Cryptoart

Cryptoart: The Hidden History Of Art, an exhibition by Rafael Andres, known as The Raf, opens at Eat Me in Bangkok on Monday. The Raf has reproduced iconic paintings, such as Leonardo's Mona Lisa, though with a twist: he digitally adds subversive additional elements to each picture.

The effect is similar to Jake & Dinos Chapman's appropriation of Goya's etchings, or an extension of Marcel Duchamp's LHOOQ. Cryptoart, curated by Pan Pan Narkprasert (Gagasmicism) closes on 29th June.

The Heritage Of World's Prints

An exhibition of signed prints, The Heritage Of World's Prints [sic], opened today at Artery Post-Modern Gallery in Bangkok. The exhibition, featuring works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and others, will close on 31st May. (Prints by Picasso and other iconic artists were also included in The Art Of Time, in 2008.)

The exhibition's poster is a reproduction of Picasso's 1954 lithograph La Femme Au Singe, which was produced in an edition of fifty. The exhibition also includes another Picasso lithograph, which is perhaps a variation of his Le Chevalier & Le Page from 1951, and three Picasso etchings. (Strangely, the exhibition does not list the titles or dates of any of the exhibits.)

Bastards Of Misrepresentation

Bastards Of Misrepresentation: Doing Time On Filipino Time, a group exhibition showcasing contemporary art from the Philippines, opens today at H Gallery in Bangkok. The exhibition, curated by Manuel Ocampo and featuring MM Yu's photographs of Manila roadkill titled Itch, will close on 11th June.

Museum of the City of New York

The Museum of the City of New York has put its vast collection of Stanley Kubrick's photographs online. In the 1940s, before he became a director, Kubrick worked as a photojournalist for Look magazine, and Look's photographic archive was subsequently donated to the Museum.

Now the Museum has uploaded all 7,271 of Kubrick's photos onto its website. Highlights include a self-portrait of Kubrick's reflection in a mirror, and portraits of Alfred Hitchcock on a train. The photographs are almost exclusively black-and-white, with only one colour image in the entire collection.

The Stanley Kubrick Archive in London and the Library of Congress in Washington both have small collections of Kubrick's Look photos, though MCNY's archive is far more extensive. Many of the photographs originally appeared in Look (1945-1950), and others have been published in various catalogues: Ladro Di Sguardi, Still Moving Pictures, Drama & Shadows, Only In New York, and Fotografie 1945-1950.

100 Artists' Manifestos

100 Artists' Manifestos: From The Futurists To The Stuckists is an anthology of manifestos from 20th century art movements, edited by Alex Danchev and organised with minimalist clarity. Danchev's comprehensive selection includes not only artists but also filmmakers and architects. The concept is similar to the excellent Manifesto: A Century Of Isms, by Mary Ann Caws.

Danchev begins with FT Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, published on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909, the document that inspired all subsequent art manifestos. The various avant-garde movements of the 1920s all published manifestos inspired by Marinetti's breathless enthusiasm.

The book ends on a sour note with the Stuckists, a reactionary group of anti-Conceptualists who are impossible to take seriously. If Danchev had extended the survey into the early 21st century, he could have concluded instead with the optimistic Sustainism manifesto published in 2010.

500 Classic Films

500 classic films, listed chronologically, representing the history of international cinema.

Talk About Cinema

Talk About Cinema, by Jean-Baptiste Thoret, discusses how contemporary cinema is influenced by stylistic innovations of the past. It was originally published in French, with a more descriptive title: Cinema Contemporain: Mode d'Emploi.

Thoret, who writes for Charlie Hebdo, highlights some cinematic technical breakthroughs, briefly summarises cinema's major artistic movements, and profiles some leading contemporary directors (as in Cinema Now). He also lists 20 Seminal Films, chosen because they contain "motifs, situations, or images destined to be reused again and again".

Talk About Cinema's 20 Seminal Films are as follows:

• Freaks
• The Red Shoes
• Invasion Of The Body Snatchers
• The Searchers
• Rear Window / North By Northwest / Vertigo / Psycho / The Birds
• Big Deal On Madonna Street
• The Twilight Zone
• 'the Zapruder film'
• Inferno
• A Fistful Of Dollars / For A Few Dollars More / The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly / Once Upon A Time In The West / Duck, You Sucker!
• Blow-Up
• Play Time
• The Prisoner
• Le Samourai
• Night Of The Living Dead
• Bullitt
• 2001: A Space Odyssey / A Clockwork Orange / Barry Lyndon / The Shining
• Easy Rider
• Aguirre: The Wrath Of God
• Scarface

The list, in chronological order, actually has far more than twenty titles, because Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Sergio Leone are each represented by multiple films. Even more esoterically, Thoret includes television series (The Prisoner and The Twilight Zone), an actuality film (Abraham Zapruder's footage of John F Kennedy's assassination), and an unfinished film (Inferno). (Note that Scarface is the Brian de Palma version, not the Howard Hawks original.)

The Greatest Movies Ever

Gail Kinn and Jim Piazza's book The Greatest Movies Ever has been slightly updated for its second edition. The list in the latest edition, published last year, is almost exactly the same as the 2008 version, as only two entries have been changed.

My Fair Lady, #55 in the old edition, has been replaced by Slumdog Millionaire; also, The Bank Dick, the old edition's #84, has been changed to The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King. The new edition still lists 102 films, because The Godfather and The Godfather II appear as a single entry at #1.

The 101 Greatest Movies are as follows:

1. The Godfather I-II
2. Citizen Kane
3. Casablanca
4. Sunset Boulevard
5. Lawrence Of Arabia
6. North By Northwest
7. The Wizard Of Oz
8. Annie Hall
9. Chinatown
10. Singin' In The Rain
11. Nashville
12. Some Like It Hot
13. All About Eve
14. Psycho
15. Taxi Driver
16. Apocalypse Now
17. On The Waterfront
18. Gone With The Wind
19. To Kill A Mockingbird
20. The Searchers
21. La Dolce Vita
22. Double Indemnity
23. Pan's Labyrinth
24. Vertigo
25. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
26. GoodFellas
27. Jules & Jim
28. Funny Face
29. A Streetcar Named Desire
30. Saving Private Ryan
31. Strangers On A Train
32. It Happened One Night
33. The Graduate
34. It's A Wonderful Life
35. Raging Bull
36. The Best Years Of Our Lives
37. The African Queen
38. Dr Strangelove
39. Blade Runner
40. The Conformist
41. Schindler's List
42. The Lives Of Others
43. Diner
44. City Lights
45. The Deer Hunter
46. 8½
47. Top Hat
48. La Regle Du Jeu
49. 2001: A Space Odyssey
50. Bonnie & Clyde
51. King Kong
52. Star Wars IV: A New Hope
53. The 400 Blows
54. A Night At The Opera
55. Slumdog Millionaire
56. The Night Of The Hunter
57. The Third Man
58. Dr Zhivago
59. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
60. Invasion Of The Body-Snatchers
61. Pinocchio
62. Shadow Of A Doubt
63. Fargo
64. Blue Velvet
65. Jaws
66. The Grapes Of Wrath
67. Do The Right Thing
68. Wild Strawberries
69. Bicycle Thieves
70. Bringing Up Baby
71. Paths Of Glory
72. The Maltese Falcon
73. Pather Panchali
74. The Lady Eve
75. The Last Picture Show
76. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
77. Rosemary's Baby
78. Midnight Cowboy
79. M*A*S*H
80. American Graffiti
81. The Producers
82. Rashomon
83. Cabaret
84. The Lord Of The Rings III: The Return Of The King
85. A Place In The Sun
86. Red River
87. The Conversation
88. Grand Illusion
89. LA Confidential
90. Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid
91. Imitation Of Life
92. Raiders Of The Lost Ark
93. Spartacus
94. The Manchurian Candidate
95. Seven Samurai
96. A Hard Day's Night
97. Atlantic City
98. American Beauty
99. Pulp Fiction
100. The Shawshank Redemption
101. Groundhog Day

Note that The Maltese Falcon is the John Huston version, which is actually a remake of an earlier Roy Del Ruth film. Also, Some Like It Hot is the Billy Wilder classic, not the 1939 film of the same name; and Psycho is the original version.

The 100 Best Movies Ever Made...Mostly Suck

The 100 Best Movies Ever Made... Mostly Suck, written pseudonymously by Nick S, is a self-published rant against the classics of world cinema. There are actually 101 films on the list, because he also includes Day For Night as an extra entry.

The films were selected from various other published lists, and the reviews (written in the same 'style' as the late Chas Balun) are taken from the author's website. (Online, he uses a different pseudonym: Mr Satanism.)

I'm not sure exactly how serious Nick Satanism (?) is. If he genuinely hated classic films, why would he bother to watch so many of them? And if he actually liked classic films, why would he review them so negatively?

His comments often border on self-parody, so maybe the book is intended to be ironic? If it is, then he has no sense of humour; if it isn't, then he has no taste.

The 100 Best Movies Ever Made are as follows:

1. Citizen Kane
2. Singin' In The Rain
3. Schindler's List
4. On The Waterfront
5. Casablanca
6. The Godfather
7. Gone With The Wind
8. Lawrence Of Arabia
9. 2001: A Space Odyssey
10. All About Eve
11. The Bridge On The River Kwai
12. Annie Hall
13. Star Wars IV: A New Hope
14. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
15. The Best Years Of Our Lives
16. Raging Bull
17. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
18. The Wizard Of Oz
19. West Side Story
20. The Graduate
21. Vertigo
22. The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre
23. It's A Wonderful Life
24. The Godfather II
25. Some Like It Hot
26. High Noon
27. It Happened One Night
28. The African Queen
29. Midnight Cowboy
30. Amadeus
31. The Gold Rush
32. Psycho
33. Chinatown
34. City Lights
35. The Maltese Falcon
36. Dr Strangelove
37. Taxi Driver
38. Bonnie & Clyde
39. The Rules Of The Game
40. Mr Smith Goes To Washington
41. 8½
42. From Here To Eternity
43. Battleship Potemkin
44. Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ
45. The Searchers
46. L'Avventura
47. M*A*S*H
48. Double Indemnity
49. Bicycle Thieves
50. Greed
51. The Deer Hunter
52. North By Northwest
53. The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
54. Rear Window
55. The Magnificent Ambersons
56. King Kong
57. Intolerance
58. L'Atalante
59. The Birth Of A Nation
60. Persona
61. The Silence Of The Lambs
62. A Streetcar Named Desire
63. A Clockwork Orange
64. Ugetsu Monogatari
65. An American In Paris
66. Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs
67. Sunset Boulevard
68. The Apartment
69. The General
70. GoodFellas
71. The Grapes Of Wrath
72. Pulp Fiction
73. Seven Samurai
74. Tokyo Story
75. All Quiet On The Western Front
76. Unforgiven
77. Apocalypse Now
78. Louisiana Story
79. Rocky
80. The Sound Of Music
81. Pather Panchali
82. Fantasia
83. Le jour se leve
84. To Kill A Mockingbird
85. Rebel Without A Cause
86. Dr Zhivago
87. Tootsie
88. La Terra Trema
89. Network
90. Brief Encounter
91. Le Million
92. My Fair Lady
93. Wild Strawberries
94. Jaws
95. Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid
96. The Philadelphia Story
97. The Third Man
98. Raiders Of The Lost Ark
99. Stagecoach
100. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
101. Day For Night

Note that Some Like It Hot is the 1959 comic masterpiece, not the obscure 1939 comedy. Also, The Maltese Falcon is the John Huston version and Ben-Hur is the William Wyler version.

Crazily Good!

Sutee Kunavichayanont's exhibition Crazily Good! opened at Number One Gallery in Bangkok on 15th March, and will close on 21st April. The exhibition features Psycho and other Hollywood film titles - mostly 1950s science-fiction like Creature From The Black Lagoon - copied from vintage movie posters.

Shakespeare Must Die

Ing Kanjanavanit’s film Shakespeare Must Die (เชคสเปียร์ต้องตาย) has been banned by Thailand’s board of film censors. The film was refused a certificate yesterday, on the specious grounds that it may create division within society. (The Thai Ministry of Culture has long been obsessed with maintaining the out-dated notion of social harmony, when in reality Thai society is deeply polarised between red-shirt and yellow-shirt supporters.)

The film, inspired by Macbeth, was produced by the photographer Manit Sriwanichpoom; Ing and Manit jointly run the Kathmandu gallery in Bangkok. Shakespeare Must Die is not Ing’s first banned film: her cult film My Teacher Eats Biscuits (คนกราบหมา) was banned in 1997.

Project Japan

Project Japan: Metabolism Talks..., written by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, and edited by Kayoko Ota with James Westcott, is the first comprehensive survey of the Japanese Metabolism architecture movement. The book, published by Taschen, features extended interviews with Metabolism's founders, including its prime exponent, Kisho Kurokawa.

Kurokawa's most famous building, the Nakagin Kapuseru Tawa in Tokyo, was intended as a utopian reconfiguration of urban housing. The structure, an icon of Metabolism, is comprised of movable, connectable, and replaceable capsule apartments. It epitomises Metabolism's focus on expandability, flexibility, and adaptability. Today, like Metabolism itself, the building is largely forgotten.

Project Japan is, therefore, most valuable as a comprehensive record of this under-valued movement. The book reproduces the movement's posters, blueprints, and other rare documents, including the Metabolism 1960 manifesto. Only a handful of copies of the manifesto survive, and it had never previously been reprinted.

Klab Dawla

Moroccan rapper Mouad Belghouat, also known as L7a9d and El Haqed, was arrested on Friday and charged with insulting state authorities. His song Klab Dawla criticises the Moroccan police, and he is a member of the February 20 Youth Movement, a group which organised protests as part of last year's Arab Spring.

The Extraordinary Voyage

The Extraordinary Voyage, directed by Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange, is a documentary about Georges Melies and the restoration of his most famous film, A Trip To The Moon. The documentary was made by Lobster Films, the same company which restored A Trip To The Moon last year. It includes interviews with Jean-Pierre Jeunet (director of Delicatessen), Michel Gondry (director of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind), and Michel Hazanavicius (director of The Artist).

The Extraordinary Voyage begins with a biography of Melies: his initial career as a stage magician and theatre manager, his attendance at the Lumiere brothers' first film screening in 1895, and his subsequent work as a pioneer of cinematic special effects and camera tricks. The documentary features extracts from HBO's From The Earth To The Moon - which included a recreation of Melies's studio - and clips from a tinted version of A Trip To The Moon created for a gala event honouring him in 1929.

The documentary also reveals how the hand-coloured version of A Trip To The Moon was restored. An original colour print was discovered at an archive in Barcelona, and this nitrate reel was digitised by Technicolor. A black-&-white negative, supplied by the Melies estate, was utilised to replace missing fragments from the colour print, which were then digitally coloured.

Melies is the subject of Martin Scorsese's most recent film, Hugo, released in 3D. The 5th World Film Fesitval of Bangkok organised a Melies retrospective in 2007. The restored version of A Trip To The Moon was screened as part of La Fete earlier this year.

The Annotated Godfather

The Annotated Godfather: The Complete Screenplay contains the script to The Godfather written by Mario Puzo and Francis Coppola, with notes by Jenny M Jones. Jones interviewed Coppola for the book, and it's a useful supplement to Peter Cowie's excellent The Godfather Book.

Belle De Jour

Luis Bunuel's Surrealist classic Belle De Jour will be screened at Alliance Francaise in Bangkok on 11th April. The screening is free.

Belle De Jour, starring French icon Catherine Deneuve, is probably Bunuel's most famous film. It was previously shown, as part of a Bunuel retrospective, at the 2007 Bangkok International Film Festival.

Sun City & Other Stories

An exhibition at Alliance Francaise in Delhi, Sun City & Other Stories: Paris - San Francisco - Delhi, by photographer Sunil Gupta, has been shut down following a request from the police. The exhibition opened on 23rd March, and was due to run until 15th April, though police intervened a day after it opened.

MDNA

Madonna's new album MDNA includes Masterpiece, a ballad from her film W/E, and Give Me All Your Luvin', which she sang (or mimed) at the Super Bowl earlier this year. Madonna has described the album's title as a triple-entendre. It's a pseudo-blend of her name (with every second letter omitted), it resembles M DNA (i.e. Madonna's DNA), and it's a pun on MDMA (the rave drug). One of the album's producers, William Orbit, previously produced Ray Of Light and remixed Justify My Love.

The album is surprisingly aggressive (Gang Bang) and confessional (I Fucked Up), though it also contains some pure dance tracks, such as the catchy Turn Up The Radio and Love Spent. Masterpiece is a ballad with a weak first line ("If you were the Mona Lisa, you'd be hanging in the Louvre"). Superstar, like the earlier non-album track Superpop, references some of Madonna's heroes ("You're like Brando on the silver screen").

Several songs - notably I Don't Give A and Best Friend - refer directly to her failed marriage, recalling Till Death Do Us Part on her earlier Like A Prayer album. In another link with Like A Prayer, there are numerous references to Catholicism: Girl Gone Wild begins with a confession, and I'm A Sinner includes a list of saints. MDNA represents a real return to form, with the insubstantial B-Day song being its only weak track.

The double-disc track-list is: Girl Gone Wild, Gang Bang, I'm Addicted, Turn Up The Radio, Give Me All Your Luvin', Some Girls, Superstar, I Don't Give A, I'm A Sinner, Love Spent, Masterpiece, Falling Free, Beautiful Killer, I Fucked Up, B-Day Song, and Best Friend. A single-disc version, containing fewer tracks, is also available, and both versions are also available in non-explicit editions.

100 Ideas That Changed Film

100 Ideas That Changed Film, written by David Parkinson and published by Laurence King, is a guide to 100 significant technical and stylistic innovations from the Cinematographe to CGI. Each entry is allocated a single page of text accompanied by a full-page, full-colour photograph.

It's refreshing to see film-theory concepts like mise-en-scene, and structural elements such as flashbacks, given equal coverage alongside more mainstream entries. This will hopefully promote an awareness of film grammar (close-ups, zooms, continuity editing, etc.) and the historical development of the medium. Conversely, the chapters on major topics such as film noir are inevitably condensed.

The book, with its extensive and well-chosen illustrations, provides a practical and accessible introduction to film studies. It's a useful supplement to film-history surveys such as Cinema: The Whole Story and film-analysis primers like How To Read A Film.

La Fete 2012

This year's La Fete arts festival runs from 2nd February until 29th March, at various venues around Bangkok including Alliance Francaise. A highlight of last year's festival, Museum Siam's Cinema Picnic By Moonlight, returned on Valentine's Day with a free outdoor screening of the Georges Melies classic A Trip To The Moon.

A Trip To The Moon, silent cinema's first masterpiece, was presented in 35mm, in a hand-coloured version miraculously restored last year. The film predates continuity editing and montage, so it resembles a series of staged tableaux, and it's undeniably quaint and Victorian by today's standards. However, it's still a magical film, a quantum leap ahead of the cinema of its time.

Melies (the subject of Martin Scorsese's latest film, Hugo) was a pioneer of cinematic production design and special effects, and invented various editing tricks, though A Trip To The Moon also introduced sustained narrative to cinema for the first time. If we credit the Lumiere brothers with the technology of cinema, Melies deserves credit for cinema as art.

Air's soundtrack to the restored A Trip To The Moon felt incongruous because it's too contemporary and avant-garde. (The film has been shown in Bangkok before, at the 5th World Film Festival, with live piano accompaniment and narration, though that was a DVD screening; last month's glorious 35mm projection was far superior, despite Air's odd music.)

Boadwalk Empire

The premiere episode of Boardwalk Empire’s first season was originally broadcast by HBO on 19th September 2010. The episode was directed by Martin Scorsese, and is perhaps the most expensive TV show ever produced.

Boardwalk Empire (the title of the premiere episode and the series) is a historical crime drama set in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the introduction of prohibition. At that time, Atlantic City was noted for its casinos and organised crime—a reputation that would later be inherited by Las Vegas, as portrayed in Scorsese’s film Casino. Thus, Scorsese is in familiar territory, having directed gangster films such as GoodFellas and The Departed.

In fact, the episode contains potentially self-referential plot points, such as a casino owner dealing with an unwanted customer (as in Casino) and a gangster’s well-educated crew-member being an FBI informant (as in The Departed). A brief montage at a police training centre looks remarkably similar to the FBI training sequence in The Departed. There is even a moment of arguable self-parody, with a boxing match between two dwarves (surely evoking Scorsese’s masterpiece Raging Bull).

In the past decade, HBO has led a renaissance of creativity in American television drama, a welcome contrast to the prevalence of trashy ‘reality TV’. Boadwalk Empire is the latest in a long list of acclaimed HBO shows, including The Sopranos (inspired by GoodFellas), The Wire, Oz, Deadwood, Sex and the City, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Six Feet Under. Being an HBO production, the series is not subject to the restrictions imposed on network television, thus it contains the strong language and flashes of extreme violence associated with Scorsese’s films. Another of his directorial trademarks, the freeze-frame (as in GoodFellas), is also present.

Scorsese has previously directed documentaries for television, such as A Personal Journey Through American Movies, though Boardwalk Empire is his first TV drama. Alfred Hitchcock also ventured into television drama, with Alfred Hitchcock Presents; similarly, Hitchcock and Scorsese have also both added prestige to 3D cinema: Hitchcock with Dial M for Murder, and Scorsese with Hugo.

The Battle Of Algiers

The Battle Of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo's classic and realistic portrait of urban guerilla warfare, will be shown tonight at the FCCT in Bangkok. The screening is free.

Red Issue

Copies of Manchester United FC's fanzine Red Issue were seized by police last month, after the magazine printed a Ku Klux Klan mask on its back cover, with the slogan "SUAREZ IS INNOCENT". The slogan was a reference to Liverpool FC player Luis Suarez, who has been accused of racism. The magazine has now been reprinted with an alternate cover.

The Artist

The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius, is, like Martin Scorsese's Hugo, a tribute to silent cinema. However, while Hugo was filmed in 3D, colour, and widescreen, The Artist is a black-and-white, silent film, in the Academy ratio. (Steven Soderbergh attempted a similar technical tribute with The Good German, his black-and-white, Academy homage to Casablanca.)

Hazanavicius recreates, with impressive fidelity, the experience of watching a silent film, though he does bend the rules occasionally (notably in a dream sequence with synchronised sound effects). Inter-titles are used to convey dialogue, though it's often possible to read the actors' lips anyway, because they perform in the traditional overly-dramatic silent-film style. Only in the final few seconds do people actually speak audibly, a moment comparable to the fleeting movement at the end of Chris Marker's photo-roman La Jetee.

The Artist's plot is clearly inspired by A Star Is Born, with a young starlet (Peppy Miller) beginning her career while an established star (George Valentin) fades away. The film belongs in the same company as classic backstage dramas such as 42nd Street, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, The Bad & The Beautiful, and The Player. Specifically, as it explores Hollywood's transition to sound after The Jazz Singer, it invokes comparisons with Singin' In The Rain. (The Artist isn't a musical like Singin' In The Rain, though it does include Astaire/Rogers-style tap dancing.) There are also references to Citizen Kane, such as breakfasts revealing the deterioration of a marriage.

The lead male character is partly based on Douglas Fairbanks, and clips from Fairbanks's The Mask Of Zorro are included; his last name, Valentin, also refers to Rupolph Valentino. The heroine quotes Greta Garbo ("I want to be alone"), and insists that the studio hire Valentin just as Garbo demanded a role for John Gilbert in Queen Christina. The strong supporting cast includes John Goodman (playing a movie producer, as he did in Matinee), James Cromwell, and the dog Uggie.

The film's technical sophistication and cine-literacy make it fascinating, though it's also incredibly witty and entertaining. For cinephiles, it's (almost) as exciting as Hugo, though it works just as well for mainstream audiences, too. It has an engaging narrative and it makes silent cinema accessible, and achieves both for 100% of the time. [In contrast, Hugo is 50% exciting plot for kids (the story of the two orphans) and 50% film history for adults (the life of Georges Melies), though the two halves don't quite fit together.]

Attounissia

The publisher of Attounissia, a daily Tunisian newspaper, has been arrested and charged with disrupting public morality. Nasreddine Ben Saida has been held in custody since his arrest on 15th February, the day that his newspaper printed a front-page photograph of footballer Sami Khedira and his girlfriend, Lena Gercke. The photo, taken from the March issue of GQ magazine in Germany, shows Gercke topless, though her breasts are covered by Khedira's hands. Ben Saida faces up to five years in prison if found guilty.

The Human Clay

The Human Clay, a joint exhibition by provocative Thai artist Vasan Sitthiket and Australian photographer Diane Mantzaris, opened today at Number One Gallery in Bangkok. (Vasan's solo exhibitions Obsessive Compulsive and Ten Evil Scenes Of Thai Politic [sic] were also held at the same venue.)

Vasan has painted a self-portrait as a skeleton holding a machine gun (People Can Do No Wrong), and an auto-fellating monk (Intrend Smart). Mantzaris has photographed herself posing as classical sculptures while urinating (Fountain Of Eve and Fountain Of Venus).

Both Vasan and Mantzaris have used art as a means of political protest; they previously collaborated in the 1990s, shortly after the Black May massacre by the military. The Human Clay will close on 3rd March.

Newsweek

The 20th February issue of Newsweek Asia has been banned in Malaysia. The magazine included reproductions of paintings by Egyptian artist Weaam El Masry that were deemed offensive by Malaysian censors. One of the paintings is reprinted as a thumbnail photo in Newsweek's current issue.

El Pais

Last Thursday's edition of the Spanish newspaper El Pais has been banned in Morocco, as it contains a caricature of King Mohammed VI. The cartoon, by Damien Glez, was first published in Le Monde in 2009, and distorts the King's head and body into the shape of a keyhole.

Walid Bahomane, a Moroccan man, was arrested after he uploaded the cartoon to Facebook this month. A Facebook group, Mohammed VI: Ma Liberte Est Plus Sacree Que Toi, has been set up in solidarity with him, and now contains numerous King Mohammed caricatures. Persecuted cartoonist Khalid Kadar has drawn a portrait of the King which has been censored with the word "INTERDIT", highlighting Morocco's lack of free expression.

(A previous edition of El Pais was also banned in Morocco for similar reasons in 2009. Other foreign publications - Le Nouvel Observateur this year and last year, Courrier-International in 2009 and 2011, Pelerin this year, L'Express in 2011, and L'Express International in 2008 - have also been banned in Morocco, and the Moroccan newspaper Akhbar Al Youm was closed down in 2009.)

Hugo

Hugo is Martin Scorsese's first film in 3D, and also his first film aimed specifically at a family audience. Like Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder, Scorsese's film adds prestige to the 3D fad, and demonstrates that stereoscopic cinema can be used creatively as more than merely a gimmick. It's the greatest (and arguably the only great) 3D film since Avatar.

Chloe Moretz gives another impressive performance, after her equally self-assured appearances in Kick-Ass, 500 Days Of Summer, and Let Me In. Ben Kingsley is, of course, excellent, in his second Martin Scorsese film (following Shutter Island). Ray Winstone (also in his second Scorsese film, after The Departed) has merely a cameo role, as does Jude Law. It's ironic that Law repairs an automaton in Hugo, as he previously played a robot in AI.

The Hugo Movie Companion

The Hugo Movie Companion is a guide to the making of Martin Scorsese's latest film, Hugo. The book's author, Brian Selznick, also wrote The Invention Of Hugo Cabret, the graphic novel on which the film is based. Like the novel, the Movie Companion is extensively illustrated, with images from Scorsese's influences including A Trip To The Moon, The 400 Blows, and even the Mona Lisa.

Selznick covers every aspect of the film's production, and has seemingly interviewed all of the key cast and crew, including Scorsese. Numerous on-set photos are included, along with script extracts, storyboards, and pre-production sketches. Scorsese has contributed a short essay on the influences of the Lumiere brothers and Georges Melies.

Given Selznick's proximity to the film's source novel, he's not really objective enough to write a making-of book. Fortunately, though, self-references are kept to a minimum - except in the final chapter, when he describes his own cameo role with false modesty and excessive detail.

Le Nouvel Observateur

The 2nd February issue of Le Nouvel Observateur has been banned in Morocco, because it includes a drawing of God from the animated film Persepolis. A previous issue of the magazine was banned in Morocco last year. (Other foreign publications - Pelerin this year, Courrier-International in 2009 and 2011, L'Express in 2011, El Pais in 2009, and L'Express International in 2008 - have also been banned in Morocco, and the Moroccan newspaper Akhbar Al Youm was closed down in 2009.)

Retro Ver-Spective

The group exhibition Retro Ver-Spective opened yesterday at Gallery VER in Bangkok. The exhibition includes a video by Thunska Pansittivorakul, excerpted from his film The Terrorists (though, at the time of writing, the video was not working).

Retro Ver-Spective will close on 8th April. Gallery VER previously hosted an exhibition of Thunska's photography (Life Show), and a retrospective of his short films (Inside Out, Outside In).

Taschen Art and Collector's Editions

Taschen Art & Collector's Editions: An Art Book Exhibition opened at the Serindia Gallery in Bangkok on 2nd February, and will close on 15th April. The exhibition features a selection of culture and architecture books published by Taschen, including a signed copy of Steve Shapiro's Taxi Driver monograph.

Taschen's catalogue includes some of the world's greatest art books, though they've become synonymous with rather risque material since publishing their (initially censored) Jeff Koons monograph. They're probably my favourite publisher, because they celebrate high and low culture equally. Also, unlike most other publishers, Taschen continue to produce lavish editions that highlight the value of printed hardback books.

Taschen's Napoleon is the largest and most expensive book I own. Their other titles include 100 All-Time Favorite Movies, Some Like It Hot, Modern Architecture A-Z, Photographers A-Z, Letter Fountain, Horror Cinema, Art Cinema, Cinema Now, A History Of Advertising, Trespass, Film Noir, Atlas Maior, Harmonia Macrocosmica, Chronicle Of The World 1493, Codices Illustres, The Eiffel Tower, Fashion, The World Of Ornament, The Complete Costume History, Atlas Of Human Anatomy & Surgery, Decorative Arts From The Middle Ages To The Renaissance, Architectural Theory From The Renaissance To The Present, Art Now, Industrial Design A-Z, Design Of The 20th Century, Architecture In The 20th Century, and 20th Century Art.

Their directors series includes introductory books on Stanley Kubrick (Visual Poet) and Alfred Hitchcock (Architect Of Anxiety), and their books Sculpture: From The Renaissance To The Present Day, The Stanley Kubrick Archives, Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings & Drawings, Michelangelo: Complete Works, Picasso, and Andres Serrano: America & Other Works are definitive surveys.

Pelerin

A special edition of the journal Pelerin, published last month, has been banned in Morocco as it contains five images of a veiled Mohammed. (Other foreign publications - Courrier-International in 2009 and 2011, L'Express and Le Nouvel Observateur in 2011, El Pais in 2009, and L'Express International in 2008 - have also been banned in Morocco, and the Moroccan newspaper Akhbar Al Youm was closed down in 2009.)

Hugo (2D)

Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese, is nominally the story of Hugo Cabret, a Parisian orphan, though its real focus is filmmaker Georges Melies, played by Ben Kingsley. Melies sells toys at a small booth, though Hugo discovers that he was a pioneer of science-fiction cinema. Melies directed A Trip To The Moon, silent cinema's first masterpiece, excerpts from which are included in Scorsese's film.

The film also features clips from other silent classics, including The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (which set the template for Scorsese's Shutter Island), The Great Train Robbery (which inspired the final shot of Scorsese's GoodFellas), Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory, and Intolerance. The scene depicted on the poster is, of course, a reference to Safety Last.

At a time of digital film production, exhibition, and distribution, Scorsese emphasises the medium's mechanical origins, and hopefully the film will introduce silent films to a new generation. (Scorsese has promoted early cinema before, writing the foreword to Silent Movies.) It's a charming film, and an evocative tribute to the first artist of cinema, though I wonder whether the Melies storyline will be sufficiently engaging for children.

Though written by John Logan - who also wrote RKO281, Rango, The Aviator (another Scorsese film about a director), and Sweeney Todd - Hugo has parallels with Scorsese's own life. Scorsese was captivated by the cinema as a child, and he rehabilitated the reputation of director Michael Powell, just as Hugo brings Melies back into the limelight. (I saw Hugo in 2D, though it was filmed in 3D and is also screening in a 3D version.)