Stories On Human Rights

Stories On Human Rights, an evening of film screenings, will take place at the FCCT in Bangkok on 4th May. The films were commissioned by the United Nations, and the programme includes Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mobile Men. Apichatpong will be present for a Q&A session after the screenings.

Our Body

Our Body: A Corps Ouvert, an exhibition of seventeen plastinated human corpses, has been closed down on the orders of a French court. It opened in Paris on 12th February, and was due to run until 10th May, though a judge ruled that it was a disrespectful use of human cadavers. The exhibition features real bodies with exposed muscles, and is one of several imitators of the original Bodyworlds exhibition, which opened more than a decade ago.

15 Most Influential Classic Movies

TCM's 15 Most Influential Classic Movies:

• The Birth Of A Nation
  
• Battleship Potemkin
  
• Metropolis
  
• 42nd Street
  
• It Happened One Night
  
• Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs
  
• Gone With The Wind
  
• Stagecoach
  
• Citizen Kane
  
• Bicycle Thieves
  
• Rashomon
  
• The Searchers
  
• Breathless
  
• Psycho
  
• Star Wars IV: A New Hope

This chronological list was compiled by Turner Classic Movies last week. I would only quibble with a couple of their choices: is It Happened One Night really necessary on such a short list, and surely Stagecoach could be removed if The Searchers is included? Also, nothing from Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman, Francis Coppola, or Jean Renoir.

The Hacienda Must Be Built

Chulalonghorn University's Art Centre will host an exhibition by Australian artist Arlo Mountford later this month. The show, titled The Hacienda Must Be Built, opens on 21st April and closes on 30th May. It features Mountford's video installation Return To Point, which consists of animations based on canonical artworks, including a Richard Hamilton collage (Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?).

United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship

Two residents of Bangkok’s Nang Loeng district have been shot dead by United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship protesters. Residents in several districts, especially tenants in Din Daeng apartments, have clashed with the UDD in Bangkok today.

The red-shirted UDD movement originally prided itself on protesting peacefully and legally, in contrast to the yellow-shirted People’s Alliance for Democracy. The UDD’s demands (for the army and Privy Council to stay out of politics, for the violent PAD protesters to be prosecuted, for the reinstatement of the 1997 ‘people’s constitution’, and for a new general election) are reasonable, though of course they are likely to lose any public sympathy after the violence of yesterday and today.

Early this morning, the army began advancing on a group of demonstrators at the Din Daeng intersection near Victory Monument, firing shots into the air from M16 rifles. After several hours, and dozens of injuries, the protesters dispersed. UDD leaders claimed that six protesters were killed, a rumour that former PM Thaksin Shinawatra repeated in live CNN and BBC interviews this evening. Also on CNN, Thaksin pleaded for royal intervention: “I humbly urge His Majesty the King to intervene, please”.

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva declared a state of emergency in Bangkok yesterday, and the UDD reacted by raiding several government ministries and attacking the PM’s car. Several buses and gas tankers have also been hijacked by UDD demonstrators.

Sunday Times

Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa's ruling ANC party, is suing cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro (known as Zapiro) for libel. Shapiro's cartoon was published in the Sunday Times newspaper on 7th September 2008, and on the front page of its sister paper The Times two days later; it was also broadcast on CNN last month (African Voices, 22nd March).

‘Finland Plot’

Former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra sued political columnist Pramote Nakornthap for libel after Pramote alleged that Thaksin was involved in a republican scheme known as 'the Finland Plot'. The allegations were made in a series of five articles written by Pramote, published in the Manager Daily (ผู้จัดการรายวัน) newspaper on 17th–25th May 2006.

Manager is one of the publications owned by People’s Alliance for Democracy leader Sondhi Limthongkul, and Pramote’s articles were part of a campaign to discredit Thaksin by questioning his loyalty to the monarchy. Today, the Criminal Court gave Pramote a one-year prison sentence, suspended for two years, after finding him guilty of libel. Thaksin previously sued Sondhi in 2005.

Six Degrees Of Separation

Kiosk at Bangkok's TCDC presents a festival of short Thai films called Six Degrees Of Separation, every Saturday until 11th April. Each week, a different director introduces a retrospective of their most notable films.

Sompot Chidgasornpongse appeared tonight, and showed four films: To Infinity & Beyond (people watching the sky, played twice: first with data about space missions, then repeated as a parable about prioritisation), Physical Therapy (a very short, almost abstract study of a desert landscape, in 16mm), Yesterday (a hand-held semi-documentary following a group of Thai students in California, influenced by Dogme), and Diseases & A Hundred Year Period.

The latter film features censored scenes from Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes & A Century. It premiered with Physical Therapy and Yesterday at the 12th Thai Short Film & Video Festival last year; it was also shown recently at the Filmvirus thirteenth anniversary exhibition.

Mondo Cane

Mondo Cane, directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti, features sensationalist documentary footage set to an inappropriately thunderous musical score. The clips compiled by Jacopetti present African and Asian societies as 'primitive' and 'savage'; the narrator even refers to a tribe from New Guinea as "barbarians".

Jacopetti uses juxtapositions for shock effect, such as cutting from a close-up of a model's cleavage to a tribeswoman suckling a pig, and a shot of pet dogs in America followed by footage of an Asian dog-meat restaurant. The film is exploitative, with its National Geographic-style nudity and animal-slaughter, and it's also misleading. For example, a beached turtle is seen flapping its flippers in obvious distress, though apparently, according to the narrator, the 'delusional' creature believes it is swimming in the ocean.

Clearly unable to source sufficient shocking material, Jacopetti pads the film out with long, dull sequences showing mildly intoxicated Germans and retired American tourists. The film was, however, an inexplicable success, and it instigated the long-lasting mondo documentary sub-genre (as discussed in the books Sweet & Savage and Killing For Culture).

Subsequent mondo films repeated Jacopetti's formula of exotic tribal rituals, incongruous music, exploitative nudity and violence, and condescending narration. Of course, each film was more explicit than the last, with the sub-genre eventually specialising in (both genuine and simulated) footage of human death. Jacopetti himself directed several further mondo films, including the graphic Africa Addio, the filming of which was critiqued in the horror film Cannibal Holocaust.

Making Waves

Making Waves: New Cinemas Of The 1960s is Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's account of cinema's various New Wave movements, including those of Britain, France, Germany, Brazil, and Czechoslovakia. The book's focus is almost exclusively European, thus there is no discussion of New Hollywood or the new cinemas of Japan, Yugoslavia, or Hungary. Nowell-Smith is the editor of the excellent The Oxford History Of World Cinema.

A chapter on censorship includes Dusan Makavejev and Vilgot Sjoman - yet not Andy Warhol's Flesh, which was confiscated by British police. This chapter ends with Salo and Empire Of The Senses, which, though fascinating, really belong to a later era.

There are also concise surveys of film criticism (principally Cahiers Du Cinema) and technology (colour, widescreen, and the zoom lens). Due to the lack of American coverage, critics Jonas Mekas and Andrew Sarris are excluded. A footnote in the latter essay makes the odd assertion that black-and-white productions of the 1960s were "retarded films".

The highlight is the historical section, titled Movements, with chapters on British, French, Czech, and Latin American cinemas which succinctly cover all the bases. This section also includes a less comprehensive chapter on Italian cinema, which omits Mario Bava and Sergio Leone.

Deep Storage Art Project

Kristian von Hornsleth launched his Deep Storage Art Project in Bangkok this evening, at Gallery Soulflower. The Project involves collecting blood samples from volunteers and storing the samples inside a large sculpture which will be lowered onto the sea bed in the Mariana Trench (the deepest location on the planet's surface). Blood donors receive a certificate marked with blood and signed by the artist, and there will be a further opportunity for donation next Saturday evening.

Saboteur

Saboteur is archetypal Alfred Hitchcock: an innocent man caught up in counter-espionage and on the run from the authorities. Hitchcock had used almost exactly the same plot in his earlier (and better) British thriller The 39 Steps, and he would return to it again for North By Northwest.

Saboteur's leading man, Robert Cummings, doesn't quite have the charm of Robert Donat (The 39 Steps) or Cary Grant (North By Northwest). The supporting cast, however, includes a plethora of fascinating characters, such as a truck driver who looks like (but isn't) James Cagney, a kindly blind hermit (perhaps influenced by a sequence from The Bride Of Frankenstein), and even a group of circus freaks. As usual with Hitchcock, the villains are the most interesting figures, and Saboteur's spymaster, played by Otto Kruger, is as suave as those of The 39 Steps, North By Northwest, and Notorious.

The film is bookended by two impressive action sequences: a factory fire, with black smoke ominously filling the screen (the eponymous saboteur is an arsonist); and a climactic scene set at the top of the Statue of Liberty (a precursor of the Mount Rushmore chase scene in North By Northwest). But in between those two sequences, there are too many unexplained plot holes (methods of escape and reunion are conveniently omitted) and too much overtly patriotic speechifying (as Saboteur was made during World War II).

The Trouble With Harry

Alfred Hitchcock's black comedy The Trouble With Harry begins right away with the discovery of Harry's corpse in a wood. The body is found by a poacher, who assumes that he shot Harry by mistake and buries him to conceal the crime. But Harry is soon disinterred, and the poacher is vindicated. Then, a spinster reveals that she knocked Harry unconscious when he attacked her, and he is buried again to protect her modesty. The characters, including Harry's estranged widow, take all this in their stride, treating Harry's corpse merely as an inconvenience, with no sense of guilt, abjection, or even shock. They are all assisted by a local artist, Sam Marlowe, whose name is a cross between film noir detectives Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon) and Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep).

The film is full of bright, verdant autumn landscapes, a counterpoint to the macabre subject-matter. It's not a murder mystery, and has no suspense, making it a rather atypical Hitchcock film (though it's notable as his first collaboration with composer Bernard Herrmann). The setting, a village in Vermont, is almost equivalent to Royston Vasey (the fictional location of The League Of Gentlemen), with an insular population who seem to exist outside of conventional moral codes. The villagers discuss sex (the poacher crossing the spinster's "threshold"; whispered references to a "double bed") and death (Harry's repeated interments and exhumations) with a surprising frankness, and, in common with many Hitchcock characters, they seem to distrust the law.

In an unexpected 'happily ever after' ending, a passing millionaire grants wishes to all of the principal characters. It makes no sense at all, though it's surely deliberately unrealistic, perhaps even a Hitchcockian fairy-tale. As such, it's similar in tone to some of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television dramas and Roald Dahl's Tales Of The Unexpected short stories.

Phantoms Of Nabua

Phantoms Of Nabua is a new short film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, for Animate Projects (as is Jane and Louise Wilson's Unfolding The Aryan Papers). Apichatpong's film is part of an art installation titled Primitive, which also includes another short film, A Letter To Uncle Boonmee. Phantoms Of Nabua was filmed at night in the Thai town of Nabua, illuminated by a series of ethereal light sources including flashes of lightning, a burning football, and a film projector.

Recently, another new film by Apichatpong, Mobile Men, was also distributed online, and his Prosperity For 2008 was given an online release last year. He is best known as the director of Syndromes & A Century.

Mobile Men

Mobile Men is a new short film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, his contribution to a series titled Stories On Human Rights. The film features a group of Burmese migrant labourers in a pickup truck, and shows them asserting their masculinity by flexing their muscles and displaying their tattoos. Mobile Men is available online; Apichatpong has also distributed other works online, including Prosperity For 2008 and several forthcoming Animate Projects films.

Art Of Animation

Disneyland in Hong Kong includes a permanent exhibition of Disney concept art, including sketches and maquettes from films such as Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, Toy Story II, and Cars. The exhibition, titled Art Of Animation, opened last year.

Hemat

The editor of Hemat, a weekly Iranian satirical magazine, has been arrested. The magazine had published a spoof film poster featuring images of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his potential electoral rivals.

โปรแกรมหนังสั้นไทยคัดสรร

โปรแกรมหนังสั้นไทยคัดสรร, a show at Bangkok's Jamjuree Art Gallery to celebrate the thirteenth anniversary of DK Filmhouse, includes short films selected by two Thai bloggers, Jit Phokaew (Madeleine de Scudery) and Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa (Filmsick). Sompot Chidgasornpongse's film Diseases & A Hundred Year Period (inspired by Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes & A Century, and first shown at the 12th Thai Short Film & Video Festival last year) will be screened on 6th February.

Unfolding The Aryan Papers

In the early 1990s, Stanley Kubrick was planning to make a film about the Holocaust, titled Aryan Papers. Kubrick wrote the screenplay, adapted from Louis Begley's novel Wartime Lies, and cast Johanna Ter Steege in the lead role. However, when Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List went into production, Aryan Papers was abandoned, as Kubrick and/or the studio feared that audiences would have Holocaust-fatigue after Spielberg's film. (The same situation occurred in the early 1970s, when Kubrick could not secure funding for his Napoleon biopic after the release of Waterloo, and he suffered at the box-office in 1987 when Platoon was released before his own Vietnam war film, Full Metal Jacket.)

A new short film, Unfolding The Aryan Papers by Jane and Louise Wilson, features pre-production photographs of Johanna Ter Steege (costume tests, photographed by Kubrick, from the Stanley Kubrick Archive) and new film footage of the actress shot by the Wilsons. The exhibition will be showing at the British Film Institute (in London) and online (Animate Projects), from 13th February to 19th April.

Quote of the day...

Q: “So, does that mean the more than 2,300 websites that were banned were all done so by court order, and that the ICT has not preemptively or illegally banned any websites?”
A: “Yes. But it takes time to get court orders, so we may delete certain content deemed inappropriate before we go through the process.”
— Bangkok Post

The Computer Crime Act allows the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology to block websites only after successfully applying for a court order. Interviewed by Voranai Vanijaka in today’s Bangkok Post, ICT Minister Ranongrak Suwanchawee initially denied preemptively blocking websites, though she then immediately contradicted herself, and admitted to violating the Computer Crime Act. (In a previous quote of the day, a Ministry of Culture official patronised Thai filmgoers.)

San-Dan-Ka

A new butoh dance performance titled San-Dan-Ka, directed by Teerawat Mulvilai, will begin today at the Democrazy Theatre Studio in Bangkok. The performance was inspired by Anupong Chantorn's painting representing monks as crows. The final performance will be on 8th February.

Verisimilitude

Harry Nicolaides, the Australian author of the novel Verisimilitude, has been sentenced to three years in jail, on a charge of lèse-majesté. The sentence was reduced from six years because he pleaded guilty; Verisimilitude was self-published, and Nicolaides reportedly sold only a handful of copies. An official announcement banning distribution of the book was published in the Royal Gazette.

The lèse-majesté charge relates to a single paragraph (the second paragraph on page 115), though Nicolaides courted controversy by excerpting this paragraph in the press release he issued to promote the book. The passage in question has been published in various Australian newspapers (The Australian, 5th September 2008; The Age, 10th September 2008; The Sydney Morning Herald, 16th December 2008; The Canberra Times, today). It was also quoted yesterday by The Scotsman newspaper in Scotland.

Dirty Words

Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia Of Sex, edited by Ellen Sussman, consists of almost 100 chapters, each of which discusses a different 'dirty' word. The chapters are more anecdotal than literary, but it's great that a serious book on this subject has been published, especially with an uncensored cover.

In his chapter on one of the words (yes, that one), Jonathan Wilson quotes a paragraph verbatim from my website without any attribution. The editor has already confirmed that I'll be referenced properly when the book is reprinted.

The Dark Knight (IMAX 70mm)

The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s sequel to Batman Begins, stars Christian Bale as Batman and Heath Ledger as the Joker. This ultra-noir Batman, from the director of Memento, is nothing like the camp 1960s TV series, and is even darker than Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns.

Six sequences, including the incredible truck-flip (achieved without CGI), were filmed in IMAX 70mm format. With an aspect ratio of 1.43:1, these scenes occupy the full IMAX screen, though the majority of the film was shot on 35mm and is framed at 2.4:1.

Perishable Beauty

Perishable Beauty, running from 28th November 2008 until 22nd February 2009) at Bangkok's TCDC, is an exhibition exploring the transience of physical perfection (also the theme of The Way Of All Flesh, by Midas Dekkers). The exhibition's installation is stunning, though the exhibits themselves are less substantial.

A banqueting table laden with rotting food, sealed in an air-tight tank and growing mouldier every day, is the most impressive exhibit. There is also a diamond created from human ashes, produced commercially by Algordanza. Other displays, relying on TV clips, photographs, and everyday objects, are underwhelming.

Although the Perishable Beauty poster is seemingly inspired by Orlan, her work is not included in the exhibition. Also, the exhibition is filled with dead flowers yet Otto Berchem is not represented. (His sculpture Deadheading was shown in Bangkok two years ago, at The Suspended Moment.) Indeed, the exhibition is more suited to a museum than to TCDC, as it's educational rather than artistic.

Save The Film

The Thai Film Archive (in Salaya, near Bangkok) is hosting an event called Save The Film tomorrow afternoon. Two of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's recent films will be shown: Luminous People (which premiered at Traces Of Siamese Smile) and Morakot (which was previously screened at Tomyam Pladib).

“It’s over, boss...”

Democrat leader Abhisit Vejjajiva has won this morning’s parliamentary vote, and has thus become Thailand’s new prime minister. Abhisit’s coalition partners resisted lucrative offers from Puea Thai, perhaps after behind-the-scenes pressure from the army and Democrat deputy leader Suthep Thaugsuban. Following the People Power Party’s dissolution, a key PPP faction led by Newin Chidchob shifted its allegiance to the Democrats, after Newin telephoned Thaksin Shinawatra to say: “It’s over, boss.”

International Film Festival 2008-2009

Chulalongkorn University's International Film Festival has returned, running from today until 6th February 2009 in Bangkok. The main attraction at the previous festival was Four Months, Three Weeks, & Two Days, and this time the highlight is another Romanian film, California Dreamin' (showing on 23rd January 2009). All screenings are free.

Illustration

Illustration: A Visual History, by Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast, features a chronological account of the history of commercial illustrations from Victorian caricatures to digital art, via pulp novels, psychedelic posters, and satirical cartoons. It includes representative examples of magazine covers, advertisements, comics, and typography.

“The Court had no other option...”

This afternoon, the Constitutional Court announced its verdict in the vote-buying and fraud cases against three ruling coalition parties. All three parties (Chart Thai, Matchima Thipataya, and the People Power Party) were found guilty, and are thus automatically dissolved. Their executives, including PPP leader and Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat, are now banned from politics for the next five years.

Somchai, Thaksin Shinawatra’s brother-in-law, had been PM for only three months. He was appointed following the disqualification of Samak Sundaravej earlier this year. Samak’s removal emboldened the People’s Alliance for Democracy, who had been occupying Government House. On 5th and 6th October, the PAD also blockaded parliament, though they were dispersed by riot police on 7th October. One protester was killed by an exploding tear gas cannister; Queen Sirikit presided over her funeral on 13th October, in an apparent signal of support for the royalist PAD.

The head of the nine judges defended today’s decision, saying: “The Court had no other option”. The judgement marks the third guilty verdict against parties affiliated with Thaksin, after Samak’s disqualification and the dissolution of Thai Rak Thai. Today’s decision seems designed to placate the PAD, and it has already been described as a judicial coup.