...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))