31 August 2011

1001 Movies
You Must See Before You Die

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
The 2011 edition of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider, has been released. As in previous editions (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010), changes to the list have been limited to 1% of titles, all from the late 1990s onwards.

A dozen films have been removed, including Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill I (first deleted in 2006, then added again in 2008), Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!, Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together, and Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. The twelve replacement titles include True Grit, The Passion Of The Christ (added in 2005, then deleted in 2009), Inception, and Black Swan.

PDF

Some Like It Hot


Bangkok Screening Room

Some Like It Hot — The Funniest Film Ever Made: The Complete Book, Taschen’s tribute to Billy Wilder’s classic comedy, has been reissued to celebrate the publisher’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Some Like It Hot, starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon, is arguably the greatest comedy film ever made; its final line of dialogue—“Nobody’s perfect!”—is one of the most famous moments in cinema.

The book includes an interview with Wilder, and was originally published shortly before his death. This new edition has a slightly smaller format, and comes with a DVD of the film. The original edition featured a reprint of Marilyn Monroe’s annotated script, which is missing from this new edition. It remains a comprehensive tribute to the film, though, with a complete reprint of the shooting script, publicity materials, media clippings, and a Wilder filmography.

Editor Alison Castle has also edited two Kubrick books for Taschen, The Stanley Kubrick Archives and Napoleon, both of which are equally lavish. Her collaborator on Some Like It Hot, Dan Auiler, is the author of Hitchcock’s Notebooks.

29 August 2011

19th to 19th


19-19 19-19

Two new books, 19-19 ภาพ ชีวิต และการต่อสู้ของคนเสื้อแดง จาก 19 กันยา 2549 ถึง 19 พฤษภา 2553 (‘pictures of the life and struggle of the red-shirts from 19th September 2006 to 19th May 2010’) and กรุงเทพฯ (ไม่) มีคนเสิ้อแดง: บันทึกการต่อสู้ของคนเสื้อแดงกรุงเทพฯ (‘Bangkok (no) red shirts: a record of the battle of the red-shirts in Bangkok’) both provide photographic records of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Bangkok from 19th September 2006 (the coup) to 19th May 2010 (the Ratchaprasong massacre). Both are published by left-leaning political journals: 19-19 is from Same Sky Books, and กรุงเทพฯ (ไม่) มีคนเสิ้อแดง is from Read Journal.

The red-shirt anti-coup movement gained momentum in 2007, with an organised campaign opposing the 2007 constitution. On the other hand, the cause was significantly set back in April 2009, when red-shirt groups started violent demonstrations in Din Daeng. Subsequent red-shirt protests near Democracy Monument in early 2010 were peaceful. Much of 19-19 is devoted to the extraordinary events of May 2010, when red-shirt demonstrators were massacred by the army; กรุงเทพฯ (ไม่) มีคนเสิ้อแดง, on the other hand, focuses more on the build-up to the massacre

22 August 2011

International Film Festival 2011

International Film Festival 2011
Dogtooth
Chulalongkorn University's International Film Festival 2011 opened today. This year's highlight is the controversial Greek family drama Dogtooth (previously screened at the 2009 Bangkok International Film Festival), which is scheduled for 5th September.

The Festival runs until 9th September. As in previous years (2008, 2008-2009, 2010), all screenings are free.

17 August 2011

Journey Of The Buddha

Journey Of The Buddha
Journey Of The Buddha
Journey Of The Buddha, the inaugural exhibition of Bangkok's VR Museum, is a collection of Buddha statuettes (collected by Vichai Raksriaksorn) dating from the 9th century onwards. The icons originate from throughout South-East Asia, though primarily from Thailand's Sukhothai and Ayutthaya periods. The majority of the collection is displayed in darkened corridors with atmospheric red uplighting and ambient music. In contrast, an impressive panorama of more recent Buddha images is positioned around one side of the VR's modernist glass dome.

The most frequent Buddha styles and postures are all represented in the VR collection, with the exception of the emaciated Buddha, a striking example of which can be seen at Wat Umong in Chiang Mai. Thailand's most celebrated Buddha images include the golden Buddha at Wat Traimit and the emerald Buddha at Wat Phra Kaew, both in Bangkok, though the country's most majestic Buddha statues are in the ancient city of Sukhothai. (Buddha has been portrayed less respectfully in popular culture, appearing as a malevolent alien in Gantz.)

12 August 2011

The Book Of Skulls

The Book Of Skulls
Black Kites For The Love Of God
The Book Of Skulls, by Faye Dowling, is a visual survey of the human skull as a design icon, with examples of skull imagery from art, fashion, and graphic design. Damien Hirst's For The Love Of God, a platinum skull decorated with 8,000 diamonds, is the ultimate symbol of artistic commodification and fetishisation, and one of the most expensive works by a living artist, though the terms of its sale remain mysterious.

Gabriel Orozco's Black Kites, a chessboard pattern drawn onto a skull, is not included in Dowling's book, though it's an even more direct example of vanitas or memento mori iconography. It also evokes the Dia de los Muertos and Santa Muerte traditions of Orozco's native Mexico.

11 August 2011

Kulo

Kulo
Poleteismo
Poleteismo
Poleteismo
Kulo, a controversial exhibition accused of blasphemy and subjected to vandalism, has been closed prematurely. The exhibition opened on 17th July at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines in Manila, and was originally scheduled to run until 21st August.

Kulo was a group exhibition featuring works by thirty-two artists, though Poleteismo, an installation by Mideo Cruz, was singled out for criticism. Cruz's installation includes crucifixes and icons of Jesus decorated with wooden dildos and a used condom. President Aquino claimed that Cruz's work is offensive to Christians, which over-rides freedom of expression: "there is no freedom that is absolute". Cruz is now facing blasphemy charges.

Poleteismo has been shown in Manila several times before: at the Vargas Museum in 2002, at the Kulay-Diwa gallery in 2005, and at Ateneo de Manila University in 2007. It was profiled on the Telecingko television programme in 2005, and featured in a video directed by Sigfried Barros-Sanchez in 2007.

10 August 2011

Courrier-International

Courrier-International
The 13th July 2011 issue of Courrier-International has been banned in Morocco. The magazine includes a cartoon of King Mohammed VI, and it was banned for the same reason in 2009. (Other foreign publications - El Pais and L'Express International - have also been banned in Morocco, and the Moroccan newspaper Akhbar Al Youm was closed down in 2009.)

01 August 2011

Another Art Book

Another Art Book
Another Art Book is a portfolio of artworks commissioned by Another Magazine over the past decade. (The title is similar to Stefan Sagmeister's Another Self-Indulgent Design Monograph.)

Highlights include Ucnt (an irreverent anagram by Jake and Dinos Chapman) and Urine Shroud (a Rorschach blot by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, punning on the Turin Shroud and influenced by Andres Serrano's Piss Christ). The centrepiece, however, is The Stations Of The Cross, David Bailey's glossy photographs of Damien Hirst's passion-of-Christ tableaux, featuring skulls, a cow's head, and lots of blood.

The Tree Of Life

The Tree Of Life
The Tree Of Life, directed by Terrence Malick, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. Malick avoids publicity, works intensely, and emerges every few years with another masterpiece (like Stanley Kubrick, though even more so). His first two films, Badlands and Days Of Heaven, are undisputed classics, with gorgeous magic-hour cinematography. The Tree Of Life looks as stunning as his previous works, though its non-linear, almost abstract narrative is surprisingly experimental.

The film begins with a mother and father's grief at the death of one of their three sons. How he died is never explained; he would be at the right age to fight in the Vietnam war, though Malick's brother committed suicide and the film may therefore be semi-autobiographical. Later scenes of the sons growing up together in Texas in the 1950s may also be autobiographical, as Malick was also raised in Texas.

Like the art film Powers Of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, The Tree Of Life's perspective is both macroscopic and cosmological. Malick shows us the origins of galaxies, stars, and planets, the development of microbial organisms, the evolution of marine creatures, and the reign of the dinosaurs. These sequences are extraordinary and breath-taking, especially on a large cinema screen. They resemble the interplanetary scenes from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the analogue visual effects for both films were developed by Douglas Trumbull.

The dinosaur sequence (influenced, as are so many other CGI dinosaurs, by Jurassic Park) is arguably a prequel to 2001's 'Dawn of Man' segment; whereas Kubrick used pre-historic apes to illustrate our capacity for violence, Malick's dinosaurs represent nascent compassion, as one dinosaur spares the life of another. The hallucinatory dreamscapes of 2001 - and, less profoundly, Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void and Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain - may be The Tree Of Life's only parallels in commercial cinema; few other films are as ambitious (or audacious).

After the dinosaurs are obliterated by a meteorite, paving the way for human evolution, Malick returns to the three sons growing up in Texas. Scenes from their childhoods, remembered by one of the sons as an adult, present an idyllic existence punctuated by occasional moments of unsettling incongruity (a man suffering a seizure; a burning house) and magical-realist fantasy (the mother levitating, and laying in a glass coffin like Sleeping Beauty). These scenes are presented impressionistically, like snapshots from a photograph album, out of sequence and often without dialogue, leaving many events unexplained.

There is an unavoidably religious element to the film: it opens with a quotation from the Book of Job, and concludes with a family reunion on a heavenly beach. A purely abstract light pattern seen at the start and end of the film may thus represent a divine presence. I was put off by the religiosity, and the pretentious whispered voice-over, though more importantly I was captivated by the scope of the narrative.

27 July 2011

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger
You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger is another of Woody Allen's late-period London films (after Match Point, Scoop, and Cassandra's Dream). Again, the main characters are writers and artists; more unusually, they all seem to be alcoholics.

Anthony Hopkins is excellent in an unflattering role, his character's mid-life crisis resulting in acute humiliation. Naomi Watts plays the unsympathetic lead female character, shouting "I need my own gallery!" at her husband and "You imbecile! I need that money!" at her mother; as in Sex & The City II, the 'problems' being dealt with are so upper-middle-class. The various plot strands are leading up to some potentially awkward moments, though Allen leaves them unresolved and instead finishes on a happy ending.

24 July 2011

The Terrorists


The Terrorists

Thunska Pansittivorakul’s The Terrorists (ผู้ก่อการร้าย) is his most political film to date, a direct and personal response to last year’s massacre in Bangkok. With his previous political work, This Area Is Under Quarantine (บริเวณนี้อยู่ภายใต้การกักกัน), Thunska waited four years before criticising Thaksin Shinawatra for the Tak Bai incident, though The Terrorists is an immediate, courageous, and necessary condemnation of the government. (This month, Abhisit Vejjajiva conceded defeat to Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck, though The Terrorists was made long before the election.)

The Terrorists begins with scenes of Thai fishermen; later, it features footage shot at an aquarium. The symbolic value of these sequences is revealed when a Thai monk is quoted equating killing Communists with catching fish. This strategy was also employed in Rwanda, where Tutsis were compared to cockroaches; it represents a dehumanisation of political opponents, in order to justify the massacre of civilians. The film’s title itself refers to a similar propaganda tactic, Abhisit and Suthep Thaugsuban’s demonisation of red-shirt protesters as terrorists in order to turn public opinion against them.

Documentary footage of the protests, providing yet more evidence that the Thai army shot and killed unarmed pro-democracy protesters, is also included. Despite the existence of such evidence, no one in the army has yet been held accountable for the massacre; the film ends with a pertinent rhetorical question: “who do you think has the power to order the soldiers?” Footage of the 1976 Thammasat University massacre is also included, demonstrating that history will keep repeating itself if we don’t prevent it.

Thunska’s trademark sexual content is also present: after the opening credits, a bound man is stripped naked and abused; later, in an echo of Thunska’s short film Middle-Earth (มัชฌิมโลก), a nude man is filmed while sleeping. Most provocatively, Thunska also combines explicit sex with political violence: footage of a man masturbating is accompanied by captions describing the Thammasat massacre.

The Terrorists was screened at the Dialogic exhibition yesterday, alongside Thunska’s short film KI SS. He has also directed the semi-autobiographical documentary Reincarnate (จุติ), and his early short films were screened at a retrospective in 2008 (Inside Out, Outside In).

23 July 2011

Dialogic

Dialogic
Dialogic
KI SS
Morbid Symptom
The Terrorists
The group exhibition Dialogic at BACC encourages visitors to interact with its exhibits: there is a large recreation area, a media zone, a hut to sit in, even (after Tracey Emin) a bed to sleep in. The exhibits are (tangential and indirect) responses to fundamental activities such as eating, excreting, and dying; the atmosphere is informal and laid-back.

The exhibition includes KI SS, a short film by Thunska Pansittivorakul in which footage of two men kissing is followed by the text of Snow White, ending with a photograph of Bangkok's Democracy Monument. Thunska's previous films include the politically and/or sexually provocative Reincarnate and This Area Is Under Quarantine; his new film The Terrorists was screened at Dialogic today, followed by a long Q&A session, as part of the Morbid Symptom film season. (After today, Morbid Symptom resumes on 6th August, and finishes on 17th September; the season is presented by Filmvirus.)

KI SS is accompanied by a collage of images of the 2010 massacre and other state-sanctioned violence, including the 1976 Thammasat massacre (which also inspired Manit Sriwanichpoom's Horror In Pink and Flashback '76), Holocaust victims, numerous other corpses, and even a severed head. Fortunately, these images are uncensored, though BACC did censor similar photographs from last year's Rupture exhibition.

Dialogic runs from 21st July to 25th September. Various books by Sulak Sivaraksa, including his banned ค่อนศตวรรษ ประชาธิปไตยไทย, are available to buy from a stall within the exhibition.

22 July 2011

The Information

The Information
In The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, James Gleick (author of Faster) documents the history of mediated communication and calculation, from the first alphabets to contemporary social networks, and their associated technologies. He also explains how the information we exchange is stored, processed, and organised, from Charles Babbage's mechanical 'difference engine' to the modern computer.

Gleick writes in an accessible and anecdotal style, though he doesn't dumb down the science. The book's scope is extremely wide-ranging; personally, I was most fascinated by the chapters on communications technologies (telegraphy and telephony, also covered in A Social History Of The Media), lexicography (documented by Jonathon Green in Chasing The Sun), and memetics (pioneered by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene).

Convergence Culture

Convergence Culture: Where Old & New Media Collide, in its updated and expanded paperback edition, explores audience participation in the 'web 2.0' era. Author Henry Jenkins dismisses the "Black Box Fallacy" that television, telephone, films, games, and the internet will all be streamed to a single set-top box via a fibre-optic 'information superhighway', and argues instead that the media landscape is becoming increasingly multifarious. He also perceives a shift from passive to active media consumption. These trends converge into a new paradigm: the multi-platform, interactive narratives of 'transmedia'.

Smartphones represent a potential technological convergence, though Jenkins focuses on the synergistic convergence of texts and narratives, with multi-national conglomerates cross-promoting their products across a wide media spectrum. He cites The Matrix as an example of this corporate inter-textuality, with the film trilogy The Matrix I-III followed by a cartoon (The Animatrix), a game (Enter The Matrix), and various comics (The Matrix Comics I-II). These additional products are revenue-generating spin-offs, though they also add to the narrative complexity of the Matrix universe, promoting discussion among fans and acting as an advanced form of viral marketing.

Jenkins's main research interest, and the central focus of Convergence Culture, is the participatory nature of audience responses to contemporary media. He highlights the product-placement, sponsorship, and interactivity inherent in 'reality TV' quasi-documentary series such as Survivor. He examines an individual case-study in each chapter, though these are restricted to either reality TV or 'fan-fiction' - neither of which are genres that I'm particularly impressed by. Jenkins is particularly fascinated by fan-fiction - fans writing alternative narratives for existing characters - though to me it seems marginal and derivative. Regular sidebars, in which he discusses broader trends and contexts, are more interesting than the case-studies in the body text.

While the tools of media production are available to many consumers, we do not all utilise them to their full capacities. Most audience members (fortunately) do not write fan-fiction or create 'mashup' video re-edits. More people read blogs than write them. We do, however, interact with our media more than ever: time-shifting television, commenting on websites, voting for reality TV contestants, collaboratively 'crowdsourcing' data, and of course using social networks.

20 July 2011

"The most humble day of my life"

News Of The World
The Guardian
Rupert Murdoch gave evidence to a parliamentary select committee yesterday, and began by stating: "This is the most humble day of my life". During the committee session, a spectator pushed a custard pie into Murdoch's face, leading to inevitable "humble pie" headlines in today's news coverage.

Murdoch was responding to allegations that News Of The World journalists systematically hacked into the mobile phones of hundreds of celebrities, politicians, and other public figures. The Guardian's Nick Davies (author of Flat Earth News) has been investigating the scandal for years, and his revelation that the News Of The World hacked the mobile phone of murdered teenager Milly Dowler caused public outrage when it was published earlier this month.

In a genuinely jaw-dropping moment, Murdoch's son James announced on 7th July that the News Of The World newspaper would cease publication. Its final issue was published on 10th July, headlined "THANK YOU & GOODBYE". Numerous News International journalists, including NI's former chief executive Rebekah Brooks, are facing criminal charges in relation to phone-hacking and the subsequent corporate cover-up.

19 July 2011

The (Longer) Long Tail

The Longer Long Tail
Chris Anderson originally formulated his 'long tail' theory in a 2004 Wired magazine article. (Anderson is the editor of Wired, making him one of the most influential figures in technology and media.) The article was subsequently expanded into the best-selling book The Long Tail: Why The Future Of Business Is Selling Less Of More. The paperback edition contains an extra chapter (on marketing), thus it's been retitled The (Longer) Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand.

Anderson's thesis is that there is a market for everything. Not a potential market, but an actual one: that anything and everything will be consumed by someone, somewhere. He compares the limited selection of products available at bricks-and-mortar shops (where shelf space is reserved only for popular items) with the seemingly limitless diversity offered by e-commerce retailers. He then proposes a paradigm shift in supply-and-demand: catering to niche markets (the 'long tail' of the sales curve) by selling a wider range of products at lower volumes.

As we've seen in the past, wider distribution channels do not always lead to increased diversity. There may be hundreds of cable television stations, though very few of them offer original programming, so choice is only an illusion. Similarly, multiplex cinemas don't offer a variety of films; instead, they show the same blockbusters on more screens. (For instance: a fourteen-screen cinema in Bangkok showing Transformers on twelve of those screens!) More distribution channels just means more ways to receive the same content, as the new channels are all controlled by oligopolies (such as Hollywood studios, TV/radio networks, and online social networks).

Media conglomerates see increased consumer choice as a potential threat, because it leads to market fragmentation: as the number of cable TV channels increases, for example, audiences for terrestrial networks are decreasing. Anderson invites corporations to embrace this trend, utilising the seemingly limitless bandwidth of digital distribution to produce (or aggregate) an endless variety of sub-genres and specialist-interest products, all of which would eventually find an audience.

This theory works perfectly for digital aggregators such as iTunes: Apple can store millions of tracks on its servers, ready to be downloaded by a global audience. Indeed, Anderson sees the digital-only model as the ultimate future of 'long tail' distribution. It's also a potential model for other media, such as newspapers, films, computer games, and software, in their inexorable (and arguably regrettable) shift towards digital-only distribution; it's not applicable to other industries, though.

The conversion from physical to digital ("a progression from the economics of pure atoms, to a hybrid of bits and atoms, to the ideal domain of pure bits"), and especially the potential for an infinite variety of consumer choices, remain utopian ideals rather than realistic objectives. While digital files can be stored, distributed, and copied at no cost, they still have to be produced in the first place. The notion of transforming information from atoms to bits was predicted and advocated by Nicholas Negroponte in his Wired columns and his book Being Digital; Anderson appropriates Negroponte's concept without acknowledgement.

16 July 2011

European Union Film Festival 2011

European Union Film Festival 2011
Exit Through The Gift Shop
This year's European Union Film Festival is being held, like last year's Festival, at BACC. The event opened on 7th July, and will close tomorrow. All screenings are free.

The Festival includes Banksy's documentary (or mockumentary) Exit Through The Gift Shop, a profile of fellow graffiti artist Mr Brainwash. It's not clear how much of the documentary is actually true: Mr Brainwash's Warhol-esque self-documentation seems too convenient; his sudden transformation into a conceptual artist (a la Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons), and his absurdly derivative art (inspired by Andy Warhol), are surely satirical rather than factual.

Exit Through The Gift Shop was first shown on 14th July and was screened again today. Banksy, arguably the world's most famous guerrilla artist, also wrote the foreword to Trespass, a history of street art. Mr Brainwash subsequently designed the cover for Madonna's Celebration album, suggesting either that she was in on the joke or (more likely) that she believed the hype.

15 July 2011

Que Reste-T-Il De Nos Amours

Que Reste-T-Il De Nos Amours
Napoleon
Pepe Le Moko
Le Grand Jeu
Port Of Shadows
La Bele & La Bete
Que Reste-T-Il De Nos Amours: The Year Before The New Wave Revolution [sic] is a season of films organised by Filmvirus, screening at Thammasat University, Bangkok, between 17th July and 18th September. All screeings are free.

The season showcases some of France's key films from before the New Wave, opening with Abel Gance's epic Napoleon on 17th July. Two Poetic Realist classics are screened on 24th July: Pepe Le Moko by Julien Duvivier, and Le Grand Jeu by Jacques Feyder. The great director Marcel Carne is represented by Port Of Shadows on 31st July. Jean Cocteau's Surrealist fantasy La Belle & La Bete is showing on 14th September.

11 July 2011

Beyond The Crash

Beyond The Crash
After A Journey and The Third Man, the final memoir of the New Labour triumvirate has been published. Gordon Brown's Beyond The Crash: Overcoming The First Crisis Of Globalisation analyses the causes and effects of the recent global economic crisis, and proposes strategies to prevent another boom-and-bust cycle. Brown has often been attacked for his dry and unemotional presentational style, and this book will do little to counter such criticisms. The text reads as if it were a fiscal-policy speech, and is about as engaging as that sounds (i.e. not very).

The book begins with Brown's personal, chronological account of the crisis: a month-by-month summary of his dealings with the UK banks, the G20, and other world leaders. However, his prose is completely dispassionate: he refers matter-of-factly to "whispers of a 'coup' to remove me", though he offers no elaboration. Tellingly, though, his predecessor merits only a single mention in the entire text: "Tony Blair and I had spent twenty years building New Labour".

A Journey (paperback)

A Journey
Tony Blair's memoir A Journey has now been published in paperback, with a new introduction. In his lengthy new essay, Blair calls for an end to the divisive polarisation of left/right politics, arguing that the boundaries between the two traditional opposites are increasingly blurred.

Blair presents some surprising statistics ("China will build seventy new international airports in the next decade"), though his analysis is hardly ground-breaking: his views on current issues (the Arab Spring, the global economy, the future of energy) are all sensible yet predictable. Also, the introduction has a more formal tone than the rest of the book; he doesn't abandon exclamation marks completely, though he does at least put them all on the same line: "listen! Get advice! Seek views!".

04 July 2011

“Thaksin thinks, Pheu Thai does...”


Democracy Monument

Yingluck Shinawatra won yesterday’s election, and will become the next prime minister, replacing Abhisit Vejjajiva. Yingluck is former PM Thaksin Shinawatra’s sister; she has no political background, and became Pheu Thai’s prime ministerial candidate only two months ago. Pheu Thai is a reincarnation of the People Power Party and Thai Rak Thai. (TRT was dissolved in 2007, followed by the PPP a year later.)

Yingluck is the third of Thaksin’s proxy prime ministers, after Samak Sundaravej (disqualified for his cookery show) and Somchai Wongsawat (disqualified at the height of the yellow-shirt protests). In fact, one of her campaign slogans was “Thaksin thinks, Pheu Thai does”, fuelling suspicions that Thaksin is controlling Thai politics while remaining in self-imposed exile.

In a bizarre twist, Sonthi Boonyaratkalin, the leader of the 2006 coup, formed his own political party (Matubhum), and won a seat in the election. (There was never any likelihood of Sonthi being prosecuted for the coup, as Thai army generals are effectively untouchable and the 2007 constitution absolved the army of any liability.)

23 June 2011

"Dear Projectionist..."

Stanley Kubrick
Whenever Stanley Kubrick's films are released on video, their aspect ratios always provoke intense debate. Most recently, the Warner blu-ray release of Barry Lyndon, Kubrick's exquisite period drama, has attracted criticism because it's framed at 1.78:1 whereas the film's original theatrical ratio was 1.66:1.

1.78:1 corresponds to the ratio of current high-definition widescreen TVs, thus the 1.66:1 image has been horizontally cropped so that the blu-ray image perfectly fits an HD-TV screen. Presumably, the studio felt that viewers would not tolerate the black 'letterbox' bars across their TV screens required for a 1.66:1 image. With similar reasoning, Barry Lyndon's original mono soundtrack has been remixed in 5.1 Dolby Digital on blu-ray, to accommodate contemporary multi-channel home-theatre systems.

Warner claims that the 1.78:1 ratio is in accordance with Kubrick's wishes for Barry Lyndon (thus apparently dismissing its own previous 1.66:1 laserdisc and DVD releases). Kubrick's assistant Leon Vitali told blogger Glenn Kenny categorically that Barry Lyndon's ratio had always been 1.77:1, and that it had never been released at 1.66:1, though this is clearly incorrect as its theatrical, laserdisc, and DVD releases were all 1.66:1. It appears, unfortunately, that Vitali is making these revisionist statements in order to justify Warner's commercial decision to reformat Kubrick's films to 1.78:1.

Kenny tracked down a letter to cinema projectionists in which Kubrick specifies the 1.66:1 theatrical ratio. Surprisingly, Vitali responded to this by insisting that Kubrick had always preferred 1.77:1, despite clear evidence to the contrary. 1.77:1 is a digital TV ratio, not an analogue theatrical ratio, thus it is practically impossible that Kubrick ever considered it for Barry Lyndon.

Kubrick's early, independent films Fear & Desire and Killer's Kiss were released in the Academy ratio, though he later favoured 1.66:1 for The Killing, Paths Of Glory, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon. Lolita and Dr Strangelove were released with variable aspect ratios, with individual shots alternating between Academy and 1.66:1. His epics Spartacus and 2001: A Space Odyssey were premiered in 70mm at 2.21:1. His later films The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut were projected at 1.85:1 and released on video at 1.33:1 as per Kubrick's wishes.

Since Kubrick's death, Warner has released four Kubrick collections on DVD. The first Stanley Kubrick Collection, released in 1999, used the versions Kubrick had previously approved for VHS and laserdisc, and thus conformed to Kubrick's specifications. However, when Warner released the second Stanley Kubrick Collection on DVD in 2001, some of the original mono soundtracks were retrofitted into 5.1 Dolby Digital. For the third (Director's Series, 2007) and fourth (Limited Edition Collection, 2011) Warner collections, most films were cropped to 1.78:1 in addition to the 5.1 remixes.

Reformatting films to accommodate domestic audio-visual technology is hardly a new practice. All films are at least slightly cropped for television and video, as the original CRT TV aspect ratio was 1.33:1 whereas the conventional Academy film format was 1.37:1. Widescreen films were often pan-and-scanned on VHS and VCD to fit CRT TV screens. The contemporary high-definition widescreen TV ratio 1.78:1 does not quite match the standard theatrical widescreen ratio 1.85:1, thus 1.85:1 films are routinely cropped to 1.78:1 for DVD and blu-ray release.

The 1.37:1 Academy 35mm format was adopted as an industry standard soon after sound technology had become established in Hollywood. This format persisted, with very few exceptions (such as The Big Trail, in 70mm) until the 1950s, when Cinerama launched the widescreen revolution. The anamorphic 35mm widescreen format then became standardised at 2.35:1. Non-anamorphic 35mm films were projected at either 1.66:1, 1.75:1, or 1.85:1 aspect ratios. Today, 1.85:1 has become the standard non-anamorphic format, and 2.35:1 remains the standard anamorphic widescreen format.

(Kubrick's "Dear Projectionists..." letter has a reliable provenance, and it's consistent with similar correspondence I've seen at the Stanley Kubrick Archive and elsewhere. I also own an original Kubrick document: a signed Christmas card.)

22 June 2011

Moral Education: Ethics

Moral Education: Ethics Moral Education: Ethics
A Muslim group in Lucknow, India, has complained after a cartoon image of Mohammed was printed in a school textbook. There have been calls for the book, Moral Education: Ethics by Chandra Prakash, to be withdrawn; the offending cartoon appears in a chapter titled Being Good & Gentle. Visual depictions of Mohammed have caused international controversy ever since a dozen Mohammed caricatures were printed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005.

This is not the first time Mohammed has been depicted in a school textbook: an illustration from The Remaining Signs Of Past Centuries was censored from Histoire Geographie in France. It is also not the first Indian book to feature a Mohammed image: the author of Hajarat Muhammad was arrested in India after his book depicted Mohammed on its cover.

10 June 2011

Foreign-Familiar

Foreign-Familiar
Bangkok Twilight
Foreign-Familiar, a photographic exhibition exploring Western views of Asian landscapes and lifestyles, opened at BACC on 4th June and closes at the end of the month. The exhibition includes Bangkok Twilight, Nick Nostitz's disturbing portraits of sex, drugs, and death on the streets of Bangkok.

03 June 2011

Carnivalism

Carnivalism
Cinema now has a new 'ism': Carnivalism, a one-day film event organised by New Media Communication students from Assumption University, takes place tomorrow at SF World (CentralWorld, Bangkok). All screenings are free of charge.

Incidental Art Festival

Incidental Art Festival
Wang Jun, one of the organisers of the Incidental Art Festival at Beijing's CCD 300 gallery, was arrested yesterday, and the Festival was closed down by police the day after it opened. One of the gallery's walls had been left blank, except for a small label bearing the name of artist Ai Weiwei. Ai, China's most famous contemporary artist, was detained earlier this year on vague tax-evasion charges.

01 June 2011

Letter Fountain

Letter Fountain
Joep Pohlen's Letter Fountain: On Printing Types, published by Taschen, is an encyclopedic reference to typography, an expanded English translation of Pohlen and Geert Setola's Letterfontein (fourth edition). At 600 pages, it's far more extensive than the slim Typographic Desk Reference, and its comprehensive scope makes it the best general typographic reference work.

However, Letter Fountain lacks TDR's clear organisation and cross-referencing. The alphabetised sub-sections and extensive appendices are hard to navigate quickly; if tabbed pages or a detailed general index were added, the book's material would be easier to access. (For a detailed account of typographic history, see Printing Types by Daniel Updike and 20th-Century Type by Lewis Blackwell; in both cases, the first and second editions are superior to the third.)