A History Of The Movies In Four Parts

Today's edition of the Wall Street Journal features A History Of The Movies In Four Parts, a guide to "four landmark films" selected by David Thomson. (Thomson's book Have You Seen...? has a list of 1,000 films.) The four films profiled in today's concise article (in the Weekend Journal supplement) are M, Psycho (the subject of Thomson's book The Moment Of Psycho), Sunrise, and The Truman Show.

Design Nation

Design Nation, a festival of music, performance, film, and visual art, opened at the Pridi Banomyong Institute in Bangkok on 29th September, with a screening of Carl Dreyer's silent classic The Passion Of Joan Of Arc. The festival ran until yesterday.

Last night, Design Nation closed with an evening of four film screenings. A Retelling Of Dystopia I (by Nopadol Boonyai) and II (by Teerawat Mulvilai) are edited versions of 1970s action movies with comical live dubbing (as in What's New Pussycat?). The Island Of Utopias (by Pramote Sangsorn) features a poor man searching through the rubble of a collapsed building. Finally, Thunska Pansittivorakul's 2060 is an extract from his forthcoming feature Supernatural.

2060, set forty-eight years in the future, features three men reciting the rules of citizenship (respecting the nation, religion, and monarchy), and discussing a birthday speech by "the Leader". There are echoes of George Orwell's 1984, though it's also a comment on contemporary Thailand. Cutaways to posters of Communist dictators highlight the power of propaganda and cult of personality.

The film ends with direct criticism of the Thai military, featuring photographs from the October 1976 massacre and condemning two former generals (the sanctimonious Chamlong Srimuang and the unrepentant Pallop Pinmanee). Thunska has previously directed numerous short films, and his features include This Area Is Under Quarantine, Reincarnate, and The Terrorists.

Muji Product Fitness 80

Muji Product Fitness 80, an exhibition of Muji-designed products, opened at Central Chitlom, Bangkok, last week, and will run until 22nd October. The suitably minimalist exhibition includes a small collection of Muji posters. Industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa gave a presentation on the opening day, 9th October, though strangely his most famous design - a Muji wall-mounted CD player - is not part of the exhibition.

Cactus River

Cactus River, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest short film, premiered on the Walker Art Center's website earlier today. The film is an observational documentary filmed in black-and-white, with some scenes speeded up and others slowed down.

It stars Apichatpong's regular collaborator Jenjira Pongpas (who also appears in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Mekong Hotel, Morakot, The Anthem, Luminous People, and My Mother's Garden), who has now changed her name to Nach Widner. Apichatpong's previous online short films are Ashes, For Alexis, Phantoms Of Nabua, Mobile Men, and Prosperity For 2008.

10th World Film Festival of Bangkok

The 10th World Film Festival of Bangkok will open on 16th November with a screening of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new film, Mekong Hotel. This semi-documentary is set on the Thai/Laos border, like Apichatpong's recent Primitive films. It will be screened again on 21st November.

Leos Carax's eccentric new film, Holy Motors, will also be shown (on 17th November including a Q&A with Carax, and then on 22nd November), alongside his classic romantic drama Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf (on 19th and 22nd November). Holy Motors is full of references to French cinema history, including Etienne-Jules Marey's Chronophotographie and Edith Scob once again wearing the mask from Eyes Without A Face.

The opening-night screening of Mekong Hotel will be at Paragon Cineplex (the venue for the 6th, 7th, and 8th Festivals), with subsequent films showing at Esplanade Cineplex (the venue for the 5th Festival, and the 9th earlier this year). The Festival will close on 25th November.

Shargh

The Iranian newspaper Shargh was shut down last week, and its editor Mehdi Rahmanian was arrested, after the newspaper printed a cartoon commenting on the Iran-Iraq War. The cartoon, by Hadi Haydari, was published on 25th September, and shows Iranian soldiers blindfolding each other.

The Price Of Politics

The Price Of Politics, by Bob Woodward, details last year's tortuous negotiations between President Obama and House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner over the rise in America's debt ceiling. Woodward reconstructs the meetings between the two sides in considerable detail, supplemented by interviews with Obama and Boehner. (Woodward also interviewed Obama for his last book, Obama's Wars.)

The exhaustive detail limits the book's scope: the negotiations are covered in depth, but this sidelines any coverage of wider economic issues. (Ron Suskind's Confidence Men had a broader scope.) Also, Obama and Boehner's disputes are already familiar, and their bargaining and quibbling don't exactly make for a riveting read.

1001 MoviesYou Must See Before You Die

The 2012 edition of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider, has just been released. As in previous editions (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011), changes to the list have been limited to the most recent films.

Fourteen films have been removed, including the South Korean western The Good, the Bad, and the Weird (좋은 놈, 나쁜 놈, 이상한 놈) and Roman Polanski’s award-winning The Pianist. The Passion of the Christ, first deleted in 2009 then reinstated in 2011, has been deleted again. The fourteen replacement films include Shame, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Tree of Life, Hugo, and The Artist.

International Herald Tribune

The International Herald Tribune newspaper today published a cartoon by Patrick Chappatte which includes a drawing of Mohammed. (It was first published by Le Temps newspaper in Switzerland.)

The cartoon shows Voltaire in the editorial office of French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Voltaire is depicted holding a copy of Charlie Hebdo, which features a caricature of a naked Mohammed. Chappatte previously drew Mohammed in one of his 2006 cartoons.

The Race For Colour

The Race For Colour, directed by Vince Rogers, was broadcast on BBC1 on Monday. It's a short documentary on the discovery of the first experimental colour film.

Staff at the UK's National Media Museum in Bradford (which, incidentally, has a splendid Cinerama auditorium) found a reel of 38mm film made by Edward Raymond Turner in the 1900s. Turner shot with black-and-white film through red, green, and blue filters, and projected the film through the same filters to produce a colour image. (Previously, colour had been achieved artificially by hand-painting or tinting each frame.) After Turner's death, however, his test films were considered lost, and a rival system, the Kinemacolour process, was developed instead.

Kinemacolor was a retrograde technology, though, as it used only two filters (red and green, a simplification of Turner's three-filter process), resulting in less realistic colour reproduction. Kinemacolor was one of a series of cinematic innovations produced by the 'Brighton school', a group of film pioneers that included William Friese-Greene (inventor of the Biophantascope), Charles Urban, James Williamson, and George Albert Smith. They are particularly famous for their early use of close-up photography, in Smith's film Grandma's Reading Glass and in Williamson's The Big Swallow.

Technicolor eventually achieved realistic colour reproduction, initially with a two-strip process used for The Gulf Between and The Black Pirate. Three-strip Technicolor was first used for Becky Sharp, though is most famous for the classics The Adventures Of Robin Hood, Gone With The Wind, and The Wizard Of Oz.

The Race For Colour includes fragments of Turner's colour film, which dates from 1902, demonstrating that his three-colour system was at least twenty years ahead of its time. The programme also features Martin Scorsese discussing Turner's footage.

The discovery of Turner's film rewrites film history. After the hand-coloured version of A Trip To The Moon, the longer version of Metropolis, and the Danish version of The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, Turner's footage represents yet another incredible discovery of a historic silent film.

Stanley Kubrick & Me

Stanley Kubrick & Me, written by Emilio D'Alessandro with my good friend Filippo Ulivieri, is D'Alessandro's memoir of his time as part of Kubrick's inner circle. D'Alessandro initially worked as Kubrick's driver, though he later became one of the director's closest associates.

Stanley Kubrick & Me (subtitled Trent'anni Accanto A Lui: Rivelazioni & Cronache Inedite Dell'assistente Personale Di Un Genio) tells the story of D'Alessandro's thirty years with Kubrick. It's the autobiography of the director's most trusted assistant.

Charlie Hebdo

Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French newspaper, has again published provocative cartoons of Mohammed. The newspaper's current issue features a back-page caricature of Mohammed naked with a video camera, and a cartoon of Mohammed at an awards ceremony; both caricatures were drawn by Renald Luzier, known as Luz.

The cartoons are a commentary on the recent film clip Innocence Of Muslims. That film has led to anti-American protests outside numerous American embassies, and over thirty people have been killed as a result. Anticipating similar reactions to Charlie Hebdo's cartoons, several French embassies have announced that they will close on Friday as a precaution.

Charlie Hebdo's editorial office in Paris is currently being guarded by riot police. The office was attacked by arsonists last year after the newspaper published a Charia Hebdo special edition 'guest-edited' by Mohammed. Charlie Hebdo also caused controversy in 2006 by printing Mohammed cartoons in solidarity with Jyllands-Posten. Charlie Hebdo's first Mohammed cartoon appeared in 2002.

Many other publications also printed their own Mohammed cartoons in solidarity with Jyllands-Posten: Weekendavisen, France Soir, The Guardian, Le Monde, Philadelphia Daily News, Liberation, Het Nieuwsblad, The Daily Tar Heel, Akron Beacon Journal, The Strand, Nana, International Herald Tribune, Gorodskiye Vesti, Adresseavisen, Uke-Adressa, and Harper's.

Equally provocative drawings of Mohammed as a dog were exhibited in 2007. The short film Fitna also includes a Mohammed cartoon, and there was an Everybody Draw Mohammed Day! event in 2010.

Closer

A French court has ordered the publisher of Closer magazine to cease distribution of photographs of Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, topless. The paparazzi photos were taken while she and her husband, Prince William, were sunbathing at a private villa. The couple took legal action against the publisher, and are also seeking a criminal prosecution of the photographer.

The photos first appeared in Closer last Friday, and were reprinted by the Irish Daily Star newspaper the next day. Italian magazine Chi (which previously printed a photograph of a dying Princess Diana) published more of the images on Monday. The magazine Se & Hor, published in Sweden and Denmark, has announced that it will print the photographs this Friday. The regional French paper La Provence printed a relatively modest picture of the Duchess in a bikini on 7th September.

Nude photographs of the royal family have been published before. Famously, UK tabloid The Sun printed a topless photo of Sarah Fergusson on its front page on 21st August 1992. Full-frontal photos of Prince Charles were published in Playgirl magazine (January 1997). Famously, Brad Pitt successfully sued Playgirl for invasion of privacy after it published nude photographs of him in August 1997 (which was the magazine's best-selling issue).

The Master Switch (paperback)

The Master Switch: The Rise & Fall Of Information Empires, by Tim Wu, has been slightly expanded for its paperback edition. Wu's meticulously researched book has an impressive and ambitious historical scope, covering the development of communications media throughout the 20th century.

Wu identifies a pattern that he calls "the Cycle": the introduction of a new technology creates an open period of unregulated access, though this honeymoon phase ends when vertically-integrated oligopolies take over control of the medium. Wu demonstrates that radio/television networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) and the Hollywood studio system (MGM, Paramount, Fox, RKO, and Warner) conform to this model, though his central example is AT&T, which fought off competition from Western Union to effectively monopolise American telecommunications.

The history of the Cycle serves as a cautionary tale, as the paradigm shift to digital communication could instigate a new Cycle of conglomeration. Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser crushed its rival, Netscape, leading to the 1998 anti-trust case. Early web portals such as AOL (which later merged with Time Warner) have been replaced by an effective duopoly of social networks: Facebook and Twitter. Smartphone operating systems are similarly bifurcated, between Google's Android and Apple's iOS. Apple (which operates a 'walled garden' similar to the old AOL model) and Google (now facing its own anti-trust case) both claim to value innovation above profit, though both companies are now producing software and hardware, reducing compatibility between different systems.

As Wu writes: "Both Apple and Google, while pursuing different versions of the good, have continued to cultivate and leverage their status as dominant firms and, technically, monopolists in some key markets... Along with a few other 800-pound gorillas, like Facebook and Amazon, they disproportionately determine what the internet is in the 2010s". Wu's proposed solution is the adoption of a "Separations Principle", comparable to the independence of the three branches of government or the division of church and state. He argues that the three tiers of communications media - content producers, network infrastructure providers, and device manufacturers - should remain separate, thus avoiding the potential risks associated with vertical integration.

The Rise Of The Collateral

Police have closed an exhibition of paintings by Nepalese artist Manish Harijan. The exhibition, The Rise Of The Collateral at Siddhartha Art Gallery in Kathmandu, was shut down yesterday after police received complaints that Harijan's work was blasphemous.

Harijan's exhibition included paintings of Hindu deities caricatured as superheroes, such as Captain America Playing With Bhairav and The Ghost Rider In Buddha. Super Kali portrayed Kali as Superwoman. Super Nataraj depicted Shiva as Superman. The exhibition, which featured eleven paintings, opened on 22nd August and was scheduled to close on 20th September.

Les Films-Cles Du Cinema

Les Films-Cles Du Cinema, by Claude Beylie and Jacques Pinturault, is a guide to 250 milestone films, organised chronologically. The ninth edition was published last year.

The book, written solely by Beylie, was first published in 1987. He compiled a further four editions, in 1990, 1993, 1997, and 1998. Pinturault has been Beylie's co-writer since the sixth edition, published in 2002. Together, they wrote subsequent editions in 2006 and 2008.

Cartoons Against Corruption

Aseem Trivedi has been arrested in Mumbai, and charged with insulting India’s national symbols. Trivedi founded Cartoons Against Corruption last year, to campaign against political corruption, and his cartoons were displayed at MMRDA in Mumbai last December.

Trivedi’s most controversial cartoons include National Emblem, which represents the four Sarnath lions as bloodthirsty wolves; National Toilet, in which the country’s parliament is depicted as a toilet; and Gang Rape of Mother India, which uses a violent sexual metaphor to symbolise the damaging influence of corruption. Trivedi faces up to two years in prison if found guilty. His detention comes after the arrest last year of another Indian cartoonist, Harish Yadav.

Creativities Unfold 2012

TCDC's flagship event, Creativities Unfold, runs this year from 25th August until tomorrow. The theme for 2012 is Design Is Opportunities: Innovation, Strategy, Business. This morning, the International Symposium featured a presentation by industrial-design icon Dieter Rams.

Rams, speaking in German, delivered a speech about the challenges facing contemporary designers in a consumer society, including materialism, disposability, and visual pollution. He followed this with a more relaxed Q&A session, in which he discussed some of his classic Braun designs - the TP1 portable turntable, the T1000 world-band radio, the TG60 reel-to-reel recorder, the ET66 calculator, the T2 lighter, and the MPZ2 juicer - in relation to his famous 'zehn thesen zum design' ('ten principles of design', first published in 1995).

VSD

The French magazine VSD has been fined 2,000 euros for invasion of privacy after it published photographs of French President Francois Hollande and his partner, Valerie Trierweiler, on holiday at Fort Bregancon. VSD printed the photographs in its 9th August issue. Trierweiler is also suing three other magazines for publishing similar photos on their front covers: Public (published on 10th August), Closer (11th August), and Voici (11th August).

10th Printemps Des Arts

Two artists were arrested in Tunisia following widespread protests against their exhibits at the recent Printemps Des Arts exhibition. Mohamed Ben Slama's work, Sobhana Allah, depicts ants emerging from a child's satchel and spelling the word 'Allah'. Nadia Jelassi's sculpture Celui Qui N'a Pas... features two Muslim women surrounded by stones. Both works were shown at the Palais Abdellia in Tunis, from 1st-10th June.

The MDNA Tour

Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right Front National party, has filed a lawsuit against Madonna after the singer depicted her as a Nazi at a concert in Paris. During The MDNA Tour, a video of Nobody Knows Me plays as an interlude, and the video includes a split-second sequence in which a swastika is shown on Le Pen's forehead.

After the tour opened in June, Le Pen announced that she would sue if Madonna included the swastika in her French concerts. When the tour reached Paris on 14th July, the swastika was present (prompting a loud cheer from the crowd), and Le Pen sued Madonna for defamation. When Madonna played the video at her next French stadium show, in Nice on 21st August, she changed the swastika to a question mark, though the swastika has been included in all of her concerts outside France.

The question mark at the Nice concert is a rare example of Madonna censoring any aspect of her live shows. Scottish police had warned her against using prop guns during her MDNA Tour performance of Gang Bang, though her Edinburgh show on 21st June included the guns. Similarly, the behind-the-scenes documentary Truth or Dare shows Madonna defying police in Canada during her 1990 Blond Ambition Tour in 1990.

Ashes

Ashes, a new short film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, features Apichatpong's dog, King Kong, and various farm animals. It will open the 16th Thai Short Film & Video Festival on 16th August.

It has no dialogue, though there is a voice-over describing "a dream within a dream" (Inception?). There is also footage of a protest against Thailand's lèse-majesté law, kaleidoscopic light patterns, jungle scenes, and a horizontal split-screen sequence. It ends with a pyrotechnical display at a funeral ceremony. The film was made for the Mubi website, and is Apichatpong's second online partnership (after his Animate Projects collaboration in 2009).

Ashes was filmed with a LomoKino, a hand-cranked camera that records short film clips on consumer 35mm film rolls. It's like a return to the Lumiere brothers' Cinematographe, which similarly captured only a minute of footage per roll. The lo-tech LomoKino also resembles the PXL (PixelVision) camera from the 1980s, which recorded video footage onto regular audio cassettes. There is even a special Mubi edition of the LomoKino available to buy, branded with Apichatpong's signature.

Apichatpong is now most famous for his feature films, such as Tropical Malady, Syndromes & A Century, and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, though he has also directed many short films and videos in addition to Ashes. These include Prosperity For 2008, Vampire, Luminous People, Mobile Men, Phantoms Of Nabua, For Alexis, A Letter To Uncle Boonmee, and the Primitive project. He has hosted two retrospectives of his short films in Bangkok: Apichatpong On Video Works and Indy Spirit Project.

16th Thai Short Film & Video Festival

The 16th Thai Short Film & Video Festival starts at BACC this Thursday, and runs until 26th August. The Festival will open with the Thai premiere of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new short film, Ashes.

The Thai Short Film & Video Festival is Thailand's oldest film festival. The 11th Festival was at Bangkok's now-closed EGV Grand Discovery cinema, though the 12th, 13th, and all subsequent festivals have been hosted by BACC.

The Unfinished Revolution

Philip Gould's book The Unfinished Revolution: How The Modernisers Saved The Labour Party has been substantially expanded, and now has a new subtitle: How New Labour Changed British Politics For Ever. The new version reprints the original edition and supplements it with an entirely new second part (similar in organisation, though not in subject, to the expanded edition of Nightmare Movies).

The new section covers Labour's three terms in government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (though Andrew Rawnsley dealt with the same period more objectively in Servants Of The People and The End Of The Party). Blair has written an extensive foreword to Gould's book, arguing that Brown "took an Old Labour way out of the financial crisis"; advocating a return to the New Labour agenda, Blair even uses that old phrase from the Bill Clinton era, 'the Third Way', which is hardly likely to inspire a revival of Labour's fortunes.