"Using all forms of violence..."

An audio clip in which Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva appears to call for the suppression of the red-shirt demonstrators "using all forms of violence" has been blocked by the Ministry of Information, Communication, and Technology. Thai sites that previously streamed it (including Matichon and Thai Insider) have now deleted it.

The tape was edited to misrepresent Abhisit, using extracts from his 19th and 26th April Confidence In Thailand TV programmes. According to the Democrats, it was originally distributed via email by an employee of SC Asset (a company owned by Thaksin's younger sister). It was apparently sent to Pheu Thai (the political party Thaksin controls) on 26th August. It has since been broadcast by ASTV and D-Station.

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds [sic] is the new film by Quentin Tarantino, slightly re-edited (and two minutes longer) following its premiere at Cannes earlier this year. For more than a decade, Tarantino had been telling interviewers that he was planning a 'guys on a mission' film, and he had apparently been writing the script for much of that time. The result is a World War II revenge fantasy in a 'spaghetti western' style. (The opening caption, "Once upon a time", indicates the fantasy element; it's also a spaghetti western tribute, as are the many Ennio Morricone music cues.) The title is an intentional (though unexplained) mis-spelling of The Inglorious Bastards, the American release title of a 1978 Italian exploitation film.

So, Tarantino is again paying homage to 1970s genre cinema (after Blaxploitation in Jackie Brown, rape-revenge in Death Proof, and 'chop socky' in Kill Bill), though here he's also paying tribute to the cinema in general. The 'basterds' of the title, a group of Jewish-American vigilantes intent on killing Nazi soldiers led by top-billed Brad Pitt with a Southern drawl, are not really the main focus of the film. The crux of the plot actually involves a scheme to kill Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Third Reich officers, by sending a former film critic and an actress to blow up a Parisian cinema. Coincidentally, the cinema's owner also plans to burn it down, by setting fire to inflammable nitrate film prints. Thus, cinema literally saves the world.

Christoph Waltz has received substantial praise for his performance as SS Colonel Landa. His character is arguably more significant than Pitt's, and he certainly gives the film's greatest performance. Speaking French, English, German, and Italian, he charms his suspects with effortless charisma. The film is composed of a series of chapters, each containing one or more long dialogue scenes; those featuring the cordial yet ruthless Landa are the most tense, amusing, and captivating. Like Samuel L Jackson and Harvey Keitel in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Waltz's precise delivery and verbal dexterity steal the show. (Jackson and Keitel have voice-over cameos in this film, as does Tarantino himself.)

Getting Off At Gateshead

Getting Off At Gateshead: The Dirtiest Words & Phrases In English From Ass-End To Zig-Zag, by lexicographer Jonathon Green, is divided into twenty-six alphabetical chapters, with each chapter devoted to a particular word. (Chapter three is the most interesting.) Brief etymologies and literary citations are provided, followed by synonyms and derivatives. The content is not all that different from Green's earlier Slang Down The Ages, and several other works, all produced by extracting thematic lists of words from Green's comprehensive slang dictionary (published in 1998, revised in 2005, and updated in 2008).

13th Thai Short Film & Video Festival

The 13th Thai Short Film & Video Festival closes this Sunday (and opened on 13th August). Each year, a short film to promote the Festival is played before every programme, and this year's film (Man Who Eat An Egg) was directed by Thunska Pansittivorakul, who filmed it in a recreation of Thomas Edison's primitive Black Maria studio. (The Black Maria replica was on show earlier this year, at the Cine-Bananas event; Thunska's Middle-Earth was screened at the 11th Festival.) Like the 12th Festival, this year's event takes place at the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre.

Discovering Orson Welles

Discovering Orson Welles is a compilation of articles about Welles by Jonathan Rosenbaum. There are a few essays and film criticism pieces, though many articles are less substantial: book reviews, notes, and other ephemera. In fact, what's most interesting here are not Rosenbaum's comments on Welles but rather his comments on other Welles books. He also presents a useful survey of the various versions of every Welles film, and discusses his contribution to the restoration of Touch Of Evil.

Rosenbaum's annotations are too "autobiographical in nature", and he tends to "spin out" his single meeting with Welles - both of which he acknowledges in his introduction. Despite this, however, Rosenbaum is the ideal Welles scholar, more objective and meticulous than acolytes such as Barbara Leaming or Peter Bogdanovich. Also, his criticisms of both Pauline Kael and David Thomson are very welcome.

Spaghetti Westerns

This is the third edition of Christopher Frayling's classic study of Italian westerns, subtitled Cowboys & Europeans From Karl May To Sergio Leone. Though Frayling did not coin the term 'spaghetti western', his book did popularise and destigmatise it.

Although the original Spaghetti Westerns was written almost thirty years ago, neither subsequent edition has revised or expanded the text, with the only additions being new prefaces and a brief introduction by the editor, film historian Jeffrey Richards. Even the errata and typographical errors remain uncorrected, though they are at least listed in the prefaces.

The book is essential as the first substantial, academic analysis of spaghetti westerns. It's also vital for anyone interested in the western genre, or in genre cinema in general. Frayling has since written two books with production designer Ken Adam: an extended interview, and a design monograph. He also wrote a biography of Sergio Leone (Something To Do With Death) and a monograph on Leone's films (Once Upon A Time In Italy).

Ganapati

Ganapati, an exhibition at Kerkar Art Complex in India, is causing controversy as it features irreverent drawings of the Hindu god Ganesha. The artist, Subodh Kerkar, has been threatened with violence, and complaints have been made to the police. He has been warned by the police not to "hurt religious feelings". The exhibition opened yesterday and will close at the end of the month.

Lae Nang... Long Tai

Paragon Cineplex, Bangkok, will host a mini film festival from 7th-9th August, called Lae Nang... Long Tai. The festival's films all depict life in southern Thailand, with the highlight being a screening of Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Invisible Waves on the final day. Invisible Waves was first shown in 2006, when it opened that year's Bangkok International Film Festival.

Cinerama Adventure

Cinerama Adventure is a feature-length documentary written and directed by David Strohmaier. It presents a comprehensive history of the Cinerama film production and distribution process.

Cinerama was developed by Fred Waller, who originally created an eleven-projector system called Vitarama in 1939, later modified to five projectors as a flight simulator for trainee pilots in World War II. Rare footage of both versions of Vitarama is included in Cinerama Adventure. Another key Cinerama antecedent was the triptych Polyvision system used by Abel Gance for Napoleon in 1927, also featured in Cinerama Adventure. Gance was inspired by the incredible Cineorama of 1900, a truly panoramic display produced by ten 70mm projectors.

No surviving Cineorama footage exists, and the process is not discussed in Cinerama Adventure. Also, footage from multi-projector processes produced after Cinerama, such as Disneyland's Circle-Vision (nine projectors, 1955), the Russian Kinopanorama (three projectors, 1958), and the experiments discussed by Stan van der Beek (author of Culture: Intercom & Expanded Cinema) and Gene Youngblood (author of Expanded Cinema), is also omitted.

Filming in Cinerama required three synchronised 35mm cameras, which could then be projected as a triptych onto a curved screen at an aspect ratio of 2.89:1. This resulted in an immersive audience experience, with the screen extending into the viewer's peripheral vision. Also, the process utilised seven audio tracks, with speakers positioned at the front, back, and sides of the auditorium.

Cinerama Adventure includes numerous short clips from the first Cinerama film, This Is Cinerama, which premiered in 1952 and is most famous for its roller-coaster opening sequence. [I saw This Is Cinerama in one of the three surviving Cinerama cinemas, the National Media Museum in Bradford, UK.] This Is Cinerama is not commercially available, so the clips in Cinerama Adventure are invaluable. Longer extracts were featured in The Reality Trip (a 1995 BBC Moving Pictures documentary), though this has never been released on video.

The documentary also includes extensive footage from various Cinerama travelogues, and from How The West Was Won, one of the few narrative Cinerama films. Finally, brief clips from conventional 70mm films projected onto Cinerama screens (including Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, originally shown in 2.21:1 with six audio tracks) are included. All Cinerama extracts are presented using the new Smilebox process, a digital simulation of the curved Cinerama screen.

Cinerama was a relatively short-lived process, as the three-camera system made close-ups and vertical compositions virtually impossible. Also, it was prohibitively expensive for cinemas to install the two extra projection booths necessary for Cinerama exhibition. However, the format did directly inspire the use of anamorphic widescreen processes such as CinemaScope, which successfully approximated the spectacle of Cinerama without the need for such cumbersome cameras or drastic cinema alterations. Cinerama, CinemaScope, and also 3D projection (all popularised in the early 1950s) were gimmicky attempts to draw audiences away from television and other pursuits, after American cinema audiences declined steeply in the late 1940s. (History is currently repeating itself, with new IMAX and 3D crazes perhaps reacting to the popularity of home theatre systems and HDTV.)

Cinerama Adventure features interviews with film historians such as John Belton (author of Widescreen Cinema) and Kevin Brownlow (who restored Napoleon and directed the documentary series Hollywood), and director Joe Dante. Belton and Dante also contributed to The Reality Trip, which discussed one aspect of Cinerama not mentioned in Cinerama Adventure: the vertical seams which appeared when the films were projected. These seams were often disguised by positioning conspicuous trees or similar objects within the frame, creating another aesthetic limitation for Cinerama directors.

Nymph

Pen-ek Ratanaruang originally screened Nymph at Cannes, and that version was given a limited release in Bangkok last month. Pen-ek has also prepared a shorter, more commercial version, which has received a wider release. This version makes slight trims to many scenes, shortening the dialogue-free stretches which multiplex audiences may have dismissed as longueurs.

Some sequences, such as Korn leaving his wife, and Korn and May praying to the tree, have been removed because they are already referred to in the dialogue: the audience knows that they have happened, so it is not necessary to actually show them. At least one key shot has been cut: we hear a loud noise, and later see Korn's bandaged hand, though without the shot of the broken glass (present in the original), it is not clear that Korn smashed the window of May's car.

Also, to enable the characters to reach the forest as quickly as possible, several scenes from the beginning of the film are deleted in their entirety. These include sequences in a photography shop (where Nop discusses his plan to visit the forest), a hotel (where May surreptitiously telephones Korn), and the car journey to the forest (during which May ignores Nop and answers phone calls from work). The result is that May and Nop's relationship seems to deteriorate only when they reach the forest, whereas in the original version it is clear that their marriage is in trouble even before they begin their trip.

The shorter version certainly has a faster pace, though the most noticeable change relates to the soundtrack. To create a conventional horror film atmosphere, music has been added to many scenes, whereas there was no music at all on the original soundtrack.

Courrier-International

The 9th July issue of Courrier-International has been banned in Morocco. The magazine features a cartoon of King Mohammed VI, by Khalid Kadar, depicting the King riding a jet ski on a pile of money. (Last year, an issue of L'Express International was also banned in Morocco.)

Poisoned

German artist Ottmar Horl is facing a police investigation following public complaints about his Nazi gnome, titled Poisoned. The golden gnome, which is performing a "Heil Hitler" salute, was on display in Nuremberg, though displaying Nazi iconography is illegal in Germany. Horl has previously shown similar gnomes in an exhibition titled Dance With The Devil, in Belgium and Italy.

Future Noir

Future Noir: The Making Of Blade Runner, by Paul M Sammon, has been updated to include details of The Final Cut, an additional version of the film Blade Runner released in 2007. The second edition of Sammon's book contains a 100-page chapter on the production of The Final Cut, listings of the various Blade Runner DVD releases, and an extensive interview with actor Harrison Ford.

Much of Sammon's primary research for the new edition was published by Empire magazine in August 2007. Sammon has been writing about Blade Runner ever since its production began: his on-set report was published by Omni in May 1982, his making-of article appeared in Cinefantastique in July 1982, and he compared the various versions of the film for Video Watchdog in November 1993.

A History Of Interior Design

A History Of Interior Design, by John Pile, is now in its third edition. Pile's historical survey spans more than 3,000 years, from Mayan temples and ancient Egypt to 21st century Europe. Interior design is "a field with unclear boundaries", as Pile acknowledges, though fortunately the book's scope is inclusive rather than exclusive, incorporating architecture, furniture, and enclosed exterior spaces in addition to conventional interiors.

There are almost 700 illustrations and nearly 500 pages, plus an Interactive Timeline CD-ROM, though the book concentrates primarily on Europe and America, with only a single chapter discussing non-Western design. The publisher, Laurence King, specialises in definitive surveys of various artistic fields, with other titles including A World History Of Architecture and Graphic Design: A New History.

Nymph (director's cut)

In Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Nymph, a young married couple take a camping trip to the forest. Nop communes with nature and photographs the surrounding trees, while his wife May is more interested in her cellphone signal, calling Korn, her lover back in Bangkok.

Nop and May's marriage is clearly going stale, as was the central relationship in Pen-ek's previous film, Ploy. Nymph, in its original version as premiered at Cannes, also share's Ploy's slow pace, sparse dialogue, and ambient soundtrack.

Nop becomes fascinated by one tree in particular, caressing its trunk as if it were a woman's body. He sees a nude woman in the distance, and follows her deeper into the forest. The woman he sees is perhaps the same woman who killed two rapists in the film's impressive prologue, with the camera swooping through trees and over a river. The woman may also be a spirit (the nymph of the film's English title) who personifies the unusually compelling tree.

Exactly what happens to Nop remains ambiguous. He seems to disappear, though later he apparently returns to the couple's house. As in Nang Nak, the returning spouse may not have returned at all; Nop may, in fact, have become a forest spirit himself, as does the missing boy in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady.

The Spectator's 50 Essential Films

The Spectator, in its 20th June and 27th June issues, has published its list of 50 Essential Films, as follows:

1. The Night Of The Hunter
2. Apocalypse Now
3. Sunrise
4. Black Narcissus
5. L'Avventura
6. The Searchers
7. The Magnificent Ambersons
8. The Seventh Seal
9. L'Atalante
10. Rio Bravo
11. The Godfather I-II
12. The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
13. Grand Illusion
14. Citizen Kane
15. The Scarlet Empress
16. Tokyo Story
17. Blade Runner
18. Rear Window
19. Point Blank
20. The Red Shoes
21. Mme De...
22. Shadows
23. Pickpocket
24. Viridiana
25. Barry Lyndon
26. City Lights
27. Pierrot Le Fou
28. Sunset Boulevard
29. Notorious
30. M
31. The Roaring Twenties
32. Singin' In The Rain
33. The Long Day Closes
34. Killer Of Sheep
35. Gun Crazy
36. Andrei Rublev
37. Taxi Driver
38. The 400 Blows
39. Pulp Fiction
40. Kind Hearts & Coronets
41. In The Mood For Love
42. Sullivan's Travels
43. 8½
44. Pinocchio
45. Great Expectations
46. Rome: Open City
47. Duck Soup
48. Jaws
49. Manhattan
50. Out Of The Past

Most directors are represented by only a single film, though Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock have two each, and Francis Coppola has three (with The Godfather I and II making a total of fifty-one films on the list). One oversight: nothing by Akira Kurosawa. Foreign-language films are quite well represented, though there are only two silent films.

Rediscovering Spiritual Value

Rediscovering Spiritual Value: Alternative To Consumerism From A Siamese Buddhist Perspective is a collection of recent articles and speeches by Sulak Sivaraksa, publisher of Seeds Of Peace. One of Sulak's previous books, ค่อนศตวรรษ ประชาธิปไตยไทย, was banned in Thailand in 2007.

Significantly, Rediscovering Spiritual Value includes an English translation of an interview in which Sulak discusses the Thai monarchy, originally published in a banned edition of the Thai journal Same Sky. In the translated version, Sulak adds a footnote at the end of the interview: "The Thai editor stopped the interview here, yet both the editor... and the interviewee were charged with lese-majesty."

Happy Wonju

A cartoonist in South Korea is facing a fine equivalent to $100,000 after his local council filed a complaint with the police. The cartoonist, Choi, inserted insulting comments about South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak into a cartoon in the Happy Wonju newsletter, distributed last month.

Putin: "It's a bit too much..."

A Russian artist, Alexander Shednov, also known as Shurik, has been arrested after he projected an image of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's face and a woman's body onto the side of a building in Voronezh on 12th June. In the collage, the PM says: "A third Presidential term? It's a bit too much. On the other hand, three's a charm".

Thai Rath

On 6th June, the sensationalist Thai Rath (ไทยรัฐ) newspaper published, on its front page, a photograph allegedly showing David Carradine’s body at the scene of his death. (His body had been discovered in his hotel wardrobe two days earlier.)

The image was partially censored, with a black moire pattern added to cover the body. (Incredibly, this pattern has led some international news sources, who have clearly not seen the photo, to claim that Carradine died wearing fishnet stockings.) The same image was also printed on an inside page with only slight pixelation.

Since the photograph was published, Carradine’s family has threatened legal action against any subsequent reproduction. Consequently, no other publication has printed the image, and it has been removed from Thai Rath’s website.

There is some speculation that the image is a fake, as it appears to show a relatively young man with black hair. But the position of the corpse is consistent with police reports that Carradine was discovered hanged and tied up in an apparent act of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Several unquestionably genuine photographs taken after Carradine’s autopsy have appeared online, though they have not appeared in any print publications.

Thai Rath is notorious for its crime-scene photographs. Perhaps the first was in 1961, when it published a photo of the body of a female student who had been raped and murdered. That image has rarely been reproduced, though it does appear in ๔ ทศวรรษภาพข่าวไทย (‘40 years of Thai photojournalism’).

World Comedy Film Festival 2009

Bangkok will host the inaugural World Comedy Film Festival later this month (10th to 16th June) at Paragon Cineplex and SF CentralWorld. The event has been postponed twice, and an ambitious early announcement, that Stephen Chow and Rowan Atkinson would be attending, has been quietly dropped.

The most interesting film in the programme is With Gilbert & George (screening on 12th and 16th June), a comprehensive portrait of the artists filmed by Julian Cole over a seventeen-year period. But it's an art documentary, not a comedy. (The artists were the inspiration for several murals at Bangkok's Siam Center mall.)

2nd Bangkok Triennale

Anupong Chantorn, famous for his painting representing monks as crows, is currently exhibiting a similar drawing at the 2nd Bangkok Triennale International Print & Drawing Exhibition. Anupong's earlier painting won first prize at the 53rd National Exhibition and inspired a butoh dance performance, San-Dan-Ka. His new drawing, Hope In The Dark, has won the Triennale Prize, and is showing at Bangkok Art & Cultural Centre from 14th May until 14th June.

The 67 Most Influential Films Ever Made

The current issue of Total Film magazine features an unordered list titled The 67 Most Influential Films Ever Made, as follows:

• Jaws
  
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
  
• Night Of The Living Dead
  
• The Man With The Golden Arm
  
• All Quiet On The Western Front
  
• Nanook Of The North
  
• The Abyss
  
• Enter The Dragon
  
• Blood Feast
  
• Heaven's Gate
  
• Easy Rider
  
• Star Wars IV: A New Hope
  
• The Graduate
  
• Tron
  
• Becky Sharp
  
• Carrie
  
• Reservoir Dogs
  
• Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs
  
• Gertie The Dinosaur
  
• The Adventures Of Prince Achmed
  
• Metropolis
  
• Battleship Potemkin
  
• Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
  
• The Evil Dead
  
• Flashdance
  
• Blade Runner
  
• Workers Leaving The Factory
  
• A Streetcar Named Desire
  
• Breathless
  
• Meet Me In St Louis
  
• Blazing Saddles
  
• Stagecoach
  
• Nashville
  
• The Last Laugh
  
• Deep Throat
  
• Room At The Top
  
• The Battle Of Algiers
  
• Sex Lies & Videotape
  
• The Cable Guy
  
• The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari
  
• Shadows
  
• Rashomon
  
• Do The Right Thing
  
• Blackboard Jungle
  
• Psycho
  
• The Birth Of A Nation
  
• The Wild Bunch
  
• Mean Streets
  
• Batman
  
• Halloween
  
• The Jazz Singer
  
• Toy Story
  
• Terminator II: Judgment Day
  
• Pink Flamingos
  
• Twister
  
• Citizen Kane
  
• The Thief Of Bagdad
  
• The Matrix
  
• The Robe
  
• It Happened One Night
  
• Bwana Devil
  
• L'Assassinat Du Duc de Guise
  
• Cabiria
  
• Le Roman d'Un Tricheur
  
• Un Chien Andalou
  
• Victim
  
• The Blair Witch Project

It's great to see so many silent films included, though there's no film noir, no Neorealism, and (most surprisingly) nothing by Francis Ford Coppola. Twister, the only entry I take exception to, was included simply because it was the first film released on DVD in the UK. Note that Carrie is the 1976 Brian de Palma horror film, not the 1952 William Wyler romantic drama. Total Film previously published lists of 100 films in 2005 and 2006.

Choc

A French judge yesterday ordered that the current issue of Choc magazine must be withdrawn from sale. The magazine's cover features a photograph of kidnap victim Ilan Halimi taken by his kidnappers.

Bangkok Bananas

The Bangkok Bananas arts festival ended today (having started on 30th April). It featured Cine-Bananas, a series of outdoor film screenings including the silent documentary Chang (accompanied by a live orchestra), filmed in Thailand by the directors of King Kong (Merian C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack).

The festival's finale this evening, Spooky Night, featured a collection of horror films, including Vampire, a short film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul commissioned for the Travelling series by Louis Vuitton. Vampire is a cryptozoological faux-documentary about a vampire bird, filmed in the same style as The Blair Witch Project.

Quote of the day...

“Another core leader, Phipob Thongchai, said earlier that under “new politics” there would be land reform so that every Thai citizen would own a piece of land and be able to make a living. He cited the case of North Korea, saying that although the country is poor and its people are starving, the North Koreans can pride themselves in owning a small piece of land.”
— Bangkok Post

Phipob Thongchai, one of the leaders of the People’s Alliance for Democracy, gave a glimpse of the movement’s social policies, citing the dictatorship of North Korea as a model to aspire towards (quoted by Veera Prateepchaikul in today’s Bangkok Post). Previous quotes of the day: the Information and Communication Technology Minister openly admits to violating the Computer Crime Act, and a Ministry of Culture official dismisses Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s entire œvre at a single stroke.

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.

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.