Tomyam Pladib

Tomyam Pladib, which opened on 19th March until 5th June, is an exhibition of Thai and Japanese art hosted by The Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. The exhibition features Morakot, a video by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Morakot is the name of an abandoned Bangkok hotel, and Apichatpong's slow-moving camera films the hotel's deserted rooms filled with (digitally added) floating white feather-like objects. The effect is elegiac, evoking the memories of the hotel's long-departed guests.

Apichatpong discussed his various films and videos in a presentation this evening (Apichatpong On Video Works). He explained the origins of his multi-screen video installations (one of the more surprising sources being Thai melodramas), and played extracts from several of his films. He also screened a few short films in full:

Ghost Of Asia
(a man follows a child's instructions all day, with the action sped up for comic effect; part of the Tsunami Digital Short Film project),

0116643225059
(a telephone call between the director and his mother)

The Anthem
(a wonderful overture to cinema, first screened at the 11th Thai Short Film & Video Festival)

There was also a short Q&A session with the director.

5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival

The 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival began yesterday, and runs until Sunday at Esplanade Cineplex. This year's event, organised by Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Project 304, has The More Things Change... as its central theme.

There will be two programmes commenting on post-Thaksin political instability (Learned Behaviour, 27th and 30th March; Track Changes, 26th and 30th March). Both of these programmes will include films from Spoken Silence at the 11th Thai Short Film & Video Festival, including Middle-Earth in Learned Behaviour. Another highlight is sure to be Thaiindie Buffet, featuring a selection of independent Thai films (Thaiindie Showcase, 29th March) and music videos (Experimental Music Videos, 27th March).

This evening, the Sompot+Thunska programme featured three works by Sompot Chidgasornpongse (Naoko Is Trying To Teach Me How To Make Tonkatsu In One Minute, 8,241.46 Miles Away From Home, and Landscape 101 01 1101 01...) and two new films by Thunska (Action! and Soak). There was also a Q&A session with Thunska.

Action! is a short compilation of out-takes from Zart Tanchareon's film God Man, featuring the actor Sitthipong Prempridi. Sitthipong died last year, and Action! is Thunska's tribute to him.

Soak stars Saifah Tanthana, who is filmed swimming in the sea (during which the soundtrack is dominated by the gurgling of the water) and riding a motorcycle, with the video camera representing Thunska's gaze. The film is an extended, improvised sequel to Thunska's first film, Private Life. It also recalls his film You Are Where I Belong To, which briefly features Thunska filming a man as they paddle in the sea.

Hajarat Muhammad

Rabindra Prasad Panda, author of the Odia-language book Hajarat Muhammad, has been arrested in Cuttack, India. The cover of his book features an image of Mohammed wielding a sword.

The Lord of the Rings:The Return of the King

The Return of the King is the final film in Peter Jackson’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings. The director’s cut is almost an hour longer than the theatrical version. This third film is more satisfying than the second, The Two Towers, perhaps because the battle of Gondor (in this film) has more narrative significance than the battle of Helm’s Deep (in the second film). In retrospect, the substantial time devoted to Helm’s Deep now seems more like an excuse for dramatic tension in the second film rather than an integral episode in the overall narrative.

The Lord of the Rings:The Two Towers

The Two Towers is the second film in Peter Jackson’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings, and the sequel to The Fellowship of the Ring. The director’s cut, which is substantially longer than the theatrical version, contains several unique sub-plots. It’s as impressive as The Fellowship, although slightly more conventional, as it intercuts between three plot strands. Andy Serkis is outstanding as the schizophrenic Gollum, physically ravaged and mentally unbalanced by his “precious” ring.

Daily Xpress

Today saw the launch of Thailand's first free daily newspaper, the Daily Xpress, published in Bangkok by The Nation. (The Nation is one of two daily English-language newspapers on sale in Thailand, the other being the Bangkok Post.)

The first issue of the Xpress has forty-eight pages. Even with ten pages of classified ads, it's an impressive total for a freesheet. 100,000 copies will be distributed every day. The emphasis is on features, human interest, and lifestyle.

The Xpress does have a surprising amount of entertaining and original content. It is, however, disposable rather than informative, and it can't replace other titles as a news source.

To coincide with the Xpress launch, the Nation itself has been rebranded. It now styles itself as "Thailand's biggest business daily", and has shifted its focus almost entirely to business news. Politics and international news have been reduced to one page each, and sports news has been moved over to the Xpress. There is no coverage of general Thai news at all.

This is a risky decision, as it narrows the Nation's target market and takes it out of direct competition with the Post. The new business focus also makes it an odd bedfellow for the Xpress, as the two papers are aimed at opposite audiences. While the Xpress may attract young readers who pick it up for free, the copies bundled with the Nation will probably remain unread.

The Stranger

The Stranger was the first film directed by Orson Welles following his Rio documentary It's All True. His work on It's All True earned Welles an unfair reputation: that he was profligate and extravagant. The Stranger was a conscious (and successful) attempt to prove otherwise - to show that he could make a regular, popular film within the studio system, on-budget and on-schedule.

In the film, Welles plays a Nazi war criminal (the architect of the Holocaust, no less) who has changed his identity and escaped to a small American town. He marries a judge's daughter, played by Loretta Young, to keep up appearances. Edward G Robinson plays a detective attempting to track him down.

A similar situation occurs in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, made in the same year, with the major difference being the role of the Nazi's wife: Loretta Young's extremely naive character is very different from the Ingrid Bergman role in Notorious. A more general comparison could be made with Hitchcock's Shadow Of A Doubt, in which a killer seeks refuge in a small American town; in that film, it is the killer's sister who is (initially) as naively unsuspecting as Young is in The Stranger. Welles's line about watching people from the clock tower "like God, looking at little ants" anticipates his role in The Third Man, when he looks down from the ferris wheel at the "dots" below.

The Stranger is a less personal project than Welles's other films, though it does include numerous high-angle and low-angle shots which add visual interest. The dark lighting and heavy shadows are not only typical of early Welles but also typical of the period, as by this point film noir had caught up with Welles's eccentric cinematography. (Welles later directed the final film in the classic noir cycle, Touch Of Evil.)

Indie Sex

Indie Sex is a series of documentaries broadcast on America's Independent Film Channel last year. Each episode deals with a different theme: Censored, Taboos, Teens, and Extremes. Each show features critics and directors discussing the history of (almost exclusively heterosexual) sex in cinema. Most of the film clips (with a few exceptions) are very tame, though the DVD includes more graphic sequences.

The first episode, Censored, gives a detailed history of American film censorship (and is less polemical than This Film Is Not Yet Rated). There is quite a lot of overlap, though, with the same points being made, and the same films being discussed, in several episodes. Among the directors interviewed are John Waters (discussing A Dirty Shame), Fenton Bailey (discussing Inside Deep Throat), Catherine Breillat (discussing Anatomy Of Hell), and John Cameron Mitchell (discussing Shortbus).

Navar Igen IV

The editor of a Swedish newspaper has received death threats after he published a poster featuring Satan defecating on Jesus. The poster, advertising the Navar Igen IV: Punx Against Christ! festival, was censored by the local council, though the Ostgota Correspondenten newspaper published it uncensored yesterday.

A World History Of Photography

The fourth edition of Naomi Rosenblum's A World History Of Photography has recently been published. The book's 800 images are beautifully reproduced, the text is as wide-ranging as the title suggests, and there is a useful annotated bibliography. At the end of each chapter are themed albums of full-page photographs, profiles of significant photographers, and technical histories.

The wealth of visual and textual information could, however, be more clearly organised and more up-to-date. Rosenblum acknowledges that the book is "structured in a somewhat unusual way", with chapters arranged thematically rather than chronologically (rather like the Tate Modern galleries). The book is divided into twelve major chapters, including portraiture, landscape, still life, art, and media. The chapters are too broad, however, a problem compounded by the lack of detail in the table of contents and the scarcity of subheadings within chapters. This also makes the layout feel rather dated, as do the line drawings in the technical history sections - does a book about photography really need to use line drawings? Similarly, there is not enough space given to recent and contemporary photographic artists and technologies: only a general account of digital technology, nothing about war photography after 1945, and no examples of contemporary fashion or advertising images.

Arguably the first book to present the history of photography as an art form, emphasising aesthetics alongside technology, was Beaumont Newhall's The History Of Photography, first published in 1937 and last revised in 1982. The first edition of Rosenblum's survey appeared in 1984, and since then it has been generally accepted as a successor to Newhall in scope and authority.

Both Newhall and Rosenblum begin their histories in 1839, with the invention of the Daguerreotype, though they also provide extensive pre-photographic background, as the invention and initial demonstration of photography was a process of simultaneous experimentation rather than a single 'eureka moment'. The first extant photograph, taken by Joseph Niepce in 1827, appears in Rosenblum's first chapter; it was discovered by Helmut Gernsheim, author of The History Of Photography, published in 1955.

The most recent historical survey of international photography is Mary Warner Marien's Photography: A Cultural History. It has 200 fewer pages than Rosenblum's, and 200 fewer illustrations, and is subsequently less in-depth in its coverage. On the other hand, it is more clearly organised and feels more up-to-date (with a large Andreas Gursky reproduction, for example). Marien's chapters are more specfic, and are subdivided more clearly. Her final chapter discusses photography after 1975 (and in the second edition she adds a new post-2000 chapter), whereas Rosenblum's final chapters begin as far back as 1950.

L'Erotisme

L'Erotisme is an anthology of eleven underground films, inspired by Georges Bataille's excellent book Eroticism, a study of sex and death as cultural taboos:

Ritualis
(a Black Mass ritual set to Heavy Metal music; directed by Pat Tremblay)

Maldoror: A Pact With Prostitution
(a man meets a prostitute in a cemetery, and kills a grotesque glow-worm [!] with a rock; directed by Nate Archer and Micki Pellerano)

Ass
(as a woman fingers herself, the red-tinted film intercuts rapidly between her face and her buttocks; directed by Usama Alshaibi)

KI
(partially obscured glimpses of a man receiving fellatio; directed by Karl Lemieux)

La Fin De Notre Amour
(an artist and an unidentified woman cut themselves with razors and surgical instruments; directed by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani)

Extase De Chair Brisee
(a rape-revenge story: a woman kills two masked men with a drill, after they molest her in a park; directed by Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt and Frederick Maheaux)

Baby Doll
(a doll is tied up and fondled, in a bondage fantasy; directed by Serge de Cotret)

The Loneliest Little Boy In The World
(a pig's head is licked and worshipped by a nude woman; directed by Mike Dereniewski)

Paranoid
(a woman films herself with a camcorder as she inserts a dildo; directed by Anna Hanavan)

D'Yeux
(a slide-show of erotic photo-montages featuring body parts and meat; directed by Monk Boucher)

Imperatrix Cornicula
(a woman rubbing herself with feathers, and birds gathering in the sky; directed by Jerome Bertrand)

Almost all of these short films are silent, except for Ritualis (which features slowed-down incantations as dialogue, though would be more effective as a silent film). Maldoror even adds mock-Victorian inter-titles, to add to the silent film aesthetic.

Maldoror's occult symbols evoke Kenneth Anger's treatment of magick, and the film's decaying, abject glow-worm could be a refugee from David Lynch's Eraserhead. It's one of the best films in the anthology.

Another highlight is KI, the only film to cross the borderline into hardcore imagery. Its intentionally degraded and washed-out images resemble Peggy Ahwesh's The Color Of Love, another porn/sex scene rendered semi-abstract by degraded film-stock, though KI is less confrontational than Ahwesh's uncomfortable film.

I also like La Fin De Notre Amour very much. It's filmed as a series of static images (like La Jetee), and, though it's perhaps a bit too stylised (tinted red and blue), it is certainly disturbing.

In my opinion, the weakest films are Ritualis (cliched, verging on self-parody) and, especially, Extase De Chair Brisee. This latter film is like a cross between I Spit On Your Grave and The Driller Killer - in other words, it's an exercise in gratuitous exploitation; the unconvincing acting, costumes, and make-up remove any sense of empathy or engagement, and the camerawork is frequently out of focus.

100 Best Films

Today, The Sunday Telegraph newspaper, in its magazine supplement Seven, has published a 100 Best Films list. The list was compiled by Catherine Shoard, Jenny McCartney, Alan Stanbrook, and Mike McCahill. It is divided into ten categories: drama, thriller/action, comedy, animation, horror, romance, kids, musicals, documentary, and world cinema. Each category has ten films, arranged preferentially.

Drama

1. The Conversation
2. Strangers On A Train
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Winter Light
5. Dogville
6. Raging Bull
7. The Godfather I-II
8. Double Indemnity
9. Apocalypse Now
10. Chinatown

Thriller/Action

1. North By Northwest
2. Raiders Of The Lost Ark
3. Manhattan Murder Mystery
4. Heat
5. The 39 Steps
6. Terminator II: Judgment Day
7. Once Upon A Time In The West
8. The Ladykillers
9. The Silence Of The Lambs
10. Die Hard

Comedy

1. Some Like It Hot
2. Annie Hall
3. Meet The Parents
4. Withnail & I
5. His Girl Friday
6. The Odd Couple
7. Zoolander
8. Stir Crazy
9. Gregory's Girl
10. Tootsie

Animation

1. Dimensions Of Dialogue
2. The Jungle Book
3. Spirited Away
4. Toy Story
5. Composition In Blue
6. Grave Of The Fireflies
7. The Secret Adventures Of Tom Thumb
8. Finding Nemo
9. Perfect Blue
10. Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs

Horror

1. Psycho
2. Frankenstein
3. The Exorcist
4. Night Of The Living Dead
5. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
6. Dead Of Night
7. The Wicker Man
8. The Blair Witch Project
9. Vampyr
10. The Kingdom I-II

Romance

1. Before Sunset
2. Head-On
3. I Know Where I'm Going!
4. Brief Encounter
5. The Lady Vanishes
6. The Quiet American
7. Hannah & Her Sisters
8. Bringing Up Baby
9. Days Of Heaven
10. Casablanca

Kids

1. Back To The Future
2. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
3. Babe: Pig In The City
4. Freaky Friday
5. Addams Family Values
6. Mean Girls
7. Anne Of Green Gables
8. Clueless
9. Enchanted
10. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit

Musicals

1. West Side Story
2. The Sound Of Music
3. Cabaret
4. Top Hat
5. Chicago
6. Mary Poppins
7. Singin' In The Rain
8. Nashville
9. Woodstock
10. My Fair Lady

Documentary

1. American Splendor
2. The Sorrow & The Pity
3. American Movie
4. Touching The Void
5. Capturing The Friedmans
6. Spellbound
7. To Be & To Have
8. Hearts & Minds
9. My Kid Could Paint That
10. Neil Young: Heart Of Gold

World Cinema

1. Battleship Potemkin
2. The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
3. The Rules Of The Game
4. Tokyo Story
5. Seven Samurai
6. Pather Panchali
7. Smiles Of A Sumer Night
8. A Man Escaped
9. Andrei Rublev
10. The Colour Of Pomegranates

The animation section is surprisingly diverse and even avant-garde. That's the exception rather than the rule, though, because, in general, this list is terrible.

Dividing the 100 titles into ten rigid categories is asking for trouble. Manhattan Murder Mystery, for example, is listed as a thriller/action film (the third greatest thriller/action film, no less), but it's actually a comedy. Why it's listed at all is a mystery, because it's a pale imitation of Annie Hall. Bringing Up Baby appears in the romance list, even though it's one of the most famous comedies ever made.

The inclusion of so many very recent films is bizarre. Is Enchanted (released last year) really one of the greatest children's films ever made? Is There Will Be Blood (released this year) really one of the best dramas of all time? Is it really necessary for seven of the ten documentaries to be films made after 2001? Emphatically no, in all cases.

Why is world cinema relegated to only ten films, as if it were a genre? Are 90% of the 100 'best films' really English-language? No. The world cinema category whitewashes whole chapters of film history: no German Expressionism, no French New Wave, and no Italian Neorealism.

Oh, and the compilers seem to have forgotten about science-fiction and westerns altogether. D'oh! So there's no place for Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey (no Kubrick films at all, in fact), Metropolis, Stagecoach, The Searchers, or High Noon.

Finally, what about Citizen Kane? I'd like to think that the compilers were making a revisionist statement by omitting it, but I'm more inclined to believe that they simply forgot about it because it doesn't fit into one of their ten categories.

(Note that Frankenstein is, of course, the superior James Whale sound version, not the Thomas Edison silent film; and Psycho is the original version. Also, Some Like It Hot is the 1959 comic masterpiece, not the obscure 1939 comedy.)

Cumhuriyet

Two Turkish cartoonists, Musa Kart and Zafer Temocin, have been charged with defamation, after the Cumhuriyet newspaper published their caricatures of Turkish President Abdullah Gul. Kart's cartoon, depicting Gul as a scarecrow, was published on 28th November 2007. Temocin's caricature, of Gul in an envelope, appeared the next day.

Fast Food Nation

Richard Linklater's film Fast Food Nation is a drama inspired by the superb investigative book of the same name by Eric Schlosser. It follows two recent documentaries on the secretive and unhealthy nature of McDonald's and its products, McLibel and Super-Size Me.

The exploitation of the American fast food industry is illustrated by the experiences of Mexican immigrants working at a meat-packing factory, a student activist who has a McJob at Mickey's (the fictional company created for the film), and a Mickey's executive who investigates claims of contaminated beef. Though the characters are fictitious, the film concludes with genuine Blood Of The Beasts-style slaughterhouse footage.

The narrative intercuts between a series of concurrent stories, though characters from separate stories never meet (except for one shot in which vehicles from two different segments unknowingly stop beside each other at a traffic light). The structure doesn't quite work, though, because it's too episodic. Characters are introduced, they have one or two major scenes, then they are never seen again, leaving numerous plot points unresolved. This pattern is repeated throughout the film, which has an impressive ensemble cast but no strong central plot line to link everything together.

The Seven-Year Itch

The Seven-Year Itch is a comedy directed by Billy Wilder, starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell. Like all 20th Century Fox productions of the period (the mid-1950s), it was filmed in CinemaScope. Wilder would later direct Monroe in his fantastic Some Like It Hot.

Ewell plays Richard Sherman, a New York publisher whose wife and son go on holiday for the summer. Monroe's un-named character sub-let's the apartment above Sherman's, and he fantasises about seducing her while his wife is away. In the earlier play of the same name, they do have an affair, though in the toned-down film version he is only unfaithful in his imagination. (Some of the fantasy sequences are parodies of popular films, such as From Here To Eternity.)

At the start, the premise is laboured a bit too much, with repeated emphasis on Sherman's regular office job and normal marriage, and several references to the New York wives who apparently all go on summer vacations without their husbands. It seems a bit strained, as if it were attempting to normalise an unrealistic scenario.

There's a bit too much of Ewell, who narrates the story and appears in every scene, though when Monroe appears she is sensational. She has some great lines, such as recognising classical music because "there's no vocal". This film also contains Monroe's most famous scene: standing over a subway grating, her skirt billowing above her waist. (A similar scene was filmed by George S Flemming and Edwin S Porter for What Happened On 23rd Street in 1901.)

A nude photograph of Monroe had been published by Playboy the year before the film was released, and in an interesting parallel, Monroe's character had also previously posed for a cheesecake photo. In an even more blatant in-joke, Sherman, discussing Monroe's character, says "Maybe it's Marilyn Monroe"!

A Coup For The Rich

Giles Ji Ungpakorn's book A Coup For The Rich: Thailand's Political Crisis has been banned by the Thai police. In his introduction, Ji writes: "The coup of 2006 can only be understood as a "Coup for the Rich" against the interests of the poor." Thammasat University Bookstore, the only outlet where the book was on sale, has received a letter from the police to the effect that the book is being investigated for lèse-majesté (due to eight paragraphs in its first chapter) and must therefore be removed from sale.

To Catch A Thief

To Catch A Thief is in many ways a typical Alfred Hitchcock film, though it doesn't have the tension or cinematic sophistication of much of his other work. The sophistication on display here relates to the costumes and locations, rather than the camerawork or editing. The pace is extremely slow, with excessive establishing shots of scenery and grand buildings, and over-long helicopter shots and chase sequences.

Cary Grant, one of Hitchcock's favourite actors, plays John Robie, a cat burglar who has retired to the French coast. Grace Kelly, probably Hitchcock's favourite actress, plays Frances Stevens, who falls in love with him. Robie is that archetypal Hitchcock figure, the persecuted innocent: he gave up burglary years before, though he is framed for a spate of recent jewellery thefts. To prove his innocence, he must catch the real burglar himself. The final revelation of the burglar's identity is hardly a surprise, and the whole plot is rather flimsy.

There are some amusing double-entendres, including Kelly asking Grant if he wants "leg or breast" (she's talking about pieces of chicken). Apparently, these moments were improvised by Kelly and Grant. Interestingly, Grant's character explains that he travelled around Europe performing in a circus during his youth - which is exactly what Grant did in his own youth. Grant is always a superbly suave actor, though he was better in Hitchcock's North By Northwest and Notorious. In this film his skin is alarmingly dark; his tan actually makes it difficult to recognise his face in some scenes.

Artspace Germany

Artspace Germany, organised by the Goethe Institut of Bangkok, is an excellent opportunity to see works by highly influential modern artists. Arguably the highlights of the show are the sculptures by Nam June Paik and Joseph Kosuth.

Paik is regarded as the father of video art: in 1965, he and Andy Warhol, working independently, were the first artists to incorporate video footage into their work. Two of Paik's iconic video sculptures, constructed from TV monitors, are included in this exhibition: Internet Resident and Candle TV.

Kosuth's work demonstrates the principles of semiotics, with a real object exhibited alongside a photograph and dictionary definition of the object. Kosuth first demonstrated this concept in 1965, with a real chair, a photograph of the chair, and a written definition of 'chair' presented side-by-side. In this exhibition, the same principle is applied to a frying pan (One & Three Pans).

Artspace Germany is showing at PSG (Silpakorn University) from 6th-27th February.

“Joining the government won’t be a problem...”

The formation of a coalition government is now almost complete. Following the dissolution of Thai Rak Thai, it was reincarnated as the People Power Party, led by Samak Sundaravej, and the PPP won last month’s election though without an overall majority. Samak is now likely to become prime minister, taking over from Surayud Chulanont, who was appointed by the coup-makers. (The country also has a new constitution, as the the draft charter was endorsed by 57.81% of voters in last year’s referendum.)

Before the election, candidates and factions were grouping and regrouping on a daily basis, with seemingly no consideration of party ideology whatsoever. In the end, every other political party except the Democrats has joined in a PPP coalition. The final coalition partners, Puea Paendin and Chart Thai, announced their membership yesterday, after more than two weeks of negotiations; they had used the mourning period following the death of Princess Galyani to buy themselves more time. Chart Thai’s leader Banharn Silpaarcha announced that “joining the government won’t be a problem”.

The Supreme Court yesterday dismissed six cases against the PPP and the Election Commission of Thailand. The New Aspiration Party had alleged that the Commission was not authorised to organise absentee ballots and advanced voting before the election. Democrat candidate Chaiwat Sinsuwong claimed that the PPP was not legally allowed to contest the election, as it is a TRT nominee, Samak is a Thaksin proxy, and PPP candidates distributed Thaksin VCDs. All of these complaints have been dismissed by the Supreme Court. (The Democrats had earlier asked Chaiwat to withdraw his allegations, and he has now resigned from the party.)

The PPP’s last obstacle was Yongyuth Tiyaphairat, one of the party’s deputy leaders. He was among many PPP candidates accused of vote-buying, and he has been under ECT investigation. The ECT must endorse at least 95% of MPs before a new parliamentary term can begin. Thus, the ECT were under pressure to complete their vote-buying investigations as soon as possible. Fearing demonstrations from PPP supporters, the ECT delegated the Yongyuth investigation to a sub-committee. Then, when Yongyuth was invited to view the evidence against him (an incriminating VCD), he missed the appointment. However, Yongyuth has now received ECT endorsement. Indeed, the ECT rushed to endorse some twenty-nine candidates yesterday, in order to meet the deadline. (Previously, candidates had been endorsed in dribs and drabs, averaging three per day.)

Japanese Film Festival 2008

The 2008 Japanese Film Festival, organised by the Japan Foundation, takes place from 18th-25th January in Bangkok. The event's subtitle is The Hidden Treasures Of Japanese Cinema: Masterpieces From Its Golden Age - 1950s-1960s.

The 1950s were indeed a golden age for Japanese film (as, previously, were the 1920s), with Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon introducing international audiences to Japanese cinema for the first time. However, the cinema of Japan does not begin and end with Kurosawa. The Japanese Film Festival emphasises the lesser-known directors of Japanese cinema's second golden age.

The schedule includes Gion Bayashi (Saturday) by master director Kenji Mizoguchi, and the historical drama Wild Geese by Shirou Toyoda (Sunday). Also included is The Ghost Of Yotsuya (Sunday), a classic interpretation of Japan's most famous ghost story by its greatest horror director, Nobuo Nakagawa. (The legend of Yotsuya is the Japanese equivalent of the Thai folk tale Mae Nak, on which Nang Nak was based.) There are also two films by Mikio Naruse: Repast (Thursday) and Sound Of The Mountain (Friday). All films will be screened, free of charge, at the Grand EGV cinema, Siam Discovery Center.

Hostel

Hostel was directed by Eli Roth, one of a group of contemporary directors known as the Splat Pack due to the graphic violence of their horror films. The films themselves have been called 'torture porn', such is their emphasis on blood and gore.

Hostel begins with a group of three male backpackers, who are told about an Eastern European hostel full of attractive women. When they arrive at the hostel, they do indeed meet three ladies, though what they don't realise until far too late is that they have been drawn into a honeytrap. The women are prostitutes, hired by a Russian company called Elite Hunting, who bring the men to a derelict factory where they are to be tortured and killed by the company's paying clients. (Elite Hunting was supposedly inspired by a Thai organisation whose website Roth saw.)

The torture scenes are dank, dark, and hard to watch the first time. (I saw the unrated edition, which is slightly longer than the theatrical version.) During subsequent viewings I always have to look away when Josh's ankles split open. Jan Vlasak, who plays a Dutch businessman who uses Elite Hunting's services, gives a chilling, casually sadistic performance.

Prosperity For 2008

A new short film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul is available online. The film, Prosperity For 2008, is a beautiful, abstract work, in which a dot of light travels slowly across a black background (and is perhaps a firework in the night sky).

Seduced

The Seduced exhibition catalogue presents representative images covering all aspects of the exhibition (Seduced: Art & Sex From Antiquity To Now) alongside contextualising essays by Marina Wallace, Martin Kemp, and Joanne Bernstein.

Jackass II

I had seen neither the Jackass MTV series nor the original Jackass film, so I had little idea of what to expect from this sequel. Basically, it's a group of raucous men daring each other to perform a variety of risky stunts, directed by Jeff Tremaine.

What surprised me was how scatological many of these activities were - bodily fluids (both human and animal) were required (and ingested) for several stunts. The version I saw was the unrated DVD, and I don't know how much of this material was missing from the theatrical version.

The team are so over-enthusiastic that it's difficult to laugh at them too much, though it is genuinely fascinating in a disgusting kind of way, if only to wonder at how they cleaned up and recuperated afterwards. Also, there's a cameo by director John Waters, whose film Pink Flamingos rivals Jackass II for sheer abjection.

Casino Royale

Casino Royale was the first of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, though the film rights to it had always eluded Cubby Broccoli, who produced films based on all of Fleming's subsequent Bond books. A film of Casino Royale was made in 1967, though it was a spoof version featuring a huge, chaotic ensemble of directors, writers, and stars. When the rights finally passed to Broccoli's company, a canonical version could finally be made, directed by Martin Campbell.

Campbell had previously directed Pierce Brosnan as an ultra-suave Bond in GoldenEye. Brosnan's replacement, Daniel Craig, is more reminiscent of Die Hard's John McClain than the traditional James Bond character. (Does he want his Martini shaken or stirred? "Do I look like I give a damn?" is his iconoclastic answer.)

Adland

Adland: A Global History Of Advertising, by Mark Tungate, is the first truly historical and international book about the advertising industry. Its emphasis is on the industry rather than the advertisements themselves, and its index is incomplete, though it explores the business of advertising with unprecedented scope.

Potty Fartwell & Knob

Potty Fartwell & Knob: Extraordinary But True Names Of British People, by Russell Ash, is a pre-Christmas, stocking-filler book. Ash has compiled thematic lists of unusual names, all taken from census records, registers of marriages, and other public documents.

Thus, for example, we learn that there was a man named Jesus Christ who was born in 1940 and died in 2004. My favourite word is given its very own chapter, and the book lists twenty first names and surnames which incorporate it. (Anyone familiar with the English town Scunthorpe will get the general idea; as a personal nomenclature, it appears in even less disguised forms.)

In his introduction, Ash stresses that "wherever possible original documents have been checked" to avoid mistakes, though he also writes that his research involved "access to online material". Exactly how many census records he checked online, and how many he examined in their original versions, is unclear. I'm not convinced that all of the names listed are genuine, as it's too easy for mistakes or spoofs to creep in when records are typed into databases.

New Works

New Works, an exhibition of videos and sculptures by Santiago Sierra, opened at the Lisson Gallery, London, on 30th November, and will close on 19th January 2008. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, Seven Works.

New Works features twenty-one blocks (Anthropometric Modules) of dried human excrement, collected and moulded by 'dalit' ('untouchable') scavengers in India. Sierra's art raises awareness of the exploitation of low-paid workers, though he has also been accused of exploiting the disadvantaged volunteers who work for him (by paying them nominal sums to perform degrading acts). Indeed, the Indian scavengers received no compensation for their work on his recent sculptures.

Stanley Kubrick Archive

The Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts in London is currently being catalogued before opening to the public later this year. One of the boxes contains the list of Kubrick’s Look magazine photographs from the Kubrick page at matthewhunt.com, presumably printed out by a member of the Kubrick family.

Live Earth

This year's Live Earth concert has been released on DVD and CD as Live Earth: The Concerts For A Climate In Crisis. The CD features Madonna performing Hey You, and the DVD features her performance of La Isla Bonita.

Seduced

Seduced: Art and Sex From Antiquity To Now, an exhibition at the Barbican in London (from 12th October 2007 until 27th January 2008), presents an historical survey of sex as represented in various artistic media from Classical sculpture to contemporary photography.

Every significant field is included: Japanese illustrations from the 18th and 19th centuries, Victorian and early 20th century erotic photography from the Alfred Kinsey collection, outrageous drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, Surrealist images by Man Ray, illustrations for Justine and The Philosophy Of The Boudoir, and the Kama Sutra. There are even late drawings by Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, and an early (self-satisfied) Picasso self-portrait. Sex in contemporary art is represented by collections of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe (his most sado-masochistic, homoerotic images), Nobuyoshi Araki (close-up, eroticised images of isolated organs and snails), Jeff Koons (quasi-pornographic self-portraits with Ilona Staller), Thomas Ruff (out-of-focus images appropriated from porn websites), and Nan Goldin.

Goldin's work, a slide-show of naturalistic images, is the only exhibit to carry an individual 'explicit content' warning, although the Kinsey slideshow is far more graphic; the Goldin warning may be a precautionary reaction to the fuss over her recent Baltic exhibition. There are very few notable omissions, though Warhol would have been better represented by Blue Movie, and Carolee Schneemann's film Fuses should have been included, as should Andres Serrano's History Of Sex photographs.

30,000 Years Of Art

30,000 Years Of Art: The Story Of Human Creativity Across Time & Space, published by Phaidon, features 1,000 artworks from cave paintings to conceptual art. Each work is illustrated by a full-page, colour photograph, and accompanied by a few paragraphs of explanatory text, following the same format as Phaidon's The Art Book and The 20th Century Art Book.

30,000 Years Of Art spans the entire history of artistic achievement, and features works from around the world. In addition to painting, sculpture, installation, and video, it also includes decorative art: ceramics, textiles, and metalwork. (In contrast, The Art Book is restricted to Western art since the Renaissance, and decorative art is excluded.) Unlike The Art Book, there are no cross-references but there is an index.

Each artist is restricted to a single entry. Some artists are represented by their most famous works, such as Velasquez (Las Meninas), Richard Hamilton (Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?), and Picasso (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon), though others are not: Leonardo's first portrait (Ginevra de' Benci) is included instead of the Mona Lisa, and Michelangelo is represented by his Dying Slave sculpture rather than David or the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

30,000 Years Of Art, weighing almost 6kg with more than 1,000 pages, is an excellent introduction to international art history. The Story Of Art (by EH Gombrich; also published by Phaidon), A World History Of Art (by John Fleming and Hugh Honour), and Art Through The Ages (by Helen Gardner) are the best single-volume art histories.