24 November 2007

Seven Works

Seven Works
Seven Works, edited by Elena Crippa, is a catalogue of recent works by the artist Santiago Sierra, including his new Anthropometric Modules (sculptures moulded from dried human excrement), to accompany the forthcoming New Works exhibition at the Lisson Gallery, London.

23 November 2007

Spellbound

Spellbound
Spellbound was directed by Alfred Hitchcock for producer David O Selznick. The film's theme, psychoanalysis, was suggested by Selznick, who was in analysis at the time. Ingrid Bergman (as radiant as ever) plays Constance Petersen, a psychoanalyst who correctly diagnoses that John Ballantine (played quite blandly by Gregory Peck) is suffering from delusional amnesia. She must discover his real identity before the police find him and charge him with murder.

Selznick was notorious for his personal supervision of the films he produced, often over-ruling the directors and assuming ultimate creative responsibility. (Gone With The Wind, for example, has one credited director, though two others worked on it at different times and Selznick is effectively the film's auteur.) Hitchcock planned his films down to the last detail in pre-production, and, to avoid post-production changes, he shot only the specific angles that he knew he would use. After his Selznick contract expired, he personally produced every film he subsequently directed. The joke in North By Northwest about Roger O Thornhill's middle initial standing for "Nothing" is a sly dig at Selznick's similar affectation, and, more surprisingly, the murderer in Rear Window bears an uncanny resemblance to Selznick.

One of Hitchcock's favourite actors, Leo G Carroll, appeared in five films for the director besides Spellbound. Ingrid Bergman would later star in Hitchcock's Notorious, one of his greatest films. (Incidentally, one reason why it is so great is that Selznick was preoccupied with writing Duel In The Sun so he didn't interfere in the production.)

Spellbound has rather too much psychobabble; the whole script plays like the last reel of Psycho. Also, the early scenes in which Petersen is misconstrued as frigid and a female patient is treated for nymphomania feel laboured and un-necessary. The two close-up point-of-view shots (drinking drugged milk and suicide by shooting, the latter featuring a flash of red in an otherwise monochrome film) are a bit gimmicky. On the other hand, the music score by Miklos Rozsa is fascinating, featuring the first use of the theremin in any film soundtrack.

The film is probably most famous for its short dream sequence, designed by the over-rated Surrealist artist Salvador Dali and directed (uncredited) by William Cameron Menzies. Dali's concepts borrow heavily from the iconography of his previous paintings, and from his and Luis Bunuel's film Un Chien Andalou.

Creature From The Black Lagoon (2D)

Creature From The Black Lagoon
Creature From The Black Lagoon, directed by Jack Arnold, is one of the most iconic of all science-fiction films. It may not have the visual spectacle of Metropolis, nor the philosophical insight of 2001, but it does have a red-blooded, web-fingered, amphibious gill-man.

The eponymous creature, an evolutionary missing link, is discovered in an Amazonian lagoon by a team of scientists. As their fact-finding expedition progresses, the creature kills the more expendable of them and abducts the film's token female love-interest. The film itself is also a missing link, half-way between King Kong (a primitive monster capturing a distressed woman) and Jaws (a small group in a boat, attacked by a deadly marine animal).

The film was originally released in 3D, like Jack Arnold's previous It Came From Outer Space, which the underwater photography (including a lyrical pas de deux, directed by James C Havens) takes full advantage of. The above-water scenes are more routine, with repetitive, melodramatic music cues and a predictable plot preventing any genuine suspense or surprise. It's great fun, though.

Arnold also directed a sequel to this film, Revenge Of The Creature. His most interesting sci-fi production of the period is the existential The Incredible Shrinking Man.

16 November 2007

Syndromes and a Century


Syndromes and a Century

Syndromes and a Century (แสงศตวรรษ), the latest film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, was screened tonight at Alliance Française in Bangkok. (It will also be shown tomorrow.) The director was present to introduce the film and answer questions afterwards. It was, sadly, shown on DVD instead of 35mm, due to ‘technical difficulties’, just like the Georges Méliès event two weeks ago.

These screenings offer a very rare chance to see the film in Thailand, as it is effectively banned from distribution in this country. When it was originally submitted to the censors at the Ministry of Culture, they insisted that four (totally innocuous) scenes be removed; rather than mutilate his work, Apichatpong instead decided not to release it here at all, forming the Free Thai Cinema Movement to campaign against state censorship.

The film begins in a rural clinic, with a female consultant interviewing a male army doctor. The doctor falls in love with her, though she tells him that she is keen on someone else, a lotus seller seen in an extended flashback. One of her patients, an (unsympathetic) elderly monk, recounts a dream in which he is attacked by chickens. At the same clinic, a singing dentist strikes up a friendship with one of his patients, a young monk who dreams of being a DJ.

Then, at the halfway point, the film begins again: the consultant interviews the army doctor, the old monk recounts his dream, and the dentist treats the young monk. This time, the location has shifted to a city hospital, and, rather than falling for the consultant, the army doctor has a beautiful girlfriend instead.

Like Apichatpong’s mystical Tropical Malady (สัตว์ประหลาด), Syndromes and a Century is a film of two distinct halves, a beautiful and tranquil enigma. It’s also semi-autobiographical, as the director’s parents also met each other at a hospital.

Unknown Forces

Unknown Forces
Unknown Forces: The Illuminated Art of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (สัตว์วิกาล: ภาพเรืองแสงของ อภิชาติพงศ์ วีระเศรษฐกุล), edited by Sonthaya Subyen, is the first monograph on Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The latest in Sonthaya's Filmvirus book series, it includes interviews with the director, a bibliography, and a comprehensive filmography.

14 November 2007

Strangers On A Train

Strangers On A Train
In Strangers On A Train, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, two men meet by chance in a train carriage. One (Bruno, played by Robert Walker) recognises the other, Guy (Farley Granger), who is a famous tennis player. Bruno initiates a conversation between them, in which he subtly exposes Guy's insecurities. Bruno then makes a theoretical proposal: that he will kill Guy's unfaithful wife if Guy kills his father. Guy laughs dismissively at the idea, and leaves the train.

Then, when Bruno carries out his end of the arrangement, he pressures Guy to do likewise. Guy refuses, though he realises that he cannot tell the police that Bruno killed his wife because Bruno would claim that they had plotted the scheme together. Thus, Guy is treated as a suspect by the police, and must find some way to stop Bruno from framing him.

The plot, an archetypal Hithcock concept, comes from Patricia Highsmith's novel Strangers On A Train, which Hitchcock adapted with Czenzi Ormonde and Barbara Keon. Novelist Raymond Chandler had been originally contracted to write the script, though Chandler disliked collaborating with Hitchcock. Chandler regarded Hitchcock's contributions as interferences, while, for Hitchcock, collaborating on a script was the most enjoyable part of the creative process.

The novel's central premise remains unchanged in the film; this is unsurprising, as it's such a perfect Hitchcockian scenario. There was a major structural alteration, however: in the book, Guy does indeed kill Bruno's father, whereas in the film he does not. Highsmith's book is about the corruption of innocence: Bruno's pervasive persistence ultimately drives Guy to murder, much as Iago poisons the mind of William Shakespeare's Othello.

Hitchcock's film, on the other hand, explores the persecution of innocence, with an innocent man under constant suspicion (a theme he dealt with equally directly in The 39 Steps, North By Northwest, and The Wrong Man), as Bruno encourages Guy to feel guilty for a crime he has not committed. Other Hitchcock preoccupations are present, too: the idea of the 'perfect murder' is a conversation topic in both this film and Shadow Of A Doubt; also, the 'Oedipus complex' lies at the heart of the mother-son relationships here, in Psycho, and in Notorious.

The most striking element in the film is Robert Walker's performance as Bruno. He perfectly captures the character's decadence, obsession, and psychosis. Indeed, notwithstanding his murder of Guy's wife, he is the most engaging character in the film, and the audience is invited to sympathise with him. Hitchcock's villains were often more engaging than his heroes: Uncle Charlie, for instance, in Shadow Of A Doubt, Norman in Psycho, and Tony in Dial M For Murder. Bruno is also another in a line of Hitchcock's gay characters: while Brandon and Phillip in Rope, Leonard in North By Northwest, and Mrs Danvers in Rebecca are not explicitly homosexual, they are, like Bruno, implicitly coded as gay.

The notion of contrastive doubling is another significant aspect of the film, recalling the two Charlies of Shadow Of A Doubt: two leading men (gay/straight, guilty/innocent), two love interests (Madonna/whore), and two detectives (good cop/bad cop). The psychological subtexts (doubling, Oedipal relationships, transference of guilt) add layers of interest to a thoroughly entertaining and blackly comic film.

Aside from the brilliant performances by Walker (in his only Hitchcock film) and Granger (who had previously appeared in Rope), the supporting cast is also outstanding. Leo G Carroll (veteran of five other Hitchcock films) is superb, and Hitchcock's daughter Patricia (who later appeared in Psycho) has a substantial role. This film also marks the beginning of Hitchcock's collaboration with cinematographer Robert Burks, who would go on to photograph eleven further films for the director.

The standout sequence is before Guy's tennis match, when the spectators' heads turn like metronomes from left to right to left to right, following each volley of the ball, while Bruno stares conspicuously ahead. The ending, however, is less impressive: there is an unrealistic (typically outrageous) shootout on an out-of-control carousel, followed by a studio-imposed coda. Fortunately, though, the ending cannot diminish one of Hitchcock's greatest films.

13 November 2007

Get Real

Get Real
Get Real
Eames chairs
Get Real is an exhibition organised by furniture design company Herman Miller. The exhibition features classic pieces of furniture (principally chairs) designed for the company since 1946. The highlights are George Nelson's bright, quirky Marshmallow sofa (1956) and, especially, the mass-produced moulded plywood (1946) and plastic (1948) chairs by Charles and Ray Eames. Get Real is at Siam Paragon from 10th November until tomorrow.

10 November 2007

Zoo

Zoo
Robinson Devor's film Zoo is a documentary about Kenneth Pinyan, who died in 2005. Pinyan, also known by the pseudonym Mr Hands, was a zoophile who fatally perforated his colon during sex with a horse at a farm near Enumclaw, Washington. (Bestiality was not illegal in Washington at that time, though it was criminalised following Pinyan's death.)

The use of reconstructions and atmospheric imagery, and the lack of authoritative narration or detailed factual information, are increasingly common in contemporary documentaries. In Zoo, audio interviews with other Enumclaw zoophiles (who never refer to Pinyan by name) are accompanied by overly aestheticised, non-judgemental reconstructions of the events they describe.

Devor consciously avoids sensationalising the subject-matter, though explicit video footage of Pinyan and a horse is shown for a few seconds in the corner of the frame. The only other instance (to my knowledge) of comparably explicit material being legally available was in 2002, when La Fura dels Baus included a similarly brief and graphic clip of a woman and a horse in their multi-media play XXX.

There are very few precedents for a documentary on this subject. On UK television, Channel 4 screened Hidden Love: Animal Passions in 1999, which featured an interview with Mark Matthews, another zoophile with a passion for horses. Matthews was a guest on the Jerry Springer Show in 1998, though the episode (I Married A Horse) has never been broadcast.

08 November 2007

Thai Film Journal

Thai Film Journal
From Censorship to Rating System
This month, the Thai Film Journal (วารสารหนังไทย) has a special issue devoted to film censorship. It features the proceedings from a seminar organised by the Thai Film Foundation, From Censorship to Rating System: The Way Forward? (จากเซ็นเซอร์สู่เรตติ้ง ทางออกที่เป็นไปได้), which was held at Bangkok Code on 29th May. Speakers at the seminar included Dome Sukwong, founder of the Thai Film Archive; Chalida Uabumrungjit from the Thai Film Foundation; Ladda Tangsuppachai, an official from the Ministry of Culture; and director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, representing the Free Thai Cinema Movement.

05 November 2007

"Ytringsfrihed er Dansk"

Dansk Folkeparti
After their Mohammed cartoons competition last year, Dansk Folkeparti's poster for the forthcoming Danish election features a drawing of Mohammed with the anti-censorship slogan "Ytringsfrihed er Dansk, censur er det ikke" ("Freedom of speech is Danish, censorship isn't").

02 November 2007

Film Factfinder

Film Factfinder
Film Factfinder, like Ronald Bergan's Film, features a concise guide to film genres, directors, countries, and 100 key films. Unlike Bergan's book, it does include a film glossary and a biographical dictionary of actors yet does not include any photographs. Each entry is rather brief: the biographies are less than ten sentences each, and each genre and country is given only one or two paragraphs. (The book is edited by Camilla Rockwood; the lists of directors and actors first appeared in the Chambers Book Of Facts.)

Film Factfinder's alphabetical list of 100 "Notable Films" is as follows:
  • Amores Perros
  • Andrei Rublev
  • Apocalypse Now
  • L'Atalante
  • Battleship Potemkin
  • Belle De Jour
  • Bicycle Thieves
  • The Big Sleep
  • The Birth Of A Nation
  • Blade Runner
  • Blow-Up
  • Blue Velvet
  • Bonnie & Clyde
  • Breathless
  • Brief Encounter
  • Brighton Rock
  • The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari
  • Casablanca
  • Chinatown
  • Citizen Kane
  • A Clockwork Orange
  • Close-Up
  • Days Of Heaven
  • Deep Throat
  • La Dolce Vita
  • Don't Look Back
  • Do The Right Thing
  • Easy Rider

  • Eraserhead
  • ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
  • The Exorcist
  • Farenheit 9/11
  • Fear Eats The Soul
  • The 400 Blows
  • Frankenstein
  • The General
  • The Godfather I-III
  • The Gold Rush
  • Gone With The Wind
  • The Gospel According To St Matthew
  • Greed
  • High Noon
  • His Girl Friday
  • It's A Wonderful Life
  • The Jazz Singer
  • Jules & Jim
  • King Kong
  • Last Tango In Paris
  • Last Year At Marienbad
  • Lawrence Of Arabia
  • The Leopard
  • The Lord Of The Rings I-III
  • Manhattan
  • Man With A Movie Camera
  • Metropolis
  • The Night Of The Hunter
  • Night Of The Living Dead
  • The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
  • Pather Panchali
  • Pickpocket
  • Psycho
  • Raging Bull
  • Raise The Red Lantern
  • Rashomon
  • Rebel Without A Cause
  • The Red Shoes
  • The Rules Of The Game
  • Reservoir Dogs
  • Russian Ark
  • Sans Soleil
  • Saturday Night & Sunday Morning
  • Schindler's List
  • The Searchers
  • Seven
  • The Seventh Seal
  • Shadows
  • Singin' In The Rain
  • Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs
  • Some Like It Hot
  • The Sound Of Music
  • Star Wars IV-VI
  • A Streetcar Named Desire
  • Sunrise
  • Sunset Boulevard
  • Taxi Driver
  • Three Colours: Blue/White/Red
  • Titanic
  • Tokyo Story
  • Touch Of Evil
  • Toy Story
  • Trainspotting
  • Triumph Of The Will
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • Vertigo
  • Whisky Galore
  • White Heat
  • The Wild Bunch
  • Wings Of Desire
  • The Wizard Of Oz
The list actually includes 108 films, taking the various trilogies into consideration. It was compiled by Hannah McGill. Note that Titanic is the James Cameron version and Frankenstein is the James Whale version. Also, Some Like It Hot is the 1959 comic masterpiece, not the obscure 1939 comedy.

Film Classics

Film Classics
Film Classics is a film studies primer published by SparkNotes (like CliffsNotes, but not as good). The book discusses twenty classic films, and begins by explaining the criteria for inclusion: technical achievement, influence, universal appeal, zeitgeist, and genre. There is also a "Shortlist of Great Directors", which lists ten significant filmmakers (or eleven, because Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut are listed together). Ingmar Bergman and Sergei Eisenstein, to name but two, are conspicuous by their absence.

Each film is given around thirty pages of analysis, though the list of films is far too limited: there are only two foreign-language films, and only one silent film. Because Star Wars, The Matrix, The Godfather, and The Lord Of The Rings are all included as trilogies, there are twenty-eight films in the list, rather than twenty. (There are four films by Francis Coppola, yet none by Akira Kurosawa, Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, Jean Renoir, or Kenji Mizoguchi - a slight imbalance?)

The classic films are as follows, in chronological order:
  • The Birth Of A Nation
  • Gone With The Wind
  • Citizen Kane
  • Casablanca
  • On The Waterfront
  • Vertigo
  • Sleeping Beauty

  • A Clockwork Orange
  • The Godfather I-III
  • One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
  • Taxi Driver
  • Annie Hall
  • Star Wars IV-VI
  • Apocalypse Now
  • Schindler's List
  • The Matrix I-III
  • The Lord Of The Rings I-III
  • Spirited Away
It's difficult to know who would benefit from this book. It's aimed at film students, but it's totally unacademic. There is no bibliography, the analyses of each film are all uncited and anonymous, and there are no references to film theory of any kind. General readers, though, would surely find it too dry, with its character analyses and interpretations of themes, motifs, and symbols.

31 October 2007

Songs Of Mass Destruction

Songs Of Mass Destruction
Madonna is featured on the new Annie Lennox album Songs Of Mass Destruction. She appears on the track Sing, along with Anastacia, Isobel Campbell, Dido, Celine Dion, Melissa Etheridge, Fergie, Beth Gibbons, Faith Hill, Angelique Kidjo, Beverley Knight, Gladys Knight, KD Lang, Sarah McLachlan, Beth Orton, Pink, Bonnie Raitt, Shakira, Shingai Shoniwa, Joss Stone, Sugababes, KT Tunstall, and Martha Wainwright. While the others make brief, barely distinguishable contributions, Madonna sings the entire second verse.

28 October 2007

Chandramohan

Durga Slaying Krustacean
Chandramohan, a Fine Art student at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Gujarat, was arrested in May after his degree show included paintings of nude Hindu deities. One painting, Durga Slaying Krustacean, depicts the goddess Durga giving birth; he has also depicted Jesus ejaculating during the crucifixion.

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.)

27 October 2007

European Union Film Festival 2007

European Union Film Festival 2007
Four Months, Three Weeks, & Two Days
This year's European Union Film Festival is afiliated with the World Film Festival of Bangkok, at Esplanade Cineplex.

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.

26 October 2007

5th World Film Festival of Bangkok

5th World Film Festival of Bangkok
Help Me Eros
Closely Observed Trains
George Melies: Le Cinemagicien
A Trip To The Moon
The 5th World Film Festival of Bangkok opened on 25th October and will close on 4th November. Most screenings take place at Esplanade Cineplex. The Festival's main attraction is a sidebar event: Jiri Menzel, one of the leading directors of 1960s Czech cinema, will speak about his classic Closely Observed Trains, at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand (FCCT) on 1st November.

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.]

25 October 2007

From Message To Media

From Message To Media
How To Explain Art To A Bangkok Cock
Horror In Pink I
From Message To Media is a retrospective survey of Thai new-media art 1985-2005, at Bangkok University Gallery from 22nd September until 10th November. (The title inverts Marshall McLuhan's dictum "the medium is the message".)

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. Manit created the series after Samak Sundaravej was elected governor of Bangkok in 2000: the works were intended to remind the city's electorate of Samak's notorious role as an agitator prior to the 6th October 1976 massacre.

24 October 2007

Doo Phra

Doo Phra
Perceptless
A painting by Withit Sembutr titled Doo Phra, depicting a group of Buddhist monks crowding around an amulet-seller, has been withdrawn from an exhibition in Bangkok. Withit, an art student, entered the painting in the Young Thai Artist 2007 competition, and the winning entries are currently on show at the Esplanade mall. There is, however, a blank space where Withit's painting should be.

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.

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.

17 October 2007

Film

Eyewitness Companions: Film
Film, by Ronald Bergan, is a single-volume introduction to cinema history, as part of Dorling Kindersley's Eyewitness Companions series. Within its 500 pages, it includes a decade-by-decade history of the cinema, an explanation of the film production process, chapters on each film genre, film production in each major country, profiles of 200 key directors, and reviews of 100 significant films.

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
Note that The Maltese Falcon is the John Huston version, which is actually a remake of an earlier (and inferior) Roy Del Ruth film. Also, Some Like It Hot is the 1959 comic masterpiece, not the obscure 1939 comedy.

14 October 2007

Creativities Unfold 2007-2008

Creativities Unfold 2007-2008
Pen-Ek Ratanaruang Stefan Sagmeister
Creativities Unfold 2007-2008 at TCDC (10th-14th October) featured a series of design workshops, seminars, and symposia, and was part of the Bangkok Design Festival. The theme for this year's event is Genius Of The Place: In Search Of Excellence From Within. We went to the final day's event, the Genius Loci & Design symposium, to see Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Stefan Sagmeister.

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

Bangkok Design Festival 2007
This year's Bangkok Design Festival runs from 10th-21st October. Among the many events are Creativities Unfold 2007 at TCDC and From Message To Media at Bangkok University Gallery.

Siam Center

Siam Center
The Siam Center mall in Bangkok has redesigned its interior, and now features several large wall displays seemingly inspired by the artists Gilbert and George.

11 October 2007

Quote of the day...


Quote of the day

“Nobody goes to see films by Apichatpong... Thai people want to see comedy. We like a laugh.”
— Ladda Tangsupachai

Welcome to an occasional new Dateline Bangkok feature: ‘quote of the day’, a series of I-can’t-believe-they-said-that quotes from Thailand. The inaugural example is from Ministry of Culture official Ladda Tangsupachai, who was interviewed by Simon Montlake in Time magazine’s Asian edition. (The magazine is dated 22nd October, though the article was published online today.)

Ladda (who justified the banning of Bangkok Inside Out last year) dismissed the work of Thailand’s most acclaimed filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in a single stroke. She also described Thai filmgoers as “Uneducated”, adding for good measure: “They’re not intellectuals—that’s why we need ratings”.

On Kubrick

On Kubrick
James Naremore's On Kubrick is a substantial new study of the director's feature films. Each film (excluding Spartacus, omitted on the grounds that it is not an auteurist work) is given approximately twenty pages of analysis, within six rather broad chapters.

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.

10 October 2007

Cosmopolitan

Cosmopolitan
Mexican singer Paulina Rubio is facing charges of flag-desecration, due to a photograph published in this month's issue of the Spanish edition of Cosmopolitan magazine. The photo shows Rubio, apparently naked, wrapped in the Mexican flag (perhaps in a reference to Madonna's Rock The Vote video from 1990).

04 October 2007

ค่อนศตวรรษ ประชาธิปไตยไทย

ค่อนศตวรรษ ประชาธิปไตยไทย
A book by Sulak Sivaraksa, ค่อนศตวรรษ ประชาธิปไตยไทย, has been banned by Thai police citing national security grounds. The book is an account of the challenges faced by democracy in Thai politics in recent history. Sulak, publisher of Seeds Of Peace, was interviewed in 2005 by Same Sky magazine. He attempted to flee the country in 1984, after copies of his book ลอกคราบสังคมไทย were seized by police.

01 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.

29 September 2007

Cute

Cute
Thai police have seized copies of the August issue of Cute magazine, branding its glamour photographs 'obscene'. The magazine specialises in erotic photography, though it is careful to avoid frontal nudity. The police ban doesn't appear to have been very successful, though, because the magazine is still available at Media Network (Robinson Ratchada) and Squeeze (Siam Paragon) in Bangkok.

PDF

28 September 2007

Graphic Design

Graphic Design: A New History
Join Your Country's Army!
Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?
Graphic Design: A New History, by Stephen J Eskilson, is perhaps the only serious rival to Philip Meggs's A History Of Graphic Design. Eskilson is the only author, apart from Meggs, to produce a comprehensive history of graphic design from the earliest printing presses to the present day. The book's publisher, Laurence King, has previously published a number of definitive histories of various artistic fields: A History Of Interior Design, Photography: A Cultural History, History Of Modern Design, A World History Of Architecture, and A World History Of Art.

Eskilson's scope is slightly narrower than Meggs's, though arguably this is to Eskilson's advantage, as he is able to discuss case-studies in more detail. For instance, he devotes several pages to the tactics utilised by recruitment posters during World War I, including the classic Herbert Kitchener poster by Alfred Leete, and Savile Lumley's "most famous picture of emasculation ever made... Lumley's poster, especially the shamefaced visage of the emasculated patriarch, is a masterpiece of bullying propaganda".

Meggs is less engaging than Eskilson, though his bibliography is more extensive. Both books are lavishly illustrated, though Eskilson's photographs benefit from their larger reproductions.

18 September 2007

Aalpin

Aalpin
Arifur Rahman, a Bangladeshi cartoonist, has been jailed following publication of a cartoon in which a boy calls his cat "Mohammed cat". Rahman's cartoon appeared yesterday in Aalpin, a supplement of the newspaper Prothom Alo.

Hunden I Konsten

Lars Vilks has portrayed Mohammed as a 'rondellhund' ('roundabout dog', a stylised canine sculpture which appears on Swedish roundabouts) in a series of drawings. They were removed from the Hunden I Konsten exhibition in Tallberg, Sweden, on the opening day. The reason given was that the drawings, like the Danish cartoon caricatures of Mohammed, were too provocative.

PDF

11 September 2007

Thaksin, Where Are You?

Thaksin, Where Are You?
Sunisa Lertpakawat's book Thaksin, Where Are You? has been an instant best-seller in Thailand, and demonstrates how popular Thaksin remains following last year's coup. Sunisa apparently travelled to London (where Thaksin is currently living) of her own volition, without knowing where Thaksin was or how to contact him. Then, while riding on a London bus, she saw Thaksin's son Panthongtae on the street, and he took her to their house.

If that seems like too much of a coincidence, it probably is. It's more likely that Thaksin organised Sunisa's trip and granted her a pre-arranged interview. The book itself is essentially a Thaksin fanzine, and doesn't add anything to the post-coup political discussion.

06 September 2007

Lady Diana:
L’ênquete criminelle


Chi

Lady Diana: L’ênquete criminelle, by Jean-Michel Caradec’h, is an analysis of the French police investigation into the death of Princess Diana. What has made the book infamous is its twenty-page insert, featuring photocopies of the police dossier itself. The insert includes a photograph of Diana receiving first aid at the scene of the crash.

The photo has also been published by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera (on 12th July 2006), the German newspaper Bild (15th July 2006), the Spanish magazine Interviu, and, most famously, the Italian magazine Chi (19th July 2006). The image was first seen by the public on 21st April 2004, when it was included in a 48 Hours CBS documentary (Diana’s Secrets) on American television. It was then reprinted by Ici Paris magazine on 27th May 2004.

Lady Diana

On 31st August this year, the UK satellite TV channel Sky News broadcast a report about the crash taken from CBS News, which included the crash photograph. The CBS report, titled Could Diana Have Been Saved?, was originally broadcast on 30th August. The Sky broadcast represents the only uncensored availability of the image in the UK.

When Chi printed the photograph, it was heavily criticised on the front page of The Sun, though the tabloid made no comment when Sky News broadcast the image last month. (The Sun and Sky are both part of News International, owned by Rupert Murdoch.)

03 September 2007

The Blair Years

The Blair Years
Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair's press secretary when Blair was leader of the opposition. When Blair became UK Prime Minister in 1997, Campbell became his official spokesman. When Blair won a second term in 2001, Campbell was given the unique role of Director of Communications & Strategy. He resigned in 2003, and Blair stepped down earlier this year. Campbell, who was one of the key architects of New Labour, kept a daily diary which ran to over 2,000,000 words, and a single-volume concise edition has been published now that Blair is no longer Prime Minister.

Campbell freely admits that there is much material missing from The Blair Years. (Or The TB Years, as it should be called: everyone is referred to by their initials, and the shorthand prose style is not easy to read in long stretches.) The most obvious omission is Gordon Brown: there are occasional references to his uncommunicative grumpiness, but not to the repeated blazing rows we know he had with Blair. Presumably Campbell wants to spare Brown any embarrassment, now that Brown himself is Prime Minister.

Andrew Rawnsley's excellent Servants Of The People, by contrast, offers much more on the Blair/Brown conflict, though his sources are mostly off-the-record and he only covers the first three years of Blair's premiership. Nevertheless, it's probably the most authoritative account of the Blair government yet published. Famously, it includes the anonymous observation that Brown is "psychologically flawed", a statement widely attributed to Campbell. I hope he's planning an updated edition.

Alastair Campbell was Blair's 'spin doctor', though he was often in the headlines himself. His diaries cannot be a definitive record of the period, because it's impossible for someone who was simultaneously managing and making the news to be impartial. They are also incomplete: not only has Brown been toned down, but Blair and the Cabinet Office were permitted to delete especially sensitive passages.

Notably, much of Blair's swearing has been removed, including his four-letter description of veteran Labour MP Roy Hattersley. Plenty of profanities remain, however, most of them Campbell's own comments on other people. In this respect, The Blair Years shares the frankness of Alan Clark's Diaries. Conservative MP Clark's account of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's downfall was astonishingly candid, and, indeed, Clark and Campbell were friends, with Clark making occasional appearances in The Blair Years.

The Blair Years offers a behind-the-scenes look at all the major UK political stories of the past decade, with anecdotal details of Blair's private feelings and actions. Arguably the most fascinating section, though, is that devoted to Campbell's conflict with the BBC over shortcomings in government dossiers published before the Iraq war.

The government commissioned a dossier on Iraq's military capabilities, which was written by the Joint Intelligence Committee in 2002. The dossier claimed that Iraq possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, which were capable of being deployed within forty-five minutes at any time. In 2003, another dossier was also published, this time prepared within the government, though it was later revealed that much of it had been plagiarised from existing online sources.

On BBC Radio 4's Today programme in 2003, correspondent Andrew Gilligan alleged that the 2002 dossier had been "sexed up" with more forceful language: an un-named source told him that the JIC's language had been altered after suggestions from within the government. Specifically, Gilligan claimed that the "forty-five minutes" detail was added at the request of the government. In a subsequent newspaper article, again quoting his un-named source, Gilligan identified Campbell as the person who added the "forty-five minutes" detail to the dossier.

Campbell denied sexing up the dossier, but the BBC refused to retract the allegation. Gilligan's source, WMD expert David Kelly, committed suicide after his name was made public. It was suspected that Campbell had learned of Kelly's identity and leaked it himself. A public enquiry into Kelly's death by Brian Hutton exonerated Campbell and the government while criticising the BBC's editorial judgements. Consequently, the BBC's Chairman and Director-General both resigned.

In The Blair Years, Campbell denies leaking Kelly's name and suggesting "forty-five minutes". He writes extensively about his bitter confrontations with the BBC in the immediate aftermath of Gilligan's allegations, and his submission of evidence to the Hutton enquiry. It is this information which makes Campbell's diaries so valuable, rather than its interesting though hardly earth-shattering day-to-day Blair anecdotes.