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)
