a great synthesis of the great body of small partial truths

world enough and time
Copyright 2009 Andrew Lucre (with obvious free sources)

Do we really? Ever. Want to be where we are? Always hankering for somewhere/something at least once removed? Isn't the Christmas/New Year season a time where we inhabit that limbo or libidiness of just once in a lifetime? Do we take what seems such an innocent step into the shallow tide only to fall flat on our face in the countenance of a higher something. Curtis in Take Shelter (UK distributed by The Works) is perhaps the Everyman of our civilisation. He doesn't want to say 'I told you so' in post-self congratulation, rather, 'I think it is so' in celebration of what it is to behold our planet. Such is the magnetic truth of Jeff Nichols' film (also a Sundance 2011 hit) that any cavils are out-anchored by such a dictum. Particularly in America where normality is projected as so much of a given. After Lars von Trier's typical laser dissection of family-hiss in the face of Melancholia and Earth's extinction in all its Medusa beautification, Another Earth (opener for this year's Raindance Film Fest and this year's Sundance Fest hit and on general release by Fox Searchlight, Dec 9) proved an elegaic tale of how otherness ain't necessarily so. While there are many similarities to the 1969 Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (where everything is an earth but in reverse) Another Earth is more akin to the Philip K. Dick world of how everyday mundanity strangely proves the thing itself.

Fox Searchlight are proving to be a frontrunner for studio indie product: who'd have thought they'd ever take on a film for US distribution such as Shame (the latest from artist Steve McQueen)- Momentum releases in the UK. Like all McQueen's work to say it is 'about' something reduces the work to that only. Shame isn't just about sex addiction. It reeks of people trapped and embrassing architecture both of high-rise and its low-rise people. Of predicaments that are as unruly as the elements. And you'd have thought that the story of We Were Here had been recounted before but no. Sentiment that far outways sentimentality.

Terence Davies' adaption of Rattigan's play The Deep Blue Sea is another case in point. Anyone who knows their Rattigan knows that he was truly a dramatist precursor of John Osbourne's 'kitchen-sink' drama (reference the recent Royal National Theatre revivals) and not merely a slate to be wiped clean. Davies' film is a ballet of looks, desires, felled emotions in silent corridors that outweigh any historical context. Davies pushes the use of extant music to its exteme cinematic ends in his films - no less here than with Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto. Any film director who can match that lithe intensity let alone dance with its music of time should surely be allowed carte blanche to create whatever they wish in the future.

It's an interesting double-bill with Anthony Kimmins' My Own Executioner (B/W,1947) that had a rare showing (all that's available is a scratchy VHS copy) at Andrea Sabbadini's bi-ennial 6th European Psychoanalytic Film Festival this November. Conference delegate opinions were divided about the effectiveness of Kimmins Hollywood tropes e.g music, the trad romantic storyline but few were left unfascinated by the film's rare exploration of the analyst's daily practice and sometime dilemma in treating patients. Migration, the theme of this year's conference, also divided delegates. Some thought that the festival should have focusssed more on literal pycho-geographical films rather than those more to do with border crossings within the mind such as My Own Executioner, Hotel Sahara (Bettina Haasen, Germany, 2009) or the stories of steam room men in Steam of Life (Joonas Berghall and Mika Hotakainen, Finland, 2010).

Yet Sabbadini's choices made for lively discussion and dissent foregrounding the important issue that the pain and trauma of displacement is relative only to the patient's own boundaries that may be even more destructive than anything literally geographic. How a film such as The Reverse (Borys Lankosz, Poland, 2009) couldn't obtain a wider release outside its native audience is tantamount to the fickle politics of world film distribution. It's use of poignancy and wit alleviating the burden of historical guilt crosses the divide of art-house and mainstream so very easily. And the denouement of mother/son reunification is a fascinating masochistic/sado-masochism. Should she have told her son who his father was really? Did she survive through denying her son knowledge? Is delaying the inevitable unearthing of history's walls preferable to its more immediate traumatic opposite? (One is reminded of one of this year's most provocative films Jim Loach's Oranges and Sunshine.) The festival opened with Charlie Chaplin's classic 1917 short The Immigrant and closed with Stefan Le Lay's 2009 short The Postcard about a seaside postcard come to life - its male figure falling (literally) for a girl on the opposite kiosk rack. Even with the transgression of boundaries a happy life is possible - and with the help of analysis it need not be just a sugar pill/rush alternative. A totally apposite way of ending the festival.

And if you fancied that paragraph:
Surviving Life -Jan Svankmajer
Ashes and Diamonds
Zelig
Hannah and Her Sisters
Midnight in Paris (out soon on DVD and Blu-ray)
and The Artist

Film and art aren't an escape from reality - in so many ways they ARE the reality. As actor Morgan Freeman said in a recent CNN interview, god resides in ourselves. In our actions. And it's sad that films are seen less and less in communal picture palace gatherings and so more often on a computer screen. The birth of cinema was a monadic epiphany - the one in many and the many in one as humans gathered to be personally awed and collectively challenged. Martin Scorsese's Hugo 3D (and the 3D is pin-point stunning) bear-hugs the beauty of cinema experience urging us to move on in our lives but not at the expense of forgetting and erasing the past. Adapted by John Logan from Brian Selznick’s 2007 illustrated childrens' book The Invention of Hugo Cabret it's about lost hearts and newfound happiness. And in that regard some may find it all just a wee unchallenging. Yet the film's innocence, grace and minutai of detail trick one into thinking you've seen more than you have. It isn't clever like Christopher Nolan or with the Jean-Pierre Jeunet's (Delicatessen) belligerent, bizarre joy. It is quite simply holding out a hand to feel the wind. Of dipping toes gingerly into the sea even though one senses there is no immediate danger. The film's biographical truth is Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) an extraordinary chap who, inspired by the Lumière Brothers, unsuccessfully tried to buy a camera from them and instead made his own, made his own films, directing, acting, supervising the sets, hand colouring the negatives - 531 films between 1896 and 1914 . Only to see WWI and most of the celluloid melted down into heels for ladies' shoes (200 films survived). A more depressing tale just could not be told.
A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la Lune) made in 1902 was restored in colour for the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and the London Film Festival of this year screened before Roberto Rossellini's restored rarely seen 1952 comedy about morals, corruption and a magical camera that kills The Machine That Kills People.

And there's more than a sense at the end of the movie that the kids have have had a jolly good nourishing time but that the adults must close the book and get on with grown-up chores. It doesn't feel that this is inadvertent on Scorsese's part. One couldn't have hoped for better casting in Sacha Baron Cohen's dour railway station cop who relentlessly tries ridding the station of the pesky orphan kids. And one wonders whether his bitterness of life has only temporarily disappeared so scared both physically and mentally was he by a war. Kids will leave this film feeling rather smarter than their adults. Yet in that truth lies responsible on their part not to squander that youthful intelligence on manipulative techno frippery. Rather, to harness that observation for detail, their agility of thought, and not so much to create a better world but be cognoscent that they have that power first and foremost within themselves.
Pipilotti Rist's Eyeball Massage and George Condo at the Hayward Gallery (look out for the tiny surreal 'dolls house' twinkling the Internationale
and Gerhard Richter at the Tate Modern

With much the same message, Aardman, the wacky Wallace & Gromit animation Brit company, have teamed up with Sony for Arthur Christmas. It's a tour de force of technical wizardry and character detail that's unlikely to leave anyone disgruntled (except maybe an old fogey of a reindeer).

Make Someone Happy (Performed by Bill Nighy)
Arthur Christmas (Suite) - Harry Gregson Williams
Tony Bennett/Bill Evans - Make Someone Happy
vintage (that only youth will provide) 1963 Stevie Wonder:

Doris Day
Judy Garland performed live at the Russel Hotel in London, 29 November, 1964. Judy was appearing for her fan-club, and was accompanied by future husband Mark Herron at the event.
Barbra Streisand (2009).
and the version that inspired them:
And just because they were such an adorable pair of songwriters some Comden and Green: Comes once in a Lifetime from their musical Subways are for Sleeping- Judy Garland's version
Doris Day: Who Knows What Might Have Been recorded on Nov. 21, 1961
Mary Martin - Never Never Land fromPeter Pan)

it never is like a story

Perhaps a clarification is needed. Far from criticising the annual BFI London Film Festival this blog has nothing but applause for its ability to muster 150 odd films into a coherent force of cinema appreciation. Having managed to see about 75% of those this year I can speak from experience. Yet like any large organisation factions will always form fostering single agendas. One I've heard verbalised over the years is "we're not interested in entertainment". All that can be voiced in response to that is, one man's poison is another man's socialism. To even think that the woes of a nation's people are galvanised around an 'art house' film is of course ridiculous. On a weekend they are off watching a Hollywood movie rather than seeing themselves cavort on screen and would be doing so even without the marketing strategies of a major studio. There are of course exceptions like Brazil's police corruption Elite Squad now in its sequel release.

That's not to say that the likes of Ken Loach exposing moral and political hypocrisy have had their day. By no means true. But I felt this year at the London Film Festival, and have always felt, that the Festival continues to survive and succeed not through offering an alternative cinematic politics, rather, by celebrating the diversity of cinema's possibilities: one man's 'entertainment' is another man's 'watching paint dry'.

Such musing congealed this week through watching 4 DVD re-issues of Francis Ford Coppola's work: The Outsiders (1983), The Conversation (1974), One from the Heart (1982) and Hammett (1982, directed by Wim Wenders at Coppola's Zoetrope Studios in California). And the irony of much good work born out of Hollywood is that it would only have had a life in the first place thanks to the independents in film production. A point often missed by Tinseltown's critics. Paramount, for example, only agreed to make The Conversation because of Coppola's The Godfather success - keeping him happy until he made Part 2. Warner Brothers turned down most of Coppola's early scripts such as American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) and cut roughly 22 minutes from The Outsiders in order to liven the pace and focus on one character - all restored in this DVD version from 2003. Yet it's those very two qualities that make The Outsiders what it is: a sweeping 'Gone With the Wind' story of three brothers. Not the childhood survival story of just one kid.

Opinions have always been divided about Coppola's work but undeniable is his love of cinema - paraded upon the big screen. I confess to have always been smitten with that parade. The Outsiders romantic theme (composed by Coppola's father Carmine and sung by Stevie Wonder) oughta seem smaltzy. But it fits the cinemascope camera work like a glove (Coppola, as always, trying new techniques in this movie such as split diopters). This isn't and was never meant to be like a Dardennes brothers movie of human 'reality' (for want of a better word). Coppola was begged to make a film of S.E. Hinton's 1967 novel by a school class in his local town of Fresno who even signed a petition. This was post Apocalypse Now and Coppola was working on a relatively low budget. And from an audition of around 1,000 unknowns, he and his casting director/producer Fred Roos launched the careers of Tom Cruise (pre Risky Business), Matt Dillon, Partick Swayze, Diane Lane, Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe. The 2-disc DVD is loaded with extras including a commentary from Coppola and one from the 2003 cast reunion for the new cut. "After you everyone in my life was a bozo," laments Patrick Swayze of Coppola.

Listening to Coppola's commentary on The Conversation you see why such an accolade is heartfelt and not just shootin' some breeze. The DVD extras of Coppola's original script dictation tapes (to be typed up by his assistant) at a local cafe are just fascinating. This is all further enhanced by Walter Murch's separate commentary - being his first editing job and non-union he was credited with sound montage. For a general audience both commentaries will be intriguing. For the die hard cineastes Murch has some great editing and art direction tips, we learn that the first cut was 5 hours, that Haskell Wexler was originally DP but there was a falling out, and that Harry's dream sequence was supposed to end the film (Coppola's dictated ending was different again). Composer David Shire had hoped for a big orchestral score but it was Coppola who persuaded him to write the solo piano score (Shire reveals in his interview extra that it was this score that generated most of his work ever since): a score cleverly sound mixed by Murch as the film progresses.

No extras (alas) on One from the Heart and Hammett but what CINEMA. At one point you wish Coppola had just gone the whole hog and made the former a musical. But then you realise that's precisely the point: that it isn't. It is all real or rather sur-real. And wow, remember the great Raul Julia, looks to kill and a dancer/singer. And oh, Nastassja Kinsky as a lonely, errant circus performer. This IS about the ordinary lives of people struggling to be someplace else in their head. And who better to bring the tattered glitter of our imaginations to town than Tom Waits. "The most highly implausible thing I've ever seen in my life."

Pierre Thoretton's documentary on fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent L'Amour Fou may seem a strange segue. But what is different here is that Pierre Bergé's (his partner in business and love) reflections aren't simply a bio-pic of the man. The details of his art and antique collecting, his houses - the Normandy 'Proustian' dacha, the grand auction after his death, aren't just celebrations of dead objects. As Bergé put it they are like birds flying away to a new life rather than a coffin. And he creates an image of Yves Saint Laurent as a man in constant search of escape. His couture would take flight giving women "confidence and allowing them to assert themselves". He was 2 years ahead of the student occupation of the Odeon theater by creating ready to wear (prêt-à-porter) clothes reflecting the needs of the street. "He was never fooled by haute couture," notes Bergé. Like most artists, perhaps, he achieved in his art what he couldn't in life "an absolute purity...a kind of [musical] harmony...the more you simplify, the more you risk boring people". Screening at the ICA Nov 7 (DVD Nov 21).

So much of this year's BFI London Film Festival had films of escape, the road, of a past that would never be hence - the staples of cinema. What price fame in Miss Bala (general release, Oct 28) where a young Mexican girl, by accident, is caught up in a drug cartel war. She has no choice but to win the beauty pageant (rigged in her favour) and co-operate with the government coup. Perhaps a scenario not as far away from one's doorstep as we'd like to believe.

The protagonist in Americano (debut directed by Mathieu son of Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy) travels to Mexico in a strange search for his dead mother's friend. The strands wrap together maybe a little too neatly in pursuing Lola (some of life does!) but it's an inventive, stylised journey recommended worth the taking if or when it's ever released. Las Acacias (released by Verve, Dec 2) won director Pablo Giorgelli this year's prestigious Sutherland Award. Nothing happens on this lumber truck trek from Paraguay to Buenos Aires but of course we watch the man and his 'hitchhiker' with baby in lap. And by simply watching maybe we remember more about the world around us. Raindance offered attention holding parallel road trips either side of the Pacific in All That Remains while Spanish director Alberto Morais's 80 year old widower begins inhabiting his Spanish Civil war past on his road trip, The Waves (Las Olas) (LFF).

Still yet to be UK released is Julia Loktev's Day Night Day Night (2006) from last year's LFF. She obviously has a fan base here 'cause the Saturday matinee of her latest The Loneliest Planet (in one of the larger Vue cinemas) was 'technically' sold out and in reality certainly near that. If you hadn't read Loktev's festival catalogue entry, "how do you forgive someone that does not want to be forgiven?" you'd be asking similar questions anyway after seeing this film. It mirrors the intensity of Day Night Day Night but revolves around two hikers, their guide and a wilderness. Is HERE from American music video director Branden King any less focussed than Loktev as he follows two trekkers - a satellite mapper and a photographer to Armenia? An unfair comparison perhaps but an interesting one in discussing the power of cinema.

Brit debut Junkhearts falls far short of most of the aforementioned films -it did, however, earn Candese Reid Best Actress at this year's Fest Awards. Actor Dexter Fletcher's Wild Bill (LFF) was an extremely accurate depiction of a London ex-crim trying to go straight and be an initially reluctant single dad. It ain't a happy nor contrived ending. Sparks fly from the dialogue of gay themed Weekend (opening this week), and though it's well worn territory there's much that's sizzlingly fresh from the cast and director in early 'Godard-ian' mode Andrew Haigh. Or was it Rohmer? I'm not sure he was thinking of either;) Another Brit debut Broken Lines (from last year's LFF) has been out a month plus, so catch the DVD. Strong performances (including Paul Bettany against type as a beleaguered boxer) and a keen sense of screen sculpting from director Sallie Aprahamian.

Award for Best Brit feature at Raindance this year went to Ron Eyal and Eleanor Burke's Stranger Things. A grieving young Oona returns to her deceased mother's house striking up a rapport with the resident tramp. Many will find it more engaging than Junkhearts and Eyal and Burke are well on top of their actors and concept. Whether Johnny Daukes' Acts of Godfrey will ever get a release is anyone's guess! But it's one of the funniest, most original things to emerge in ages out of Brit cinema. Anyone remember Richard Jones' production of La Bête that played Broadway and the West End? Well Godfrey is all in rhyming verse as well - Simon Callow (narrator) must have fallen off his chair in amazement when this script hit his palate. Divine intervention, sales motivation, love and revenge meet Pam Ayres is the pitch. Believe it or not it works! American writer/director Andy Viner's sitcom/vampire/horror Dick Night was also clever fun and deserving of being seen more widely. Norwegians in Los Angeles Marie Kristiansen/Patrik Syversen have a great future given their DSLR feature Exteriors. Two struggling young actresses, two 'a-hole' boyfriends but the result is reminiscent of John Cassevetes.
At The Zabludowicz Collection is the first UK solo exhibition of US photographer/video artist Laurel Nakadate, and the way her photos soak in 'light' are quite compelling.

Across the pond in New York Jack Goes Boating (out this week in London) is Philip Seymour Hoffman's directing debut (also acting in most scenes) that will surely warm your heart. More than that? Well, does it need more than that is really the question? Based on Bob Glaudini's play (originally performed by Hoffman, John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega) the film easily out-runs most actor/director debuts. Or indeed directing debuts full stop. If we crave 'more than that' it boils down to the script that we've sorta heard before: ordinary people trying to make do with being ordinary. Is Jack not being able to cook or swim a-typical ordinary? In learning to do these things to get the attention of the girl stuck selling funerals Connie (Amy Ryan) extraordinary? Glaudini's play, for many tastes, may just get too stuck on being normal. Hoffman elevates these characters (including his own) to stalwarts in Manhattan's shifting neuroses. But there's an even stranger heart yearning to break loose in Hoffman's performance and we long to be pumped through those extra-ordinary arteries. We don't necessarily want to go Terry Gilliam waltzing in Grand Central (Fisher King) but we sure don't want to go back to driving the limo ourselves. It's not wrong to dream; only errant to delude ourselves that we are the king.
Charms and Miracles continues at the Wellcome Institute (Video interviews HERE). And I'm too late in mentioning Bill Fontana's sound sculpture for the Institute's front entrance. Sorry...but get a taste of it HERE. And you missed Audio Obscura - a new sound work by poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw conceived for the public spaces of St Pancras International. Wandering around with her stories in my ears was a great way of retreating from the nerves of heaving travelers. The result was creating a third narrative all of one's own.

And a new Picturehouse cinema has just opened in Hackney. Distributed by the same company, artist Miranda July's second feature The Future opens this week. Too whimsical? Insubstantial? It's Miranda July, she's predictably unpredictable. And quite possibly extraordinary? Jacques Deray's little seen La Piscine (The Swimming Pool) (1969) has received a very nice clean up (out on Blu-ray): Alain Delon and a tres jejeune Jane Birkin wandering around a Côte d'Azur pool scantily clad. But the co-script with Jean-Claude Carrière is quite a subtle satire on aspiration and the idle rich and becomes almost Brechtian when Michel Legrand's song Ask yourself why? chimes in over the soirée.

Last night of After Dark Extreme Scare – The Human Centipede - a Halloween tie in for the sequel to The Human Centipede2 (Full Sequence) film (7pm to late from October 31st). Featured sets recreating the horror of the film, including the evil Dr Heiter’s laboratory, clips from the film and audio as well as the main attraction - a live human centipede. Sure beats pumpkins;)

I am not offended that these creatures (that's the word)
Of my imagination seem to hold me in such light esteem,
Pay so little heed to me. It's part of a complicated
Flirtation routine...John Ashbery

It's a shame the general release of Ralph Fiennes' film of Shakespeare's Coriolanus (London Film Festival, LFF) doesn't co-incide with the opening this week of Anonymous for it would serve only the greater purpose of promulgating these Elizabethan plays rather than detracting from either film. Anonymous posits that Shakespeare the man didn't exist at all and was actually a pseudonym for the politically powerful Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans) - plays were deemed "the work of the devil" so he couldn't possibly use his own name. Director Roland Emmerich turned many a brow when this action/disaster movie director came on board to direct John Orloff's script. Turns out he does a damn fine job much to the chagrin of his detractors.

Does the film convince you of the case for 'anon'? Well, yes in so much as throughout history anyone seen to rock the establishment will be under scrutiny. And it takes not only a brave human writer but one that can withstand "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" to survive 'the powers that be'. Rare that an artist can cope with that and politics was no more rife than in the Elizabethan court. I digress for a minute to note that I have my own London Film Festival cross to bear, for politics is rife there as well. Festival PRs decreed that I couldn't film any of the Anonymous press conference with my little DSLR (the big boy dinosaur cameras were stabled at the back;). They also denied struggling filmmakers this privilege of independent publicity too: the ones who really needed it. At the George Clooney press conferences you couldn't move for a sea of iPhones, iPads and other filming devices. Hypocrisy can be the only word for PR censure of hand-held devices. In fairness, I am yet to receive comment in this regard from Anonymous's distributor Sony - one company that has always appeared more open than other studios to widening its appeal to independent debate.

You have what are essentially 3 (or arguably 4 festivals going on at the BFI London Film Festival)
1. the more 'socialist' orientated films that will always have minority audiences though through no fault of their quality;
2. This aesthetic in tandem with the BFI's (British Film Institute) remit to preserve and promulgate the history of cinema both new and archival;
3. The more mainstream films e.g. Anonymous and Coriolanus whose studio or mini-major distributors use the LFF to create a PR platform for their imminent release;
and 4. films both experimental and otherwise that defy these former categories and while probably in tune with the BFI aesthetic would rather exist outside that rubric e.g. Phil Solomon's American Falls (earlier work of his screened at the Tate Modern Thurs Oct 27 and a video interview with me to come) or Joseph Cedar's Cannes Fest award winning Footnote - the director quipped at the Q&A last night that even though he arrived for his screening in a marked Festival car, the red carpet was clearly not for him and he had to convince 6 people on the way that he was indeed a festival filmmaker! Out of the 80 odd films I've seen at the Fest Footnote would have to be at least in the top 5.

What all this has to do with the film Anonymous is fairly clear I think. Joseph Cedar is from Tel Aviv, not from the occupied territories or their allies. Friends in some cities can be thin on the ground. And his film is all to do with belonging, of not so much finding the truth insomuch as finding if not happiness then contentment between a father and son. That's where the war should begin, resolve and end - not in the wider realms Cedar seems to say. De Vere in Anonymous has everything he could desire and so too his sons. Yet he is allowed power without a voice. "You have no voice that's why I chose you," he barks to his surrogate purporting to be Shakespeare. De Vere's fatal flaw is not his vanity but his love of art and poetry and his belief that the world could be a different place. He pens Richard III to inspire a political revolt. Footnote questions not so much the notion of authenticity but how we as humans inevitably bend our ego towards an acknowledgement of our talents in the form of medals, prizes, disputed lands and ideals. Or in John Ford's world: if the legend becomes truth, print the legend. That's until a real historian like Simon Schama comes a-digging up the daffodils.
Grigori Kozintsev's often gutting and spellbinding Russian versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1971) are B/W classics just out on DVD (wish Mr Bongo would hurry up with their new website -it's been months!). Kozintsev really does make the world a stage to behold our swelling scene.

More family strife in Lynne Ramsay's much anticipated adaptation of Lionel Shriver's book We Need To Talk About Kevin (LFF and now on general release). Easy viewing this ain't but Ramsay and her production team create a world in every frame - the angle of light, the design on a costume, the textures of our lives. Is it all too much? Perhaps, but this is cinema aiming to really get under your skin so that you leave the cinema seeing the world a little or even a whole lot more. The 'social realist' Dardenne brothers offered The Kid with a Bike that has wowed every critic on every continent. And the end really is worth the wait. Seen in isolation this, of course, is a fine film choking with nuances. But as my brain wizzes through all the LFF films it doesn't seem to fall in the top 5. Perhaps Louise Wimmer (a first feature from Cyril Mennegun) does - a film whose subject would normally make me doubtful. A performance from little known French stage actress Corinne Masiero capturing magnificently the character's "insignificance in the eyes of others". I'm still asking myself why this film affected me more than most.

Should Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn have the last word this week? Perhaps not. But I wondered hard about what it would be like to be a youngster watching this awesomely executed motion-capture movie. Would I be inspired by that sense of cinematic wonder? Or would I have already been bludgeoned into submission by all the technology about me? Just to wonder about wonder was enough for me in a world that persists in keeping us in a box - albeit a very shiny one for some.

A colleague asked of me the other day, don't they all (the dozens of films I've seen at the London Film Festival) all blur into one? And in one sense yes, but rather in a good clear way so that one's final picture is minutely detailed. And all because every film (the many good ones) only help sign post you to the next. And with two actor directed 'political' features screening in the same week - Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus (opens Jan 20, UK) and George Clooney's The Ides of March (opens Oct 28, UK)- it does "give us pause" as Shakespeare said to consider the reality/the fiction/the fact/and the future nay, the past. Are we forever bound on a wheel of fire or is it that we been allowed pause to quench our thirst?

Actor/director Philip Seymour Hoffman hit the home run when he said at yesterday's press conference for Ides of March that acting for him was to "de-mystify what it is to be a human being". Some will no doubt say that the film in question is somewhat derivative not giving its audience a cleverer unseen take on the bandwagon for American Presidency. And that indeed may be true. But Clooney (no surprise playing the wannabe President) directs the adapted play with knife-like precision. It's a science/biology lesson: it doesn't immediately seem that exciting but the more one watches and questions the more you become Aristotle fleeing the boredom of Athens mediocrity and off dissecting frogs in some far off island lagoon. What is ego? What the hell am I voting for anyway? Is loyalty just some Darwinian fin that was a rather useless appendage or was it at the heart of the evolutionary chain?

Why Coriolanus has often been deemed a Shakespeare problem play I shall never know. Always it seemed rapier-like slicing through the thinly disguised pudgy flesh of false democratic ideals. It was never thus that the great general Coriolanus was arrogant/egotistical/belittling. He was a man who knew who he was, got on and did the things he believed in; didn't sit around enjoying being idly flattered by the masses great and small. Though Fiennes has updated the play its clarity of decimating the hypocrisy of democracy didn't really need it. What the adaptation does, though, is make palpably clear the hidden agendas of all the surrounding characters - James Nesbitt egging on 'the crowd' to fell Coriolanus' oak tree that his philandering thistle could never nor hope to be. Brian Cox's Whitehall honeybee buzzing from one conflict flower to the next yet none too fussy about successful pollination.

A more contemporary play about power and the people would be hard to find. As Seymour Hoffman said in the Ides press conference, there really aren't any heroes in life only flawed humans. Coriolanus' flaw isn't ego (which of course he has in spades like anyone else) it is his Hotspur temper. He denounces the populace as curs because he's sick and bloody tired of playing politics and having to be nice and 'play upon them like a flute'. He believes 'all that' should be left to his political underlings while he gets on with running the country. His underlings get him hot under the collar but have no one to put in his place. Very like protestors who want change but offer no alternatives.

People, alas, are fickle - not all but enough of them to weigh heavy on the heart of democratic realities and ideals. Coriolanus acknowledges the illusion and is smart enough to know that it's somewhat necessary: as long as he's required not to sing and dance. The Artist is a sad and wondrous film that is sort of a silent B/W grand opera (in that all - well most- opera is political in nature). Hollywood matinee idol George finds he's relegated to the potato patch with only his dog for company when the talkies arrive. His ultimate saviour is ironically the girl who serendipidously slipped under the red ropes dividing the people from their idols - George promulgating Peppy as a new starlet. The talkies embrace her though not George. The plotting is predicable but French director Michel Hazanavicius' comic execution is far from it. No surprise for anyone who saw that director's secret service spoofs OSS - every comic nuance handled like a racing car spinning hill-top curves.

Politician's lives are always to be on the knife-edge of the populace, not so for most entertainers. Arguably, so should be the former in a democracy. As Clooney's candidate confesses about the death penalty - if someone killed his family then he'd probably feel like doing similar to the perpetrator. But he would need to serve his time for that act of revenge he stresses. The awesome, sublime quality of Shakespeare's play is that ultimately Coriolanus' fatal flaw is his heart not his head. The people would never let him sit upon a hill. They wanted to bait the monster that lay dormant within themselves. And as in relationships they lost the only beautiful thing that simply dropped down dead. Life thankfully isn't like the movies (more of that debate to come...) and though George in The Artist never has a voice (or will he?) he retains his heart whilst allowing another to flourish. Who could argue with that? Not even Karl Marx!

Gus van Sant's Restless (LFF and on general release this week) - shot by Harris Savides in halcyon hues though with pin-prick accuracy - seems superficially a little old-fashioned. Rather than being lazy, though, van Sant seems to be invoking the origin of the Love Story terminal death cliche spinning a dormant web in which his teenage characters can round out their lives in a little sleep. You cry not because you're being manipulated but because so often life's beauty and crazy zest for a life outside the norm only ever comes to the fore and fruition in moments of tragedy. And photographer Andrew Dosunmu's debut about Senegalese in New York Restless City (last chance Fri at the Brixton Ritzy) avoids all the cliches conjuring a world between the cracks - immigrant lichen clinging and thriving creating a whole new sub-culture.

Peter Sasowsky interview now live and new photos.

the half-heard radio sings its song of sidewalks

"It's good not to accept the current reality as eternal and definitive," wrote surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel. What better quotation to get one through these days of so-called London normality. Tube disruption last week has been its worst in ages (and this week isn't shaping up any better) but Mayor Boris brought a smile to our faces - not through his policies - but through his image looming large on the posters for extra-marital dating agency Ashley Madison. All publicity is good publicity as 'they' say. And instead of the 'Boris bike' to ease our passage up those congested London streets we might consider the 'Boris bonk'. Or as the Mayor said recently about next year's sporting event, we're ready now!

Onwards and upwards...but a lucky few with any energy left after the city's strenuous pycho-somatic workout have/will be immersing their bods in one of the city's autumn film festivals or its art fairs and gallery openings. Why do all these films exist? Why do all these crazy people keep wanting to make movies when it's hard enough to keep body and soul alive these days? Is it simply maybe a capitalist system keeping both right and left just so happy? At the independent film fest Raindance (still ensconced in the intimate Apollo Cinema boudoir) box office receipts are up 40.3% on last year -as is much other cultural/entertainment activities in the city. One young filmmaker from Berlin asked me if London "knew about Raindance?" - a question slightly missing but illuminating the point that 'normal' people are indeed looking for a way out if not a way forward from their 'humdrum' existence. Josh Golding (author of the forthcoming Maverick Sreenwriting: A Manual for the Adventurous Screenwriter) gave a talk on how a filmmaker can enable audiences to "see the world as they've never seen it before": to think outside the box.

Each Raindance year, one 'shorts' filmmaker is awarded the chance to make the trailer for the following year's fest (this year it was Alex Brook Lynn who made last year's I am A Fat Cat). Next year will be Nicolangelo Gelormini (Reset) -a former assistant of Italian Paolo Sorrentino whose first film in America This Must Be the Place screens at this year's 55th BFI London Film Festival (Sean Penn in Oscar winning mode as a 'Goth' rock star on the road in search of his father's Nazi friend; America's nowhere 'architecture' in stunning cinematography). At the Raindance Awards party Gelormini made a plea to ignite the flames of Italian cinema - not just remembering its greatness and not to relegate that country's contribution to simply a thing of the past. And if after watching Martin Scorsese's 4 hour adventure in cinema My Voyage to Italy (out on DVD) he hasn't convinced you to watch every single movie he mentions in its entirety then nothing will. Rossellini's film of the title "was reviled when it was first released and only later championed by the French New Wave directors". And De Sica's Umberto D had the Italian culture minister Andreotti publish "an open letter in which he declared his opposition to neo-realism for washing dirty linen in public, [wanting] de Sica and his fellow filmmakers to be more optimistic." Plus ça change...
Ken Loach continues at the BFI

In epic doco mode lately, Scorsese's 3.5 hour George Harrison: Living in the Material World is also just released on DVD. Does it need to be so long? Well it's certainly not boring and the first 90min is taken up, inevitably, with Harrison's time with The Beatles. What one ultimately walks away with above all from this documentary, though, is just how hard it is to survive the fame others project upon you. All the Pranayamas in the world couldn't save George Harrison from himself. But Paul and Ringo live on, and there are some very fascinating and funny if maybe not quite soul-revealing footage. Arguably, George Harrison's fans (and of course those of The Beatles) felt they were seeing the world through a different lens through listening to their idols. Another doco worth seeking out is Lawrence of Belgravia (London Film Festival, LFF hereafter) charting the trials and tribulations of this 'underdog' musician. (reviews embargoed until Oct 22)

That 'different lens' is this year's 'motto' for the Raindance Fest too. And as in previous year's many of the greatest delights of this festival lay in documentaries that may have trouble seeing the light of a projection screen for some time. This year's Award winner How to start a Revolution documented Gene Sharp and his 'velvet' non-violent revolutionary guide book From Dictatorship to Democracy. Some of his methods of undermining the symbols and pillars of power can be seen in action in The Green Wave (cinemas now)- Iran's bloggers' promulgation of the rigged presidential elections on June 12th, 2009. Where My heart Beats (Raindance) proved that a very personal rather than objective documentary can still pack an effective political punch. The same goes for The Boy Mir and Hell and Back Again (both on general release) - the latter documenting an American marine wounded in Afghanistan and returned to his hometown. There's no attempt by the filmmakers to allow their gun/kill-loving subject likability in any way - just a man doing his job. And whereas filmmakers previously had to choose between beauty of the image and getting the documentary facts, the latest DSLR's and video empower one with both. Richard Jobson's highly stylised The Somnambulists plays at the LFF (reviews embargoed until Oct 14)

Against the facts, the drama of immigrant Iraqis in London on the eve of the Allied invasion Mesocafe can fall somewhat flat. But first feature Raindance course graduate Ja'far 'Abd al-Hamid has a real command of actors and can write lines that stick out a mile for their incisiveness into the human political dilemma. Why did he shoot on Super 16 rather than digi, though?

Inevitably, many of the most memorable features and documentaries of both Raindance and the LFF are all to do with outsiders and society's escapees. The doco Darwin (LFF) is a fascinating, funny and poignant glimpse of the 35 lives in this tiny, off-grid Californian town. SXSW Fest hit Dragonslayer (LFF) is more an acquired indie taste getting up close and personal to sometime skateboarder Josh and his new girlfriend. As vérité as it may be, its the sort of doco that could just as easily be a fiction rather than us watching it fight for its documentary corner. Phoebe Hart, born half male/half female, picks up a camera and tells her fascinating story in Orchids-My Intersex Adventure (Raindance). Another Ozzie, rock journalist Lilian Roxon, who hung out with 70s legends was profiled in Mother of Rock: Lilian Roxon (Raindance). And the Japanese Matsuo Ohno who sound engineered all those weird Astro Boy 60s effects is found sprightly as ever producing the annual play at a disabled people's home - The Echo of Astro Boy's Footsteps (Raindance): "If he stopped experimenting he'd have no reason to live," notes a former colleague. But equally, "his tendency to move on means he doesn't develop."

Peter Sasowsky's Heaven + Earth + Joe Davis (Raindance) on this extraordinary artist/scientist was inspiring, riveting and ultimately a depressing comment on how our society prefers R&D ideas that can be brought to fruition ASAP rather than broadening the minds of our planet. Joe Davis did finally end up with a post at Harvard- unpaid! (Video interview)

As an alternative to the art fair domination of Frieze, Ed Winkleman has brought his Moving Image video festival from New York to London's Oxo Barge House (just near the Tate) this weekend. On Saturday, October 15, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, in collaboration with Film Co Lab, Moving Image will present Bring Your Own Beamer(or BYOB). Each artist will choose the work to be exhibited and bring his or her own projection apparatus. It's a managable fest to get around too with famous and not so names. Probably unfair to single out any particular artists. But you won't be disappointed.


to be continued...

to hold the sky in your hand, a moon, one star

Not so much that this blog chooses 'a theme' for a posting rather that the world chooses its own similarities. Sort of nature vs nurture. Where does power lie? French philosopher Foucault wrote extensively in Discipline and Punish on disciplinary institutions and the "docile bodies" resulting from them. Power was at its most literal when one mid-morning last week electricity was cut to a section of the Jubilee line underground and 600 were forced to walk through tunnels. A familiar London tale over the past years.
Art on the Underground Acts of Kindness...goodness knows they need them down there.
A police presence to keep them ever so docile: citizens expected to cope or else. All will be fine by the Olympics Mayor Boris assures us. No doubt the chance for another photo opportunity with his band of merry Met Police officers. We have the power! Most of those rioters were wanton criminals anyway claimed Home Secretary Theresa May! Hmmm, George Orwell is alive and well.
Police are barely able to write says lawyer
A profile of the incoming Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe.
"Britain’s biggest artists are joining forces for a major new project entitled MINDFUL, an exhibition and arts festival at the Old Vic Tunnels (22 – 27 Sept). The project, initiated and curated by British artist and Mind Ambassador Stuart Semple in collaboration with creative directors of the Old Vic, will raise money for a new creative therapies fund within Mind, the leading mental health charity in England and Wales."
Toby Mott's 'riot' art

Nice photo too last week - Sarkozy and Cameron either side of of Libya's 'liberation'. Playing down the fact that the 'allies' had collaborated with Gaddafi regularly redacting terrorist suspects back to Libya.

Glamour of the Gods: Hollywood Portraits (National Portrait Gallery until Oct 23) may seem a rather old-fashioned 'easy option' exhibition for the NPG (organised by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art from the John Kobal Foundation). But there's something quite eerie and awesome seeing all these movie stars air-brushed to perfection. One thinks of Russell Brand snapping his wife Katy Perry without make-up as we peer at the more professional untouched negative of a Joan Crawford close-up. And so much more revealing and beautiful it is. The drawback of the show is that there's precious little about the techniques of each photographer's style. And the Crawford neg is the only photo 'unmasked'.
London's 'lost' film history is catalogued online
Future Cinema’s latest event

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement is one of many an Academy show with an agenda. Monsieur Degas wasn't just an artist for the dance, he was a scientist of it studying it from every angle and when photography began to elucidate and isolate the science of movement Degas bought a camera too! Perhaps the most interesting idea with which one leaves this show is what would Degas have created had he been born a decade or two later painting well into the C20th? There's even a whole darkened room finale devoted to a brief glimpse of the man as a chutzpah filmmaker captures him walking down a Paris street. A few ballet photos of Degas survive and if you're not well versed in the history of motion picture movement you will be after this show. There was an impressionist side to late Degas as he experimented with light on his dancers. Would he have become more 'graphic' and 'colourised' like early Van Dongen? Or would he have simply retreated back to his old world in the face of the awesome new? We shall never know, but the Academy's show treats Degas as if he were in a Tate Modern retrospective (although obviously not as comprehensive). And we look more closely at what we thought we always knew.

Andrew Rossi's documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times covers familiar ground - survival of mainstream media in the age of an 'independent' internet - yet still gets one pondering the question as you exit and walk the streets. One young blogger (Brian Stelter - tvnewser.com) taken on by the NYT is half jokingly described by veteran scribe David Carr as "a robot assembled in the basement of the NYT to destroy me". I know the feeling Mr Carr;) - Russian dolls: I'm sure my colleagues say the same about me. Lucky for 'them' I don't blog on the day. Yet! Rossi's doco is fairly thorough and unbiased towards all his interviewees questioning "implied credibility" vs agenda and advocacy, and the 'aggregating' net outlets like Gawker that 'give people what they want'. Even the NYT follows the latter dictum often placing the same news story on its front page for the New York edition yet on an inside page for national circulation. That's where the film stops just when the debate starts becoming really interesting. Ironically as paper advertising revenues flounder, the advertising crux of giving or convincing people of 'what they really want' is fashioning the internet.
"According to US magazine Newsweek's latest cover story, Grimsville, UK, there are estates in the capital where kids keep cockroaches as pets. Is the city really that bad? ...the Grimsville, UK, cover is only on the international edition. The US Newsweek cover says "Let's Just Fix It!", in relation to a story on American self-reliance."

One invaluable tip for actors is that one can really only play the similarities of a character's traits to oneself rather than the differences. Director Jonathan Miller when working with Jack Lemmon on Long Day's Journey into Night believed that actors could only effectively play characters somehow 'related' to themselves. If one is to portray Hitler the question resides within one and not without. The will to power isn't some extra-terrestrial force. Or perhaps the intricately inventive Brit classic Quatermass and the Pit isn't that 'hokey' after all. (DVD re-released on both formats with the juicy extras available only on Blu-ray Oct 10)

Pablo Larraín's Post Mortem is a film (like his previous, equally idiosyncratic Tony Manero) that will be seen by the very few. A huge shame, for Larraín asks us to look at people. Or rather allows us the cinematic space to feel the human complexity of a political situation without ever overtly thrusting in our face. This is 1973 Santiago, Chile the eve of Pinochet's military coup against socialist president Salvador Allende. Alfredo Castro (star of Tony Manero) is a morgue attendant - while staying alive himself by doing more than just fantasize about his seedy cabaret showgirl neighbour Nancy (Antonia Zegers). Larraín's grainy 16mm camera observes quietly like a cockroach well-past humanity's final moments of ruthless, pragmatic survival.

The camera of Tomas Alfredson's cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is another quiet observer as in his previous vampire adaption Let The Right One In. Almost a pervert: "It’s all about what you don’t see, what’s outside the frame. You understand?" Alfredson is quoted as saying. Yet Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan's screenplay (originally Peter Morgan) of John le Carré's 1974 Cold War spy novel moves fast, almost to the point sometimes where you want to double-back a few steps. Yet the camera convinces you you've missed nothing, you might still spot something noone else has. Le Carré is quoted as feeling that Gary Oldman's chief Brit spy master is "a Smiley patiently waiting to explode" - one of the film's many faultlessly cast roles. It's not a pace/space regular cinema going audiences will be used to. Yet it couldn't be more a London/Brit film if it tried - as if walking down a deserted night-time street convinced that you'd seen the truth but not quite able to piece everything together. It continues gnawing away. A polar opposite to Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener adaptation (his 360 opens the 55th BFI London Film Festival Oct 12). Perhaps.
Cameron was approached to spy for the KGB
The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman

The streets of New York have never looked like those of West Side Story (1961 - 50th anniversary - stunning, just stunning restored print of the Super Panavision 70 - Daniel L. Fapp's camera) before and since! Director Robert Wise (The Sound of Music) hadn't even directed a movie musical before. The choreographer Jerome Robbins is given co-directing credit, and many stories abound about all that. But it's what's up on screen at the end of the collaborative process that counts (though Marnie Nixon's credit for singing Maria (Natalie Wood) isn't). It's a cliche to speak of New York City's 'urban' beauty of decay but this classic film of the stage musical proves why they do and did speak and why the "the whole ever mother-lovin' street [s]" have lured all sorts of photographers to its inner depths. West Side Story is a film of sentiment rather than sentimentality (the stage show loosely based on the love that dares not speak its name from Romeo and Juliet). Elvis Presley was originally approached for the role of Tony. Fascinating idea to ponder. And it's hard to imagine any group of kids (even and especially today) that wouldn't be caught by the spell of this unique film. It's comment on policing is as ever true. Like the kids, they're not all rotten apples but it only takes one for the orchard to be felled. And Stephen Sondheim's lyrics should be a lesson even to every rapper let alone Leonard Bernstein's rhythms of the street.
Remember photographer Corinne Day from the 90s?

Much as with West Side Story's tomboy character Anybodys, writer/director Celine Sciamma (Water Lilies) Tomboy is a minutely directed and affecting (shot on the DSLR Canon 7D for €500,000) is a French film about a 10-year-old girl exploring male sexual acceptance. Using the wide cinema screen (2:35) is the slightly more traditional French love story
Mademoiselle Chambon . Perhaps its cinematic metaphor of life's building blocks, beginning with parents struggling to define French grammar's direct object, is at times a tad clunky. And we later see a Hammershoi art poster on the wall of Ms Chambon's apartment - house-builder Jean (Vincent Lindon)'s son's teacher and the object of his elicit affair. As with the lighting dialectics of Hammershoi's interiors, so too does director Stéphane Brizé unite and separate his characters on the wide-screen.

Minute detail is the key to Ben Turnbull's comic book collages currently on show at the
Eleven gallery (Photos HERE). And though not created to co-incide with the commemorations of 9/11 they are an strident comment on the nature of power, good vs evil. Strangely, so too, is the dance doco The Way of the Morris a quiet hit at the SXSW fest: "I think that Americans might just be the best audience. Morris dancing won't carry the stigma of embarrassment it does in the UK. They might be more able to relate to it through the universal human need to dance," said director (and actor) Tim Plester who follows his uncle's tour from North Oxfordshire to France. The Morrismen's links to tradition and WW1 (the 90th anniversary of their 'twin' French graves and why on earth one would want to continue them into the present are fully and rather touchingly explored by Plester.

Artist Joseph Kosuth more cerebrally prompts us to question our existence through the power of words and he's been doing so as far back as Chomsky and Marshall McLuhan. Not much use for the lovers in The Panic in Needle Park (1971) whose survival was pitched to the studio as a junky Romeo and Juliet. Second Sight DVD does as its name suggests as is rarely even wrong. The film's screenplay was written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, adapted from James Mills' book. Ten years on from West Side Story and much of New York City was little different. 'Needle Park' was the nickname of the heroin addicts hangout - a tiny traffic island near 72nd Street and Broadway (now totally gentrified). The studio (20th Century Fox) originally didn't want either Pacino or Kitty Winn (Best Actress, 1971 Cannes Fest). And it was in fact 20 minutes of uncut footage from this film that earned Pacino his role in Paramount's The Godfather. In many, many ways the film hasn't dated an iota. The unlikely coupling of the two leads is made totally plausible by Jerry Schatzberg's directing and that thing they call on-screen chemistry. There's an early screen appearance from Raúl Juliá, and Adam Holender's 'Polish school' verite cinematography is alone worth the price of admission along with the DVD interview extras.

Also from Second Sight DVD is Hal Ashby's (Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, Being There) final feature film 8 Million Ways to Die (1986) written by Oliver Stone. None of Ashby's trademark wacky, political surrealism here. But contrary to his critics, he proves he could still deliver a damn fine movie 2 years before his death. The performances from Jeff Bridges as a de-toxed LA cop, Rosanna Arquette as the hooker he's unwittingly embroiled with, and saves from drug smuggler Andy Garcia (classic 'smoking gun' Garcia) - these performances arrive on screen from well directed fine actors. Ashby never went out with a wimper. We could do with a DVD of Ashby's first feature from 1970, The Landlord (in CinemaScope). Someone?

Jeff Bridges again on top form (two years after Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show) in The Last American Hero (1973) - loosely based on Tom Wolfe's series of 1965 articles for Esquire magazine. "I know what it's like to wanna be somebody and I think if you daydream yourself into thinkin' you could whip the world single-handed you're going to end up with your arse in a sling," advises the the 'nowheresville' receptionist Marge (Valerie Perrine) to the Southern 'hicksville' NASCAR racing car wannabe 'Junior' Jackson (Bridges). Does 'Junior' sell out to the corporates or does he beat them at their own game and finally prove a warrior son to his 'bootlegging' dad (Art Lund)? Traditional fare this movie but with the stubborn, supple heart of a Country and Western song.
Jim Croce's I Got A Name from The Last American Hero

If bad boy Dane director Nicolas Winding Refn proves only one thing in Drive it's what all the Ryan Gosling fuss is all about. Drive could be dubbed 'neo-noir' - Refn and his cameraman Newton Thomas Sigel (The Usual Suspects and originally an artist) don't so much paint with Los Angeles light, they sculpt. In fact, they managed to shoot on that city's few rainy/grey hazed mornings. Maybe Refn watched some Jean-Pierre Melville. And maybe not. And you'll either be enveloped by Drive or bored by its pretense. But Refn is uneering in whatever it is that he's doing. Consummately. Even Irene (Carey Mulligan) seems to watch rather than partake in the LA chimeras passing through her life. Her lone, beautiful smile seeming to hold sway as if an anchor to the depths of that desert town. Gosling's 'driver' almost mute, inscrutable, his metal a poor carapace to the magnet of LA's 'Westward ho'. Except there's no West left to 'ho'. Only a 'Flying Dutchman' of temptation washed aground from New York and left forever to wander these parched seas. Until, like a child, we open our eyes to the cut-glass dawn.

In 2009, a tribute was held to honor the work of Hal Ashby hosted by director Cameron Crowe. Pearl Jam Twenty is Crowe's doco charting the rise and rise of the title's band for their 20th anniversary. It's not always clear who's who if you're not a fan already but for anyone interested in the history of rock and grunge music it's far from a disappointing 2 hours. There's even a BBC clip (when the band were at their height in the 90's) with the presenters saying that they'd never heard of them. THis was the time when the band bravely took Ticketmaster to Washington's Capitol Hill and the Dept of Justice claiming that the organistion should have been giving the band a share/control of the company's profits in lieu of their artistic copyright. What the band's fans saw in Pearl Jam was their very impetus: a sense of belonging, of feeling alienated from the prevailing culture, "the most dependably, unpredictable" band in Rock went one recent quote given that the band would try and make their live concerts as spontaneous as possible.
Trailer

It may seem a far cry from Pearl Jam to Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri (Special Jury Prize at Cannes, 1963 losing the Palme d'Or to The Leopard). Not so, when Japanese filmmakers at the time were at the vanguard of dissident expression in that country. Eureka DVD, as always, has great booklet notes: "[Ozu]'s characters ultimately accept that they are powerless to alter their circumstances. In contrast, Kobayashi’s characters risk their very existence by coming into conflict with the forces of injustice." Kobayashi': “In any era, I am critical of authoritarian power...in Harakiri it was feudalism. They pose the same moral conflict in terms of the struggle of the individual against society.” His previous film The Human Condition (1958–61) about WWII's Pacific War was “the culmination of human evil.” And The Thick-Walled Room "was shelved by Shochiku Ofuna for four years, as a result of its controversial suggestion that those responsible for Japanese wartime atrocities were not the minor, or “B” and “C,” war criminals but those at the top. Kobayashi had been indignant that, at the end of the war, many soldiers and low-ranking officers were punished cruelly, while many of those directly responsible for the crimes escaped censure." "Since I had come to the end of pursuing realism in film, this new mode of expression [the use of traditional aesthetics] delighted me,” notes Kobayashi. It's worth bearing in mind these quotes given that the film's not an easy watch (like say Eureka's Pigs and Battleships). Fantastic, piercing Tōru Takemitsu score too.

Westerns director John Ford is said by legend to have got his first break when the head of the studio was looking for a director: "try Jack Ford he yells loud". He learnt everything from his brother Francis and the best advice: "keep the audience glad it's seeing the picture" advice that nowadays is either overipened or undernourished. The 40 films Ford directed for Universal between 1917-1922 are considered lost (from 1920 he was on loan from Universal to Fox). The Iron Horse (1924) is a silent DW Griffith's style epic of America's first transcontinental railroad (inspired by Paramount's The Covered the year before). This 2-disc set has both the shorter European version and the uncut American one. THere's also the rather beautifully slightly surreal 30min doco from Tag Gallagher, Then Came a Dream. The film's heroine Madge Bellamy (Bela Lugosi's White Zombie -1932) spent the rest of her life in poverty before dying in 1990 and the publication of her autobiography, A Darling of the Twenties.

But if you want cheering up with a message then head for Tucker & Dale vs Evil, Pride and Prejudice meets Deliverance;) It's premise is just so simple you'll wish you went out and made a movie on it yourself. The violence, though quite graphic (it's comedy/horror), will have your 'mum' reminding you that she told you not to trust those college boys. Don't bother thinking whether Tucker and Dale would 'hit it off' outside the movie screen. Just have fun.

And another movie with a moral: Jurassic Park (1993) is back (a tie-in with the digitally remastered Oct 25 Blu-ray release) . And thank the lord, no 3D - it has enough embedded sensorama to scare the bejessus out of you. What a GREAT, GREAT movie. Even if you've seen it loads of times and know just what's coming e.g. the greedy fat bloke getting stung in the eyes in a tropical storm, it still doesn't spoil your pleasure of Spielberg's wondrous cinema. And how come his special effects look miles better than what most technicians nowadays produce at 100 times the cost? Shame, shame. The monologue given to Jurassic Park's creator - fellow director and actor Richard Attenborough's (again, a film unthinkable without his casting) is one of the greats of cinema. And a warning to us and the world, as were the novels of JP's author Michael Crichton. By all and every means dream. Every waking hour. The only principle that will ever unite us - a sense of wonder. But no fence in the entire universe will ever protect us from our own shadow.

"by comparison with the reality, my [blog] is as tame as a holiday postcard" (Le Carré with bracketed addition by Lucre)

Life nowadays is a funny something

At the end of the day, we all live in different realities. Right? And if we haven't actually experienced something for ourselves, we will all inevitably have a different sense of the truth. No? The question keeps asking itself, why do we go to an art gallery, a film, a book reading? Is there really any human difference between those experiences and that of attending a sports event? Isn't it ultimately a search for belonging, for meaning in our lives? Prince Charles visited some of the sites decimated by the riots a fortnight ago and concluded that youths joined gangs for a sense of belonging. Often it's worthwhile to state the obvious. Tony Blair hit the front page of last week's Observer with his opinion piece on the riots concluding that these were isolated citizens in the minority of our good society and all that we needed to do was get back to his policies (promulgated as PM) of helping dysfunctional families.

But did Mr Blair see the real world either? The argument is a book in itself, of course. But Britain has always been a divided society. It tried (arguably succeeded) in leading the world in being a tolerant society. But for decades the money started running out to support the infrastructure for such noble ideals. New Labour created a new middle-class but ironically its result has been to out-price any new-coming house-buyers from any major town or city and create another set of under-classes. No-one could have foreseen last decade's multitude of financial debacles nor the Iraq War. Could New Labour have worked in an ideal world?

The roots of Britain's discontent lie far deeper than just dysfunctional families. Not all is lost of course and never will be (therein lies Blair's optimism and vindication) as many of America's inner-city interventions have proven. This year's Oscar winning In a Better World by Danish director Susanne Bier explores our notions of tolerance and forbearance. It's a confrontational yet life-affirming film, arguably a discourse rather than a vision for the world. The irony is that she may never have got it made (through Danish outfit Zentropa) if it weren't for the dystopian visions of Lars von Trier (his latest Melancholia opens end-Sept) who scorched an international reputation for that company. And who openly made fun of Bier (apologetically) at his Cannes press conference this year. He mentioned the Nazis and was banned from the festival. The Chapman brothers (at both White Cube spaces) eerily create an installation of life-size Nazis (like magnets that both repulse and attract) garnering them mostly praise (it really does need to be experienced). Go figure.

Von Trier's groundbreaking films are unlikely to ever win an Academy Award® (not that there aren't some very fine Academy Award® winning films). But films that win such awards will always tend to embrace the ground of life rather than break the turf. The concert film of Glee is a case in point. The stereotypes of this hit TV series are life-affirming to the minorities it champions. Who could possibly criticise that achievement? Just as the guy who blinked twice on YouTube and followed up with his confessionals went on to be one of the most widely viewed in the world. It's a sense of belonging.

But belonging can also be hewn out of dystopia as Athina Rachel Tsangari shows in her film Attenberg: “I don’t use psychology,” she has said. “I prefer biology or zoology. These are my tools." Marina's (Ariane Labed) father Spyros is dying of cancer and she forms a bond with Bella (Evangelia Randou). Together they watch Sir David Attenborough animal docs, dance, kiss and generally avoid any other human contact. As with last year's perversely provocative Greek film Dogtooth (same cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis) it is a meditation on the barriers between our inner selves and society. Are we any happier joining in the social mores of our race?

Another Dane, Lone Scherfig has helmed the film of David Nicholls's book One Day. College in Edinburgh almost unites Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturges) but life (we witness their same July 15 from 1988 to 2011) thence teases them apart. Scherfig's skill (cf An Education) is in getting up close and personal to find a character's truth. Her latest film is no exception. And many times we roll with this mirror to our nature. However, a novel allows us space to dream while a conventional film does not. Therein lies the film's failures not so much in the material.

If you've queued for hours one dreary, grey London summer morning in the vain hope of getting a ticket to see the bare-breasted torso of Jude Law in Anna Christie (the rest of the show's attributes are apparently first-rate too), try The Museum of Broken Relationships open til Sept 4: a sad, fascinating show touring from Zagreb, initiated by the Tristan Bates theatre, and spread over two Covent Garden spaces plus a few window nooks in surrounding shops. Objects with their attached 'broken stories' have been donated to the Museum by their owners and suspended in time like the volcanic aspic of Pompeii. Inspired or depressed you're certain never to walk alone with your scars after seeing this show.

Spaniard Pedro Almodóvar has spend much of his time living in another reality namely Madrid. His films find the truth of life in its melodrama, often multiple dramas within the same movie. The Skin I Live In has Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas who only seems to become more human the longer he works;) obsessed with his plastic surgery techniques. It's a far slower, more meditative, even more voyeuristic film than we're used to from Almodóvar. He creates skin that is both a metaphor for identity and a membrane for our tolerance of existence. He even seems to be toying with his viewer giving them both the entertainment they crave but also suggesting that our own inner life is far more disturbing and incisive than anything Almodóvar himself could conjure on the screen. Normally edgy 'politically aware' distributors Metrodome have savvily nabbed what could only be called Ming Dynasty soft-porn, 3D Sex & Zen-Extreme Ecstasy. Now's your chance if you've never seen a 3D nipple (and there are plenty to choose from here). Might even be a route into introducing teenage students into the semiotics of Umberto Eco and simulacra;) Or even the fine art of Chinese ceramics.

Sergei Paradjanov played with identity in The Colour Of Pomegranates, 1969 (a world 'classic' just out on DVD) outraging the censors by casting the same actress as both iconic C18th poet Sayat Nova and his seductress Anna-two halves of the same soul. He was imprisoned by the authorities who feared that he'd become a figurehead for young intellectual Ukranian nationalists. The film was commissioned for the 250th anniversary of Sayat Nova's birth - he wrote in 3 languages, viewed as a symbol of the brotherhood of the trans-Caucasus and promoted by central government as a path to united socialism. The original release was a travesty of the director's vision - and only by watching Levon Grigoryan's (Paradjanov's assistant) 2006 doco DVD extra can we gauge the full vision of the director's "poetic subtext of the everyday object". This Second Sight release is brimming with other extras such as Daniel Bird's specially commissioned doco The World is a Window and an audio commentary by one of the actors who was cast because of his authentic beard - though some phrases are a little hard to understand through his thick accent.
Legend Of the Suram Fortress DVD

A review at the time by Willy Haas of F.W. Murnau’s 1921 silent Schloß Vogelöd (Castle Vogelöd:The Revelation of a Secret) notes: "Murnau’s artistic tendency is to moderate strong gestures into others more noble and subtle. This makes him more successful than any other director in conveying intimate dialogue, the completely silent exchanges of the heart, as in the scene of the confession, where the emotion is expressed through the extraordinary tension of the bodies." The film is even more remarkable given that it was shot in only 16 days. A 30min DVD featurette shows how Murnau used sets to illuminate the character's emotions e.g. false perspective, inspired by the art of Käthe Kollwitz. Also from Eureka DVD is a very strange, rather slow Romanian tale Strigoi giving a sort of Ken Loach twist to the vampiric genre. And if you didn't know that Howard J. Ford & Jonathan Ford had over 100 commercials to their credit you'd be awestruck by the sheer technical brilliance of their zombies in Africa pic The Dead - a hit at London’s Frightfest. You don't have to give this film the 'sympathy' vote just 'cause you've heard all their trials and tribulations e.g. losing their leading man to malaria. What is lacking, though, is anything particularly new or inventive for the zombie genre. That said, you're never bored and the fact that you expect more to happen than it actually does is tantamount to the Ford brothers skill in the use of suspenseful cinema. There may indeed be a message trying to escape here but there isn't that extra twist to allow it to do so. Still, you'll happily buy a ticket for the Fords next adventure given this quality product.

Another award winning ad director turning to feature films is Ben Wheatley (whose debut last year Down Terrace divided critics). On the strength of that and his latest Kill List Wheatley's one of the few Brit directors alongside the likes of Shane Meadows who's idiosyncratic enough to deserve having their name above the title. There's a documentary edginess to the camerawork and to the way Wheatley allows us unto the lives of his characters. The 'hit man family' plot descriptions don't sound like much on paper. But when executed they're really quite spine-tingling and excitingly enigmatic. It's been a while since a Brit director had us on the edge of our seats (in Blair Witch vein) and if you prefer your violence suggested off-screen (like the Tarantino Reservoir Dogs ear slicing) then Wheatley's brand of entertainment is probably not up your street.

After In Bruges we all eagerly awaited Martin McDonagh's brother writer-director John Michael feature. The Guard's tone isn't quite as sure-footed and nimble as the former - think Tarantino on Valium in West Ireland after too many pints of Guinness. But it's still miles ahead of anyone else in the Isles attempting this sort of politically incorrect jibe, with every performance just a knock-out.

And you couldn't get further away from such shenanigans than Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth (2006, out on Eureka DVD) filmed in Lisbon's new high-rise public housing ghettos. But there you might be wrong, at least most certainly in terms of Costa's cinematic sensibility. Craig Keller's doco extra is a fascinating shambolic 2hours where Costa reminds us that 3sec of a John Ford western is equal to 3hours of some less illuminating contemporaries. "Art is not about anything else but reality...the things we see...not doing philosophy...space, form, I see certain lights...I'm not dealing with other things than this" "3 seconds in John Ford is 3,000 years. I defy any young video artist to tell his story in [one of those time frames] but he has to work very hard...it's Proust, it's Kafka, it lasts for centuries to tell just one second."

Costa has used as actors non-professional local inhabitants of Fontainhas, Lisbon to get as "faraway from the mechanisms of cinema" wanting his films to be " as rich as a Griffith or a Stroheim film (beautiful in another sense)...I never thought I could do that with a video camera [Costa began his career using traditional 35mm]...I thought it was a poor electronic way of doing some things, but..."
Criterion's Region 1 DVD release certainly beats Eureka's when it comes to the extras and its 4-disc box set


At the Royal Academy Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century puts many of the world's most famous photographers into their historical Hungarian context - André Kertész, László Moholy Nagy, Brassaï. And like Pedro Costa you start thinking about what is life and what is art and is/should there be any difference in the execution or the result? Costa's film's could be termed 'art-house' yet they aren't professing to be art. Nor are Lars von Trier's films - he remarked once about the pointlessness of showing a close-up of a fly crawling up the wall if all one is doing was creating an atmosphere for a film. Neither he nor Costa could be termed 'realist' - perhaps more akin to 'magical realism' though both may consider each other polar opposites. Moholy-Nagy's photos aren't angular just to be different and 'poetic' they are his way of showing us the reality. Munkácsi (who moved on to fashion photography) described his task as seeing "within a 1,000th of a second the things that indifferent people blindly pass by - this is the theory of photo reportage. And the things we see within this 1,000th of a second we should then photograph within the next 1,000 of a second - this is the practical side of photo reportage."
Compare this to the V&A's new show Signs of a Struggle.

Artist Ryan Gander's work has always seemed to get us asking what is it that we desire and how do we go about that journey. You arrive to Locked Room Scenario and an empty Hoxton warehouse with almost all the doors padlocked. There are signs of activity that you barely see or hear. If you're ultra-used to be inquisitive/skeptical/voyeuristic then this experience may prove somewhat disappointing. But as we know, though that is everyone's natural tendency most of us go to great lengths to keep such thoughts submissive. Gander suggests you should un-lock these inner feelings, take them home and nurture rather than suppress them. Another ArtAngel commission is 1395 Days without Red two almost identical films by artists Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala (in collaboration with Ari Benjamin Meyers) using citizens of Sarajevo to reenact the days they were under sniper attack (1992-1996) whilst crossing street corners. Each film uses the same material but is angled somewhat differently. Spanish actress Mirabel Verdú hums the notes of Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony rehearsed by the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra elsewhere in the city. Even if you've never lived through an experience such as Sarajevo, it's easy to identify with the very private act of trying to stay alive whilst focusing your mind on both the reality and the possibility of a different world.

Mike Figgis Royal Opera House weekend Just Tell the Truth
Vision Sound Music Festival Southbank Centre