28 March 2015

Penguen

Penguen
Two Turkish cartoonists have received jail sentences after being convicted of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. They were sentenced yesterday to fourteen months in prison, though the punishment was then reduced to eleven months and finally commuted to a 7,000 lira fine.

The cartoon in question, by Bahadir Baruter and Ozer Aydogan, appeared on the cover of the satirical magazine Penguen on 21st August last year. It depicts Erdoğan meeting a civil servant, who is buttoning his jacket with one hand while greeting the President. A reader complained to the government that the civil servant's hand gesture was an insult implying that Erdoğan was gay.

Penguen previously faced prosecution in 2011, when it published a cartoon containing the words "There is no Allah". In 2005, it was sued by Erdoğan (who was then Prime Minister) after it depicted him as a variety of animals. Earlier that year, newspaper cartoonist Musa Kart was fined for depicting Erdogan as a cat. Erdoğan sued Kart again last year in relation to another cartoon. In 2006, Erdoğan sued artist Michael Dickinson, who had depicted him as a dog in the collages Good Boy and Best In Show.

27 March 2015

ผลงาน Masterpiece ของ Alfred Hitchcock

ผลงาน Masterpiece ของ Alfred Hitchcock
Rope
The Trouble With Harry
Tomorrow, the Pridi Banomyong Institute in Bangkok will screen two films by Alfred Hitchcock: Rope and The Trouble With Harry. The screenings are free. (The Institute was also the venue for Design Nation in 2012, and Flashback '76 in 2008.)

Rope was Hitchcock's first colour film, and his first independent production. It was filmed in a series of long takes in order to create the illusion of continuous action (more than fifty years before Russian Ark, which was actually completed in a single take). Rope is also notable for its matter-of-fact treatment of homosexuality: the two male leads share a bedroom, and the film was based on the notorious Leopold and Loeb gay murder case.

25 March 2015

The Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower: The 300 Meter Tower is a folio reprint of a book originally issued by Gustave Eiffel in two volumes: one containing construction photographs by Edouard Durandelle (similar to those of Theophile Feau), and another featuring architectural drawings of the Eiffel Tower. The reprint, published by Taschen, includes an introduction written by Bertrand Lemoine.

The Eiffel Tower was built in 1889 for the Exposition Universelle, and has since become one of the most celebrated icons of modern architecture. In The Shock Of The New, Robert Hughes calls it "the one structure that seemed to gather all the meanings of modernity together". A World History Of Architecture discusses the Tower's significance in the pre-skyscraper era: "Not until the completion of the Chrysler Building in New York was Eiffel's tower exceeded in height, and it remains the largest iron construction in the world".

Robert Hughes argues that various innovations at the turn of the 20th century (the Cinematographe, the x-ray, the Kodak camera, the motor car, and powered flight) offered new vantage points from which to see the world. He cites the bird's-eye view from the Eiffel Tower as the most significant of these new perspectives: "This way of seeing was one of the pivots in human consciousness. The sight of Paris vu d'en haut, absorbed by millions of people in the first twenty years of the Tower's life, was as significant in 1889 as the famous NASA photograph of the earth from the moon".

24 March 2015

Film Manifestos
& Global Cinema Cultures

Film Manifestos & Global Cinema Cultures
Scott MacKenzie, in his introduction to Film Manifestos & Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, points out that manifestos written by filmmakers are often marginalised from traditional narratives of film history. Cinema history is usually classified into genres, time periods, or national film industries; even auteurist approaches to film history focus on the directors' cinematic styles rather than their written delineations of those styles.

MacKenzie's aim is "to outline a theoretically informed counterhistory that places film manifestos, often neglected, at the center of film history" and "to reconsider the status of the film manifesto in film theory". He has compiled a comprehensive and inclusive collection of film manifestos: his anthology "brings together film manifestos from the global history of cinema, constituting the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture."

Many of the manifestos have a similar recurring theme, denouncing the traditional film industries of their respective countries, largely influenced by François Truffaut's "deliberately pessimistic examination... of a certain tendency of the French cinema". India's New Cinema Movement manifesto states: "A reaction to the vulgarities of the established commercial cinema has been in existence for several years in many countries, crystallising in many places, into a regular, conscious movement for better cinema." Mexico's New Cinema Group called for a "new cinema in Mexico, which without a doubt will be a far superior cinema than the one today." The New American Cinema Group proclaimed: "we know what needs to be destroyed and what we stand for". The Oberhausen Manifesto put it even more succinctly: "The old film is dead. We believe in the new one."

Manifestos associated with major artistic movements such as Futurism (cinema as "polyexpressive symphony"), Constructivism ("the vitality of the cine platform of constructivism"), and Surrealism ("the sexual instinct and the death instinct" in L'Age d'Or) are included alongside more obscure manifestos such as Nick Zedd's Cinema of Transgression ("We... propose to break all the taboos of our age by sinning as much as possible"). I've been collecting film and art manifestos for several years, and the book includes several that are new to me. B Ruby Rich's essay The New Queer Cinema is the only notable omission.

Some of the essays are among the most famous works of film theory: John Grierson's criticism of Berlin: Symphony Of A Great City as "the most dangerous of all film models to follow", Glauber Rocha's Cinema Novo: "Our originality is our hunger and our greatest misery is that this hunger is felt but not intellectually understood", Stan van der Beek's "expanded cinema, as a tool for world communication", and Laura Mulvey's psychoanalytic study of "the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form." Collating so many key texts in a single volume is a rare achievement, and the book ranks alongside Film Theory & Criticism and Movies & Methods.

My only criticism is that MacKenzie's introduction is quite repetitive: one paragraph explains that the book "brings together film manifestos from the global history of cinema" and the next paragraph tells us that it "brings together key manifestos of the last 110 years". Also, the footnotes include a surprisingly catty comment about how the Village Voice "couldn't get any worse".

A few of the essays are also included in 100 Artists' Manifestos. The first manifesto anthology, Manifesto: A Century Of Isms by Mary Ann Caws, covers art movements though not cinema. Icon magazine published a Manifesto Issue containing fifty design manifestos in August 2007. Unlike some texts in other anthologies, the manifestos in Film Manifestos & Global Cinema Cultures are unabridged, with the Salamanca manifesto ("Spanish cinema is still a cinema of painted dolls") being the sole exception.

22 March 2015

Essential Eames

Essential Eames
Essential Eames
Essential Eames
Essential Eames
After a long hiatus, Bangkok's TCDC is once again hosting a major design exhibition. Essential Eames: Icons Of 20th Century Design, a Charles and Ray Eames retrospective, opened on 20th March and runs until 31st May.

Charles and Ray Eames were arguably the greatest furniture designers of the last 100 years. As Charlotte and Peter Fiell wrote in 2000: "Charles and Ray Eames did more to change the public perception of Modern design than just about anyone else in the 20th century" (Industrial Design A-Z).

The Eames plywood LCW chair (1946) epitomised the Mid-Century Modern style, and was named the greatest design of the century by Time magazine in 1999. Their lounge chair and ottoman (models 670 and 671, 1956) are included in TCDC's permanent collection (What Is Design?).

Essential Eames is curated by Eames Demetrios (grandson of Charles Eames), and is based on his book An Eames Primer. The exhibition was organised by furniture manufacturer Herman Miller; a previous Herman Miller exhibition in Bangkok, Get Real, also included several Eames chairs.

19 March 2015

An Eames Primer

An Eames Primer
LCW
An Eames Primer serves as an introduction to "the key projects, themes, ideas, and arcs of the lives and work of Charles and Ray Eames." The author, Eames Demetrios, is Charles Eames' grandson, and director of the Eames Office. The book was the inspiration for the Essential Eames exhibition, which opens tomorrow at TCDC. The revised edition includes a chapter assessing Eames publications and other resources.

Charles and Ray Eames were most celebrated for their Mid-Century Modern furniture designs, especially their plywood LCW chair (1946), lounge chair (model 670, 1956), and ottoman (model 671, 1956). As Charlotte and Peter Fiell wrote in Industrial Design A-Z: "Charles and Ray Eames did more to change the public perception of Modern design than just about anyone else in the 20th century."

17 March 2015

The Modi Effect:
Inside Narendra Modi’s Campaign to Transform India


India: The Modi Effact

The Modi Effect: Inside Narendra Modi’s Campaign to Transform India is an authorised account of Indian Prime Minister Modi’s 2014 election campaign. Modi won a rare overall majority in the world’s largest democracy; as David Cameron told him, he “got more votes than any other politician anywhere in the universe”.

Author Lance Price was granted “several hours of interviews” with the PM: “Modi had agreed to give me unprecedented access to help me analyse the campaign that had brought him to power. No other writer, Indian or foreign, was to be allowed the same privilege.” (Price begins by describing their first meeting: “as a gift I gave him a copy of my second book on British prime ministers and their relationship to the media [Where Power Lies]. He told me he didn’t really read books any more, which was a little disheartening”.)

Modi’s election campaign was highly presidential, emphasising the personality of Modi himself: “The name Bharatiya Janata Party translates simply as the Indian People’s Party. Its motto is ‘country first, party second, self last’. Yet... you could have been forgiven for thinking it was now, ‘Modi first, Modi second, Modi last’. It was an unashamedly, some might say shamelessly, presidential campaign”. Famously, he appeared at hundreds of rallies simultaneously by means of holographic projection. During a state visit to the US after his victory, he appeared, like a rock star, at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Price is clearly impressed by Modi’s oratory and charisma, though as a former spin doctor he retains a healthy skepticism: “in my conversations with Narendra Modi I did my best to listen politely to what he had to say, and to bite my tongue when the temptation arose to respond with ‘oh, come off it’, as it sometimes did... I didn’t feel able to take everything he told me at face value”.

16 March 2015

Becoming Steve Jobs

Becoming Steve Jobs
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution Of A Reckless Upstart Into A Visionary Leader, by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, is a biography of the late Steve Jobs authorised by Apple and Jobs's family. (Schlender wrote the May 2012 Fast Company cover story The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes, amongst many other articles.) The authors interviewed Jobs's widow Laurene Powell Jobs, Apple executives Tim Cook and Jony Ive, Pixar's John Lasseter, and Microsoft's Bill Gates.

The most revealing anecdote comes from Tim Cook, who confirmed that he offered to donate part of his liver to the terminally ill Jobs: "Cook decided to undergo a battery of tests that determine if someone is healthy enough to be a living donor." Cook recalls Jobs's angry refusal of his offer: "'No,' he said. 'I'll never let you do that. I'll never do that!'... Steve only yelled at me four or five times during the thirteen years I knew him, and this was one of them."

Walter Isaacson wrote a fully authorised Jobs biography in 2011, and Apple's unusual decision to co-operate with Schlender and Tetzeli perhaps indicates their dissatisfaction with Isaacson's book. Becoming Steve Jobs quotes Tim Cook: "I thought the [Walter] Isaacson book did him a tremendous disservice." In an interview with The New Yorker last month, Jony Ive was equally critical of Isaacson's biography: "My regard couldn't be any lower".

The World Of Ornament

The World Of Ornament
The World Of Ornament is a reprint of two French studies of ornamental designs: L'Ornement Polychrome by Auguste Racinet (published in two volumes between 1869 and 1888) and the less well-known Art Industriel: L'Ornement Des Tissus by M Dupont-Auberville (1877). Both works are early examples of chromolithography, and both were heavily influenced by Owen Jones's classic study The Grammar Of Ornament (1856).

The plates from Racinet and Dupont-Auberville's works are beautifully reproduced in two volumes, though they have been renumbered and rearranged into a single chronological sequence, and the respective Racinet and Dupont-Auberville plates are not identified. The book comes with a keycard providing access to online reproductions of the individual elements within each plate, though again there is no attempt to label the Racinet and Dupont-Auberville plates.

The reprint, published by Taschen, includes a brief introduction by David Batterham discussing encyclopedias of ornamentation. However, Stuart Durant's book Ornament, published twenty years earlier, contains the most authoritative survey and bibliography of ornament encyclopedias. Durant praises L'Ornement Polychrome for "the splendor of its chromolithographic plates", and describes it as "the most extensive published compendium of decoration". Racinet's Le Costume Historique has also been reprinted by Taschen, as The Complete Costume History.

Memento Mori

Memento Mori
Paul Koudounaris, author of the excellent The Empire Of Death, has written another guide to the display and veneration of human skeletons. Memento Mori: The Dead Among Us is more global in its coverage, featuring examples of ornamental and ceremonial human remains from Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. Less Gothic than its predecessor, Memento Mori is also exquisitely designed, with a blue satin cover and full-page colour illustrations (including a fold-out spanning four pages).

Memento Mori includes some of the ossuaries featured in Koudounaris's first book, though the photographs are previously unpublished and are even more dramatic than those in Empire Of Death. An overhead shot of the Lampa ossuary (Peru) is particularly striking. New material includes chapters on secular memorials and Bolivian 'natitas' skulls, and photographs of decorated 'kapala' skulls. An annotated introduction cites Georges Bataille, amongst others. (Restless Bones, by James Bentley, is a similar guide to human relics, focusing on those of saints and Biblical figures.)

12 March 2015

Hitchcock On Hitchcock II

Hitchcock On Hitchcock II
Hitchcock On Hitchcock: Selected Writings & Interviews Volume II has been published twenty years after the first volume of Hitchcock On Hitchcock appeared in 1995. Like the first volume, it's an anthology of interviews and articles written by Hitchcock (or "articles with his byline", as authorship of publicity material is hard to verify). Editor and Hitchcock scholar Sidney Gottlieb wrote one of the best essays in 39 Steps To The Genius Of Hitchcock.

The texts have been transcribed from newspaper and magazine articles published between 1919 and 1978. Highlights include two newly translated interviews by Francois Truffaut from Cahiers Du Cinema, and A Lesson In Psycho-logy, in which Hitchcock explains Psycho's marketing campaign. There are also a few previously unpublished pieces, including an extensive transcript of a conversation between Hitchcock and Stage Fright's production supervisor Fred Ahern.

Hitchcock has been written about more than perhaps any other director. Paul Duncan's Hitchcock: Architect Of Anxiety is an illustrated summary of Hitchcock's career. François Truffaut's book-length interview Hitchcock, and Donald Spoto's filmography The Art Of Alfred Hitchcock, are both essential reading. There are shorter Hitchcock interviews in Who The Devil Made It (Peter Bogdanovich) and The Men Who Made The Movies (Richard Schickel). Bill Krohn wrote the concise Masters Of Cinema: Alfred Hitchcock and the excellent Hitchcock At Work. Spoto's The Dark Side Of Genius is the standard Hitchcock biography, and John Russell Taylor wrote Hitch, an authorised biography. Laurent Bouzereau's Hitchcock: Piece By Piece and Dan Auiler's Hitchcock's Notebooks both contain material from the Hitchcock archives.

10 March 2015

Harmonia Macrocosmica

Harmonia Macrocosmica
Harmonia Macrocosmica
Harmonia Macrocosmica Of 1660: The Finest Atlas Of The Heavens is a Taschen reprint of a celestial atlas by Andreas Cellarius. It's a perfect companion to Joan Blaeu's Atlas Maior, and these two atlases represent the pinnacle of the golden age of Dutch cartography. (It was originally published by Johannes Janssonius, Blaeu's chief competitor.) Michael Benson described Harmonia Macrocosmica as "one of the greatest celestial atlases" in his book Cosmigraphics.

The reprint, a facsimile of the original 1660 Latin edition, features twenty-nine magnificent double-folio plates, with an introduction by Robert van Gent (a contributor to David Woodward's ongoing History Of Cartography project) and a concise bibliography. The introduction outlines the history of astronomy and uranography (celestial cartography), from geocentrism (the Ptolemaic system) to heliocentrism (the Copernican system), and the hybrid model of Tycho Brahe.

Most of Harmonia Macrocosmica's ornate Baroque plates illustrate the inaccurate Ptolemaic model, though Taschen's cover shows a detail from one of the few Copernican plates. Gent singles out the 'scenographia' plates, depicting the celestial and terrestrial hemispheres simultaneously, as "universally admired for the breathtaking beauty and originality of their design".

09 March 2015

Silhouette

Silhouette
Silhouette: The Art Of The Shadow, by Emma Rutherford, is the first international survey of silhouettes for seventy years. (E Nevill Jackson, author of the first history of silhouettes, also wrote Silhouette: Notes & Dictionary; it has since been reprinted, though the original 1938 edition has an embossed cover and several colour plates.)

Rutherford's book traces the history of the silhouette from the eighteenth century onwards, with individual chapters highlighting silhouette production in Britain and America. There are many full-page illustrations, and a bibliography.

The Anime Encyclopedia

The Anime Encyclopedia
"The world's most comprehensive book on anime", The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide To Japanese Animation Since 1917, was written by Jonathan Clements (author of Anime: A History) and Helen McCarthy (author of The Art Of Osamu Tezuka). The second edition, published in 2006, adds 1,000 new entries covering animated films and television series produced since the first edition of 2001.

This revised edition also includes entries on genres, studios, and directors: "new thematic entries offer not only signposts to more in-depth discussion of certain topics within anime, but also concise histories of the medium itself". The cover depicts Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, "erroneously described as the first TV anime... it was the first anime to be broadcast abroad." The World Encyclopedia Of Cartoons (Maurice Horn) contains some entries on Japanese animation.

05 March 2015

Cinema Winehouse


Cinema Winehouse

Bangkok’s Cinema Winehouse schedule this month includes a triple bill of the original Star Wars trilogy (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi), screening tomorrow. City Of God (Cidade de Deus) will be shown on 25th March, and Lawrence of Arabia on 30th March.

India’s Daughter:
The Story of Jyoti Singh



Leslee Udwin’s Storyville documentary India’s Daughter: The Story of Jyoti Singh was broadcast yesterday in the UK on BBC4. It was originally scheduled to be shown in India later this week, though the Indian government has prevented its transmission. Police in India banned it on the grounds that it included an inflammatory interview with a convicted rapist, though the authorities did not actually view the film before prohibiting it.

The documentary examines the case of Jyoti Singh, who was gang-raped and murdered in 2012. The fatal attack on Singh led to protests in support of rape victims, and a national debate about attitudes towards sexual assault. The programme interviews one of the rapists, Mukesh Singh, who shows no remorse and even blames the victim for his crime.

video

27 February 2015

Cosmigraphics

Cosmigraphics
Nebra Sky Disc
Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, by Michael Benson, contains 300 examples of celestial maps and diagrams, revealing how the cosmos has been depicted by astronomers and artists over the past 3,000 years, beginning with the Nebra Sky Disc, "the oldest-known graphic depiction of celestial objects in human history." It's a remarkable visual guide to the history of cosmology, though unfortunately it has no footnotes or bibliography.

Some of the most elaborate illustrations are taken from Harmonia Macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius (1660); several of his plates are reproduced, as are a selection of volvelles from Peter Apian's Astronomicum Caesareum (1540). Some of the examples are well-known, such as the panels representing the six days of creation from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). Incredibly, an illustration of the void before creation (1617) by Robert Fludd pre-dates Kazimir Malevich's famous Black Square by almost exactly 300 years.

26 February 2015

Rebel Heart

Rebel Heart
Rebel Heart
Rebel Heart
Last December, Madonna digitally released six tracks from her forthcoming album, Rebel Heart: Living For Love, Devil Pray, Ghosttown, Unapologetic Bitch, Illuminati, and Bitch I'm Madonna. A further three tracks were digitally released earlier this month: Joan Of Arc, Hold Tight, and Iconic. The full album will be available next month.

Rebel Heart will be released three years after Madonna's last studio album, MDNA. (That album inspired The MDNA Tour and the live album MDNA World Tour; Madonna also released the promo single Broken in 2012, and produced the short film secretprojectrevolution in 2013.)

The catchy Living For Love and Unapologetic Bitch are among the album's strongest tracks, as are the powerful Ghosttown and the autobiographical Rebel Heart. The least successful tracks are those featuring other artists: Nicki Minaj reappears on Bitch I'm Madonna, and Iconic opens with convicted rapist Mike Tyson. (Curiously, the album does not include any liner notes; guest vocalists are credited, though producers and other collaborators are not listed.)

The self-referential Bitch I'm Madonna echoes the final line of MDNA's I Don't Give A ("There's only one queen, and that's Madonna. Bitch!"). S.E.X. clearly evokes the infamous 1992 book Sex, though it feels too much like self-parody. Veni Vidi Vici's lyrics are a collage of titles from previous Madonna tracks ("I expressed myself, came like a virgin down the aisle..."). Holy Water, like 1993's Deeper & Deeper, quotes several lines from Vogue ("Ladies with an attitude...").

Rebel Heart will be available in three versions, each with a different cover: the 'standard' edition (featuring Madonna wearing a red sweater), the 'deluxe' edition (featuring Madonna's face bound with chord), and the 'super deluxe' edition (featuring a red-tinted cover). The standard version contains fourteen tracks: Living For Love, Devil Pray, Ghosttown, Unapologetic Bitch, Illuminati, Bitch I'm Madonna, Hold Tight, Joan Of Arc, Iconic, HeartBreakCity, Body Shop, Holy Water, Inside Out, and Wash All Over Me. (Strangely, this version doesn't include the title track, Rebel Heart.) The standard version is also available in a censored 'clean' edition.

The deluxe version adds five more tracks to the original fourteen: Best Night, Veni Vedi Vici, S.E.X., Messiah, and Rebel Heart. (This is the version released on vinyl.) The super deluxe version contains the original fourteen tracks, the five deluxe tracks, and a further four tracks: Beautiful Scars, Borrowed Time, Addicted, and Graffiti Heart. A bonus track, Auto-Tune Baby, is available in Germany.

24 February 2015

Decorative Arts

Decorative Arts
Decorative Arts From The Middle Ages To The Renaissance: The Complete Plates contains all the illustrations from Kunstewerke & Gerathschaften Des Mittelalters & Der Renaissance, first published in three volumes (1852, 1857, and 1863). Like other Taschen reprints (such as the Atlas Maior), this is a lavish, folio-sized book, with several fold-out pages.

Kunstewerke & Gerathschaften was illustrated with hand-coloured copperplate engravings, many of which were produced by Jakob Heinrich von Hefner-Alteneck. In the original publication, he is listed as co-author alongside Carl Becker; in the introduction to Decorative Arts, Hefner-Alteneck is recognised as the primary author, though strangely Taschen gives Becker sole credit on the cover.

Shortly after the first volume of Kunstewerke & Gerathschaften, Owen Jones pioneered the use of chromolithography with The Grammar Of Ornament. Jones was concerned with ornamental patterns, reproducing isolated details and motifs, though Becker and Hefner-Alteneck focused on decorative artefacts themselves, celebrating them as objects d'art.

Decorative Arts was edited by Carsten-Peter Warncke, co-author of Codices Illustres (reissued as Masterpieces Of Illumination) and a two-volume Picasso monograph. In his introduction, he quotes Becker and Hefner-Alteneck's aim of presenting objects "whether they be everyday or luxury items, for ecclesiastical or secular purposes". This inclusive approach made Kunstewerke & Gerathschaften particularly useful as a survey of applied arts, as it was not limited only to the realms of liturgy or nobility.

Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber's definitive History Of Design begins in 1400, thus there is some overlap with Kunstewerke & Gerathschaften. John Fleming and Hugh Honour's encyclopedic Dictionary Of Decorative Arts covers a wider historical period, as does Judith Williams's glossy Decorative Arts.

17 February 2015

Are You Charlie?

Are You Charlie?
A new book published in Japan has reprinted a selection of Charlie Hebdo's most controversial cartoons. The book, Are You Charlie? イスラム・ヘイトか、風刺か, also includes several Mohammed cartoons from Jyllands-Posten. Mohammed's face has been pixelated in each cartoon reprinted in the book, though the cartoons on the cover have been only slightly blurred.

Are You Charlie? includes all of Charlie Hebdo's Mohammed covers (2006, 2011, 2014, and 2015), and its back-page Mohammed cartoons from 2012. Oddly, in the cartoons of Mohammed naked, only his face has been pixelated, while his genitals and buttocks remain uncensored. Also, the pixelation is not entirely successful: two images have been mistakenly pixelated, even though they depict generic Muslim men rather than Mohammed; only the larger of the two Mohammed caricatures on the Charia Hebdo cover has been pixelated; and two covers featuring adverts for La Vie De Mahomet Part 2 have not been pixelated.

Meanwhile, following the attack on Charlie Hebdo's office last month, there has been an attempted assassination of Danish cartoonist Lars Vilks in Copenhagen. A lone gunman fired into a cafe where Vilks was holding a meeting on Sunday morning; one person inside the cafe was killed, though Vilks escaped unharmed. (A previous plot to murder Vilks was uncovered in 2010, and cartoonist Kurt Westergaard's life was also threatened earlier that year. Vilks became a target after he exhibited caricatures of Mohammed as a dog in 2007.)

11 February 2015

"C'est dur d'etre aime par des cons"

C'est dur d'etre aime par des cons
"C'est dur d'etre aime par des cons", a documentary directed by Daniel Leconte, profiles the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and its staff as they defend themselves against a lawsuit brought by the Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of French Islamic Organisations. (The magazine was acquitted in 2007, and the BBC programme Bloody Cartoons also covered the trial and its aftermath. Last year, Charlie Hebdo was sued by the Muslim Judicial Defence League.)

The documentary takes its name from a 2006 Charlie Hebdo cover which depicts Mohammed weeping and complaining that "It's hard being loved by idiots". The cover appears in the film, and was even included on its theatrical poster, and Leconte's choice of title immediately dispels any notion of impartiality. (Charlie Hebdo's current issue again features a weeping Mohammed on its cover. The documentary was made before the infamous Charia Hebdo issue, and the terrorist attack on the newspaper last month.)

The film also features the twelve Jyllands-Posten Mohammed caricatures, a front-page France Soir newspaper cartoon commenting on the controversy, preparatory sketches of Mohammed drawn by Jean Cabut and Georges Wolinski, and a cartoon inspired by Kurt Westergaard's drawing of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. A featurette on the DVD includes a rejected version of the film's poster, depicting a cartoonist stabbed in the back after drawing Mohammed.

International Film Heritage Festival

International Film Heritage Festival
A Trip To The Moon
The Ladykillers
The General
The International Heritage Film Festival will take place in Bangkok later this month, from 26th February to 6th March. The Festival's theme is Memory!, and it will include screenings of several classic comedy films. All screenings are free.

The opening film, the Georges Melies masterpiece A Trip To The Moon, will be shown on 26th February at Alliance Francaise. (It was previously screened at the 5th World Film Festival of Bangkok, and the restored version was shown at La Fete 2012.) Later screenings include Alexander Mackendrick's Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (27th February, also at Alliance Francaise) and Buster Keaton's The General (1st March, at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya).

10 February 2015

Pulp Fiction


Cinema Winehouse

Tomorrow, Cinema Winehouse in Bangkok will screen Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, celebrating twenty years since the film was first released. Pulp Fiction is arguably the greatest film of the past four decades, and a landmark of the American independent film movement.

The Art & History Of Globes

The Art & History Of Globes
The Art & History of Globes, by Sylvia Sumira, features sixty examples of terrestrial and celestial globes, from the earliest extant terrestrial globe (1492) to the Victorian era, including several by the great cartographers Gerardus Mercator and Willem Blaeu (whose son published the Atlas Maior). Most of the globes illustrated are from the British Library, though almost a third are from other collections.

Sumira provides a concise history of globe production, but the cultural history of the globe is not explored. (Globes have been cultural signifiers of power for at least 500 years, as in the 'Armada portrait' of Elizabeth I, James Gillray's 1805 cartoon of Pitt and Napoleon, and Charlie Chaplin's inflatable globe in The Great Dictator.) The book was published in America under the alternative title Globes: 400 Years Of Exploration, Navigation, & Power.

03 February 2015

الحياة الجديدة

الحياة الجديدة
Avadhnama
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has ordered an investigation into the newspaper الحياة الجديدة, after it published a drawing of Mohammed. The cartoon, by Mohammed Saba'aneh, was printed on Sunday. Mohammed is depicted sowing seeds, a metaphor for peace, and the cartoon is perhaps the first modern drawing of Mohammed by a Muslim artist.

In a similar case, the Iranian newspaper Mardom-e Emrooz was closed down last month, after it used the slogan "Je suis Charlie" as a headline. Also, the editor of the Indian newspaper Avadhnama, Shirin Dalvi, was arrested on 28th January, after her newspaper printed Charlie Hebdo's 2006 Mohammed cover on its front page on 17th January. She wrote a front-page apology the following day, though the newspaper was closed down on 19th January.

The contemporary debate surrounding representations of Mohammed began with the publication of a dozen caricatures by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005. Other newspapers subsequently printed their own Mohammed cartoons: Weekendavisen, France Soir, The Guardian, Philadelphia Daily News, Liberation, Het Nieuwsblad, The Daily Tar Heel, Akron Beacon Journal, The Strand, Nana, Gorodskiye Vesti, Adresseavisen, Uke-Adressa, Harper's, and The International Herald Tribune (2006 and 2012).

French newspaper Charlie Hebdo's depictions of Mohammed made global headlines recently, after many of its staff were killed by Islamic terrorists. In 2006, Charlie Hebdo published a cartoon of Mohammed complaining that he is "loved by idiots". Its offices were firebombed in 2011, after it published a Charia Hebdo issue guest-edited by Mohammed. In 2012, it printed a caricature of Mohammed naked. In 2013, it produced a comic-strip biography of Mohammed (part 1, part 2), with an expanded edition in 2014. Last year, it depicted Mohammed being beheaded by an Islamic State terrorist.

El Universo

El Universo
Today, Ecuador's state media watchdog SuperCom, the Superintendency of Information and Communication, ordered the newspaper El Universo to print an apology for publishing a cartoon by Xavier Bonilla (known as Bonil) that violated an anti-discrimination law. The cartoon, published on 5th August last year, featured two photographs of politician Agustin Delgado, with speech bubbles mocking his stumbling delivery.

Delgado and President Rafael Correa both accused Bonil of racism, though the cartoonist argued that he was commenting on Delgado's political inexperience rather than his African ancestry. Bonil has now been ordered to produce a revised version of the cartoon. El Universo and Bonil were also censured by SuperCom last year, after a previous complaint from Correa.

23 January 2015

“Thai democracy is dead...”


Democracy Monument

The National Legislative Assembly voted today to impeach former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra. She has therefore been banned from political activity for the next five years. (Her brother, former PM Thaksin Shinawatra, also received a five-year ban, in 2007.) The verdict was largely a foregone conclusion, as the NLA members were all appointed by the junta.

Yingluck will also face a criminal investigation, the Attorney General announced today. Yingluck had planned to give a press conference following the impeachment vote, though the military prevented her from doing so. Instead, she issued a statement online: “Even as Thai democracy is dead and the rule of law destroyed, anti-democratic forces still remain prevalent as a destructive force, as evident from what I am experiencing.”

Yingluck’s impeachment had been recommended by the National Anti-Corruption Commission, following its investigation into her controversial rice subsidy scheme. (In 2011, the Pheu Thai government agreed to pay farmers up to 50% above the market rate for their rice, intending to withhold it from the world market and thus drive up the price. The result, however, was that other countries increased their rice exports, leaving the government with vast stockpiles that it could not sell.)

Given that Yingluck was removed from office by the Constitutional Court on 7th May last year, her impeachment eight months later seems designed purely to prevent her from returning to power in future elections. It also, therefore, reinforces the impression that last year’s coup (as in 2006) was intended primarily to remove all traces of Thaksin’s political influence. (Thaksin led the most popular political movement in Thai history, though he was viewed as a threat by the military and the Privy Council, thus his nominees Samak Sundaravej and Somchai Wongsawat were both removed by the Constitutional Court.)

The NACC had also recommended the impeachment of Somsak Kiatsuranon and Nikhom Wairatpanich—former speakers of the House of Representatives and the Senate, respectively—though their impeachments were rejected by the NLA. Somsak and Nikhom had organised parliamentary votes to amend article 117 of the constitution, in an attempt to restore a fully-elected Senate.

(The 1997 constitution established an elected Senate for the first time, though after the military’s 2007 constitution the Senate was only 50% elected; the proposed amendment was rejected by the Constitutional Court.) Ironically, the military violated the constitution by declaring martial law, and then tore up the entire charter when they launched the coup, yet Somsak and Nikhom faced the threat of impeachment for attempting to amend individual articles in parliament.

Yingluck was elected in 2011. Just as Thaksin was deposed following People’s Alliance for Democracy protests, Yingluck was dismissed after protests by the People’s Democratic Reform Committee. In both cases, the protesters caused maximum disruption as a pretext for a coup—the PAD occupied Suvarnabhumi airport in 2008, and the PDRC sabotaged the election in 2014—though no protest leaders have been prosecuted. In Yingluck’s case, the protests began after her attempt to secure an amnesty for Thaksin, a policy that was condemned by both sides of the political divide.

20 January 2015

Cartographies Of Time

Cartographies Of Time
A New Chart Of History
Cartographies Of Time: A History Of The Timeline, by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, is a history of the visual representation of chronological data. This specialised branch of information graphics has not been studied before, as the authors explain: "little has been written about historical charts and diagrams... This book is an attempt to address that gap." The result is a fascinating, comprehensive, and profusely illustrated history of timelines.

The most impressive timelines featured in Cartographies Of Time are those that attempt to represent the entirety of human history. Joseph Priestley's A New Chart Of History (1769) was one of the first significant examples, followed by Friedrich Strass's Strom Der Zeiten (1804). (Sandra Rendgren's Information Graphics includes Eugene Pick's Tableau De L'Histoire Universelle from 1858, one of several timelines inspired by Strass.)

The Book Of Trees

The Book Of Trees
The Book Of Trees: Visualizing Branches Of Knowledge is a history of tree diagrams and their influence on information graphics. Author Manuel Lima begins by discussing figurative tree diagrams, though subsequent chapters cover "a number of visual methods and techniques for the representation of hierarchical structures".

The book is most significant for its inclusion of diagrams created from the Middle Ages onwards. As the author explains, the field of data visualisation has a surprisingly extensive history, and it is therefore "critical for us to understand this long evolution and not be overly infatuated with work created in the last decade alone". (Sandra Rendgen's Information Graphics and Understanding The World focus primarily on contemporary infographics, though Lima includes numerous recent examples, too.)

The Book Of Trees doesn't succeed in its ambitious attempt "to convey the long, millennial history of information visualization", as it would likely be impossible to produce a comprehensive history of 1,000 years of infographics in a single volume. But it's a fascinating study, and a useful expansion of the first chapter of Lima's earlier book, Visual Complexity. (Edward R Tufte's classic The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information examines the history of charts, tables, and graphs.)

Mardom-e Emrooz

Mardom-e Emrooz
An Iranian newspaper has been closed down after it expressed support for Charlie Hebdo, the French newspaper which suffered a terrorist attack earlier this month. On 13th January, Mardom-e Emrooz published the back-page headline (in Arabic) "I am Charlie, too". A court in Tehran this weekend revoked the newspaper's publishing licence, ruling that expressing solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, which has printed a new Mohammed cartoon, was unacceptable in an Islamic country.

17 January 2015

Understanding The World

Understanding The World
Pulp Fiction In Chronological Order
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
Understanding The World: The Atlas Of Infographics, written by Sandra Rendgen and edited by Julius Wiedemann, is a somewhat premature sequel to the excellent Information Graphics. Like that earlier book, also published by Taschen, Understanding The World features a new infographic by Nigel Holmes, a historical introduction by Rendgen, and an extensive selection of contemporary infographics organised by category. Both books are folios with brightly colour-coded chapters, and they share the same high-quality colour reproduction and print clarity.

There are several differences between the two books. Nigel Holmes's contribution to Understanding The World is a double-page infographic, though he produced a poster for Information Graphics. Understanding The World is organised thematically (nature, science, economy, society, and culture), whereas Information Graphics was classified by format. While Information Graphics cited the sources in which its infographics first appeared, Understanding The World sometimes omits these citations.

Most significantly, Understanding The World's historical introduction is substantially shorter than that of Information Graphics. The few examples it cites are well chosen, though: Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle, Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (from which a world map is reproduced), and Denis Diderot's Encyclopedie.

As in Information Graphics, the historical examples remain the highlights of Understanding The World. These hand-drawn maps and diagrams were created hundreds of years before the computer-generated contemporary examples that dominate the book. (Fortunately, there are a few additional historical examples inserted into each chapter.) From the portfolio of recent infographics, one of the most interesting is Noah Smith's timeline Pulp Fiction In Chronological Order, a deconstruction of the film's convoluted narrative.