"The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle."
Jacques Rancière: The Aesthetics of Politics (2006)
The above quote is used by the White Cube gallery as a preface to their group show New Order opening this Thursday that shares "a focus on the transformation of social or ideological structures that shape experience, and in different ways [exploring] existing communal, political and physical constructs of the everyday."
These days, London (and other English cities) are rife with protests, both student and otherwise, against the current government cuts in education, arts and local council funding - going to the extreme of last week's violence in the environs of the West End's Piccadilly. However, there's an irritating sense of déjà vu about it all for many reasons. This latest clash of class could be seen shimmering on the streets as far back as 2004, though no one wanted to admit it. Just as no one (at least not of the acceptable Labour left) wanted to admit that a mountain of debt lay dormant (like some creature from a horror movie) swept beneath the nation's magic carpet. Students 'maxed' out their credit cards, parents and would be ones wangled mortgages that would normally have been out of reach and the nation jollied itself along pretending that it wasn't in any way responsible for Prime Minister Blair's Iraq War.
[Addition]: Exiting a screening of Armadillo was a strange, numbing experience for this viewer: the most curious quality of this doco made about Danish forces stationed in Afghanistan. It's a little akin to Italian writer Umberto Eco's 'waxworks' essay in Travels in Hyperreality: we are so used to seeing the representation of something that when we actually see it for real we are, if not disappointed, then perplexed at our experience. The detail in this film is indeed frightening but then some may find that experience hard to inhabit. Hopefully I'm in the minority. But then knowledge is power. Worth considering Mr.Picasso again as to whether art really is the lie that makes us realise the truth.
Does the same problem apply with Jennifer Arnold's Kenyan doco A Small Act? One can almost hear We Are the World - the Africa 1985 anthem- in our mind's eye as we watch.
Students publish shoplifting guide
Ministers shelve proposal for free internet in libraries
In Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility, an essay for e-flux (and used in his Frieze talk some years ago), Boris Groys writes:
"the predominant mood [within the art system] appears to almost perpetually shift back and forth between hopes to intervene in the world beyond art and disappointment (even despair) due to the impossibility of achieving such a goal...Art can in fact enter the political sphere and, indeed, art already has entered it many times in the twentieth century. The problem is not art’s incapacity to become truly political. The problem is that today’s political sphere has already become aestheticized. When art becomes political, it is forced to make the unpleasant discovery that politics has already become art—that politics has already situated itself in the aesthetic field...The machine of media coverage does not need any individual artistic intervention or artistic decision in order to be put into motion...The contemporary politician no longer needs an artist to gain fame or inscribe himself within popular consciousness."
The student occupation of the Slade art school cited Groys in their recent manifesto.
This week also sees a BFI retrospective of Bernardo Bertolucci including his second feature made at the age of 22, Before the Revolution. MoMA in New York had theirs last year. The film opened in Paris in January 1968 before the famed student riots of that spring. And though the film has been championed by notable film critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, it seems more interesting for its zeitgeist rather than avant-garde cinematic techniques as compared say to the 'indiness' of John Cassavetes' debut feature Shadows (1960).
Bertolucci has confessed that the film was about “my own inability to be a Marxist, being a bourgeois”. And Bertolucci's greatness as a director seems to reside more in the baroque qualities of his later films counterpointing the personal and political that in any avant-gardism. The very personal nature of Before the Revolution makes it fascinating nonetheless. "Protesting in the square won't do anymore," says one of his protagonists. "My bourgeois future is in my bourgeois past," declares the troubled Fabrizio.
Mr Bongo DVD releases his directorial debut The Grim Reaper (April 25)
Another Communist, Spanish director Luis Buñuel, has work from his Mexican period out on Mr Bongo DVD (Facets DVD issued Region 0 of both in 2007). Susana (a remake of Alexander Korda's 1929 The Squall) was released in 1951 (made the same year as the more famous Cannes Fest winner Los olvidados) and could easily have been made by a 'B' movie Hollywood director using a starlet. It's similiar to Pasolini's Theorum (1968-the same year as Bertolucci's The Conformist) in that the voluptuous devilish figure (Rosita Quintana) arrives out of nowhere and ends up seducing the bourgeois family on the ranch. In 1972 Buñuel would make his more famous Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie).
In Buñuel's El bruto(The Brute,1953) the gender tables are turned as a slaughterhouse worker (asked to evict his employer's tenants) kills a man and is seduced by the landlord's wife (Katy Jurado). Both Buñuel melodramas could easily have been made in 50's Hollywood with their subversive political undertones and it would be interesting at some point to have a boxed set of all the director's oft-neglected work of this period. Optimum issued the director's greatest hits boxed set as far back as 2005.
Another film that's taken forever to receive a UK DVD release is Cassavetes' Minnie & Moskowitz (1971) (the 2000 Region 1 Anchor Bay DVD had audio commentary by Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel. This release is film only). The politics and loneliness of class have rarely been played out so acutely and so acidly as in this film. Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands) is a 40ish, divorced, LA County Museum curator who begins a tempestuous relationship with charismatic drifter Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel). In a way, it pretty much says everything inherent in Bertolucci's Before the Revolution - only with sublime, gritty graceful urbane new frontier amusement.
A recent LA film is Matthew Bissonnette's impressive 'shaggy-dog' road movie Passenger Side with writer Michael Brown (Adam Scott) chauffeuring his estranged brother Tobey (Joel Bissonnette) around Los Angeles for the day. The 'shaggy dog' turns out to be quite well groomed by its director. As is the 'mixed tape' soundtrack by music supervisor Mac McCaughan (of indie rockers Superchunk).
But for something seriously weird and cinematically wondrous the prize must go to directors Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine for Louise-Michel (winner of a Special Jury Prize at Sundance). Their latest and equally bizarre Mammuth is also released by Axiom on June 3. Yolande Moreau (Séraphine) is Louise who after downsizing pools the resources of her fellow textile workers hiring someone (Michel) to bump off their boss. You'll either love these French directors or be left scratching your head wondering what it's all about. One thing's for sure: there ain't nothing else like it in cine-land at the moment.
Axiom also released Ballast - a fine directorial debut by an American indi (Lance Hammer) that's taken ages to cross the Atlantic (2008 London Film Festival).
Rubber was far quicker off the mark after mixed reviews at Cannes this year. Directed (and almost everything else) by Quentin Dupieux its star is a black rubber car tyre and if nothing more, the film is a great showreel for the stills camera that also does knockout video - the Canon 5D Mark II. But it's a film so full of witty invention (albeit begged, borrowed and stolen from Hollywood) you'd be churlish not to exit the cinema grinning from ear to ear. It should team up with that Australian existential short that won in Cannes a few years back about the car and the traffic lights in the middle of desert nowhere.
Hop will prove a fun Easter treat for the kids while not outstaying its welcome with the adults either. Perhaps not quite as fun, though, as Andy Riley's The Book of Bunny Suicides: Little Fluffy Rabbits Who Just Don't Want to Live Any More (2003)
Megamind is out on DVD
[Addition]: Nor should adults (and even 'ratty' teenagers dragooned into helping their baby brothers and sisters) get too bored sitting through Rio (3D) - Twentieth Century Fox's Easter offering. No live action in this thrilling animation only pic from the Blue Sky Ice Age movie series team. And the 3D isn't much to speak of. But there's a lot of witty (albeit often corny) lines given to the chipper-ing birds who finally escape their nasty human captors' cages; helped by a slobbering bulldog Luiz "messed up [man]" and hindered by a pack of minxing marauding marmosets and the treacherous Oz cockatoo Nigel. A great kids' film for introducing them to the animals of the forest and the concepts of wildlife preservation. Can't wait to hear a kid commenting that the romantic duo of bickering blue macaws, Blu bred in Minnesota domesticity and who never learnt to fly, and Jewel in the bad-ass Brazilian wild are just like their Mum and Dad arguing at home. And what the film's exec music producer/legend Sergio Mendes doesn't know about Brazilian sounds of any species probably isn't worth knowing.
Back in more serious mode is the directorial debut of Ken Loach's son Jim - Oranges and Sunshine based on the true story of British kids who were deported to Australia (as late as 1972) from their institutions with hopes of a better life - hence the film's title. Emily Watson plays Margaret Humphries, the Nottingham social worker who wrote the book of her uncovered story having gone to Oz in search of the truth. Australian household acting name David Wenham (infamous for his bare bum in that nation's TV series SeaChange in the late 90's) plays Len - the only adult Margaret meets suspicious of her motives in delving and digging into their childhood past. With this character Loach's film (written by Rona Monro) resonates with far more about Australian-ness than simply the story itself. Australia (much like America) is a new land that while presenting a brave, united front hasn't always been honest about its divisive past.
And its the character of Len that acts as a wedge to unleash Margaret's boulder of blame into a safer haven rather than creating an avalanche. Many of the adults tell Margaret of their abuse at the hands of the Christian Brothers in the outback. Len, however, while not necessarily proud of what occurred, is proud of his survival and the sun-drenched life-style he now enjoys in Australia. And what would have been simply a well rounded, insightful, well acted directorial debut from Jim Loach becomes something much more than that. Until meeting Len, Margaret has only been seeing the past. Len forces her to see a future despite it being predicated upon a dubious history. Moreover, the seams of Margaret's family life back in the UK have almost started unravelling because of her new found obsession with somebody else's past in a distant land - the film's dialectic is almost Brechtian and the moral complexity a resilient chip off his father's old block.
Ken Loach's 1969 Kes is out on Criterion DVD in the States (April 18)
A Day In The Life - Four Portraits Of Post-war Britain is out on BFI Blu-ray.
Sofia Coppola's Somewhere is out on DVD
Nick Hamm's Killing Bono (based on music journo Neil McCormick's memoir) is a much more light-hearted affair while maintaining a dig at Ireland's love/hate relationship with the need for international recognition. Two brothers Neil and Ivan McCormick are still struggling to get gigs while their school friends have become the globe trotting sensation U2. It's a film that so easily could sink into an Irish bog but to everyone's credit it's not only good entertainment but one with a waspish sting in its title tail. Ben Barnes successfully transcends his pretty boy acting status as Neil McCormick and there's a wonderful, ascerbic final performance from Pete Postlethwaite (who died recently of cancer). Kieran McGuigan's (The Other Boleyn Girl) cinematography is also ravishing.
For a rather goulish, gory dig at Japanese family life Sion Sono's Cold Fish never disappoints (in similar vein to his Exte: Hair Extensions (2007)
The Sci-Fi Fest have a Royal Wedding All-Nighter (Thurs April 28) on the eve of the wedding at 11.30pm and featuring some classic B/W pics: The Corpse Vanishes, Bride of the Monster with Bela Lugosi, Bride of Frankenstein with Boris Karloff, Bride of the Gorilla with Lon Chaney Jnr and finally I Married a Witch with Veronica Lake. Bucks Fizz on arrival. There's also an Easter Sunday parade from BFI Southbank to London Film Museum (24th April) and a tie-in with Camden's nightclub KOKO for the after-party. And the British Silent Film Festival is upon us. Silent film DVD specialists in the States Flicker Alley have coming up George Schnéevoigt's 1929 Laila and though not strictly intended as a silent film, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno on Blu-ray (April 18)
Bill Woodrow's sculptures (at Waddingtons) have that wonderful sense of having clambered organically out of their material as if nurtured and watered for years. Art that appears so effortless and easy to grasp while belying its incredible eye and skill.
Robert Tear died last week: not only one of Britain's finest singers but also a wonderful teacher as any who'd attended his masterclasses would attest to. Obits in The Guardian, The Independent.
Show us not the aim without the way
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