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)
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