary of state for Northern Ireland) no one dissents as an extraordinary (and fun) politician.

One commentator on the televised proceedings of The Iraq Inquiry was Carne Ross (Iraq expert on the British delegation to the United Nations) who felt that the panel failed to dig deep enough under Blair's claims in "a much more intrusive adversarial way" exploring the breach of "fundamental trust between public and government". Ross was also interviewed on the BBC's two-part The Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia (the T.E. Lawrence of David Lean's 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia) and shared the programme’s overall admiration of the man and disillusionment at the way his promises to the Arabs were broken by the British and the French. In 2002, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw observed "A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now, I have to deal with now, are a consequence of our colonial past...The Balfour Declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis - again, an interesting history for us but not an entirely honourable one." Straw is also referring back to French diplomat François Georges-Picot and Briton Sir Mark Sykes who drafted the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 between the two governments arbitrarily carving up former Ottoman Arab territories.

Hannah Arendt in The Imperialist Character writes of Lawrence: "Never again was the experiment of secret politics made more purely by a more decent man. The Imperialists destroyed Lawrence until nothing was left except some inexplicable decency." Lawrence was never forgiven by the Arabs and never forgave himself ending his life in self-imposed menial chores as a provincial army soldier back in England. He wanted "our first brown dominion not our last brown colony". He returned to Oxford after the Paris Peace Conference a broken man "his mother spoke of him sitting for hours on end unmoving with his face frozen, staring at the ground". Lawrence embodied the very 'old-fashioned' qualities of language skills, diplomacy and a human understanding of cultures alien to ours that made the British Foreign Office second to none. Gazing high or low into that magnificent Foreign Office internal courtyard often our only choice nowadays is to bow our heads to the ground in abject silence.

BBC Radio 3's Between the Ears on how to re-produce the world's most debated stage direction of "the distant sound of a breaking string" in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (Вишнëвый сад or Vishniovy sad) (1904). The 150th anniversary of his birth.

"half the tree's gone but it blossoms as if nothing has happened"

Ethan Watters discusses his book Crazy Like Us on The Daily Show:
Japan is 5 years behind the States in the use of drugs for mental health "do we want the rest of the world to think like us?...it's a billion dollar business in Japan...[we'll go] with the cultural trends that are there and sell a lot of drugs."

The Tokyo City Promotion 2010 couldn't have begged for better free publicity across the world as it's banner shouted proudly above The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre (venue for The Iraq Inquiry). One of their greatest movie exports Yasujiro Ozu is currently receiving a 2-month retrospective on the BFI Southbank. Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953, B/W) lead last month (twice ranked by critics as among the 5 greatest films ever made in Sight and Sound): cult director Jim Jarmusch "couldn't imagine the world of cinema without [his] perfect, contemplative (and often funny) observations of human nature".
Tokyo Story: "Times have changed, we must face up to it."
"You deserve a better life," - "I'm fine, I'll never get old."
Complementing this in February is Late Autumn (Akibiyori, 1960, Colour) made 3 years before Ozu's death. As one of the older men says, "It's the people who tend to complicate life. Life itself is simple." At times in the film, the new bustle of modern city life is almost Jacques Tati-esque in its comic, choreographed background movement. Its insights notwithstanding, Late Autumn's lush romantic score does nod somewhat toward Hollywood presentation.

Back in 2007 the BFI held a Naruse retrospective with three new prints including his When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) (Onna ga kaidan o agaru). And for years all Naruse's later was accused (Noel Burch) of being too close to the Hollywood norm. The studio head at Shochiku told him, "Naruse we don't need two Ozu's," so he moved to Toho for the next 30 years. Burch viewed Ozu as a modernist and non-Hollywood, contrary to other judgments of Ozu as establishment and nostalgic for old values. Though many others would argue that the neglected Naruse far more deserved new prints rather than Ozu, Tokyo Story would nonetheless reality benefit - Ozu's sound effects loose much of their power on an aging soundtrack. Hopefully they'll be one for the BFI DVD/Blu-ray release April 19 along with DVD for Late Spring (1949) and Early Summer (1951). But there are new prints in the season for Good Morning (Ohayo, 1959) and An Autumn Afternoon (Samma no Aji, 1962).

"His characters lack the hope and good humour of Ozu's in the face of disappointment," writes Alexander Jacoby in Senses of Cinema, "and, unlike Mizoguchi's protagonists, they are usually denied the luxury of death." Donald Richie in Cinema: a Critical Dictionary (1980): “He lacks that hope which is the highest wisdom.” “If they move even a little,” Naruse famously remarked of his characters, “they quickly hit the wall. From the youngest age, I have thought that the world we live in betrays us; this thought still remains with me.” One doesn't, of course, want to detract from any praise of Ozu. But it's fascinating to view all this work in historic cine context. In January 1960, the renewal of the Japanese-American Security Treaty set off violent clashes between students and police and in June 10,000 demonstrated prompting Oshima's radical film Night and Fog in Japan. As David Bordwell points out, "only the most dedicated reflection-theorist could find traces of this tumult in [Ozu's] Late Autumn...utterly insular, portraying a tranquil society that no longer existed."

Naruse's earliest extant work is Flunky, Work Hard (Koshiben gambare, also known as Little Man Do Your Best) from 1931, where he combined melodrama with slapstick, trying to meet the demands set by Shochiku's Kamata studio, who wanted a mix of laughter and tears. Akira Kurosawa called Naruse's style of melodrama, "like a great river with a calm surface and a raging current in its depths" and "a magnificent editor aware of the fact that you're caught in the flow of something...emotional tone," adds Phillip Lopate on an audio commentary disc in Eureka's must have box set of Repast (Meshi, 1951), Sound of the Mountain (Yama No Oto, 1954) and Flowing (Nagareru, 1956) - all great prints. It wasn't until a 1983 Locarno retrospective by Audie Bock and a subsequent Toronto Cinemateque and Film Forum, New York retrospective that Naruse became known (included in Eureka's booklet is Bock's essay A Gesture and a Pose first published in Artforum 2005).
Bock: "If Ozu can imbue a film with transcendence by holding a shot of a vase in a corner of a dark room while the soft murmur of a father's snoring continues on the soundtrack Late Spring), Naruse will use a cutaway to an inanimate object for a completely different purpose." Lopate: "One of the charms of Naruse's art is its earned pessimism. It takes for granted that life is unhappy: therefore, we can relax in the possession of sadness, acquiesce from the start to a fated disenchantment."

Naruse made shomin-geki (working-class drama or 'home films' about the lower, middle or salaried classes) with female protagonists - "his forlorn flavour of existence can become addictive" Lopate writes, while James Quandt in The Films of Japanese Master Mikio Naruse notes "Naruse's lucidity (as opposed to pessimism, a distinction Bresson often made about his own work...Naruse's films could never be mistaken, as Ozu's often are, as transcendental." Quandt also compares Naruse to French director Maurice Pialat. "A director of the here and now," says Lopate comparing him to American John Cassavetes, with a "devotion to getting the exact feel of domestic space [his characters] forced to behave well and compelled to express their discontent with that arrangement." The father muses to his daughter in the opening of The Sound of the Mountain: "whenever I see a sunflower, I think of a man's head. I wonder of the inside of a man's head could be as beautiful as a flower. Wouldn't it be great if you could send your brains off to be cleansed? You could remove your head take it down to the hospital and say, 'wash this for me' like at the laundry!"

Hirokazu Kore-eda doesn't let the Japanese side down with his Yokahama family re-union Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo) released before Christmas and having just finished its BFI run to coincide with Ozu. Well worth catching the DVD of this. The BFI also has a concurrent season of films influenced by Ozu.
Soda Pictures' has the poignant Korean release Treeless Mountain with a 7 and 6-year-old left in the care of their alcoholic aunt. Another DVD to look forward to.

Director Yojiro Takita's Departures (released last June in New York by Regent Releasing and in the UK late last year) beat Waltz With Bashir and The Class to win the 2009 Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar. Best known for making soft-core porn, the film divided many critics but you'll be able to decide for yourself soon on DVD. Daigo (Masahiro Motoki-former pop idol 'Mokkun') is a cellist in a waning Tokyo classical orchestra that's victim of the credit crunch. With his wife, they decide to move back up north of and live in his childhood home - unhappily but thankfully with his mother now deceased. Seeking work he spies an ad for "departures" which in fact turns out to be "encoffinment," the preparation of corpses before their cremation, nokanshi . Such a job is frowned upon as Japan’s burakumin (outcast) class. It's a strange, somewhat very intentionally melodramatic film about death and its empowerment through strengthening the soul. Some critics felt the comedy and pathos just too strained. But Yojiro Takita seemed to know always exactly what tone he was creating. John Williams' (unreleased theatrically in the UK) Firefly Dreams was released on DVD sometime ago (reviewed here {8 paras in}) and again worth a look.

Clive Owen's Ozzie (Brit ex-pat) sports journo in The Boys are Back may have landed in hot-water had he pretended to be report from his sofa (not from the broadcast booth) Andy Murray's defeat in the Australian Open final in Melbourne yesterday against Roger Federer. (We learnt from BBC coverage that Murray began from humble beginnings in Dunblane, Scotland pillow fighting as a kid to commanding the world stage. The Boys are Back director Scott Hicks gave us the breakout Oz film Shine (1996) and while this adapted memoir from Simon Carr is by turns touching, amusing, beautiful to look at, and with fine acting (as always from Owen) it never really takes flight into anything surprising or disturbing.

Naruse's battling wife in Repast almost cries all the time while always smiling. And at one point in the film she says quite simply, "I'm so tired of this". We all say this. Often. But Naruse's skill and his actress manage to send shockwaves through us. The afore mentioned critics view Naruse as the most materialist of all directors with many at the "end of their rope in terms of their finances". As in Chekhov and Mike Leigh they continue smiling and hoping for a better life.

[MUCHO ADDITION-Fri Feb 5)

....there are a few more words to inhabit this space...just their removal van went a bit kaputt ;)
and unlike The Three Sisters, some of us do make it to Moscow and beyond. Certitude versus adventure.

.it is what it is.


Businessmen in FOOD, INC (Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)
Distributed by Dogwoof in the UK

You don't argue...

In spiritual vein, 3 posts for the price of one today. And as you'd not expect from this site there are to be no 'best of 2009' lists, wish lists, twhat lists or even decoupage of our previous Brit decade. The BBC has done that sociologically and depressingly well in The Story of the Noughties. Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe Review 2009 (BBC4 or read his column for The Guardian) is your man for the rap sheet on telly.

Let's try to forget the fact that Britain practically grinds to a halt everytime it snows (the town of Benson hit minus 17 degrees Celcius) and try to accentuate positive Brit. Gritting salt has run out for many a road. Look what happened to the Venetian Empire. A new book David Boyd Haycock's A Crisis Of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (i.e. WWI - Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson and Stanley Spencer) does, however, beg the question of whether Britain after the 00ties possesses artistic brilliance or indeed any crisis to speak of. Popping over to Paris on the Eurostar for savoir-faire won't quite feel the same for many after being trapped in a tunnel for 15 hours. And let's face it many - even those in certain artistic realms - didn't know 15 years ago that the Festival d'Automne existed. And still don't. I imagine the riposte to that is 'we don't no French fry fest/ we got chavucatiiiooonn! Even the achievements of Brit Dept of Environment policy advisor and Norfolk lass Chrissie Wellington went relatively unheralded as for the third time in succession she became the Ironman Triathlon World Champion-9 hours of swimming, cycling, marathon. Adrenaline's nothing without the PR love.
Prince Harry may not have found love sleeping rough on the streets of London but he did manage to highlight homelessness at Christmas as we learnt that 1 in 5 schooleavers will be unemployed. Meanwhile BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review enlighteningly mused, "when will we see the Citizen Kane of new technology".

The curious and perhaps ironic thing about the past New Labour decade is that their American go-getting (or is that me-getting) economic push can cite in its defense many past Brit success or near success stories. They just happen to be mostly Americans. But recent men who've been lured to sort out various messes for the masses (you know who you are) just gave up in despair but most certainly not in penury and not without leaving a clean copy book. Britain was famous for its boffins - the most high profile, of course, being Sir Alan Sugar (he of the Amstrad computer) fronting TV entrepreneur reality show The Apprentice. And as BBC2' series The Noughties confirmed, Britain's last decade led the world in entertainment export (the format show). Oh, and football. While culture...well: in 3 episodes that word was never allowed out on its own unless in the company of the word celebrity.

Brit screenwriter Stuart Hazeldine has an otherworldly quality though choosing to work in the more commercial realm - rewrites for Knowing and The Day The Earth Stood Still- and with co-writer Simon Garrity Exam is his directorial debut (seen at Raindance and the Edinburgh Fest). A steely invigilator (Colin Salmon) locks eight candidates into a high-tech bunker with blank sheets of paper and an armed security guard. We watch their predicament in real-time. But what is the question let alone the answer? This could be David Lynch meets David Mamet shags David Fincher but isn't. Lynch is needed at the beginning to quell the wry smiles of 'it's The Apprentice slasher movie'. Fincher's needed in the middle where the mind games sag slightly and Mamet would come in handy at the end to give wry sociological depth. Apart from that it's not a bad debut - no damp praise intended. Seems all very London 2010 to me.

On the other side of the coin or is it the other face of the dollar (adds new meaning to blue 'collar' worker) Brit pioneers most often succeed by being outside prevailing common views - a subject worthy of a book rather than a blog. Classical composers spring to mind. William Walton decamped to sunnier climbs while colleagues battled on. Atheist but spiritual pacifist Vaughan-Williams stayed as did Sir Michael Tippet and Benjamin Britten. Even the populist and financially generous (from his film scores) Malcolm Arnold was left to rot and be swindled in a boarding house. But we always loved you is the salient cry. Nedup. Nedup. Something clearly that was never the case. In recent years filmmaker Peter Greenaway fled to Amsterdam, theatre director Peter Brook to Paris.
Composer George Benjamin interviewed on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters

In Episode 2 of BBC2's The Noughties: "Celebrity culture promised that wealth and success could be gained by merit whether that meant talent or just public appeal." Journalist Toby Young hit the nail on the designer handbag: "Because the celebrity class occurs in such a prominent position at the pinnacle of our society that fools ordinary people into thinking that British society in general is much more meritocratic than it is and that secures their consent to the vast inequality." In a sense and in essence not much in that regard has changed during the last decade though superficially class structure seems more to have broken down with 'ordinary' folk becoming celebrities. Celebrity culture has increased the urge to spend aided by New Labour's encouragement of riches and allowed more to afford the nightclubs frequented by celebrities, while of course, still maintaining a red rope and carpet between the haves and the have nots. But as legal immigrants continue pouring into Britain another worthwhile film release last November from Cinefile
Welcome
sensitively dramatised the plight of some whose only impossible hope is to swim the English Channel.
Container at the Young Vic

This year's Celebrity Big Brother (the last ever) has chosen hell, the devil and temptation as their theme. In Britain Christianity's never high on many an agenda and even the Archbishop of Canterbury is seen somewhat as a cool bloke in a cassock who preaches a lot of sense. So it must seem odd to many viewers having American film actor Stephen Baldwin preach his Christian beliefs on a TV reality show. Over the years the cynical Brit press have derided CBB inmates as washed up and in need of a make-over - all without whom, of course, their newspapers would probably have washed away. No-one in 'the house' is denying the fame or money but there's always more to it than that. Although taking a heavy fall during the recent recession, America remains a country of aspiration and optimism. Americans never really expect their 'celebrities' to be drinking at the same trough as themselves. Whereas in Britain, someone in 'the public eye' is damned if you do and damned if you don't mix with your admirers or past associates. Ivana Trump has just joined the 'house'. Let's hope she doesn't end up like Blanche DuBois. Though many would salivate at the thought. Whatever next.
We Live in Public showed that Big Brother had all been done before. Frighteningly so.
Barbara Kruger's work from the 90s showed at Sprüth Magers
Ever-Present Surveillance Rankles the British Public
Metropia (LFF) and 9 showed the future

Art critic Richard Cork has curated Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill at the Royal Academy (final weeks thru Jan 24)- the decade 1905-1915. Have we seen anything quite like Epstein's 1913 sculpture Rock Drill in recent years? One critic at the time called it "indescribably revolting". Oftentimes, artistic Britain does lead the world but that lead is so ahead and contrary to popular culture that nobody takes a blind bit of notice. Even when Roger Fry held his 1910 Manet and post-impressionists show at Grafton Galleries, Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh public response was YUCK! Not all of Wild Thing measures up to the Epstein but all power to an institution like the Royal Academy for mounting a show that proves just what an uphill struggle it always is to tilt against the windmills of popular taste while knowing full well that your life depends on that palette.

Multi award-winner at the Césars (French BAFTAs) Martin Provost's film Séraphine was New York released back in June (Music Box Films) and in London start of December (Metrodome). Self-taught painter Séraphine de Senlis (gregarian and extraordinary Yolande Moreau) is housemaid by day and painter of colour bulging fruits and flowers illuminating the night. Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a German collector and art critic, champions what he calls her "modern primitive" rather than “naïve” art - World War I interrupts, "I don't give a fig about war". Years later Uhde bumps into her art once again resulting in her upward mobility, fame and mental demise. Few films about artists have ever surpassed bio-pic curiosity: Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh (1991), Victor Erice's The Quince Tree Sun (El sol de membrillo) (1992), Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1956 doco Le Mystere Picasso, John Maybury's Love is the Devil (Francis Bacon) and perhaps Jacques Rivette's 1991 La Belle Noiseuse - all notable exceptions. Does Séraphine join those ranks? Perhaps not quite, but the film does dig into the obsessiveness of art and creativity. And Yolande Moreau has you believe that she was born to embody Séraphine.

Apologies for not mentioning Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Line (closed Dec 12 Arcola Theatre). Mixed reports about the play but Suzanne Valadon was a fascinating gal and an untold story behind many French men.
Arcola Theatre launches new eco-theatre plans
John Logan's play Red about American painter Mark Rothko at the Donmar.
A handheld translation gadget could bring a whole new audience to the theatre
Worth checking out the plastic bag sculptures of Khalil Chishtee in The State of Things: Recent Art from Pakistan at Aicon Gallery.
Widely influential and relatively unsung German-born American artist Eva Hesse: Studiowork (1936 – 1970) at the Camden Arts Centre.
Rokeby Gallery's new basement space was worth checking out with Tom Bradley's show - intriguing impetus from a Liszt piano etude in 'orchestrating' projected quicktime movie downloads of 'found' clips. He cites French philosopher Lyotard but the work's impish immediacy is what grabs you.
Australian painter residing in London Martin Brown showed striking New Paintings at Fred (the gallery is considering a show for him at Basel Volta). Echoes of the Camden Town Group style etc - his figures almost fleetingly manifesting themselves in their urban environment before seeming to disappear back into he canvas. Reminds one of Arikha's still-life abstraction (championed by playwright Samuel Beckett).

Further down the East End road at the V&A's far flung annexe the Museum of Childhood was Wonderland - an exhibition of 80 wonderful works by East London Printmakers on fairy tales and myths. Wish I'd seen this gem of a show earlier to recommend. Beautiful building to visit anyway if you can brave the tube vagaries of the Central Line to Bethnal Green.
Stephen Rhodes'installation Reconstruction or Something at Vilma Gold (also showing in Saatchi Gallery current survey of new work from America) digitally tinkered rather cleverly with The Exorcist (1973) acompanied by irritatingly catchy musak.
Another bloke who turns film imagery on its head is downtown NYC darling Cory Archangel still showing at Lisson.
David Rickard's Test Flights explore gravity and the power of free fall in The Economist plaza. Very appropriate venue.

wearethepeoplemovie.com was syndicated free with The Guardian on Saturday 28th November: you can watch/download the trailer here
At the Susan Inglett Gallery in New York, The Bruce High Quality Foundation University (B.H.Q.F.U.) is an unaccredited, free collaborative school founded by the eponymous artist collective and presented by Creative Time, where “students are teachers are administrators are staff.” B.H.Q.F.U. responds to what it views as the over-commercialization of the current art school system, offering instead “an education in metaphor manipulation”. Admission is based on a peer-recommendation system; select public programming is also offered.

...about an April wind

David Lurie (John Malkovich) is a 50-something Lothario and professor of romantic poetry in post-apartheid South Africa. After seducing student Melanie Isaacs (Antoinette Engel) he exiles himself to the remote market-garden farm of his daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines): “No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts,” he muses to her. “Is that the moral?” asks Lucy, “that males be allowed to follow their instincts unchecked?” David: “No, that is not the moral. What was ignoble about the spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. It punished itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it.” As the camera pulls back from Lucy's teeny bit of our planet into a wide wide shot at the end of the film, we are left with multiplicities of feelings. Disgrace (DVD 8 February and at the ICA cinema thru January) surprisingly engrosses as an adaptation of South African J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning 1999 novel by the Australian husband-and-wife team Steve Jacobs (director) and Anna-Maria Monticelli (screenplay). Nor is it simply a white liberal guilt trip. Lucy convinces herself that she has no other choices but the ones she's made: choices that David (and many audiences) will find hard to agree with. David could have 'got away' with his actions (with mild disciplinary action) but chooses instead disgrace and atonement. Precisely because of its specificity, the film resonates with much wider contexts into continents afar.
Coetzee's new novel Summertime

Experienced in documenting African issues, Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson's Mugabe And The White African surreptiously shot (HD video) one man's last stand and court case (74-year-old Mike Campbell) to keep his farm (built with a State mortgage over 20 years) while Zimbabwe's President Mugabe nationalises everything in sight through bloodletting. Essential harrowing and ultimately uplifting viewing.
Article in The Telegraph
BBC News 24 Our World slot airs the never screened 1979 film A Vanishing Breed about Kenya's white hunters.
Are the walls in Rio de Janeiro being built around the city's favelas serving as eco-barriers, or hiding the city's social problems?
District 9 is out on DVD(SD) and Blu-ray
Based on the novel by Alan Paton, Cry the Beloved Country (1952) starring Sidney Poitier and filmed in South Africa at the height of apartheid is out on Optimum DVD.

Cormac McCarthy 's Pulitzer prize winning, Oprah Winfrey approved novel The Road is according to the film's adaptor Australian director John Hillcoat (Greencine podcast) "a love story between a father and son...a test for their humanity and a struggle for humanity". Or as the novel puts it "each the other world's entire". That phrase could easily be set as the final challenge for a film grad from such as Lodz in Poland (Roman Polanski's old school). Cinematically greats such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Wim Wenders have assailed this spiritual territory before and far more profoundly. And one wishes Hillcoat's film to transfix us more than it does. Bleak can be beautiful if one remembers the grey dirt road poster for Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice. And Hillcoat's film is certainly that with the young boy so special (Kodi Smit-McPhee) that the DP Javier Aguirresarobe (another reason to see Erice's The Quince Tree Sun) described him as "not of this world". Robert Duvall has a great cameo as The Old Man tramping the road. Perhaps the trouble with Brit playwright Joe Penhall's screenplay is that it's too much of this world. Cormac McCarthy (also source for the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men) anchors in the bedrock of human language but what Hillcoat's film needs is a cinematic poetry of time allowing depth (not of field but breadth of consciousness) to the haunting cinematography. Nick Cave's score errs on the nostalgic, the melancholic. But how to create that trinity of the father, the son and the holy ghost of "carrying the fire" within our soul? Kodi Smit-McPhee's 'presence' is the reason for seeing this film and the crux of McCormac's novel (he's approved the film). Hillcoat's 1988 debut Ghosts...of the Civil Dead will again see the light of distribution in the States in the next year or so (according to Greencine).

Michael Caine at a Brit awards ceremony recently extolled the wealth of Brit film talent. So why don't we see more of it? Scottish director David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Asylum, Hallam Foe) needed America to shoot Spread (Optimum UK and Anchor Bay DVD in the States) refusing to play 'to the gallery' audience. Artist Sam Taylor-Wood by contrast delivers a consummate product with Nowhere Boy - great cast, visuals etc etc- but not a patch on her best experimental art work. It took a Dane, Lone Scherfig, to make a Brit film An Education that in subject matter harked back to a Brit film industry of yesteryear (no mean social mores' feat) tackling sexual issues. Ridley Scott's daughter Jordan chose for her debut Cracks a 1934 Brit girls' boarding school simmering with suppressed erotic desires all beautifully shot by John Mathieson but ultimately a little too much style over substance. In fact when the Brit flics do sex they usually do it very well indeed. Crying With Laughter's (Raindance 09 and shot on HD) premise is a stand-up comedian (Billy Connelly mode) whose joking medicates him (though not his alcohol) from his adolescent sexual trauma. That's until an old sparring partner from childhood arrives on the scene with unhealed neuroses. Great use of HD video though the plot veers melodramatically towards the end. Actor David Morrisey's film (also shot on HD) Don't Worry About Me (LFF and due out sometime this year) is incredibly tender and would be appreciated by many a multi-plex crowd bored with current fodder if only they'd get the chance to see it. Also in last year's London Film Festival and out soon - Jullien Temple's as ever inventive music doco Oil City Confidential (Feb 5) and The Disappearance Of Alice Creed (March 12), In June last year, the ICA inaugurated their annual New British Cinema season with an impressive line up including: Smita Bhide's The Blue Tower (HDV/HDCam -Raindance 08), Thomas Clay's Soi Cowboy, and Mark Losey's eerie The Hide (HD)- an inventively twisted bird-watching psychological drama (just out on DVD). Next week sees commercials director Malcolm Venville's debut 44 Inch Chest hopefully utilising its great cast. BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme interviews Basil Dearden's (Victim, Sapphire) son James about his father's film The Halfway House (1943). Just one of many listener requested films still unavailable on DVD.
Optimum DVD does its best with another 3 titles out in its Ealing Collection Classics as well as The World Ten Times Over and The Proud Valley with Paul Robeson stranded in Cardiff.
Writer Jon Dighton's (Kind Hearts & Coronets, Went the Day Well?) Undercover is out Jan 25.

The Brits are also very adept at what one could dub with the artworld term 'ready made' comedy of the everyday - and by it's very condition intrinsically somewhat surreal, whether it be Monty Python, The Goons, Fawlty Towers, The Office or recent cinema release Bunny And The Bull. Helmed by Paul King (director of the wacky cult TV series The Mighty Boosh) its naive charm is reminiscent of last year's FAQ About Time Travel (Lionsgate UK). The picaresque travels through Europe are in Stephen Turnbull's(Edward Hogg) mind in an attempt to make sense of of why his flat has become a Warhol-like life repository even down to a box labelled "drinking straws 94-96". With a budget of 1 million pounds the mix of live action and animation has the nerdy energy (but also longeurs) of a couple of teenagers in their bedroom computer animation suite. That same end-November week last year also offered up the very unfunny gay London rom-com Mr.Right and Debbie Isitt's Nativity! - a film tapping into Britain's celebrity obsession with a Coventry school kids' teacher (Martin Freeman) letting slip that his ex-girlfriend (Ashley Jensen) now Hollywood exec (though not really) might come to see the kids' Christmas nativity play. Some deft moments and casting but for many it's likely to send them running a mile for a pint and seeking the nearest black hole time portal.
Far funnier was Shane Meadows' manifesto example of guerilla filmmaking Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee (out on DVD-1st December posting)
The BFI treated us to Terence Davies poetry in a DVD set of his work and also offered The Jacques Tati Collection

Unlike almost every after Second Sight DVD re-release Gambit (a capering heist) is by no means a great film either as it's 98 year-old director Ronald Neame freely admits on the audio commentary: "The first thing I'd do is cut 20 minutes." But watching Michael Caine and Shirley Maclaine act together could never be called hard work and most of the film's production team have been multi Oscar winners or nominees including composer Maurice Jarre. What you're really buying this DVD for is Neame's commentary or rather his anecdotes recounting stories so evocative you don't even need the picture track. Thanks to film studio head Arthur Rank Neame worked with David Lean (as cameraman) on several pictures and then produced for him. Great Expectations (1946) was the first but "I hated being behind a desk, watching budgets, hated telling David to get off the set because we'd go over budget". At just 21 he became the youngest DP in England due to the cameraman's medical misfortune on Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929) - Britain's first sound film and went on to work with all the greats: Judy Garland's last film (even though she tried to have him fired) and Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968-even though she hated filming and preferred the theatre). Retired for 20 years Neame is now 98 with some colleagues labelling him a deserter to tinseltown after shooting The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Odessa File (1974). If you ever dreamed of being in the motion pictures Neame's story will keep your flame alight. Second Sight also released Hopscotch (1980) again with a fascinating commentary.

It's sobering to re-watch The Poseidon Adventure - what cinema one can achieve with a firehose, an upside down stairwell, star character turns one remembers etc etc- in the light 2012's impressive, thrilling but often sterile digital pyrotechnics. The success of Paranormal Activity (Israeli-born director Oren Peli's $15,000 budget reaping over $100 million) can only be accounted for as the result of people's fascination with the scary in the everyday. The irony being that the everyday social interaction of walking down the street, buying groceries or family relationships is far scarier than this accomplished Big Brother ghost house. Building on the film's success (Icon distributed in UK Paramount is dishing out $1 million a year for 10 micro-budget (under $100,000) projects. Paramount is also starting an online service to sell their movie clips.

A recent survey revealed that New York was one of the world's unhappiest places to live if no longer the scariest (BBC Radio 4's The Archive Hour on the city's hellish blackout). In writer-director Marc Lawrence's comedy Did You Hear About the Morgans? estranged Manhattan couple lawyer Paul Morgan (Hugh Grant) and real estate agent Meryl (Sarah Jessica Parker) are forced to discover what country living is all about when relocated to to a dot on the map in Wyoming by witness protection. The murderer spotted them also and quietly connives in the background by bugging Meryl's workmates. The acting is what you watch here in this amiable and jovial script and once the local marshal Clay Wheeler (Sam Elliott) and his wife Emma (Mary Steenburgen) join, the film bubbles along. This cast make comedy look easy (which films can so often clearly show it just isn't). And one always has an unwilling expectation that this is the time Hugh Grant might just deflate the souffle. But as always he never does. In fact his one-note characterisation works in favour of wooing back Meryl - very dependable and not quite as boring as she'd thought. More of Mr Hugh Grant a bit later.

More country matters in Taking Woodstock (out on DVD in the States and UK mid-Feb ). Based on Elliot Tiber's (Demetri Martin) 2007 memoir of that dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y summer of 1969, as always director Ang Lee coaxes great performances: the Russian-Jewish parents Jake (Henry Goodman) and Sonia (Imelda Staunton) with Liev Schreiber popping up as a cross-dressing pistol totin' bodyguard. Was avant garde performance art ever as wanky as parodied by The Earthlight Players? And anyone old enough to remember The Red Telephone by the Los Angeles band Love?
Also showing at the BFI studio
Burk Uzzle had no idea his Woodstock photos would become iconic (Laurence Miller Gallery, New York)

It Might Get Loud is directed by The Inconvenient Truth's Davis Guggenheim and while his new doco never really digs beneath the guitar fretboard it does reveal that although many of these great musos - seeming to rely merely on a few notes, chords and time signatures - the Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) of this world know their instruments inside out and can actually build a guitar from scratch.
(US site)
BBC Four's series on Guitar Heroes

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll by all accounts reincarnates Ian Drury through Andy Serkis' performance. Out now on UK release.
A history of The Mods on BBC Radio 4's Archive on 4
And the UK still hasn't seen The Posters Came from the Walls (Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams, London Film Fest 2008) a fascinating sociological doco on ’80s Brit band Depeche Mode's fans across the world.

There's not a lot left to remember several weeks after viewing Post-Grad except for lead actress Alexis Bledel. For the uninitiated, Bledel played the daughter in American TV sit com Gilmore Girls. Now if one could 'marry' a sitcom this would probably be the one - every episode peppered effortlessly with witty, cheeky, wise one-liners attributed to characters who seem really to have slipped on real-life. If that marriage were possible then maybe the world's not about to end after all [no historical spoiler needed]. Post-Grad is the debut of screenwriter Kelly Fremon and though it's not half-bad she hasn't quite found a voice of her own for Vicky Jenson's directorial skills to steer. However, the pitfalls of post-grad jobsearching haven't really been seen in film comedy and Bledel's acting ability makes one believe (as in Gilmore Girls) that she's an American girl-next-door that you'd actually be interested in getting to know let alone employing her. Carol Burnett pops up as the grandmother (she's more than just a sit com actress as anyone who heard her sing Sondheim's breathless Not Getting Married Today on Broadway will testify). More of Bledel's Post-Grad father Mr. Michael Keaton later this posting.

With Meryl Streep in the lead, Nancy Meyers' (writer/dircector/co-producer) It's Complicated is given the veneer of comic sophistication. But Streep is not a natural comedienne when playing basically 'herself'. A mere slurp of wine from her Julia Child chef in Julie and Julia could raise a knowing smile as do almost all her comic characterisations. But such knowing-ness should be for our part not the actress. Her 60 something Santa Barbara cafe/restauranteur Jane Adler is a fun gal (as is Streep) but every character nuance seems somehow just too 'signaled' to the viewer. Out jogging, her not so non ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin) calls out from his car and there's a cut-away shot of her doing a quirky stop in her tracks. It's fun but she knows that so we the audience don't really register or enjoy it so much. Her love-forlorne architect Adam (Steve Martin) is as we know a die hard comedian and is endearingly funny precisely because he does nothing. When he gets 'high' with Jane at her daughter's party, Martin erupts with his signature crazy dance while under the influence and it still raises our smile. Because of Martin's pathos and therefore as a comic foil, Streep's scenes with Martin fare best. Baldwin playing straight is fun to watch, too, just as the whole film is 'fun' utilising a great production team. But when Jane's three grown kids cry in response to their dad's (Baldwin) tears, we just aren't moved. And we should be. And we feel Nancy Meyers feels we should be. What's missing is that simple uncontrollable 'crying into the cupcake' moment of our existence - a Brechtian dialectic between the reality and our desire of it.

Tales From The Golden Age (Amintiri Din Epoca De Aur) (London Film Festival 09) written by Cannes Palme d'Or winner (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) Cristian Mungiu who also directed the second of 5 parts (though each is uncredited) is a familiar lampooning of Ceausescu's 1980's Romania and the 'golden age' of communism - "legend has it". Worth catching a look at the DVD from Trinity Filmed Entertainment (their web site has been under construction for quite some time) as are most of their titles e.g. Beaufort, Import/Export. And when will OsadnÈ (LFF and Best Doco at last year's Karlovy Vary Fest) air on TV- the funny tale of a town on the farthest reaches of the European Union, "there are no people here, not even a cow or a horse" jokes a local. Getting their Brussels MP to open a nature trail is an enormous coup as is their reciprocal visit to Belgium.
WC Fields BFI retrospective with 8 new prints
And one has to admit, Mr.President, that The Daily Show sketch on White House endeavours to unite the child labour of America is very funny.

Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon was originally UK distributed in 1992 by Sony and 1994 in the States - one of the initial releases from the now-defunct Fine Line (New Line Cinema's subsidiary). The MPAA gave it an R rating for " the strong depiction of a perverse sexual relationship" but reviews were quite liberal considering: The Miami Herald "bumpy, mesmerising ride", the New York Times: "smutty, far-fetched...darkly subversive in his view of the world he defines isn't dull, Bitter Moon is kind of world-class", London Time Out: "deeply ironic black comedy grotesque portrait of love's variety". Though the first cinematographer chosen passed on the project due to its sexual nature as did the original editor, Polanski nabbed Tonino Delli Colli whose career was "a who's who of European cinema" including Pasolini's Gospel, Canterbury Tales and Salo, as well as Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and his last film Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful. In a DVD extra, lead actor Peter Coyote recalls his first phone conversation with Polanski who defined eroticism for him: "Eroticism is when you use a feather. Pornography is when you use the whole chicken." "Polanski couldn't write the Microsoft manual" Coyote says affectionately. Arrow DVD's audio commentary doesn't begin promisingly and scriptwriter John Brwonjohn doesn't offer much that's enlightening but producer Timothy Burrill adequately fills in the gaps with enough information to make it all worthwhile. If only they could have got Polanski himself.

He based the film on an OTT French paperback novel by Pascal Bruckner founder of a right-wing faction The New Philosophers (critical of post-structuralism and multi-culturalism) that broke from the 1968 Paris left. One of the let's champions Vangelis (the band Aphrodite's Child) writes the film's score. As with all Polanski the film works best on the cinema screen. Having seen it on initial release, one is reminded of just how good a subtle comic presence was the then unknown Hugh Grant (the late, great casting director Mary Selway). The art of being not pretending on camera. And of course he still is: one of those few actors that can both raise a smile and belief in an audience when he says "I think I've fallen in love with you." The untrained actress Emmanuelle Seigner of course went on to prove her casting wasn't just a fluke. And of course Kristen Scott Thomas.
Polanski's 1972 film What? will bore, infuriate, or fascinate you (Severin DVD,Region 2)

More palatable philosophical musings can be found in Ozzies David Barison and Daniel Ross’s 2004 documentary The Ister (3 hours now available on Facets DVD) (Istros the ancient Greek term for the Danube) musing on the river's Hölderlin’s poem. Together with German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, three leading French philosophers—Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Bernard Stiegler, take turns at grappling with Heidegger’s philosophy. "Rivers have no poetic power anymore" they are losing their mythic resonance and becoming part of the “machine” of “daily life.” Some may prefer Syberberg's own historical musings to this doco (most are available on Facets DVD and are highly recommended).

Ken McMullen took a plunge in the similar waters with An Organisation of Dreams premiering at last year's London Film Festival. He also enlisted Bernard Stiegler on camera whose philosophy emerged while in jail for armed robbery. Also at the London Film Festival and December at Anthology Film Archives New York, Austrian director Gustav Deutsch's Film Ist: a Girl & a Gun takes its lead from a Jean-Luc Godard quote via DW Griffith: “To make a film all you need is a girl and a gun.”. The is an ongoing series that Deutsch edits together from often disparate archive footage -porn, science reels, obscure movies, sourcing from among others the Imperial War Museum (in Britain) and the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction (Indiana University). One's fears in the first 15 minutes or so that all this is just an arty wank are allayed into somewhat of a hypnotic meditation on the power of cinema imagery. Or rather a meditation on Eros, Stiegler's historicity of human desire and aesthetics "genealogy of the sensible" and the principles of Herbert Marcuse dubbed "father of the New Left in the United States" who in One Dimensional Man (1964) writes: “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile."

If all that proves too much you can watch Bitter Moon's sex god Heavon Grant's teammate from the group Hot Gossip Arlene Phillips judging on BBC's So You Think You Can Dance? "I live for you, I think you are the truth," one of the judges said of 19 year-old Charlie. Mmmm moving quickly on good as she was. Hugo from Brazil looked as if he'd stepped out of a Schwarznegger fitness video doing leg splits as if limbs of rubber. His visa's only good for his work on the West End so was disqualified from competing for the 100,000 pound prize. Will they find the Susan Boyle of dance? When do we get So You Think You Can Be Prime Minister? Perhaps a hosting opportunity for Gordon Brown if he gets more time on his hands. In a few weeks Tony Blair may reminisce in quieter moments of The Chilcot Inquiry (aka The Iraq Inquiry) on why he didn't pursue his 80's dream of So You Wanted to be a Beatle! As ice and snow mounted without, the inquiry (began last Nov)slipped into the more gutsy sessions with relative silence last week. According to one Major General: "I don't think the complexity of the situation [in Iraq] was remotely transferred to the public psyche."
BBC Radio 3's Discovering Music on how the foxtrot was re-invented by C20 composers
The Hurt Locker is out on DVD
BBC Radio 4 Profile of Sir Roderic Lyne

Writer/director Lynn Shelton's comedy Humpday (Raindance Film Fest 2009 opener) is one of that new bread of American 'male bonding' movies that resembles a Sideways but without the wine, locations and arch wit. While there is enough booze for old (straight) frat-mates Ben (Mark Duplass) and Andrew (Joshua Leonard) to dare each other to shoot (just) themselves in a gay porn vid for Humpfest, there's not even the whiff of a puke with the knockabout Judd Apatow way out of sight. Herbert Marcuse is looming though. UK offering, Dogging: A Love Story shrinks in the corner, rather, in comparison. On the strength of his BAFTA 2008 nominated short Soft, great things were expected from director Simon Ellis who's immersed himself in drawing and cinema over the years. But in spite of a few funny scenes involving Dan (Luke Treadaway) and his Job Centre geek functionary, there's not too much to get excited over.

John Hurt's Quentin Crisp sequel An Englishman in New York aired on ITV over New Year and is available on DVD.
Belated mention of a show tucked away in a side street off the Piccadilly drag: William E Jones: ‘Tearoom’ @ Swallow Street consisting of police surveillance footage taken through a two-way mirror in a public toilet in Ohio in 1962. The show was closed a week early. Haven't found out why.

There lay certitude; there, in the daily round

The Sacred Made Real at the National Gallery (last 2 weeks) is possibly one of the most bizarre exhibitions you're likely to see at a public institution thanks to the gallery's new director Nick Penny. 16 polychrome sculptures (painted wooden statues "ignored by historians little known outside Spain") and 16 paintings from the C17th Spanish Counter-Reformation are displayed side by side. Zurbarán seems familiar to us until informed that those religious canvases of light through vast darkness have their derivation in the painter's 'day job' as a painter of polychromes. You don't have to be religious to appreciate this show but a little knowledge helps. Pedro de Mena's Mary Magdalene meditating on the Crucifixion (1664), clad in her mermaid scaly burnt-gold dress peering at the miniature Christ on what seem two twigs, is quite a familiar religious image - bizarre and eerie as it may seem. The same artist's Saint Francis standing in Ecstasy (1663) has one foot obscured by his robe that propels his being toward you or rather the Almighty. Without wishing to sound sacriligous this was C17th 'celebrity'. Every fabric fold is observed and cherished. Gregorio Fernández's Dead Christ (1625-30) is splayed before you completely naked - his eyes made of glass, his teeth of ivory (or bone). In the same room De Mena's Virgin of the Sorrows (1673) has only one of her glass tears remaining, shrouded by the weeping headdress folds of wood. She was worshipped as so irreplacible by the nuns of the Valladolid Museo that the National Gallery needed an emissary in persuading them to part with her. The ropes binding Zurbarán's Saint Serapion (1628) seem pulled by some unseen force to the space in front of our feet. The black background of his 1627 Christ for the sacristy of San Pablo, Seville (now in the Art Institute of Chicago) you now learn was to further foreground the dead christ by sculpting with the light from an upper window. Don't miss in Room 1 of the old gallery building a 'Making of' guide to polychromes. Quite, quite amazing.

After Room 1, you can move onto the visceral beauty of Kienholz: The Hoerengracht - a relatively unknown artist outside Los Angeles circles and 1960's The Cool School for many years-he moved to Berlin and died in 1994. The National's entire temporary exhibition room is now a life-size sculpture of an Amsterdam 'red-light' district street complete with leaves, broken bicycle railings, light bulbs, brothel interiors - everything. The girls were cast from real models. Whether or not one agrees with the Gallery's linked premise of prostitution in C17 Dutch art (de Hooch et al greet the visitor), the installation is completely in keeping with discussions of representation in the old masters. And as with the best modern architecture, it is so different as to become interestingly similar. Good DVD too (with the ever enlightening and enthusiastic Colin Wiggins) part of which is screened in the room opposite. Then there's the main gallery collection itself which as ever is still free. Sometimes, so often, the weight of London is made bearable. So too the incredibly impressive all-new Medieval Galleries at the V&A with much more to see there too...

Catch Andrew Graham-Dixon's 3-part The Art of Russia (BBC Four) when next repeated. Seeing him seek out Rodchenko's original iconic posters snuck away in the filing drawers of a shabby little office is one of the series myriad delights.

More of the cult of religious celebrity in Satyajit Ray's
Goddess - the father-in-law of his young sibling carer dreams that she is an avatar of the goddess Kali and must be worshipped and soon the whole village is at her feet. As relevant today as it was in 1962.
Mr Bongo DVD also releases 15 Feb Company Limited(Seemabaddha) and The Stranger(Agantuk)

Martyrs (written and directed by Pascal Laugier) was somewhat overlooked when released by Optimum last March (and on DVD). For years, an obsessive sect have been brutally experimenting on young girls so as to induce and replicate the moment of martrydom. So far without success. Laugier admits being influenced by masters like Sam Peckinpah: "Matyrs obviously subscribes industrially, if I can use that word, to a return to torture films but...I don't think my film bears any relation to Saw or Hostel. In a way I'd even say that Martyrs was like an anti-Hostel or vice versa." Speaking of the make-up effects: "I wanted it to be more like a Raphael or a Francis Bacon painting. A suffering, sick body - gangrenous and tortured in real life is spectacularly baroque in itself. I didn't want to make it any more monstrous or creature-like." Make-Up Effects Supervisor Benoit Lestang who died in July 2008: "The yardstick for special effects was [John Carpenter's] The Thing which has never been bettered...in terms of the quantity and especially the imagination...It's crazy.That film is 25 years old." Everything about this film is uniquely inventive or re-inventive as it gives everything in its path a new twist. In-depth interviews and a feature-length Making of DVD extra.

At first glance boringly familiar, director David Volach's first film My Father, My Lord (Hofshat Kaits) - the study of an orthodox Haredic Jewish couple losing their son - soon proves very, very moving through utter simplicity.

Actor Michael Keaton has made a directorial in The Merry Gentlemen that you're not likely to forget. Based on a similar premise as Did You Hear About the Morgans?, the always wonderful Kelly Macdonald (Kate) looks up blissfully to see the Christmas sky but instead sees a man on the opposite roof. She shouts thinking he might jump. Frank Logan (Michael Keaton) is that guy, a Chicago hitman, who finds an excuse to meet with that girl. Kate makes light of her black eye concocting a different story each time she's asked, including the investigating cop, Murcheson (Tom Bastounes) who takes a fancy to her. We learn later, in fact, she's been abused by her ex-husband. Ron Lazzeretti's screenplay never seems forced, mawkish nor sentimental. Yet it is chock full of care and sentiment. Perhaps with a lesser cast and a lesser talent than Keaton's it too might tip over the edge. And perhaps it's a film not to all tastes. But the platonic chemistry between Macdonald and Keaton's character is deeply moving. They are both people whose experiences have lead to harbouring aloneness, not wanting to be that in subliminal search for another, but ultimately perhaps now always destined in seeking that isolation. So beautiful about this film is that its protagonists are driven from a position of inner strength and light. Never weakness of heart.

Look out this year for Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch (LFF and picked up by New Wave for the UK and IFC in the States) based on the writings of a C13th Christian mystic. Julie Sokolowski is riveting as the modern-day upper-class Parisian theology student Celine who thinks she's found 'the light' but is always blinded by her earnestness. If it were possible to parallel the world of Simone Weil this would be it. Celine fills herself to the brim with belief rather than opening herself to Weil's "gravity and grace". The scenes of Islamic terrorism are all the more disturbing and revealing for this. Not an easy film to watch but Sokolowski transfixes one so with eyes purged of worldly capture we're magnetised to her journey even if we don't agree nor fully understand it.

When do we get to see Jean-Marie Straub’s 21 minute Le streghe, les femmes entre elles?
Three Films by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet: The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), Sicilia! (1999) and Une Visite au Louvre (2004) are available on New Wave DVD. The latter two showing at the Cine Lumiere Jan 19.

"We always fill the screen with our own experiences. Ultimately, what we see comes from inside us," Michael Haneke in 2005. In a recent discussion on BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves presenter Philip Dodd asks: "is it possible to develop a common memory for the two Germanies?" His contributors continue: "[Since 1989], the official memory culture has been challenged by many more private memories - family memories, the intimate memories [eg Gunter Grass' Crabwalk]. A family memory that turns round assumptions, for example: Germans as victims instead of perpetrators...and that memory has filtered and challenged the large narratives that have dominated since 1945. "...An amnesia and a commodification of memory...a completely dysfunctional attitude to memory." Much has been written about Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (Cannes 09 Palme d'Or winner). And it's difficult to discuss Haneke without the context of his earlier work. Hari Kunzru in The Guardian: "Germans have acclaimed Haneke as an inheritor of Brecht, skilfully alienating the spectator from the material in order to provoke a critical, intellectual response. Indeed some have praised him for finding a way to continue Brecht's project into the new century. Now that postmodernism's stylistic free-for-all has inured audiences to the formal "alienation effects" used in Brechtian epic theatre, Haneke has found other ways to wrong-foot the spectator, a peculiar combination of shock and deadening that blocks off most easy ways to "consume" his bleak stories. However, Adorno's powerful description of the neurosis that comes with working through the past suggests that there may be something less controlled than either of these versions of the director – the cold sadist or the cold neo-Brechtian – allow. There is, in his films, an inability to deal with the pain of the world, a psychic wound whose display is not purely voluntary."

Included on the DVD of made for Austrian television (1997) Kafka adaption The Castle (Das Schloss) is Nina Kusturika and Eva Testor's hour long 2004 Haneke doco: "I always say that film is 24 lies per second in the service of truth or at the service of the attempt to find the truth. I don't know what reality is either." "I totally reject the word pessimism. Nietzsche already said that it is stupid to make a differentiate between optimism and pessimism, it leads to nowhere...It's a duty of art to feed the skepticism towards oneself...the decision of what you want to see is really yours otherwise it becomes an advice and I have no advice to give." 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) is based on a real incident in which a 19-year-old student, for no apparent reason, opened fire bank customers. The discussion of whether The White Ribbon delineates the roots of Nazism is less interesting than whether one can ever feel compassion in Haneke's films or as he would have it: what do we believe suppresses that compassion? What in us is lead more by the lie of sociability than acceptance of an inescapable dialectic? David Hudson in The Auteurs Daily: Debating Haneke (and Brecht): "The character of Mother Courage, for example, a woman who both profits from war and whose family is destroyed by it, is a study in depth, compassion and contradiction - not the detached, Marxist mouthpiece some of Brecht's writing might lead you to assume he would create." Brecht's greatness is as a poet. How words that can dance together are also capable and culpable of setting fire to one another. Nightwaves: "If no one is guilty, then everyone is: that the problem is not one of individuals, but of societies; that cultural violence demands collective culpability."

The world of Richard (Donnie Darko) Kelly isn't that far away from Haneke's. It's no where near as 'pure' and taut as his, and of course, he's working in the realm of American entertainment. But Kelly's films are about our choice of complicity - his latest The Box (based on a 1970 Richard Matheson short story) no exception to that. His last films are seen as wayward, ill-thought and structured, when in fact they owe more to the dialectics of opera. A couple receive a box from a mysterious man offering them $1million if they press the button on the box. The catch is someone will die. In a world that functions on 'wheels within wheels' does a death unconnected to us really matter? There is always a 'higher power'. Always someone to tempt or conjure control over us. Kelly uses lightning in The Box as a somewhat clunky metaphor. But as in opera the protagonists knew their destiny was fated. Not foul of fate itself but their inability to allow grace - the quality great Italian director Giorgio Strehler guided his actors with in rehearsing Brecht/Weill's Threepenny Opera.

“I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move

Let the wind speak

that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I

have made

Let those I love try to forgive

what I have made.” Ezra Pound (Notes for Canto CXX)