do that voodoo that you do so well

"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer." 
Ralph Waldo Emerson

As more university students riot in London over Conservative government grant funding cuts (some linking arms in fact to protect not damage police vans against 'rogue' anarchist protestors) the Metropolitan Police warned that "the game had changed" and that Britain entered a new era of protest. Waiting for Superman - the new documentary by Davis Guggenheim (of the Al Gore doco An Inconvenient Truth) is released in the UK this week. It doesn't have the 'bluster' of a Michael Moore doco and is all the better for it as the footage speaks for itself. And what graphics there are prove both witty and downright depressing, highlighting the lack of education in American schools. Latest Washington D.C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee has one of those faces that seems to naturally consistently smile - though probably not to the extent of ameliorating the enemies she's made in shaking up the existing system and closing down ill-functioning schools. Teachers can gain tenure in two years "as long as you keep breathing" (the quote is not hers) and thereafter is impossible to fire them. There's much cause for optimism, though, in the many schemes that are now opting out of the old ways.

Without that education, the role models for most kids moving into adulthood are those of the other films released this week - all focussing on violence and endurance. Not that the latter quality is necessarily negative only that unless one has an all round education the quality that is most likely to emerge and be misconstrued is 'gung ho' not endurance.

When Denzel Washington's Frank Barnes (stalwart engineer) leaps from the roof of one railcar to the next in Unstoppable , he's not doing it for the helicopter news teams, or to prove his masculinity. It's a calculated risk in order to stop the driverless, out of control freight train (based on actual events of 2001). Which begs the question are intelligence and education necessary for bravery?

Kids nowadays are too often given the impression that 'street savvy' is more useful than education. The characters in Tony Scott's film (scripted by Mark Bomback) rather uninterestingly divide into the hard working man versus the out-of touch corporates. Thrilling and (as you'd expect) expertly crafted, everything in the film suggests depth and detail without really delivering. We know no better than to accept the freight train physics on offer (wouldn't it be great to have a DVD interview extra with technical details of the actual event and interviews with long-serving engineers?) And though in a Hollywood pic you kinda expect denouement cut-ways to crowds cheering on the heroes, it does the suspense of Scott's direction somewhat of a disservice. Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train became a metaphor for the juggernaut of human existence - its characters psychological throttling each other in the engine cabin. Tony Scott's train could have been a meditation on man and the machine in an age when the cogs have barely the finance to be oiled let alone managed. The irony of Unstoppable is that it stops while the inertia of its heroes is taken solely for granted.

Riffing on F Scott Fitzgerald's "there are no second acts in American lives", Jason Massot's doco Road to Las Vegas is immediately arresting showing an Alaskan 5-kid Afro-American family arriving in Las Vegas penniless (living out of their car) and 4 years later, after trials and tribulations, surviving with a roof over their heads thanks to "metal girl" breadwinner Vanessa on a wage of $22 per hour when the average is $5. What you don't get,though, is more of a sense of that time or a real sense of place. One longs to hear similar stories and see more moments such as when husband Maurice discovers a bird's nest in the woods - entering an existential world rather than seeming sentimental.
Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis with its newly discovered footage is a highly recommended DVD Christmas gift (if only to then borrow it from the friend you just gave it too;)

George Clooney's sniper in The American (much anticipated from director Anton Corbijn, Control) hopped off the train of life long ago. "I don't think God's very interested in me" says Clooney 'the photographer' to Abruzzo local priest (Paolo Bonacelli) (of the tiny village Castel del Monte) who's befriended him. This mountainous region east of Rome is a world away from even such a small metropolis. Respected critic Roger Ebert felt it harked back to European cinema, "Here is a gripping film with the focus of a Japanese drama, an impenetrable character to equal Alain Delon's in Le Samourai ( Jean-Pierre Melville). ["Bourne meets Antonioni!" is not a marketer's dream tagline"] quipped NYC's Village Voice.

Well, it's a film beautiful to behold - think minimalist Bond movie (Martin Ruhe's cinematography) yet akin to Unstoppable it entices the viewer with detail when the bigger picture isn't really there. Wim Wenders and Bertolucci spring to mind and one is somewhat disappointed. The psychological momentum is all thanks to Clooney's skill at brooding (plus Corbijn's in eliciting those qualities) and the gorgeous girls with guile- Italian prostitute Clara (Violante Placido) and his fellow sniper Mathilde (Thekla Reuten): a very seductive Euro-cine film without classic dialectic qualities. And though the girl you've been sleeping with cinematically wasn't quite a Clara, it won't put you off trying to find one. Whether she'll be the deadliest of the species only time will tell. Very subtle music score by German singer-songwriter Herbert Grönemeyer.

The film grossed $13.1 million opening US weekend ahead of Machete $11.4 million.
In many myths and folk tales, a hero is a man or woman (the latter often called a heroine), traditionally the protagonist of a story, legend or saga, who commonly possesses abilities or character far greater than that of a typical person, which enable him or her to perform some truly extraordinary, beneficial deed (a "heroic deed") for which he or she is famous. These powers are sometimes not only of the body but also of the mind. Heroes are typically opposed by villains. He is a man distinguished by exceptional courage and nobility and strength. I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom. - Bob Dylan

If Robert Rodriguez's Machete (Danny Trejo in the lead) crossed just one more Hollywood border trope it might even be up there in the art house league alongside video artist Tracey Moffat - so consummate is Rodriguez's film craft (director/writer/producer/editor). If you don't enjoy female bitching empowerment/male blood and guts bonding then it's probably not quite your cup of tequila tea. Those left, will grin and chortle as hypocritical Texas senator (repub/dem) McLaughlin (De Niro) hops about, thinks he's home free then gets machine gunned and electrocuted. Or Lindsay Lohan as kidnapped web nympho/daughter April of duplicitous businessman Booth (Jeff Fahey). Or Steven Seagal on webcam till he emerges in the final showdown dressed like the local bar's Chairman Mao lookalike winner. Then there's Cheech Marin as the uber broad church Padre.....what's not to lik...

Gregory Crewdson's new show at the White Cube (West End) Sanctuary shows B/W photos of the long derelict overgrown backlots of Cinecittà studios, Rome. Fascinating photos but are they 'art'?

Mayor Gallery in London has an intriguing show of Christine Keeler images, Daily Mail, The Independent

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2010 returns to its original ICA home after decades exiled elsewhere. There's much to ponder here (at least 75%) that could easily be the work of a future famous Mr/Ms X/Y. Has anyone been so humorously obvious as Greta Alfaro (In Ictu Oculi) and filmed live vultures devouring a dinner table ;)? New Contemporaries video artist Laure Prouvost shows Charlie(Nov 26) - she seems to be following in the footsteps of Godard whose latest, Film Socialisme, is as intriguing as he always was in piecing together our fragmented existence (released around May, 2011 by New Wave) .

Into Eternity (ICA until Nov 28) is an elegiac yet sobering meditation on nuclear waste disposal. Nobody really knows the future...
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's (of Uncle Boonmee) Syndromes and a Century also plays the ICA (Dec 4/8) as well as some Tarkovsky and other gems...


If George Clooney's Clara's not your type then feisty Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) will definitely give you a workout. If you weren't overwhelmingly gripped by Part II of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy The Girl Who Played With Fire, final installment The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest plays better - perhaps because it works better as a self-contained thriller. Directed by Daniel Alfredson, 'the Section' is a rogue outfit of psychiatrists, politicians, lawyers, still operating after 30 years, whose sole aim is protecting Soviet defector Zalachenko (who raped his daughter Salander hence her mental hospital incarceration to keep her mouth shut). It's great for the Swedes to have a world-wide hit on their hands - all those great unheralded actors getting showcased and the rest of the production team etc etc. And though it's all little more than a very slickly produced thriller, the fact remains that 'Sections' still probably exist in every world democracy. David Fincher is to remake Dragon Tattoo for Hollywood.

Great French theatre/opera director turned cineaste Patrice Chéreau gets a DVD release of an early film (usually only ever seen on TV at 3am) Flesh of the Orchid - (screenplay by Chéreau and another French cinema legend, Jean-Claude Carrière) based on James Hadley Chase’s 1948 psychological thriller. Is Charlotte Rampling’s Claire another victim of society's repressions or a victim of her own making?

Hanif Kureishi had his short story Intimacy adapted by Chéreau: "Patrice seemed interested in the power of impersonal sexuality, in passion without relationship, in the way people can be narcissistically fascinated by one another's bodies and their own sexual pleasure, while keeping away strong feeling and emotional complexity....Patrice and I talked about keeping the camera close to the bodies; not over-lighting them, or making them look pornographically enticing or idealized…The point is to look at how difficult sex is, how terrifying, and what a darkness and obscenity our pleasures can be." Chéreau's Persécution (from last year's London Film Festival) still has no UK release planned. Plus ca change...
Small DVD outfit Bluebell Films also release actress Jane Birkin's Boxes - that reeks of the mid-70's or 80's but is in fact 2007. An illustrious cast conjure the ghosts of Anna's (Birkin) past. Not for all tastes this film.

Peter Blake has witty current work at Waddington's that most certainly helps one see the world differently outside the gallery: Homage 10x5: Blake's Artists
Maya Hewitt's modest nocturne is at Bischoff/Weiss.

Opening today at the BFI Gallery is The Yvonne Rainer Project (VIDEO interview here) - one of America's most groundbreaking choreographers. Showing for the first time in Europe is her provocative 2002 installation After Many a Summer Dies the swan: Hybrid. Associated film programme.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.- Umberto Eco


[ADDITION to last post]

Another impressive 1st writer/director feature from Axiom is Kyle Patrick Alvarez' Easier With Practice (based on a Davy Rothbart short story) following two brothers, Davy (The Hurt Locker's Brian Geraghty) an unpublished writer who drags his sibling along (Kel O'Neill) on his 4 month gig across middle America. Easier to believe than it seems, Davy falls 'in love' for an anonymous caller with whom he regularly starts having phone sex. Alvarez won the Someone to Watch award at the 2010 Independent Spirit Awards as well as his film (one of the first shot on the digital RED camera) being nominated for Best First Feature.

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"To maintain this fabric of absolute normality requires powerful repressive forces"- JG Ballard

Talk about soul-searching! Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (the final-ever Part 2 is next Summer) is positively European in its sensibility with cinematographer Eduardo Serra extracting the essences of the wand-wielding trio of teenagers and those of the English landscape to alchemically expose mendaciousness. Early in the plot Harry must drink a potion proffering replicas of himself so as to escape possible harm. Thereon, the pace creeps ever more darkly and slowly to the cliff-hanger ending while along the way almost suspending into existential elevation in scenes such as the Forest of Dean (actually filmed in Burnham Beeches) where Hermione's (Emma Watson) parents used to take her.

It's interesting to compare the gently erotic scenes of the latest Harry Potter with those of the 2D animation Chico and Rita where the drawing of artist/designer brothers Javier Mariscal and Tono Errando enter a sensual, erotic realm far more than live action full frontal ever could (not of course that there's any of that in Harry Potter - all gently blurred). While it takes a while to gather steam, Fernando Trueba (Belle Epoque, Calle 54) directs this 40s/50s Havana/New York jazz lost/found love story so that the animated lines gently envelop you like those of a melismatic Bolero duet (soundtrack is by Cuban great Bebo Valdés). Chico (Emar Xor Ona) is a piano player and Rita (Limara Meneses) a singer.

This year's Cannes Fest Palme d'Or winner Uncle Boonmee who can recall his past lives gets quietly seductive too. But then so has most work of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Having twice viewed it I'm in a very miniscule minority that aren't raving about it. And that I stress is a very personal opinion. Only because the director's earlier work casts spells from the very, very ordinariness of everyday life whereas his latest film concerns extraordinariness and the transmigration of souls. The Uncle is suffering from kidney failure and one night at dinner the ghost of his deceased wife appears. Thereon, is a journey to the heart of the soul that many viewers will find totally transfixing.
A surprising hit of the week (nay month) is Brazilian writer/director Heitor Dhalia's Adrift, also gorgeously photographed (Ricardo Della Rosa), but always to embody the performances of father (Vincent Cassel), cheated upon wife (Deborah Bloch) and confused, frustrated teenage daughter (Laura Neiva) - a stunning acting debut as the entire film centres around her performance.

Ashley Horner's brilliant love (this year's NYC Tribeca Film Fest and Edinburgh) is quite a lot more than just sweltering summer sex in a Northern England garage with en suite fields. Noon (Nancy Trotter Landry) is a taxidermist and boyfriend Manchester (unemployed) takes sexually explicit photos of her. Accidentally leaving some on a pub table, a stranger inveigles him into showing them in a city gallery. While not a revelatory film it's an extremely assured one. Another Brit director who may well conjure something quietly amazing in the future.
Clio Barnard's award winning The Arbor about the short life of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar (using real interviews lip-synched by actors) continues screening across the country.

Mammoth, on the other hand, the first English language opus by provocative Swede Lukas Moodyson is somewhat of a disappointment relative to his usual fare. New York games guru Leo (Gael Garcia Bernal), hugs his wife (Michelle Williams) and daughter (sparky, adorable Sophie Nyweide) before hopping over to seal a deal in Thailand. His 'spiritual' journey is paralleled by Gloria (his Filipino nanny) and her own 2 sons back home. While the film is hugely 'atmospheric' and seductive (more great cinematography - Marcel Zyskind) it's never more than the sum of its well crafted parts.

Leap Year is the 1st feature of Michael Rowe (and winner of this year's Cannes Fest Camera d'Or - Juan Manuel Sepulveda) set in the shabby Mexico City apartment of Laura Lopez (Monica del Carmen). Over 29 days her many one-night stands and 'rough sex' empower her rather than the opposite. In description the film may sound like many others but it's the singularity of vision, of seeing this woman practically 'body build' her psyche in her lonely space without a directorial recourse to cinematic stunts. One for those who like Catherine Breillat's films.
[ADDITION at end of latest post]

Another impressive 1st feature is Marc Dugain's An Ordinary Execution (adapting/directing in French from his own novel) shot entirely hand-held with a great cast of André Dussolier as Stalin and Marina Hands (Lady Chatterley) as the doctor who is summoned to 'cure' him using her 'laying on of hands' energy after the dictator has purged all Jewish doctors in 1952. She's forced to abandon her husband and forbade to speak of the consultations so as not to "pander to the people's propensity for the irrational". There's not a whiff of 'period' film or star-turn bio-pic performance to be found here. And though one could never feel sympathy with Stalin, the film is a fascinating meditation on the pain of others and the self-reflecting nature of cure. "Nature is beautiful- a pity it is so contradictory," says Stalin gazing out onto the lake at his Georgian dacha - truly believing that perfect order will result in the perfect State. "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."

Re-released in cinemas for its 50th anniversary Peeping Tom and out on Blu-ray today (par excellance commentary by film historian Ian Christie from the standard DVD). We'll never know whether the film would have gained an audience at the time by promulgating the damning reviews of disgust on a poster saving director Michael Powell's career from future oblivion. But he never worked again after this masterpiece of cinematic psychological trauma- a man whose childhood torments him into filming the death of his victims. It's become somewhat of a benchmark in considering films 'of its kind' and censorship's boundaries.

Pang Ho-Cheung's Dream Home is ghastly, gruesome stuff - almost as if Ken Loach had dreamed of a social realist horror/slasher pic. Wanting to remain living with her childhood view of the water, the ever increasing Hong Kong property prices keep thwarting Cheng's (Josie Ho) ambitions even though she works two jobs. "A cut throat film about the cut-throat property market" goes the poster's tag line. What humour there is blackly assured as is the film's overall tone. (Trailer)

It makes Let Me In (the remake of last year's Swedish cult vampire hit Let the Right One In) seem like Sunday brunch with the Addams Family. If you're a fan of the original (and I only recently saw it again in the big screen) it's hard to suspend the Swedish version whilst watching this, so closely does the American version follow the original's narrative. It's a bit like the book of the movie syndrome - the two could never be the same but if seeing the movie makes someone curious enough to seek out the original then all the better for the world.

We Are What We Are (Somos Lo Que Hay) (Mexican writer/director Jorge Michael Grau 1st feature) is an impressive debut (chosen for this year's New York Film Fest) without really being sure exactly where to go with its 'social realist' vampiric material.

Not something that could ever be said of Mike Leigh and his latest Another Year. And though it may all be a touch predictable for Leigh devotees, there are very few directors in the world (let alone Britain) who can generate performances that amount to psychological fragments so powerful that while they are geographically specific also symbolise a broader human sociology. Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) are nice, intelligent, hard-working middle-class folk as is their son Joe. When Leigh was trying to work out a 'look' for the film his regular cameraman Dick Pope presented him with four options - hence the story's four seasons was born (great tree poster). Into their lives keeps popping Gerri's work friend Mary (Lesley Manville) who's treated like her 'sister' and sadly for her almost behaves as if she is. This film will linger in the minds of many viewers. The contradictory beauty of the world.

Patrick Keiller's Robinson in Ruins is his character's (from previous films) fictional journey around Oxfordshire - documentary footage narrated by Vanessa Redgrave's very apt gentle manly timbre. Robinson's quest to preserve the earth by communicating the world's blunders to higher non-human intelligences. It's as if Monty Pythonite turned TV doco world traveller Michael Palin was on quinine musing of man's misadventures.
And some fascinating rarely seen short public service films by director John Krish in A Day in the Life: Four Portraits of Post-War Britain - a book and DVD also available. Do foreigners know that London once had trams -The Elephant Will Never Forget (1953). Kids and teenagers even these days would find Our School(1962) both funny and educational - one of the kids is so charismatically 'mouthy' that you'd have expected him to become an actor. While I Think They Call Him John (1964) is a moving portrait of a man coping on his own after his wife's deceased. It could have been made yesterday.
Aristotle's Lagoon (a repeat on BBC4) tells the little known story of the philosopher's biological investigations on the island of Lesvos. Many of them proved absolutely spot on.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.” William Blake, 1790

...to airy nothing....

You'd think one would end up being jaded and disillusioned about film's future after watching 75 pics of the 54th BFI London Film Festival (LFF for short) in just one month. Surprisingly and hearteningly, though, such a mad endeavour only increases curiosity about the world and the power of film to structure our ever more increasing fragmented existence. Some of these films will be mentioned in more depth in this post, while others may take a while longer. But the oft asked cliche question of 'did you see anything outstanding' can only fairly be answered by noting that each in the following list had at least a special something if not considerably more 'somewheres', while one inevitably missed seeing some other notables:


A Screaming Man (Un Homme qui crie)
A Brighter Summer Day
Amigo
Another Year (just UK released)
The Arbor (just UK released)
Archipelago
At Ellen's Age
Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu, The
Autumn
Carancho
Cold Weather
Dear Doctor
Double Tide
Father
Film Socialisme
Fire in Babylon
Guilty Pleasures
Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires)
Howl (UK release-Feb 25)
It’s Kind of a Funny Story (UK release-Mrch 11)
King's Speech, The (UK release- Jan 7)
Le Quattro Volte
Leap Year (UK release-Nov 26)

Loose Cannons (UK release- Dec 10)
Mammuth
Mars
Meek's Cutoff
Microphone
Miral
Mysteries of Lisbon

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (UK release-Dec 3)
Robinson in Ruins (just UK released)
The Sleeping Beauty
Somewhere (UK release-Dec 10)
Special Treatment
Spork
Super Brother
(Svankmajer's) Surviving Life

The Taqwacores
Treacle Jr
Two Gates of Sleep

Uncle Boonmee who can recall his past lives (just UK released)
Vapor Trail (Clark)
Waste Land
What I Love the Most (Lo que mas Quiero)
Willam S. Burroughs: A Man Within
Winter Vacation

My month's viewing began with the film that opened this year's New York Film Festival, The Social Network - and there wasn't much in NYFF that wasn't in the LFF with the notable exceptions of:

Post Mortem (Pablo Larraín -Tony Manero)
Old Cats
Tuesday, After Christmas
Black Venus (Abdellatif Kechiche -The Secret of the Grain)
and an Oliveira re-issue The Strange Case of Angelica but the LFF had Rite of Spring from 1963.

Like it or not, social networking site Facebook has defined a human generation and perhaps even one to follow. So can director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's film even attempt to excavate such a contemporary site? It doesn't seem that they even intended it do so (though many hoped it might attempt this feat). There are not psychological artifacts here
to be unearthed. What it does try to do (succesfully or not) is to argue that there is always an archeological fragment in our past (youthful or otherwise) that defines us forever and a day. In Mark Zuckerberg's (Jesse Eisenberg) life case it was a girl. There's even a quote from English writer John Milton, “creation myths need a devil”.
One is equally mindful of the quote (not in the film) from LP Hartley's The Go-Between, "the past is another country: they do things differently there". And the film asks not so much do we all inevitably sell our soul to our own devil. Rather, as if being a museum curator do we at one and the same time relish the thought of finding new fragments with which to piece together an antiquity while simultaneously dread the thought that our assumptions about those initial shards of light may prove totally wrong.

The pych-cinematic musing is mine but the original argument belongs to Dr Peter Stewart (Reader in Classical Art and its Heritage, and Acting Dean of The Courtauld Institute of Art) who lectured on this the other evening (at some time in the future the audio will be available on their website). It's probably easier simply to quote from the Courtauld's precis:
"All art history involves inherent tensions between the materiality of the works of art – their rootedness in time and space – and the mobility of the ideas and imagery that they embody. The tension is all the more striking in the study of ancient art. On the one hand, classical art history, with its traditional dependence on archaeology, deals with perishable, intractable objects dug up in particular places. On the other hand, it has always been concerned with the intangible spread of Graeco-Roman styles and iconography, with abstract typologies, material and visual cultures and how they transcend material constraints. This lecture explores some of the forms of material resistance which have filtered our experience of ancient art, including the accidents of archaeological survival. But such limitations affect not only the objects that we study, but also the processes of studying them. Our construction of the past, the books and articles we read and write, the photographs we reproduce or view, the dissemination of ideas on paper or on the web... These too have their hidden material constraints."

The British Museum's Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead has just opened (photos HERE) as has the Wellcome Institute's High Society
(Video interviews and photos HERE)

Dr Stewart spoke of ideas facing resistance "moving nimbly in mysterious ways" and quoted Steve Jones who when writing about Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species cited a peer reviewer at the time who, going to great lengths to find something constructive to say, concluded that the book would make a very good "manual for pigeon breeders".

Jean Becker’s previous film Conversations With My Gardener was delightful, soulful and unassuming. So too is his latest My Afternoons with Marguerite (La Tête en Friche) in which Gérard Depardieu's beafy Germain dons the cloak of gregariousness at the local bar but rather more enjoys hanging out with pigeons by the park bench each of which he's named. Nonagenarian Margueritte (Gisèle Casadesus) arrives one day and over the course of many visits reads him Albert Camus' novel of existential absurdity La Peste (The Plague). "Life makes promises it can't keep," she says but her offering of 'reality' is the gift to Germain of a dictionary "on this earth we are all couriers...with a dictionary you travel from word to word". As in The Singer, Depardieu's almost illiterate 50 going on 60 Germain is 'paired' with a lovely young lass. But it's never mawkish: simply somewhat sad, rather gentle and ultimately life enhancing for all of us and the three characters.

Fezeka’s Voice is uplifting too. For 12-years choirmaster Phumi Tsewu has been teaching the children at Fezeka High School in Gugulethu, Capetown, South Africa both traditional and Western classical music. Several even dream of becoming opera stars. Director Holly Lubbock documents their preparations and journey to last year's Salisbury International Arts Festival. There's perhaps a little too much background 'doco' music and maybe a touch too much sentiment. But the strength of the story and its individuals is overwhelmingly powerful and full of life's details - how two of the teenagers suddenly find themselves with 'surrogate' mums. How one boy is amazed that older people in this part of England mow their own lawns and do their own chores- unthinkable for him in South Africa where you'd pay someone and he's shown how to eat rhubarb straight from the garden. Produced by Ciel Productions and All Living Things, one can't help but believe that in this doco, however shattered and scattered the lives have been for some of these teenagers, there is hope in uniting at least some of the pieces to form new lives. Or as Phumi Tsewu says close to tears, the achievement of lifting these kids out of the impossible "mire" that they found themselves in.

Photos HERE from the LFF press conference for Africa United.

In the Courtauld's public temporary space, are Cézanne's Card Players of the 1890's, two from the permanent collection alongside those purloined from around the world's galleries. Of course, the 'fragments' of sketches and unfinished oils aren't really what the Courtauld's director Dr. Peter was lecturing about. However, so often a famous painting is only ever seen in its 'iconic' status never in context with those similar in earlier periods or from the same time. Moreover, none of the paintings on show here have an exact year of execution only circa (c.) and even then often c. within a period of 2-4 years. A long time in an artist's life and development. Interesting too is the fact that the artist didn't just rely on pencil strokes to outline the figures often using a brush to paint lines. And then reinforcing them to create a contour - very untypical of C19 practice when most artists disguised all traces of lines. Much like the tiny specks that Canaletto used to conjure the light of dawn, the small striking thick patches of Cézanne colour up close magically merge as one moves away from the painting. Talks and events throughout the run of this show before traveling to the Metropolitan Museum in New York (Feb 7-May 8, 2011)
Don't miss the extraordinary visceral, whirling, whaling Untitled (Crouching Figures) c.1952 of Francis Bacon (temporarily on loan from his Estate) in the next room alongside Daumier's Don Quixote and Sancho Panza that Bacon "thought to be amongst the greatest paintings in the world..."

Hollywood is perhaps no where near equivalent to a blockbuster museum show where most if not all the objects on display have the same marketing push as a suchlike studio movie but as we painfully know oftentimes far surpass in artistic merit. Aftershock(China's 2011 Academy Awards entry) directed by Feng Xiaogang (based on a novel by Zhang Ling) uses Hollywood cliches rather than tropes as an act of remembrance for the victims of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake that killed almost a quarter of the city's population. "It's not that I don't remember, it's that I can never forget," says the daughter Fang Deeng (Zhang Jingchu) who's adopted by a couple of Red Army soldiers but who her parents believe is dead (they had a moral choose whether to save her or her brother). It's powerful (thanks to the acting), affecting but melodramatic storytelling. And one wishes for more of the bleak and oblique new Chinese cinema of Winter Vacation (LFF) or dramatised arguments akin to those posed in Draquila-Italy Trembles(LFF): Sabina Guzzanti's doco on the wake of corruption in the aftermath of Italy's 2009 L'Aquila earthquake. Corruption is rife everywhere in the world, and of course, particularly Italy. But would new housing projects have had even a chance if it weren't for political clout? There's the rub. There's captivating footage also from the seismologists. Could there be any city in the world that would evacuate their citizens on even the firm likelihood of an earthquake, circa??? No economy would justify that economically even 10 years ago let alone now. There's the mortal coil.

Closing tomorrow (Saturday Nov 13), artist Christian Marclay at White Cube (West End) has created one of the most extraordinarily simple, immediate and resonant video installations one's likely to see, The Clock. Every minute of the 24-hour clock has a synchronous segment of movie footage delineating that particular minute i.e. a watch reads 2.43, a character says 9.54 etc. Not every single frame tells the time, but you can set your watch by the sequences. It's the work's universal simplicity that allows it to resonate with dialectics of editing, traditional narrative character development, montage etc. For example, would simply looping the final scene in Aftershock - a lone man cycling past the walls of names erected in memory of the earthquake victims - have deeper emotional resonance than its traditional narrative film of 135 minutes? Moreover, does the 'excess' (24 hours of it) of Marclay's work have more or less the same impact as sitting only through a few hours of it?

Just closed but running concurrent with the London Film Festival (how many of those in the 'traditional' cinemas ventured in?) was Julian Rosefeldt's American Night (2009). A slick, funny, five-screen projection (anamorphic 16mm transferred to HD) that used the Western genre and its iconography (directed actors not existing footage) to deconstruct the myth of America's founding.

American Lewis Klahr's shoestring montage animations using old comic books Prolix Satori (and a workshop run on Oct 21) were a quiet hit of the London Film Festival. (AUDIO of the Q&A HERE soon...)

Veteran Czech animator Jan Svankmaeyer appears on screen in the opening of his Surviving Life explaining that due to economic restraints he's used mostly animated cut-out photographs to tell his funny psychoanalytic story.
Sharon Lockhart's Double Tide is composed of segments though the film seems utterly seamless in time and space. We watch a Maine clamdigger at work during the low tides of dawn and dusk.

more tomorrow including.........

Patrick Keiller's Robinson in Ruins

A Day in the Life: Four Portraits of Post-War Britain by director John Krish

Film Ist from last year's LFF screens at the ICA with a Q&A (Nov 19) with the director (Nov 17 (part1) and Nov 19 (part2))