There was something my better self couldn't suppress. It's not a question of telling the truth or a lie ... I was writing for myself. Poetry is its own answer, its own end- Peter Porter
It's tricky to admit wanting to retreat from the world. People will assume that you don't care, aren't up to coping with it all etc. etc. But isn't what one really longs to escape the indifference exhibited by many fellow inhabitants? Indifferent to those who don't quite dovetail into life's machine of work and happiness. Indifference from those for whom an English goal keeper fumbling a World Cup ball has more tragic consequences than fumbled observational skills of personal and family interaction. One of the commentaries on Eureka's recent DVD/Blu-ray must-have 'archival' release of Fritz Lang's M (1931) observes that "the you at the end of the film is a larger social unit - that is us and the audience." Writer Friedrich Kittler re-enforces this: in a city where "things are becoming streamlined and rational, someone whose behaviour doesn't fit into that, becomes all the more deviant and becomes more and more a source of irritation." Fritz Lang concurs: "I don't want to have an artistic photography...[but] a newsreel photography because I think every picture that depicts people today, or out of the C15 [for example], should be a kind of a documentary of its time. Only then, in my opinion, do you get a quality of truth into the picture... In a certain way Fury, M and my so-called crime pictures are also a documentaries." As another commentator notes "The big irony was...that Hitchcock [who was very influenced by early German cinema] was referred to as the English Fritz Lang and later on in Fritz Lang's career he was referred to as the German Alfred Hitchcock." Amongst many other fascinating technical information about Lang's early sound film - (one-third doesn't have sound due to its expense at the time, and what sound there is oftentimes leads the image without ever using music) - we learn that though Lang didn't do acting cameos in his films as did Hitchcock, the close-up on hands were always his own.
Frau im Mond and Dr.Mabuse have also been released by Eureka. And Metropolis that includes 25min of footage previously thought lost to the world is out Sept 10.
Off the busy Euston Road in London, what seems the impossible curatorial goal of mounting an exhibition about Skin, triumphs at the Welcome Institute (more later in this blog). While quite appositely, radiologist Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) mammograms the skin in the opening of Nicole Holofcener's comedy/drama Please Give - a movie all about people who eventually see that the mystery of themselves might just lie in their surfaces (my Oscar Wilde misquote). Catherine Keener's Kate easily sees money to be made in buying up 50's furniture from deceased New Yorker's estates and flogging it as 'retro', but in her endearing and infuriating way, can't spot the difference between offering food to a homeless person and the black man she embarrasses whose only reason to be waiting outside a restaurant is for a table. Rebecca is a grand-child of Andra - the elderly next door neighbour whose apartment Kate has bought to expand into after her death. Andra's other sibling is beautician/masseuse Mary (Amanda Peet) who not only sorts out the spots of Kate's teenager Abby (talented newcomer Sarah Steele) but has an unlikely affair with Kate's husband Alex (Oliver Platt). Please Give is by no means revelatory but it certainly proves to be one of the most intelligent American comedy exports we've had in a long while. Released by Sony Picture Classics huge unsung credit due to producer Anthony Bregman's company Likely Story.
It's a shame that Ajami (released Stateside in Feb by Kino) can't make us laugh in spite of its violent serious subject matter. The middle-class pre-occupations of Please Give seem a world away from the gritty realism of Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. But the characters in this Oscar-nominated Best Foreign Language film are just as real - as if straight out of a TV episode of The Wire. Directors Scandar Copti (an Arab Israeli) and Yaron Shani (an Israeli Jew) use non-professional actors and cinematographer Boaz Yehonatan Yacov (My Father, My Lord) to create as far as possible unrelenting docu-realism. Ajami's multi-strand characters are first and foremost ordinary people and political props a distant second. Reading the sub-titles (if not fluent in Hebrew or Arabic) can be quite demanding for an audience but at no point lessens the impact that this senselessness of violence has on us. What's most disturbing is the reminder of how everyday human battles are so easily co-opted for political means. Yet also how similiar the 'daily round' of family is on both sides: "Our idea was to make the audience experience what it meant to be the other," said Shani. The film would be a good double-bill with the recent Lebanon - the war reduced to the inside of a tank and the minds of its soldiers, much like Polish director Andrzej Wadja's distillation in Kanal (1956). An interesting comparison too with video artist Shirin Neshat's recently released first feature Women Without Men and whether her political contextualising of the 1953 British backed Iranian coup works better than the focus on individuals in the source novel.
Vertigo UK's trailer for Ajami.
Akira Kurasawa's classic Rashomon (1951) asking where the truth lies is re-released as part of the BFI's director retrospective. And worth visiting this year's Cannes Fest winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Phantoms of Nabua installation in the BFI gallery and reading about his spooky project.
Former Spanish commercials director Gabe Ibanez in his first feature Hierro delves into the mind of a mother who thinks her 5 year-old's been kidnapped. Stunning widescreen lensing by Alejandro Martinez but the film always seems to telegraph us in advance that we should be scared. So we never are.
Directed by Marcus Dunstan with a screenplay co-written with Patrick Melton,The Collector, on the other hand, is one of those gory horror films you sorta wished hadn't watched because certain elements just keep recurring in your brain. But far better to have your enemies ingeniously dispatched silently in your imagination than the alternative. Since winning HBO's Project Greenlight competition in 2004 with their screenplay Faust, these filmmakers have penned the later/latest Saw torture/horrors and worked uncredited on some other well-known ones in the genre. They admit to being fans of the Italian Giallo horror films (Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Mario Brava) in which "the camera gets to do all the talking- it's not about cutting or things that normally break up the rhythm of what could normally be a suspenseful moment," says Dunstan. There's no psychology in The Collector just pure gore, stunning lighting/camerawork and definitely no laughs.
The Collector is all about skin. It's leather hooded torturer utilises everyday objects that pierce and cut his victim's bodily surfaces. The Welcome Institute rarely takes the obvious route to its gallery subjects and 3 weeks ago celebrated its 1 millionth visitor. Any one of the thematic strands of their latest exhibition Skin could have (and has in other galleries) entire shows of their own. One achievement of Skin is that you never feel overloaded by the information presented rather it engenders a curiosity to further explore. Historical works of art inhabit the same space as the work of contemporary artists and scientists. The ceramic apothecary jars of Tamsin van Essen appear decorative until closer inspection reveal they model stigmatised skin ailments- syphilis, acne and psoriasis. Brian Dettmer presents a book 'autopsied' into a sculpture (2002) while a specially commissioned work from Rhian Solomon combines surgical processes with the techniques of 'suturing' textiles. On loan from the Hygiene Museum are modelled hands scared with their 'owner' occupations. The front of another display case pairs the Science Museum's C19 tattooed skin collected by osteologist and anatomist La Vallete from soldiers and prisoners, while the back is devoted to Maori tattoos-essential to the exhibition given the word's derivation of 'striking' the skin. "There is no word for art in the Maori language," stressed George Nuku at the show's opening, his face entirely tattooed, "because everything is the art of something...[The art] had almost died out by the 1980's in New Zealand. And now it's almost impossible to find a job or accomodation if you are facially tattooed. They say I'm craft not art...Cutting the skin creates memory. It's about re-creating a memory of the female birth on your face. Everything [in one's life] is recorded on the body. And lots more Maori women are being tattooed now as it reinforces the miracle of birth."
Rick Famuyiwa's Our Family Wedding bravely attempts a comic broach to the subject of Latino/Black ethnic rivalry in the States - Lucia (America Ferrera) /Marcus (Lance Gross). But it's a cake whose oven would have to swim the Atlantic to reach the dinner table. Peter Sellers' elephant in The Party flashes through our mind as a goat on viagra in the bathroom humps a wedding guest. There was a recipe here someplace for America Ferrara's talented ingredients until someone let the pet dog gnaw it to bits.
Writer-director Nicholas Stoller's Get Him to the Greek is an infinitly more fun experience. "We don't lie to people, we just believe invalid truths," says company A&R man Sergio Roman (Sean "P. Diddy" Combs). Aaron Green (Jonah Hill) is the record company talent wrangler with 72 hours to get his rock star intact, clean and sober to his televised gig at LA's Greek Theatre. One would like to say zoo keeper but the comparison to Russell Brand's druggie Brit rocker Aldous Snow (last seen in Stoller's 2008 Forgetting Sarah Marshall) could most probably have the animals suing for defamation. Jason Segal's script for Sarah Marshall, from memory, was tauter than Stoller's with more of a lightness of comic rapier. Stoller is more from the Judd Apatow school of gross out comedy wearing a moral heart on its sleeve. But as a director he grounds Get Him to the Greek with that much maligned and neglected quality - relationship. "Life is full of superficial, surface encounters," says Aldous, grasping for a philosphical truth in his life that he has numbed with celebrity life-style and one that we'd wish he'd exhume into a rock ballad.
Much of Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely (out on ICA DVD) co-written with his brother Avi, is located on a remote commune in Scotland "a place where everyone is famous and no one goes". Fresh from an old people's home gig in Paris, Michael Jackson 'lookalike' (Diego Luna) is persuaded by Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) to retreat to the isle with her 'family' who include the Pope (James Fox) his bed-mate the Queen (Anita Pallenberg) and Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant). Michael's philosophy is to slow down life so that "we can live forever". "Does anything ever really change?" asks Marilyn? Some will find Korine's film somewhat mawkish, but at its many bests it casts a strange, elegiac spell and is certainly Korine's most accessible film thus far for a general audience.
His Trash Humpers just released in UK cinemas (Cinema Village, New York in May) goes to the other extreme of cinema perversity looking like "a VHS tape found in a ditch". Many audiences will find it just plain disgusting (similarly his Gummo) as two latex-masked crazies trash the urban alleyways of Nashville singing rhymes such as "three little devils jumped over the wall, chopped off their heads, and murdered them all.". As in all Korine's work there's a laser energy here firing in all directions but seemingly aimed at the light bulbs, the moths around the flame, the neon, the glitter: stealing the fire for want of a darkness, the only way to experience any eternal light.
"If you had just one word to give away, who would you give it to?" asks Vincent Gallo's Tetro of his lover Miranda (Maribel Verdú, Pan's Labyrinth). Tetro is Francis Ford Coppola's first original screenplay since The Conversation (1974) - "nothing in it happened, but it's all true" said the director last year at the Cannes Film Festival. Shot in glorious B/W (as was his Rumble Fish in 1983); this film is lensed in HD (Hi-def) video using colour flashbacks (Mihai Malaimare Jr. cinematographer, image/sound editor maestro Walter Murch). In the UK we've had to wait a year since its US release but small independent distributor Soda Pictures had the belief - even advertising with expensive poster ads on the London underground. Like the 'operatic' films of Italian director Visconti who began his career in the theatre directing American classics of family life from Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, Coppola's film (and arguably his oeuvre) is also 'an opera': private passions played out within a courtyard of larger events. And it's the very personal nature of Tetro that makes this film both frustrating and sublimely lyrical: as if the conductor has given you something in the music that only you alone have heard but no one would believe you. Coppola's tempi are more akin to the oft eccentric (but thrilling and achingly beautiful) ones of German maestro Furtwängler rather than the rigour of Arturo Toscanini. And with more than a dash of Leonard Bernstein's passionate promulgation of music as a life enhancing art for everyone. "He's like a genius but without a lot of accomplishments," is how Miranda describes Tetro (Vincent Gallo) a writer adored by his 17-year-old younger brother Bennie who arrives off a boat and out of the blue into Buenos Aires' La bohème La Boca district. Alden Ehrenreich could so easily have been just another clean cut young actor but his Bennie is awash with subtle shades of emotion. And he is believably young enough to be malleable without ever breaking.
Their eminent New York conductor father Carlo (Klaus Maria Brandauer) is at the heart of Coppola's narrative as is the conceit of an orchestra's body controlled by a conductor and the frailty of the human corpus. In Coppola's film his protagonists' bodies are constantly battered by external 'marionette' forces. And Tetro is a fan of Powell and Pressburger's 1951 film Tales of Hoffmann with its extraordinary surrealism of a doll torn apart limb by limb. For Tetro, 'love' in his family has always been "a quick stab in the heart". In homage, Coppola creates a ballet too. The heroine of Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes has the physical strength to dance her way to the top, but her emotional dependence plummets her to death. Here is what Coppola meant when he said of his film that "nothing in it happened, but it's all true". Coppola's story is true for all of us, but it never was. Nor is forever after. Just as the cinema never lies but always does. The eagle-eared may also spot in Osvaldo Golijov's score a snippet from the finale of Rossini's William Tell and a dash of Mahler's Ninth Symphony.
French director Alain Resnais also always makes the film he wants to rather than the one an audience may wish for. Wild Grass means literally in French les herbes folles - a 'crazy' plant that grows in a place where it ought to have no hope of surviving e.g. a crack in a wall, "correspond [ing] to these characters who follow totally unreasonable impulses" according to Resnais. It's a film by ALAIN RESNAIS is really all that needs to be said. Whether one loves or loathes such an artistic enterprise will always be a matter of personal taste. The fence to sit on never existed in the first place.
For years Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow (1956) lay forgotten - chronologically between the acknowledged masterpieces All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind. There wasn't even an extant trailer but the Eureka DVD has a 'working copy' as an extra as well as great interview footage of Sirk, their usual fab booklet, plus a PDF of the continuity script. Shot with stunning subtlety in B/W by Russell Metty (Orson Welles' Touch of Evil), the story is also so stunningly simple and morally duplex that it is almost Brechtian. Happily married/family suburban man Clifford Groves (Fred MacMurray))bumps into old flame of youth Norma Miller (Barbara Stanwyck). What follows isn't 'film noir' psychological narrative manipulation, just plain happenstance of life albeit chaperoned by a Hollywood score. Some reviewers have thought that MacMurray's character is unhappy. Yet what is most fascinating is that he doesn't think that of himself for the first half of the movie. Even after spending a glorious pool-side weekend with Norma when a business meeting is cancelled, he returns to a loving wife and family. Nor is Norma in any way manipulative and has no intention of breaking up the family unit - even though she may secretly wish she had one of her own. Sirk's film reminds one of Peter Weir's (Andrew Niccol's script) The Truman Show - for the first time in his life MacMurray's character notices that he has a life. A choice. He has never realised before that happiness will only ever be relative. His young daughter is a dancer and it's her sprained ankle that cancels MacMurray's trip away with his wife and is the plot's catalyst. Should life have told Clifford Groves this secret about happiness? Will he be better able to cope when life deals him its real first blow?
Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die is also a must-see DVD from Eureka.
Villa Amelia is another frustrating film. Oh dear, we feel initially: very well done French angst. Though verily it could never be echt angst because it ain't German. Happenstance hits Ann (Isabelle Huppert) a renowned French pianist when childhood friend, Georges (Jean-Hugues Anglade) enters the fray with her lover/partner Thomas (Xavier Beauvois). Ann burns and discards her 'skin' -music, CD's, every material 'professional' possession and an infuriating naivety ensues with this film. Are we captivated because it's 'La' Huppert or the film? What intrigues, though, is Ann's longing for anonymity without anonymity. Her journey resolves upon a cliff top 'outhouse' that is exotic to an audience with its unobstructed 'fantasy' vistas of the sea, but second nature normality to its inhabitants. Without the realisation of what 'fame' really is, could Ann have ever reached that epiphany? Or is it, indeed, still somewhat of a fantasy for her? Whether such thoughts crept into the mind of director Benoît Jacquot’s champion Bertrand Tavernier we don't know. But at the end of the day, we feel the same pain with our secret wishes.
The Father of My Children (Le père de mes enfants)is out on DVD
Craneway Event (just closed at the Frith Gallery) is Tacita Dean's second film featuring the late, great choreographer Merce Cunningham. Shot in an old Ford factory in Richmond (outside San Francisco), it documents a rehearsal for John Cage's 4'33" from 2008 when Cunningham was 89. Lensed in 16mm anamorphic colour widescreen the image has a distant syrupy quality with very muffled, dampened optical sound. Yet the longer you watch, the more transcendental it all becomes. Are we interested because the quayside corner warehouse space with ship masts floating by is just such a beautiful space? Is it that we know Cunningham was one of the world's greatest choreographers so we watch in awe? Whatever the reasons, after sitting through its 108 minutes we're in a totally different zone to the one we were in at the start.
Bringing experimental film back into mainstream cinema
Some photos of London Festival of Architecture (June 19-July 4) on this site.
The Easiest Room in Hell
At the top of the stairs is a room
one may speak of only in parables
It is the childhood attic,
the place to go when love has worn away,
the origin of the smell of self.
We came here on a clandesdine visit
and in the full fire of indifference.
We sorted out books and let the children
sleep here away from creatures.
From its windows, ruled by willows,
the flatlands of childhood stretched
to the watermeadows.
It was the site of a massacre,
of the running down of the body
to less even than the soul,
the tribe's revenge on everything.
It was the heart of England
where the ballerinas were on points
and locums laughed through every evening.
Once it held all the games
Inconsequences, Misalliance, Frustration.
even Mendacity, Adultery and Manic Depression.
But that was just its alibi,
all along it was home,
a home away from home.
Having such a sanctary
we who parted here
will be reunited here.
You asked in an uncharacteristic note,
'Dwell I but in the suburbs
of your good pleasure?'
I replied, 'To us has been allowed
the easiest room in hell.'
Once it belonged to you,
now it is only mine.
...........Peter Porter (1929-2010)
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