16 July 2018

Full Metal Jacket


Full Metal Jacket

Cinema Winehouse in Bangkok will be screening Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket on 21st July. (They showed Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining earlier this year.)

15 July 2018

3D:
Double Vision


3D: Double Vision

3D: Double Vision, edited by Britt Salvesen, is the catalogue to an exhibition of 3D art currently on show in Los Angeles, though it's also an in-depth (no pun intended) history of stereoscopic imagery. The book includes a chapter on stereographs by Errki Huhtamo (author of Illusions in Motion) and a detailed chronology of stereographs, holograms, Magic Eye, and lenticular images by Zach Rottman.

The stereoscope viewer and stereograph cards were Victorian inventions, which later influenced devices such as the View-Master. The first feature-length 3D film, The Power of Love, was released in 1922, though 3D cinema's heyday was in the early 1950s, with films such as Bwana Devil and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Look magazine published a lenticular image ("the first three-dimensional photograph ever produced in mass quantities by any publication anywhere") in its 25th February 1964 issue. The first printed hologram appeared in Science Year 1967: The World Book Science Annual.

There have been previous books on 3D cinema (3-D Movies by R.M. Hayes) and holographic images (Holograms by Sean F. Johnston), though Salvesen's fascinating catalogue is the first comprehensive cultural history of 3D. The exhibition plates are reproduced in 3D, and the book comes with two pairs of glasses to view stereograph and anaglyph images.

09 July 2018

The Maltese Falcon


Cinema Winehouse

Bangkok’s Cinema Winehouse will be screening The Maltese Falcon this evening. John Huston’s debut film is a classic thriller and a perfect film noir.

03 July 2018

Preacher

Preacher
Dirty Little Secret, an episode of the second season of Preacher, begins with Jesus having sex with a woman after the Last Supper, on the night before Good Friday. Afterwards, his disciples arrive, and he leaves with them for the Garden of Gethsemane. Later, the episode reveals that the woman gave birth to his child, thus continuing his bloodline. The latest descendent is Humperdoo, a mentally disabled man worshipped as a living messiah. The Preacher is based on a comic series written by Garth Ennis. Dirty Little Secret was broadcast on 21st August 2017 on the US cable channel AMC.

The myth of a divine bloodline was popularised forty years ago by Donovan Joyce's The Jesus Scroll, and more recently by Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code. Nigel Wingrove's short film Visions of Ecstasy depicts Saint Theresa's fantasy of sex with Jesus during his crucifixion. Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ caused controversy with a dream sequence in which Jesus has sex with Mary Magdalene. A sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary was also featured in the D.H. Lawrence novella The Escaped Cock (retitled The Man Who Died) and Fernando Bayona's photographic exhibition Circus Christi.

02 July 2018

Bangkok Screening Room


Bangkok Screening Room

This month, Bangkok Screening Room will show Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Monrak Transistor (มนต์รักทรานซิสเตอร์) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. Both films will be screened on 10th, 11th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 21st, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, and 31st July.

Monrak Transistor is one of Pen-ek’s most accessible and entertaining films. Like Wisit Sasanatieng’s Tears of the Black Tiger (ฟ้าทะลายโจร), it both celebrates and critiques the nostalgic idyll it depicts.

Rope, inspired by the Leopold and Loeb murder case, is most notable for its experimental editing technique: it was filmed entirely in ten-minute takes, and takes place in real time on a single set. It was also Hitchcock’s first independent film, after his Selznick International Pictures contract ended, and his first film in colour.