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.

Madonna also performed a concert at the Olympia concert hall in Paris, on 26th July, which was livestreamed online. The show, MDNA a l'Olympia (MDNA at the Olympia), ended with a cove version of the Serge Gainsbourge classic Je t'aime... moi non plus.

Ashes

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

The film has no dialogue, though it has a voice-over describing “a dream within a dream”. 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.

Ashes was made for the Mubi website, and was filmed with a LomoKino, a hand-cranked camera that records short film clips on consumer 35mm film rolls. There is even a special Mubi edition of the LomoKino available to buy, branded with Apichatpong’s signature.

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.

Dieter Rams: As Little Design As Possible

Dieter Rams: As Little Design As Possible, written by Sophie Lovell and published by Phaidon, profiles one of the world's most famous industrial designers. Dieter Rams, who was head of design at Braun for over thirty years, designed hundreds of consumer products, including the ET66 calculator, the iconic white SK4 record player, and the aluminium T1000 world-band transistor radio.

The book includes a foreword by Jonathan Ive, Apple's chief designer, who is the nearest equivalent to Rams in contemporary industrial design. Working with Steve Jobs, Ive produced a series of consumer-technology devices (including the iMac, iPhone, iPod, and iPad) that conformed to the "ten principles of good design" that Rams formulated.

Rams felt that successful design should be innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, honest, unobtrusive, long-lasting, thorough, environmentally friendly, and should involve "as little design as possible". That last maxim, adapted from Mies van der Rohe's 'less is more', became the title of Lovell's book.

In her preface, Lovell writes that Rams told her: "Why on earth do we need another book about me?" Thus, while there are occasional quotes footnoted as "Rams, in conversation with the author", Rams clearly didn't give Lovell a formal interview. There are, however, plenty of glossy photos fetishising beautiful radios, clocks, and other objects from the past fifty years.