
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
Songs Of Mass Destruction

Sunday, 28 October 2007
Chandramohan

Durga Slaying Krustacean is reproduced, in black-and-white, in the current issue of Index On Censorship. (MF Husain also caused controversy in India with representations of naked Hindu goddesses, most notably his painting Mother India.)
Saturday, 27 October 2007
European Union Film Festival 2007


Four Months, Three Weeks, & Two Days, the Romanian New Wave film that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes earlier this year, is screening on 3rd and 4th November. The film, by Cristian Mungiu, stars Anamaria Marinca as Otilia, a student who helps her friend Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) obtain an illegal abortion shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Mungiu films most interior scenes with a stationary camera, contrasted by shaky hand-held shots for corridors and exteriors. The two leading characters provide a further contrast: Gabita's (frankly annoying, though realistic) self-deluding naivety is offset by Otilia's determination and resilience. Back-street abortion is hardly a new topic, though the film also reveals the everyday hardships of life in a Communist state - black-market cigarettes, daily power-cuts, and Trabants.
Friday, 26 October 2007
5th World Film Festival of Bangkok





Taiwanese drama Help Me Eros, directed by and starring Lee Kang-Sheng, is screening on 31st October and 2nd November. Kang-Sheng has acted in several films by Tsai Ming-Liang, and Help Me Eros is clearly influenced by him. Many scenes are filmed with diagonal compositions from a static camera, with the action contained within a corner of the frame, as befitting the film's lonely, uncommunicative characters. There are two clips from a fictional TV cookery show, in which a carp is filleted alive and an unhatched ostrich is fried.
This evening, the great-grand-daughter of Georges Melies introduced a selection of his films at Alliance Francaise, in an event titled Georges Melies: Le Cinemagicien. (It will take place again tomorrow.) Melies was one of the pioneers of cinematic special effects, and although his films have a quaint Victorian charm their technical genius still impresses even now.
Melies's films were accompanied by narration and a piano recital, both performed live, to recreate their original theatrical presentations. The recreation only went so far, however: the mostly expositional narration also included some (slightly incongruous) historical information about Melies, and the films were (disappointingly) screened on DVD rather than the advertised 16mm.
Some of Melies's most famous films were included, such as L'Homme A La Tete En Caoutchouc (in which his head is seen to inflate, deflate, and explode in a puff of smoke) and A Trip To The Moon (one of the first attempts at a sustained cinematic narrative, a series of tableaux in which Victorian astronomers are attacked by spear-wielding natives on the moon). [There are many inaccuracies in the published lists advertising the films to be shown at this event.]
Thursday, 25 October 2007
From Message To Media



The exhibition, part of the Bangkok Design Festival, features video art and digital photography by ten artists. (Eleven were originally planned, though for some reason acclaimed director Apichatpong Weerasethakul was unfortunately omitted at the last minute.)
Apinan Poshyananda's video installation How To Explain Art To A Bangkok Cock (1985) features footage of the artist interpreting Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa for a group of chickens. He was presumably inspired by Joseph Beuys's performance How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare - the difference being that Apinan's chickens were all alive. Apinan also printed photocopies of Leonardo's painting onto crates, so that they resembled Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes. (He has also silkscreened the same image, titled Metamorphosis Of Mona, in a further Warhol parallel.) He cites Walter Benjamin's fascinating essay The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction as a key influence, and he is one one of the most interesting of the many artists inspired by Benjamin.
Several videos by Vasan Sitthiket are included, such as There Must Be Something Happen [sic] (1993), in which he was filmed while urinating and excreting (similar in content, if not in style, to the Aktionist films by Kurt Kren, such as The Eating Drinking Shitting Pissing Film). Vasan's other videos are I Manning Myself Around (the artist's fruitless attempts to grab some money dangling in front of him), Top Boot On My Head (performing everyday tasks with a boot balanced on his head), Goodbye Thailand (in which he pretends to kidnap himself at gunpoint), and How To Make A Good Art For Get Win Award [sic] (in which he presents a lecture on art to an empty classroom).
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook is represented by her video Reading For Female Corpse (2001). [Confusingly, I saw a different Araya video two years ago which had the same title and date.] Araya can be seen reading aloud to a woman's corpse which is positioned in a coffin-like glass box.
Manit Sriwanichpoom's trademark 'Pink Man', a man in a bright pink suit pushing a shopping trolley incongruously inserted into photographs, is seen here as a spectator at the public lynchings of Thai pro-democracy protesters in 1976. The images (Horror In Pink) are extremely powerful, especially Horror In Pink I, in which a hanged man is about to be savagely beaten with a chair. This horrifying photograph (taken by photojournalist Neal Ulevich) was also used as the cover for the Dead Kennedys single Holiday In Cambodia in 1980.
Wednesday, 24 October 2007
Doo Phra


It was withdrawn due to controversy surrounding a painting by another artist, Anupong Chantorn, which is currently being exhibited at Silpakorn University in Bangkok (at the 53rd National Exhibition, until 30th October). Anupong's painting, Perceptless (which is on the cover of the exhibition catalogue), shows monks with beaks, presenting them as bird-like scavengers. There have been demonstrations against the painting by Thai monks, though it has not been removed.
Friday, 19 October 2007
Bloody Cartoons
The twelve Mohammed caricatures originally published in Jyllands-Posten have finally been broadcast by the BBC in the UK. BBC2's Why Democracy? series posed the question Is God Democratic? in a Storyville documentary titled Bloody Cartoons on Monday evening. The programme opened with a new version of the most famous cartoon (Mohammed's turban as a bomb), drawn by Kurt Westergaard.
Wednesday, 17 October 2007
Film

Each of its five sections (history, production, genres, countries, directors, and films) really deserves its own book, and indeed such books exist. Strangely, however, Bergan provides no bibliography or further reading guide at all, which is disappointing because, although his book is a perfect introduction to film for young people, as their interest develops they will be inspired and grounded by Bergan yet will naturally want to seek out more specialist material.
Reductivism is inevitable in any book with this ratio of size to scope, but each section does adequately summarise the key points, providing a broad overview for novice film fans. The section on film production is useful as it provides a more practical approach than most introductory film guides. The section on genre surprisingly finds space for categories which are often overlooked in other genre summaries. The world cinema section is less all-encompassing, with some countries (including Thailand) reduced to brief paragraphs in a general introduction instead of receiving their own individual chapters.
There is almost no cross-referencing, which is a pity, and the photo captions are often overly literal or redundant. There is a detailed index, though it has some omissions. There are also a few mistakes: at one point, for instance, Bergan refers to "Pierre and Auguste Lumiere" (Auguste's brother was called Louis). I would also quibble with some of Bergan's opinions: he describes Salvador Dali's contributions to Luis Bunuel's early films as "invaluable", which seems to massively over-rate Dali's cinematic work, and he claims that the remake of The Mummy "benefits from" (rather than suffers from) the use of CGI. Three times, Bergan describes Kubrick as "anti-militarist", which ignores Kubrick's fascination with war. In an appendix, Bergan oddly (and incorrectly) lists Our Daily Bread as joint 10th in a reprint of Sight & Sound's 2002 critics' poll, even though it received only a single vote.
I've never been quite certain who DK's books are aimed at. They state that they publish educational, illustrated reference books for both adults and children, but to me all of their books seem more suited to younger people. Their educational tone, large fonts, glossy paper, and copious photographs (as distinct from figures or plates) give the impression of children's textbooks. For instance, DK's The Look Of The Century, by Michael Tambini, was one of the very first books on visual culture that I ever bought, and I still have it today; but, although I bought it when I was a teenager, I couldn't imagine buying it now, at twenty-nine.
The book that Film most resembles is The Virgin Encyclopedia Of The Movies, by Derek Winnert, which was published at the height of cinema's centenary celebrations but which is now out of print. That book was an excellent introduction to cinema for any young person who is starting to develop a serious interest in film, and Bergan's book serves a similar purpose.
Bergan concludes with a chronological list of Top 100 Movies, limited to one film per director. (Although there are technically 104 films because Three Colours and The Lord Of The Rings are both trilogies, and this also violates the one-film-per-director rule.) Who exactly selected the 100 films is unclear: Bergan is the book's credited author, though he introduces the Top 100 Movies as "the films we have chosen".
The Top 100 Movies are as follows:
- The Birth Of A Nation
- The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari
- Nosferatu
- Nanook Of The North
- Battleship Potemkin
- Metropolis
- Napoleon
- Un Chien Andalou
- The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
- All Quiet On The Western Front
- The Blue Angel
- City Lights
- 42nd Street
- Duck Soup
- King Kong
- L'Atalante
- Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs
- Olympia
- The Rules Of The Game
- Gone With The Wind
- The Philadelphia Story
- His Girl Friday
- The Grapes Of Wrath
- Citizen Kane
- The Maltese Falcon
- The Little Foxes
- To Be Or Not To Be
- In Which We Serve
- Casablanca
- Ossessione
- Children Of Paradise
- A Matter Of Life & Death
- It's A Wonderful Life
- Bicycle Thieves
- Letter From An Unknown Woman
- Passport To Pimlico
- The Third Man
- Orphee
- Rashomon
- Singin' In The Rain
- Tokyo Story
- On The Waterfront
- All That Heaven Allows
- Rebel Without A Cause
- Pather Panchali
- The Night Of The Hunter
- The Seventh Seal
- Vertigo
- Ashes & Diamonds
- The 400 Blows
- Some Like It Hot
- Breathless
- La Dolce Vita
- Saturday Night & Sunday Morning
- L'Avventura
- Last Year At Marienbad
- Lawrence Of Arabia
- Dr Strangelove
- The Battle Of Algiers
- The Sound Of Music
- Andrei Rublev
- The Chelsea Girls
- Bonnie & Clyde
- The Wild Bunch
- Easy Rider
- The Conformist
- The Godfather
- Aguirre: The Wrath Of God
- Nashville
- In The Realm Of The Senses
- Taxi Driver
- Annie Hall
- Star Wars IV: A New Hope
- The Marriage Of Maria Braun
- The Deer Hunter
- ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
- Blade Runner
- Paris Texas
- Heimat
- Come & See
- Blue Velvet
- Shoah
- A Room With A View
- Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown
- Cinema Paradiso
- Do The Right Thing
- Raise The Red Lantern
- Unforgiven
- Reservoir Dogs
- Three Colours I-III
- Through The Olive Trees
- Four Weddings & A Funeral
- Toy Story
- Fargo
- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
- In The Mood For Love
- Traffic
- The Lord Of The Rings I-III
- City Of God
- Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
Sunday, 14 October 2007
Creativities Unfold 2007-2008



Pen-ek, one of the leading directors of the Thai New Wave, explained that the uncommercial, depressing nature of his films reflects his personal interests in grief, death, and funerals. Alongside clips from his own films, he included sequences from Manhattan, and revealed that he is a fan of Woody Allen. (Unsurprising, as Allen appears to have a similar personality.)
Austrian graphic design superstar Sagmeister showed examples of his previous work, concentrating on Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far, a series of written mottoes (similar to Jenny Holzer's Truisms) which have appeared in a wide range of typographical styles. He gave a candid and fun presentation; unfortunately, though, he didn't mention his most famous project, which involved carving the text of a poster into his bare flesh in 1999.
Bangkok Design Festival 2007

Siam Center

Thursday, 11 October 2007
Quote of the day...

On Kubrick

Naremore strikes a largely successful balance between production history, synopsis, criticism, and theory. He does include un-necessarily long dialogue extracts, though there is minimal exposition, and his analysis is always fascinating and often original. (Many books on Kubrick, unlike Naremore's, are either overly theoretical [Michel Chion, Thomas Allen Nelson, Mario Falsetto] or overly descriptive [Norman Kagan, Gene D Phillips].)
Do we really need another guide to Kubrick's films? There have been a plethora either written or revised since his death in 1999 [Alison Castle, Paul Duncan, James Howard, Alexander Walker, David Hughes, etc.], though Naremore's is justified because of his archival research. He quotes from screenplay drafts and correspondence, uncovering new information regarding Kubrick's dealings with studios and censors.
The book's photographs are apparently screen-grabs rather than production stills, and are consequently rather murky. There is even a fuzzy screen-grab from a bootleg copy of Fear & Desire, even though a clearer production still of the same shot exists. Ironically, given the book's title, there are no images of Kubrick himself.
Spartacus is omitted from Naremore's consideration, though AI is included. While Kubrick planned AI for much of the early 1990s, arguably little of his original vision remains in the final Steven Spielberg film, so why Naremore includes it yet excludes Spartacus (begun by Anthony Mann, though taken over by Kubrick) is a mystery.
Naremore incorrectly states that A Clockwork Orange was banned by the BBFC; in fact, they passed it uncut for adult audiences. Also, his discussion of Eyes Wide Shut is marred slightly by his misunderstanding of the film's post-production: he wrongly claims that it was Kubrick himself, not the studio, who removed the Bhagavad Gita from the soundtrack and digitally censored the orgy sequence.
Wednesday, 10 October 2007
Cosmopolitan

Thursday, 4 October 2007
ค่อนศตวรรษ ประชาธิปไตยไทย

Monday, 1 October 2007
Thanksgiving
Staff at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (UK) have alerted local police to a potentially obscene image of a child, and they are currently assessing its legality. The picture was to have been included in a retrospective exhibition by photographer Nan Goldin, titled Thanksgiving. The exhibition is currently on show at Baltic, though this single image is missing.
The photograph (Klara & Edda Belly-Dancing, 1998) shows two young girls, one clothed and the other naked, both of whom have their legs spread open. It has previously been seen in several international exhibitions: Thanksgiving (White Cube, London, 2000), I Am A Camera (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2001), Le Feu Follet (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2001), The Devil's Playground (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2002; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2002; Castello di Rivoli, Rome, 2002-2003; Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, 2003), and Still On Earth (Fundacao de Serralves, Porto, 2002). There's a full-page reproduction of the original image in Goldin's monograph The Devil's Playground (2002).
Photographs of children by Robert Mapplethorpe, Graham Ovenden, Ron Oliver, Will McBride, David Hamilton, Tierney Gearon, and Annelies Strba have previously been investigated by UK police as potentially obscene. In America, the FBI investigated photographers Jacqueline Livingston and Jock Sturges, though ultimately no charges were brought.
The photograph (Klara & Edda Belly-Dancing, 1998) shows two young girls, one clothed and the other naked, both of whom have their legs spread open. It has previously been seen in several international exhibitions: Thanksgiving (White Cube, London, 2000), I Am A Camera (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2001), Le Feu Follet (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2001), The Devil's Playground (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2002; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2002; Castello di Rivoli, Rome, 2002-2003; Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, 2003), and Still On Earth (Fundacao de Serralves, Porto, 2002). There's a full-page reproduction of the original image in Goldin's monograph The Devil's Playground (2002).
Photographs of children by Robert Mapplethorpe, Graham Ovenden, Ron Oliver, Will McBride, David Hamilton, Tierney Gearon, and Annelies Strba have previously been investigated by UK police as potentially obscene. In America, the FBI investigated photographers Jacqueline Livingston and Jock Sturges, though ultimately no charges were brought.