24 May 2011

The Sunday Herald

The Sunday Herald
Ryan Giggs took out an injunction earlier this year to prevent the news of his affair with Imogen Thomas from being made public. The injunction only applied to English and Welsh media, and Giggs was named by the Scottish newspaper the Sunday Herald two days ago.

Yesterday, MP John Hemming used parliamentary privilege to name Giggs in the House of Commons: "With about 75,000 people having named Ryan Giggs on Twitter, it's obviously impracticable to imprison them all". This opened the floodgates, and today's newspapers have all named Giggs despite the injunction.

23 May 2011

ตัวตน โดย ตัวงาน

Thai Film Archive
Apichatpong Weerasethakul will host a four-hour film masterclass, titled ตัวตน โดย ตัวงาน, at the Thai Film Archive (in Salaya, near Bangkok) on 14th June. Apichatpong last appeared at the Archive almost a year ago, after winning the Cannes Palme d'Or.

He has previously given shorter lectures in 2010 (Indy Spirit Project) and 2008 (Apichatpong On Video Works). His best-known films are Uncle Boonmee and Syndromes & A Century.

09 May 2011

Phenomena & Prophecies

Phenomena & Prophecies
Horror In Pink I
Phenomena & Prophecies, a retrospective of Manit Sriwanichpoom's photographs, opened at G23 in Bangkok on 23rd April. The exhibition will close on 18th July.

Most of the images feature Manit's trademark 'Pink Man', the conspicuous consumer portrayed by Sompong Tawee, including the truly shocking Horror In Pink series (shown previously in From Message To Media). (At the opening reception, Sompong posed for photographs with visitors.) There are also portraits of soldiers posing for snapshots after the 2006 coup, ironic commentaries on politics-as-spectacle that echo Manit's recent contributions to Rupture.

Manit is one of Thailand's most celebrated contemporary photographers. Flashback '76 was arguably his most powerful solo exhibition; his work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, most recently Dialogues.

30 April 2011

Voice Of Taksin

Voice Of Taksin
Somyot Prueksakasemsuk, editor of Voice Of Taksin magazine, has been arrested and charged with lèse-majesté. The charge relates to two columns, titled คมความคิด ("Sharp thinking"), published in February and March 2010, written by Jit Pollachan (a pseudonym for Jakrapob Penkair). Voice Of Taksin is notorious for its radical and inflammatory content: some issues have incited violence, with a cartoon of a Molotov cocktail ("Don't throw more than two bottles per day!") and a cover depicting a hand grenade ("Bomb the aristocrats").

29 April 2011

Digiplay

Digiplay
Pong
Digiplay opened at TCDC on 25th March. It was originally scheduled to close on 1st May, though it has now been extended to 22nd May. The exhibition showcases contemporary computer-game design and animation from Thai and British artists.

Digiplay also includes a selection of old games consoles representing the history of video games. There are playable versions of many games, including the first-ever computer game, Spacewar; the original console game, Pong; and an interactive/virtual-reality game, Kinectimals.

28 April 2011

Modern Architecture A-Z

Modern Architecture A-Z
Modern Architecture A-Z is a dictionary of architects and architectural styles, edited by Laszlo Taschen (a project he inherited from Peter Gossel, who co-wrote Taschen's Architecture In The 20th Century) and similar in format to Taschen's Photographers A-Z. It's published in two volumes: A-K and L-Z.

Significant modern and contemporary architects, including masters such as Le Corbusier and Frank Gehry, are profiled. There are gorgeous full-page photographs of iconic buildings such as the Eiffel Tower (Paris), the Chrysler Building (New York), and the Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao). The Encyclopedia Of Architecture, edited by Joseph A Wilkes, is a five-volume encyclopedia that also includes biographies of key architects.

Photographers A-Z

Photographers A-Z
Photographers A-Z, compiled by Hans-Michael Koetzle for Taschen, is a bibliographical dictionary of modern photography, from portraiture and photomontage to photojournalism. The format is similar to that of Taschen's Modern Architecture A-Z (and Ian Jeffrey's The Photography Book). Each entry - covering one or two pages - includes a bibliography and a list of selected exhibitions.

Each photographer's work is illustrated with (sometimes rather small) reproductions from one of their published monographs. The selected artists range from masters such as Man Ray and Henri Cartier-Bresson to leading contemporary photographers such as Andreas Gursky and Sebastiao Salgado. For more historical context, see A World History Of Photography, Photography: A Cultural History, and The Focal Encyclopedia Of Photography.

23 April 2011

Conversations With Scorsese

Conversations With Scorsese
Richard Schickel's book-length interview with Martin Scorsese, Conversations With Scorsese, expands and updates Schickel's documentary Scorsese On Scorsese. (It's also more comprehensive than Ian Christie's book Scorsese On Scorsese.)

Many of the anecdotes are familiar from previous Scorsese interviews, and there are no personal revelations. (Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls has more explosive details about Scorsese's drug use.) Scorsese is more candid than usual, however: describing the delayed release of Shutter Island, he says it felt like "somebody just has a baseball bat and hits you in the chest". He is surprisingly dismissive of Shutter Island, in fact ("I want to leave Shutter Island"), and critical of the constraints imposed by the studio system during the making of Gangs Of New York, The Aviator, and The Departed.

The book also includes a detailed filmography of Scorsese's work as director, actor, and producer. Schickel's previous interviews with film directors include The Men Who Made The Movies (a documentary series and book) and Woody Allen: A Life In Film (a documentary and book).

15 April 2011

Scream IV

Scream IV
Scream IV (or Scre4m) was directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, as were Scream I-II. (Williamson wrote a treatment for Scream III, though not the script; Craven and Williamson also collaborated, less successfully, on Cursed.) The original Scream was a genre classic, starting a trend for post-modern horror; in Nightmare Movies, Kim Newman calls it "the defining horror film for a generation". (Craven's earlier New Nightmare was equally post-modern, though less successful at the box office.) Scream II was an unusually impressive sequel, though the metafictional self-referentiality in Scream III felt too much like a parody. Since Scream III, Craven has directed the effective thriller Red Eye, one of the better segments of Paris, Je T'Aime, and the shockingly mediocre My Soul To Take.

With Williamson (who also wrote the excellent The Faculty) back on board, Scream IV should have reinvigorated the series. However, there's nothing original here, merely the same old phone calls (once clever, now formulaic) and villain-unmaskings (inviting unwelcome Scooby Doo comparisons). The body count is extremely high, though the large cast and frequent killings mean that characters are given very little back-story, so it's hard to become emotionally involved in their fates. Also, there is little suspense, and each victim is dispatched so quickly, thus the film is never really scary.

13 April 2011

The Film Theory Reader

The Film Theory Reader
The Film Theory Reader: Debates & Arguments, edited by Marc Furstenau, includes some of the most fundamental film-studies texts, covering auteurism (two extracts from Andre Bazin's What Is Cinema?), semiotics (an extract from Christian Metz's Film Language), and spectatorship (Laura Mulvey's widely-anthologised Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema). The final chapter, Digital Cinema, is a sceptical essay by cinema's leading technology writer, John Belton. Film Theory & Criticism: Introductory Readings (1974) and Movies & Methods (1976) are the most comprehensive film-theory anthologies.

11 April 2011

The Typographic Desk Reference

The Typographic Desk Reference
The Typographic Desk Reference (abbreviated to TDR), by Theo Rosendorf, is a concise guide to typographical terminology and type anatomy. TDR's design is especially striking: it's slim, stark, sturdy, and elegant.

Fortunately not another conventional font catalogue, TDR instead devotes more space to the minutiae of typography, complete with diagrams and examples. This material is usually covered only in brief glossaries, so TDR's meticulous coverage is exceptional. (For a detailed account of typographic history, see Daniel Updike's Printing Types and Lewis Blackwell's 20th-Century Type; in both cases, the first and second editions are superior to the third.)

...Isms
Understanding Architecture

...Isms: Understanding Architecture
...Isms: Understanding Architecture, by Jeremy Melvin, is part of the ...Isms series (also including Understanding Art and Understanding Cinema). Whereas Understanding Cinema contained mostly redundant 'isms', the '-ism' suffixes in Understanding Architecture are all kosher.

Like Understanding Art, the book presents a logical and concise historical summary. The book was subsequently reprinted under the less succinct subtitle Understanding Architectural Styles.

...Isms
Understanding Cinema

Film Isms
Film Isms: Understanding Cinema classifies film history into a series of categories, all suffixed by '-ism'. This approach was adopted successfully by the first book in the ...Isms series, Understanding Art, because modern art has fragmented into numerous isms. (Other books in the series include Understanding Architecture; Manifesto and Styles, Schools, & Movements, unrelated to this series, are more extensive studies of artistic isms.)

Unlike art, cinema is more suited to classification by genre than by ism, though Film Isms (written by Ronald Bergan, co-author of 501 Must-See Movies) takes "an 'ismatic' viewpoint" that awkwardly converts genres into isms, coining such bizarre neologisms as 'Horrorism', 'Film Noirism', 'New Wavism', etc. These incongruous labels are unfortunate distractions, obfuscating rather than simplifying their subject-matter, and are thus counter-productive in a book that purports to provide a concise and accessible summary of film history. Also, Bergan's definition of Orientalism is simply incorrect, and the appendices are too short to be useful.

Finally, the book's title punctuation is unclear. Film Isms... appears on the cover and title page, while Film...Isms appears on the spine and flaps. ...Isms: Understanding Cinema would be more consistent with the other titles in the series. Bergan's previous book Film is a better beginner's guide to cinema history, and 1,000 Films To Change Your Life is a better thematic guide to great films.

05 April 2011

Nightmare Movies

Nightmare Movies
Kim Newman has revised and substantially updated his definitive history of modern horror cinema, Nightmare Movies, which has been published with the new subtitle Horror On Screen Since The 1960s. This edition is divided into two parts: the previous version of Nightmare Movies (covering horror cinema since Night Of The Living Dead, which he profiled recently in The Empire Five-Star 500; the original text is untouched, except for new footnotes) and "the sequel" titled New Nightmares (a reference to Wes Craven's film New Nightmare).

Newman is the ultimate horror expert, and Nightmare Movies is his magnum opus. In the updated version, he discusses serial-killer films (notably The Silence Of The Lambs), the proliferation of vampires in cinema and on TV, postmodernism (Scream) and Hollywood's current obsession with remakes, J-Horror ghost films (Ringu), 'torture porn' (Hostel), virtual-reality SF (The Matrix), and zombie horror. The last two categories also serve as an update of his apocalypse-cinema book Millennium Movies. He previously summarised contemporary horror trends in Horror, which he co-edited.

Newman is also a contributor to 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, Contemporary American Cinema, Fear Without Frontiers, 100 European Horror Films, The Oxford History Of World Cinema, and the Aururm Film Encyclopedia: Horror. He has written for various magazines, including Premiere, Sight & Sound, and Empire. He also appears in the supplements to DVDs of Video Nasties, Double Indemnity, Notorious, Suspiria, and The Old Dark House. I saw him introduce a screening of Zombie Holocaust at the ICA, London.

04 April 2011

A Voix Nue

Last month, the French radio station France Culture broadcast five episodes of A Voix Nue, directed by Manoushak Fashahi and featuring Stanley Kubrick. Each episode, transmitted daily from 21st to 25th March, was an extract from interviews with Kubrick recorded by film critic Michel Ciment.

Ciment interviewed Kubrick in 1975, 1980, and 1987, and they discussed Kubrick's films Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket. The interviews were originally published in the French newspaper L'Express, and subsequently in Ciment's book Kubrick: The Definitive Edition.

02 April 2011

Obsessive Compulsive

Obsessive Compulsive
ตัวใครตัวมันนะโยม
Vasan Sitthiket's latest exhibition, Obsessive Compulsive, opened yesterday at Number One Gallery, Bangkok, and will close on 7th May. (Vasan's previous exhibition, Ten Evil Scenes Of Thai Politic [sic], was shown at the same gallery last year.)

The exhibition includes ตัวใครตัวมันนะโยม, a painting of naked monks fighting and having sex, with a monk's saffron robe appliqued to the canvas. This characteristically provocative work is as controversial as Anupong Chantorn's painting Moral Boundary, in which naked monks were painted onto a monk's robe.

La Fete 2011

La Fete 2011
Cinema Picnic By Moonlight
Monrak Transistor
This year's La Fete festival runs from 10th February until 10th April, at various venues around Bangkok. The highlight of the festival was Museum Siam's Cinema Picnic By Moonlight, an evening of free outdoor film screenings. To celebrate Valentine's Day, Pen-ek Ratanaruang's romantic comedy/thriller Monrak Transistor was screened on 14th February.

La Fete, like the recent French Open Air Cinema Festival, is organised by Alliance Francaise. Pen-ek's other films are Fun-Bar Karaoke, 6ixtynin9, Last Life In The Universe, Invisible Waves (shown at the 2006 Bangkok International Film Festival), Ploy (shown at the 2007 Bangkok International Film Festival), and Nymph (shown at the 2009 Bangkok International Film Festival; also released in a director's cut version). He has directed several short films, including a segment of Sawasdee Bangkok.

19 March 2011

Silent Movies

Silent Movies
Silent Movies: The Birth Of Film & The Triumph Of Movie Culture, by Peter Kobel, styles itself as a "definitive illustrated history of silent movies". The key word here is 'illustrated', as the book's large, glossy images, many of which were previously unpublished, are its main attraction.

The book provides a useful introduction to silent cinema, though the text is a concise overview rather than an in-depth analysis. As in much writing about silent cinema, the American film industry and the star system receive the most coverage. A foreword by Martin Scorsese and an introduction by Kevin Brownlow add prestige to this lavish and accessible survey of silent film.

Anyone who is fascinated by this book should also read Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By and Hollywood, William K Everson's American Silent Film, and Richard Abel's Encyclopedia Of Early Cinema. Brownlow also directed two outstanding television series about silent film: Hollywood and Cinema Europe.

06 March 2011

Dialogues

Dialogues
Ash Heart Project
Dead Chicken On Thai Flag | Dog Skull On Thai Flag | Dead Dove On Thai Flag | Pig's Heart On Thai Flag
WWF
Dialogues is a multi-media exhibition showcasing recent works by prominent Thai and Belgian artists. The exhibition opened at BACC on 27th January, and will close today.

Among the numerous highlights are a ceramic sculpture by Wasinburee Supanichvoraparch (previously shown at Another Side), WWF (an enormous wasp by Pascal Bernier), and Manit Sriwanichpoom's photographs of dead animals on the Thai flag. (Manit has contributed equally political images to the Rupture, Flashback '76, and From Message To Media exhibitions.)

There is also a rare opportunity to see Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook's videos The Class I-III, in which she teaches a class of corpses. (Her video Conversation was shown at The Suspended Moment, and Reading For Female Corpse was at From Message To Media.) However, the most fascinating exhibit at Dialogues is Ruangsak Anuwatwimon's Ash Heart Project, a collection of heart sculptures made of animal and human ashes.

03 March 2011

Movie Movements

Movie Movements
Movie Movements: Films That Changed The World Of Cinema, by James Clarke, is a short guide to the major artistic movements of international cinema. Eight categories are discussed: realism, Expressionism, avant-garde, Surrealism, documentary, Soviet montage, 'new waves', and digital.

Each category is represented by a few key films, with synopses and brief analysis resembling a condensed version of Film Classics. The three films I regard as the greatest ever made - Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Citizen Kane - are not included.

27 February 2011

Ploy Saeng 100

Ploy Saeng 100
Ploy Saeng 100
For the Ploy Saeng 100 exhibition, TCDC asked 100 influential and creative people for their cultural inspirations. The exhibition includes a costume from the banned film Insects In The Backyard.

Ploy Saeng 100 was organised to celebrate TCDC's fifth anniversary. The exhibition opened on 2nd February and will close on 13th March.

25 February 2011

Asian Pulse 10+1

Asian Pulse 10+1
Asian Pulse 10+1: Art Tactic is a multi-media exhibition featuring works from the ten countries of the ASEAN region and China. A condensed version of the exhibition - featuring works from Thailand, Singapore, and China - opened at BACC on 21st January, and will close on 13th March.

Thai artist Amrit Chusuwan has produced a new video installation, Pig's Story, featuring ten pig sculptures viewing video footage of a slaughterhouse on five monitors. Other exhibits are more whimsical, though they tackle large themes such as politics, religion, and tradition.

24 February 2011

East Meets West

East Meets West
East Meets West
East Meets West, an exhibition of posters by graphic designer Yang Liu, opened at TCDC yesterday. The exhibition will close on 13th March.

Each poster illustrates a difference between Eastern and Western (specifically Chinese and German) cultures, represented by pictograms. Each cultural difference is expressed as a binary opposite, though the artist is never judgemental and the images are often comical.

18 February 2011

Battleship Potemkin


Battleship Potemkin

Sergei Eisenstein’s classic Battleship Potemkin (Бронено́сец «Потёмкин») was screened at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya (near Bangkok) this evening. It was previously screened on 2nd February, and will be shown again on 26th February. The film was accompanied by a new Thai music score by Nipat Chaisap, performed live.

This is the latest of several Battleship Potemkin soundtracks, in a variety of styles: the original orchestral score composed by Edmund Meisel; a classical score by Dmitri Shostakovich, for the film’s fiftieth anniversary rerelease (1975); an electronic score by Eric Allaman for the sixtieth anniversary, performed at the Berlinale (1986); an electronic/orchestral score by the Pet Shop Boys, performed as a free concert in Trafalgar Square, London (2004); and a jazz score by Richard Marriott, performed by the Club Foot Orchestra at the World Financial Center, New York (2005).

07 February 2011

A Serbian Film

A Serbian Film
A Serbian Film, directed by Srdjan Spasojevic, is certainly shocking and offensive, though its reputation as sickening and unwatchable is unjustified. Maybe I'm too jaded, after prior exposure to Flower Of Flesh & Blood, Cannibal Holocaust, Cannibal Ferox, Salo, Blood Feast, Ichi The Killer, Aftermath, Irreversible, Men Behind The Sun, Nekromantik I-II, and August Underground's Mordum, but A Serbian Film seems like provocative exploitation rather than a pinnacle of obscenity.

Some sequences, such as the birth of a baby, the incestuous family reunion, and the death of the final bodyguard, resemble dramatic visualisations of The Aristocrats, with the director orchestrating the most disgusting acts he can think of. As in many other 'extreme' horror films, however, the concepts may be revolting though their executions are unrealistic and thus ineffective. The lead actor, for instance, wears an enormous prosthesis that's as absurd as those in XXX by La Fura dels Baus. An early decapitation scene, and the Grand Guignol finale, are so over-the-top that the gore becomes almost comic.

The film is also a bitter, nihilistic political allegory, in which the repressive Serbian government of the 1990s (notably the genocidal President Slobodan Milosevic) is represented by a 'snuff' movie director. Snuff movies have become an increasingly common theme in contemporary horror films, ever since the release of the low-budget exploitation film Snuff and, more recently, the mainstream thriller 8mm. The ultimate source of this trend is probably Peeping Tom, a film decades ahead of its time.

A Serbian Film is genuinely transgressive in its juxtapositions of sex, extreme violence, and children, and has therefore become highly controversial. Serbia has a tradition of cinematic provocation, notably Dusan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries Of The Organism.

03 February 2011

Isan Film Festival 2010

Isan Film Festival 2010
There will be a free screening of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film Haunted Houses at The Jim Thompson Art Center tonight. The screening is part of the Isan Film Festival 2010: Back To Isan Homeland, which is coming to Bangkok from today until 13th February.

Apichatpong's most recent Jim Thompson Art Center screening was in 2008, when his short film Morakot was included in the Tomyam Pladib exhibition; his most famous films are Uncle Boonmee and Syndromes & A Century.

28 January 2011

Enter The Void

Enter The Void
Gaspar Noe is one of the most provocative (and therefore fascinating) directors in contemporary cinema. He has directed several explicit short films, the confrontational I Stand Alone, and the shocking Irreversible. Enter The Void features all of his trademarks: transgressive content, strobe lighting, and Brechtian alienation devices.

The central character dies in the second reel, and the camera rises above him and presents a detached, bird's-eye view of the subsequent action. The effect is similar to the end of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, with the camera looking down directly onto the set. (I Stand Alone was also heavily inspired by Taxi Driver: the misanthropic loner, the narration, the porn cinema, the fantasies of social cleansing, and the violent climax.)

For much of the film, we are inside the protagonist's head, experiencing what he sees through a subjective camera. Similar experiments in first-person-perspective filming were attempted by Orson Welles for his abandoned Hearts Of Darkness project, and more successfully by Robert Montgomery in his noir thriller Lady In The Lake. There are also long sequences of psychedelic abstract light effects, inspired by the 'stargate' sequence from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. (2001 is another long-standing Noe influence, and a 2001 poster appears at the end of Irreversible; Enter The Void, Irreversible, and 2001 all finish with the birth of a baby.)

The subjective camera and abstract effects are bravely uncommercial and experimental, though also repetitive and long-winded. Indeed, some of these longueurs have been shortened for alternate versions of the film. The original Cannes premiere was the longest version, though it had no opening credits. Four minutes were cut, and credits added, for subsequent festival screenings (and this is the version that I've seen); at some festivals, different music was used for the credits sequence. For general release, reel seven was removed entirely, just as Quentin Tarantino removed a reel from Death Proof. Also, Noe insisted that the film be screened at 25fps rather than the standard 24fps.

Noe is a key figure in the so-called New French Extreme movement, and Enter The Void contains the requisite amount of transgressive sex - filmed internally, as in Channel 5's 21st Century Sex - and graphic violence. An aborted foetus is shown, as in Four Months, Three Weeks, & Two Days. These extreme images, and the regular use of strobe lighting, represent a deliberate attempt at audience provocation, recalling the early films of Michael Haneke and particularly Funny Games.

Black Swan

Black Swan
Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan had been highly anticipated by serious film fans, and it lives up to our expectations. Natalie Portman stars as a naive and repressed ballerina preparing for a production of Swan Lake. Portman's character is encouraged to lose herself in the role of the Swan Queen, and she responds with hallucinations, mutilations, and paranoia. As in Aronofsky's previous film, The Wrestler, the central character is committed to an intensely physically demanding performance.

Like all ballet films, Black Swan owes a debt to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes, though Aronofsky takes Powell and Pressburger's surreal fantasy and turns it up to eleven. Visually (and literally, with mirrors and doubles) reflecting the delusions of its central character, the atmosphere is unashamedly Expressionist, evoking Roman Polanski's Repulsion and even (especially in a violent stabbing with a glass shard) the giallo thrillers of Dario Argento.

The film also feels rather Hitchcockian, and Hitchcock used the doppelganger concept in The Case Of Mr Pelham. The theme of the jealous understudy surely comes from All About Eve. It's all completely over-the-top and thoroughly entertaining, a welcome return to the disturbing psychological intensity of Aronofsky's earlier films Pi and Requiem For A Dream, after the disappointment of The Fountain.

The End Of The Party (paperback)

The End Of The Party
Andrew Rawnsley has added two new chapters to his book The End Of The Party, for the paperback edition. The book was originally published early last year (making its title either presumptuous or prophetic), before the various internal plots against Gordon Brown and the indecisive 2010 UK general election. These events are now included in the paperback edition.

Rawnsley's first history of New Labour, Servants Of The People, covered only Tony Blair's first term in government. The End Of The Party, much wider in scope, features Blair's second and third terms, and Brown's election defeat. Blair has subsequently published his own account of his premiership, A Journey; Peter Mandelson's memoir The Third Man includes an inside account of last year's post-election negotiations.

Servants Of The People's biggest scoop was an anonymous briefing that Brown had "psychological flaws". Rawnsley did not reveal the source of this quote, writing only that it came from "someone who has an extremely good claim to know the mind of the Prime Minister". Like Bob Woodward (Obama's Wars) and the authors of Game Change, Rawnsley relies on 'deep background' interviews with senior yet unidentified figures, and he has not yet fulfilled his pledge to reveal his sources after Blair left office. In The End Of The Party, Rawnsley hinted indirectly that Alastair Campbell was the source of the "psychological flaws" quote; while Campbell's book The Blair Years contained no reference to the incident, the unedited version published this year confirms that Campbell was indeed responsible.

The Empire Five-Star 500

The Empire Five-Star 500
Empire magazine has published an alphabetical list of 500 films, selected from those that it has awarded five stars when they were released at the cinema or on video. The special issue, titled The Empire Five-Star 500, also includes an article on George A Romero's original Living Dead trilogy written by Kim Newman.

Empire published a list of all its five-star reviews in its 100th issue (October 1997), a total of ninety-one films. More recently, the magazine published a 500 Greatest Movies poll.

PDF

21 January 2011

Akira Kurosawa: Master Of Cinema

Akira Kurosawa: Master Of Cinema
Akira Kurosawa: Master Of Cinema is a beautiful and lavish book celebrating Kurosawa's contribution to world cinema. The book's numerous full-page photographs are its main attraction: glossy reproductions of film stills, paintings, and script drafts, all of which look stunning.

The author, Peter Cowie, divides Kurosawa's films into modern and historical narratives (the traditional Japanese Gendai-Geki and Jidai-Geki dichotomy), with an additional chapter on Kurosawa's literary inspirations and a rather esoteric discussion of miscellaneous 'elements'. Cowie has written a satisfactory overview of Kurosawa's life and work, though the text is clearly secondary to the gorgeous images.

Martin Scorsese provides a brief foreword, and there is an introduction by Kurosawa expert Donald Richie. Cowie acknowledges that Richie's book The Films Of Akira Kurosawa is the definitive account of Kurosawa's work, and offers Master Of Cinema as "a pictorially driven tribute" to Kurosawa that complements Richie's study.

Master Of Cinema, with a short note written by Kurosawa's daughter Kazuko, is a semi-official commemoration of Kurosawa's centenary. Kurosawa's own perspective is provided in his book Something Like An Autobiography and the anthology Akira Kurosawa: Interviews. More of Kurosawa's paintings can be seen in Karl French's book Art By Film Directors.

Cowie also wrote one of the first studies of the films of Orson Welles, A Ribbon Of Dreams; authorised production histories of The Godfather (The Godfather Book) and Apocalypse Now (The Apocalypse Now Book); and a BFI Film Classics analysis of Annie Hall. He is also an authority on the career of Ingmar Bergman.

20 January 2011

Styles, Schools, & Movements

Styles, Schools, & Movements
Styles, Schools, & Movements, by Amy Dempsey, is an expanded edition of a work first published almost a decade ago. The original subtitle was An Encyclopaedic Guide To Modern Art, now replaced by the more assertive The Essential Encyclopaedic Guide To Modern Art.

The main entries give a brief history of 100 significant art 'isms', arranged chronologically from Impressionism onwards. Each chapter has a short bibliography, though these contain secondary rather than primary sources. A glossary gives capsule descriptions of a further 200 isms. Stephen Little's book Isms: Understanding Art has a similar concept, though Dempsey's book is more in-depth than Little's.

Akira Kurosawa: Interviews

Akira Kurosawa: Interviews
Akira Kurosawa: Interviews, edited by Bert Cardullo, is part of the Conversations With Filmmakers anthology series. Being a Kubrick completist, I also have Stanley Kubrick: Interviews from the same series. However, I generally prefer the earlier Directors On Directors series, which consists of in-depth, book-length Q&As rather than anthologies of shorter, sometimes repetitive interviews.

The volume on Kurosawa (whose 100 Years Retrospective finished in Bangkok yesterday) is most valuable for its reprint of Donald Richie's interview A Personal Record, which was first published in 1960 and is otherwise unavailable. (Richie's other Kurosawa interview, Kurosawa On Kurosawa, is not included, though it was partially reprinted by Sight & Sound magazine last year.)

The longest text in the anthology is a New Yorker profile from 1981 that seems more observational than interrogative: the writer describes, sometimes in oddly minute detail, what Kurosawa did during a five-day visit to New York. The interviews are almost exclusively from American publications, thus translations of Japanese press interviews would have been fascinating additions. Also, there are no early, pre-Rashomon, interviews, though Kurosawa covered this period in his own book, Something Like An Autobiography.

17 January 2011

Summit Business Review

Summit Business Review
Two journalists from Summit Business Review magazine have been arrested in Uganda. Director Samuel Sejjaaka and editor Mustapha Mugisha were subsequently released on bail pending charges.

They were arrested after the magazine's October 2010 issue featured a cartoon of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on its cover. Billboards reproducing the cartoon have been taken down in Kampala.

15 January 2011

August Underground's Mordum

August Underground's Mordum
August Underground's Mordum has been called the most violent and disturbing film ever made. It doesn't quite live up to such hyperbole, though it is an extremely uncomfortable film to watch and I can't imagine ever wanting to view it again.

Like Man Bites Dog, Mordum is a serial-killer pseudo-documentary, filmed with hand-held cameras for extra verisimilitude. Specifically, Mordum approximates the style and content of a 'snuff' film, and therefore it consists entirely of protracted torture and murder sequences without any conventional narrative. I have no idea who the target audience is, but most viewers would surely be repulsed by characters (including one who looks and acts like Crackers from Pink Flamingos) who rape their victims and vomit on each other.

There are more violent films than Mordum. Flower Of Flesh & Blood, for example, a fake snuff film from the Japanese Guinea Pig series, depicts a sedated woman being slowly dismembered and decapitated. Also, splatter films such as Braindead contain so much gore that they are hard to take seriously. Mordum does include an evisceration and a castration, though its impact is derived from the sordid atmosphere rather than specific violent set-pieces; its convincing faux-snuff aesthetic makes it more realistic than conventional horror films.

Also, Mordum is less unsettling than mondo documentaries such as Faces Of Death or exploitation films such as Cannibal Holocaust that combine mondo footage with fictional narratives. Cannibal Holocaust's faux-documentary style and graphic violence surely influenced Mordum, though both films were ultimately inspired by Peeping Tom.

04 January 2011

Saying The Unsayable

Saying The Unsayable
Saying The Unsayable, edited by Soren Ivarsson and Lotte Isager, is a fascinating collection of academic papers discussing the political role of the constitutional monarchy. The book's subtitle, Monarchy & Democracy In Thailand, arguably requires inverted commas around one word: 'democracy' is an ambiguous concept in Thailand, as Kevin Hewison and Kengkij Kitirianglarp recognise in their chapter on Thai-Style Democracy and "the events that paved the way for the military's seizure of power".

Peter A Jackson begins the book with a chapter titled Virtual Divinity, noting that "Bhumibol has become enveloped by a symbolism and discourse of magico-divinity". Implicit in the media's spiritual and supernatural descriptions of the King, and in the ubiquitous public reproduction of his image, is the notion that the King should therefore be unconditionally venerated. (Indeed, article eight of the constitution states that "The King shall be enthroned in a position of revered worship".)

03 January 2011

3rd French Open Air Cinema Festival


Breathless

The 3rd French Open Air Cinema Festival will begin later this week, running from 14th to 23rd January. The highlight will be a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece Breathless (À bout de souffle) at Santi Chai Prakan Park, Bangkok, on 21st January. Breathless was previously shown as part of The Godard Week. The Open Air Cinema Festival is organised by Alliance Française.

29 December 2010

100 Films Incontournables

100 Films Incontournables
100 Films Incontournables, by Emmanuelle Le Roy Poncet, is a guide to 100 classic films, listed chronologically. Each director was restricted to a single entry.

The 100 Films Incontournables are as follows:
  • City Lights
  • Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs
  • Port Of Shadows
  • Gone With The Wind
  • The Rules Of The Game
  • Citizen Kane
  • Casablanca
  • Rome: Open City
  • La Belle & La Bete
  • Kind Hearts & Coronets
  • All About Eve
  • A Streetcar Named Desire
  • Jeux Interdits
  • Tokyo Story
  • Seven Samurai
  • Touchez Pas Au Grisbi
  • & God Created Woman
  • The Searchers
  • Vertigo
  • Some Like It Hot
  • The 400 Blows
  • Rio Bravo
  • La Dolce Vita
  • War Of The Buttons
  • Lawrence Of Arabia
  • Le Mepris
  • Les Tontons Flingeurs
  • Le Grand Vadrouille
  • A Man & A Woman
  • Belle De Jour
  • The Young Girls Of Rochefort
  • The Graduate
  • Le Cercle Rouge
  • The Things Of Life
  • Love Story
  • Death In Venice
  • The Godfather
  • Cabaret
  • Deliverance
  • Last Tango In Paris
  • The Sting
  • The Way We Were
  • A Woman Under The Influence
  • Barry Lyndon
  • The Old Gun
  • That Most Important Thing: Love
  • One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
  • Cria Cuervos
  • Annie Hall
  • Star Wars IV: A New Hope
  • The Deer Hunter
  • Alien
  • The Marriage Of Maria Braun
  • Serie Noire
  • La Boum
  • Garde A Vue
  • Raiders Of The Lost Ark
  • Identification Of A Woman
  • Fanny & Alexander
  • A Nos Amours
  • Pauline At The Beach
  • So Long, Stooge
  • Once Upon A Time In America
  • Paris, Texas
  • A Sunday In The Country
  • Brazil
  • Shoah
  • Au Revoir, Les Enfants
  • The Big Blue
  • Die Hard
  • Dead Poets Society
  • GoodFellas
  • Pretty Woman
  • Edward Scissorhands
  • Basic Instinct
  • Three Colours: Blue
  • La Reine Margot
  • Wild Reeds
  • Pulp Fiction
  • Four Weddings & A Funeral
  • La Ceremonie
  • The Usual Suspects
  • Life Is Beautiful
  • The Big Lebowski
  • Titanic
  • Fight Club
  • The Virgin Suicides
  • Dancer In The Dark
  • In The Mood For Love
  • Amelie
  • The Lord Of The Rings I: The Fellowship Of The Ring
  • Mulholland Drive
  • Asterix & Obelisk Meet Cleopatra
  • L'Auberge Espagnole
  • The Pianist
  • Talk To Her
  • Million Dollar Baby
  • Brokeback Mountain
  • Pan's Labyrinth
  • The Lives Of Others
[Note that Some Like It Hot is the classic Billy Wilder comedy, and Titanic is the James Cameron blockbuster.] Clearly, the list has a French bias: more than a third of the entries are French-language films.

17 December 2010

Hope In The Dark

Hope In The DarkVicious Circle
Moral BoundaryMoral Boundary
Hope In The Dark, a new exhibition of paintings by Anupong Chantorn, opened in Bangkok yesterday. The show is named after a painting Anupong exhibited at the 2nd Bangkok Triennale last year. He caused controversy in 2007 with a painting depicting monks as scavenging birds, inspiring the butoh performance San-Dan-Ka; the new exhibition includes a similar drawing of a monk with a crow's beak, titled Vicious Circle.

Hope In The Dark also includes an even more provocative image. A drawing titled Moral Boundary shows three monks: one with an over-sized erect phallus, another being groped by the first, and a naked observer. The scene, albeit with slightly less nudity, has also been painted directly onto a monk's saffron robe.

Hope In The Dark also features an impressive collection of large bronze animal sculptures. The exhibition is at the Ardel Gallery of Modern Art until 30th January 2011.