Radio Times Guide To Films 2015

The Radio Times Guide To Films 2015, edited by Sue Robinson, will soon become the last remaining comprehensive annual film guide. Printed reference books such as this are an endangered species, as publishers react to the migration of information online. (Several dictionary and encyclopedia publishers have already announced that they will no longer be releasing printed versions of their flagship titles.)

Halliwell's Film Guide, for many years the standard UK film guide, died an undignified death with its The Movies That Matter edition in 2008. Its rivals, including the Virgin Film Guide (which featured longer reviews) and Elliot's Guide To Films On Video, were much more short-lived. The Time Out Film Guide (more opinionated and less mainstream) was cancelled in 2012. In America, Leonard Maltin's annual guide was split into separate Classic and Modern editions, and will no longer be printed at all after this year. VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever is still published annually, though it cuts more entries each year and is limited to films released on video.

Radio Times film reviews are all available online for free (as are Time Out's), so it's surprising that their annual Film Guide remains a viable proposition. The cover illustration - the poster for Jaws - perhaps indicates (like the Fistful Of Dollars cover from last year) that the book is aimed at an older demographic which has not yet switched over to online sources such as the IMDb.

There are precisely 23,099 entries in the new edition, including 547 new films; last year's edition contained 23,068 entries, thus there have been almost as many deletions as additions. In a spurious attempt to appear as up-to-date as possible, the Film Guide includes previews of forthcoming films, which are then rewritten as reviews in the following year's edition. This year, there are eighty-seven previews, which presumably will be converted into reviews for the 2016 edition.

The new reviews this year include Noah ("an impressive spectacle"), The Hobbit II ("dramatic tension comes in fits and starts"), and The Wind Rises ("older viewers and fans will be enchanted by this modest entry in Miyazaki's canon"). Martin Scorsese's The Wolf Of Wall Street receives a five-star review ("an exhilarating story of decadence and debauchery", as does Gravity ("breathtaking").

The Radio Times Film Guide had a little-known predecessor: the Radio Times Film & Video Guide, written by Derek Winnert and published in 1993 and 1994. It was pulped, and Winnert was dismissed as Radio Times film editor, after a plagiarism lawsuit from the publishers of Halliwell's.

12th World Film Festival of Bangkok

The 12th World Film Festival of Bangkok (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์โลกแห่งกรุงเทพฯ ครั้งที่ 12) opens next month. One of this year’s highlights will be Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis, restored with almost thirty minutes of additional footage from a 16mm Argentine print, screening on 23rd and 25th October. (Metropolis was previously shown at the inaugural World Film Festival in 2003, accompanied by a live orchestra.)

The festival begins on 17th October, and runs until 26th October. Like the 11th festival, it will be held at the SF World cinema, CentralWorld. (The 6th, 7th, and 8th festivals were held at Paragon Cineplex; the 5th, 9th, and 10th took place at Esplanade Cineplex.) The event is organised by Kriengsak Silakong, who I interviewed for Encounter Thailand magazine in 2012.

Once Upon A Celluloid Planet

Once Upon A Celluloid Planet: Where Cinema Ruled - Hearts and Houses of Films in Thailand is a unique photographic guide to Thailand's stand-alone cinemas, movie palaces from the pre-multiplex era. Sonthaya Subyen and Morimart Raden-Ahmad have photographed more than sixty cinemas, documenting their marquees, box offices, auditoriums, and projection booths. Many of these once-luxurious movie theatres are now derelict (such as Siam Theatre, destroyed by arsonists in 2010), though the splendid Scala cinema remains in business.

The book also includes nostalgic essays by writers and directors, such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who ends his piece with this comparison: "Tens of thousands of years ago, when our ancestors were living in caves, they often drew on the walls of the cave, showing us how they lived their lives. It seems to be an unknown force in our blood. Looking at it like this, you could say that cinemas, whether inside or outside department stores, are our modern day caves."

There are also chapters devoted to unusual forms of film promotion, from glass slides to painted mud flaps. The 500-page book - a valuable record of social history, film culture, and architecture - is part of the Filmvirus series, which also includes a monograph on Apichatpong, Unknown Forces. (A Century Of Thai Cinema, by Dome Sukwong, also features a few pages of vintage cinema photographs.)

Turning Point 1997-2008

Hayao Miyazaki's autobiographical Turning Point 1997-2008 is a collection of articles and interviews related to his films Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, and Ponyo. It's a translation of the Japanese 折り返し点 1997-2008, and a sequel to Miyazaki's first anthology, Starting Point 1979-1996. Miyazaki himself was surprisingly reluctant to publish it: "A book that has collected the likes of talks I have given here and there, or what I was obliged to say, or what I wrote because I was asked to write something seems to me to reveal evidence of my shame. So, frankly, I'm not too happy about it."

The book provides useful access to material previously available only in Japan. Fortunately, the chapters on Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki's first international success) and Spirited Away (his masterpiece) are the most extensive, with in-depth interviews and production notes. The Howl's Moving Castle chapter, however, has only a tangential connection to the film, and the final chapter includes only two short articles on Ponyo. It's odd that Turning Point was published some six years after the Japanese edition, and that it contains no new material on Ponyo or Miyazaki's final film, The Wind Rises. (One of the book's translators, Frederik L Schodt, wrote Manga! Manga!: The World Of Japanese Comics.)

Basic Mathematics

A textbook has been withdrawn from colleges in Thailand after a student pointed out that one of its photographs was taken from a Japanese porn website. The book, Basic Mathematics, features a cover photo of Mana Aoki posing as a teacher. The image was taken from a publicity still for the 'adult' film Costume Play Working Girl, available on the Member 247 website.

The photo was edited for the textbook cover: the Japanese text on Aoki's binder was replaced with the word "Mathematics", and the original classroom background was replaced with mathematical charts. The Vocational Education Commission, which distributed 3,000 copies of the book, admitted that the cover illustrations were randomly chosen from an internet image search, with an apparent disregard for copyright and suitability.

There have been previous textbook controversies in other countries, related to religious imagery rather than porn stars. A French textbook was censored in 2009, as it included a medieval illustration of Mohammed. There were protests in India in 2011, after a cartoon featuring Mohammed was included in a school textbook.

The Making Of Gone With The Wind

Gone With The Wind, "the quintessential film of Hollywood's Golden Age", had three directors (Victor Fleming, George Cukor, and Sam Wood, with only Fleming receiving credit), though producer David O Selznick was the film's main auteur. The Making Of Gone With The Wind, by Steve Wilson, contains more than 600 items from the Selznick archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, to accompany an exhibition which opened yesterday at the University of Texas.

The book includes correspondence from Selznick (with transcriptions of each document in a fifty-page appendix), concept artwork (including stunning drawings by production designer William Cameron Menzies), and on-set photographs. The material is presented chronologically, and the large (often full-page) photos are reproduced with surprising clarity considering they're seventy-five years old.

Selznick sought to adapt novels as faithfully as possible, a process he called 'pictorialization'; this literary approach, and his endless memos, led to creative tensions with his directors. (Thomas Schatz's book The Genius Of The System and the documentary Hitchcock, Selznick, & The End Of Hollywood discuss this further.) Alfred Hitchcock made Rebecca, Spellbound, The Paradine Case, and Notorious while under contract to Selznick; the villain of Rear Window resembles Selznick, and in North By Northwest, Roger O Thornhill's middle initial stands for "Nothing" in a reference to Selznick's similar affectation.

David Thomson (author of Moments That Made The Movies, The Big Screen, Have You Seen...?, The Moment Of Psycho, and A Biographical Dictionary Of Film) wrote the TV documentary Gone With The Wind: The Making Of A Legend, which was broadcast on the launch night of TNT, 3rd October 1988. The 70th and 75th anniversary Gone With The Wind DVD/blu-ray releases include a slim book featuring Selznick archive material, and reproductions of Selznick's memos.

Photography Will Be

An exhibition at the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art has been censored by police in Japan. Photography Will Be includes photographs by Ryudai Takano depicting himself and various male models posing nude. The photos were initially exhibited uncensored, despite Japanese obscenity laws prohibiting frontal nudity, though some visitors complained to the police.

On 13th August, instead of removing the twelve photographs (from a series titled おれと), the Museum draped translucent white sheets over them to partially obscure the nudity. Of course, this has also drawn attention to the censorship. The exhibition opened on 1st August, and runs until 28th September.

The Routledge Encyclopedia Of Films

The Routledge Encyclopedia Of Films, edited by Sabine Haenni, Sarah Barrow, and John White, is a survey of "world, classical ('classic') and independent cinema over the past 100 years". From the same publisher as the excellent Encyclopedia Of Early Cinema, the Encyclopedia Of Films contains 195 entries, covering 197 films (with the Three Colours trilogy treated as a single entry). The selected films each receive a fairly substantial analysis, in essays of around 2,000 words.

The editors begin their introduction by emphasising that they have selected a representative sample of films rather than a list of masterpieces: "This book is not an attempt to assert that the films discussed here are the 'greatest' or 'best' films ever made by film-makers from around the world." In fact, they reject the notion of a hierarchy of classic films: "There is neither effort, nor wish, to promote a particular canon of world cinema." Nevertheless, their selection does appear canonical, which I would argue is a strength rather than a weakness.

The Encyclopedia is similar to the first volume of the International Dictionary Of Films & Filmmakers, edited by Nicolet V Elert and Aruna Vasudevan. The International Dictionary's essays on each film are slightly shorter than the Routledge Encyclopedia's, though in other respects the Dictionary is superior. It covers almost 500 more films, and many of its entries include large stills, while the Encyclopedia is not illustrated. The Dictionary provides extensive bibliographies for each entry, while the Encyclopedia has only a handful of references per film. Also, the Dictionary's contributors include many first-rate film critics and historians (Erik Barnouw, John Baxter, Michel Ciment, David Cook, Douglas Gomery, Nick James, Kim Newman, Gene D Phillips...), in contrast to the lesser-known contributors to the Encyclopedia.

18th Thai Short Film & Video Festival

The 18th Thai Short Film & Video Festival opens on 28th August at BACC in Bangkok. The Festival will run until 7th September, and all screenings are free. The 11th Festival was held at Bangkok's now-closed EGV Grand Discovery cinema, though the 12th, 13th, and all subsequent festivals have been held at BACC.

The film ยานศรนารายณ์: ระหว่างวงโคจรดาวอังคารและดาวพฤหัสฯ, which was previously shown as part of the pre-Festival Marathon, will be screened on 31st August. A prophetic film, it was inspired by George Orwell's 1984 and produced before that novel became a symbol of the anti-coup movement. It's an extract from a feature-length film, though some of the dialogue has been self-censored to avoid accusations of lèse-majesté. The credits have also been blacked out, and the film was submitted to the Festival anonymously. (I'm sworn to secrecy.) Another extract from the same film was screened as a stand-alone short in 2012.

Prime Minister Prayut

Prayut Chan-o-cha, the leader of this year’s coup, was appointed Prime Minister yesterday. The National Legislative Assembly voted 191-0 in favour of Prayut’s appointment. There were no alternative candidates, no dissenting votes, and Prayut was not present to accept the nomination.

The result was hardly surprising, as most NLA members are military officers and all were chosen by Prayut’s junta. Earlier this week, the Assembly approved the junta’s budget proposal by a vote of 183-0, again without any dissenting votes. It’s clear that the NLA is merely a rubber-stamp legislature, with no inclination or ability to challenge Prayut. As army chief, head of the junta, and Prime Minister, Prayut now wields almost absolute power.

Since becoming a constitutional monarchy in 1932, Thai politics has been dominated by frequent periods of military rule, punctuated by occasional democratic administrations. There have been numerous coups and massacres, though no military leaders have ever faced prosecution. (Indeed, the leader of the 2006 coup subsequently became an elected MP, and the interim constitution grants an amnesty to the coup-makers.)

เจ้าสาวหมาป่า

Two members of the Prakai Fai Karn Lakorn theatre group have been arrested, following a police investigation into a play staged by the group last year. The play, เจ้าสาวหมาป่า, was performed at Thammasat University on 6th and 13th October, as part of a week-long commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the October 1973 pro-democracy student uprising.

Several members of the theatre group were interviewed by police in November last year. In June this year, they were summoned by the NCPO and questioned about the play. One of the actors, Patiwat Saraiyaem, was formally charged with lèse-majesté yesterday, and writer/director Prontip Mankong was charged with the same offence today.

“Amnesty shall be granted to NCPO and NCPO leaders...”

In June, National Council for Peace and Order leader Prayut Chan-o-cha announced his three-step pathway to a new election following this year’s coup. Now it seems that the country has entered the second phase of Prayut’s plan, as anti-coup protests have fizzled out and the NCPO has begun establishing an interim government.

The prospect of military detention and court martial has successfully deterred any anti-coup activity, and even symbolic protests have now stopped. Instead of promoting reconciliation, police encouraged people to submit photographs of protesters, for a ฿500 reward. After the last protest, on 8th June, the deputy police chief claimed that the protesters “are causing damage to our country... They are creating a bad image for the foreigners.”

A propaganda campaign to ‘bring back happiness” has been launched by the military, with free entertainment being provided in partnership with the private sector. Thousands of free tickets to see the patriotic film The Legend Of King Naresuan V (ตำนานสมเด็จพระนเรศวรมหาราช ภาค ๕ ยุทธหัตถี) were distributed on 15th June. (Cinemas were required to install CCTV cameras to record and identify any patrons who left the screenings early.) Rights-holder RS was persuaded to allow World Cup football matches to be broadcast on the army’s terrestrial television channels 5 and 7. Prayut has issued a list of twelve values that children should uphold; incredibly, one of these values is: “Correct understanding of democracy”.

In another PR exercise, army spokesman Weerachon Sukhonthapatiphak gave a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Bangkok on 11th June, euphemistically describing the military takeover as an “intervention” rather than a coup. He insisted that people were “invited”, rather than detained, by the military; implausibly, he claimed that former PM Yingluck “was free to go back home on the same day.” After publisher Thanapol Eawsakul’s detention, a colonel explained that they would “interrogate him and re-adjust his attitude”, in contrast to the rosy picture painted by Weerachon. Some detainees have even accused the army of torture.

To demonstrate its commitment to the country’s administration, the NCPO has already allocated billions of baht to pay for new policies and infrastructure projects. The first of these was a pledge to reimburse the farmers who had not been paid following Yingluck Shinawatra’s rice subsidy scheme. The NCPO also announced transportation megaprojects, including two high-speed train lines. When Yingluck proposed a similar plan, with almost exactly the same budget, it was vetoed by the Constitutional Court, which ruled that high-speed rail was not necessary in Thailand. Yet the NCPO’s almost identical proposal has attracted no such criticism.

Martial law also precludes any debate on the NCPO’s interim constitution, which was published on 22nd July. The constitution includes an amnesty for the coup leaders, as did the 2007 charter: “Amnesty shall be granted to NCPO and NCPO leaders, as well as individuals who take part in or conduct actions related to taking control over state administration” (article 48). When Yingluck proposed a political amnesty last year, she was criticised by all sides, triggering the People’s Democratic Reform Council protest, though there has been no criticism of the military’s amnesty. The constitution also states: “NCPO Announcements and Orders... shall be all deemed lawful, constitutional and final” (article 44), effectively giving the junta absolute power.

The National Legislative Assembly, appointed by the NCPO, held its first session on 7th August. 105 of its 200 members are serving or retired military officers. Next week, the NLA will vote for a prime minister, and Prayut is widely expected to be chosen.

The Bangkok Post’s military reporter, Wassana Nanuam, is known for her high-placed sources, though maintaining this access to top-level military personnel also risks compromising her objectivity. She wrote an especially obsequious article on 19th June, almost begging Prayut to become PM: “Confidence in Gen. Prayut is overwhelming. Many Thais think we are in dire need of a strong, decisive leader... In their view, Gen Prayut is a hero who has freed the country from its troubles.” As is the case with the lèse-majesté law, absolute censorship means that only hagiography is permitted.

The Making of Stanley Kubrick's2001: A Space Odyssey

The Making Of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, written by Piers Bizony and published by Taschen, is the most comprehensive guide to Kubrick's greatest film. It consists of four books: two hardbacks in a sleek metal box that resembles the monolith from 2001, and two paperbacks. (It also comes with a reprint of a Mad magazine comic parody of 2001.)

The most substantial volume (a tall, narrow hardback with many fold-out pages) is an expanded and completely revised edition of Bizony's 2001: Filming The Future, documenting "the story of the world's most impressive science-fiction film". It includes concept art and hundreds of photographs from the Stanley Kubrick Archive, though surprisingly there are no reproductions of Kubrick's notes or correspondence. There are limited footnotes and an equally brief bibliography.

The other hardback volume, titled 2001: A Space Odyssey, a wide book that echoes the film's widescreen format, is a collection of stills from the film. The frame-enlargements are noticeably darker than they appear in the film itself, in contrast to the bright, glossy stills in The Stanley Kubrick Archives (also published by Taschen).

The paperback volumes are facsimiles of two pre-production documents: 2001: A Space Odyssey - Script (Kubrick's annotated copy of the prose treatment, written by Arthur C Clarke), and 2001: A Space Odyssey - Notes (production notes compiled by Victor Lyndon). However, there are no drafts of the screenplay, nor Kubrick's special-effects notes. Separate from the metal slipcase, and not matching the two black hardbacks, the paperbacks seem rather incongruous, and it's odd that the entire set wasn't produced in hardback with a wider slipcase. (At least the paperbacks would look better without their dust jackets.)

The book was designed by M/M, who also created Taschen's book about Kubrick's Napoleon. Like Napoleon, The Making Of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 is a limited collector's edition: only 1,500 copies are available (mine being #1,368), all neatly signed by Kubrick's widow, Christiane. Napoleon, with ten volumes all contained within an enormous book, was a more substantial and integrated tribute to a Kubrick project, though such a definitive book on 2001 may be impossible, due to the sheer quantity of archive material. One indication of the attention to detail in the book's design is that its title is rendered as 2OO1 (using capital Os rather than zeros), as in the film's title sequence.

There are already numerous books devoted to 2001, including The Making Of Kubrick's 2001 (by Jerome Agel), The Making Of 2001: A Space Odyssey (by Stephanie Schwam), 2001 Memories (by Gary Lockwood), Moonwatcher's Memoir (by Dan Richter), 2001: The Lost Science (by Adam K Johnson), Are We Alone? (by Anthony Frewin), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (by Peter Kramer). The 2001 File (by Christopher Frayling) will be published in the near future.

Visual Project: Creativities Unfold 2012

Every day this month, Bangkok's TCDC will screen highlights from its Creativities Unfold 2012 event, as part of the Visual Project series. Creativities Unfold is TCDC's annual design seminar; the theme for 2012 was Design Is Opportunities, and the speakers included Dieter Dams, one of the greatest living designers. (Previous Visual Project seasons have included Woody Allen films and Picasso documentaries.)

Doppelganger Month

Bangkok's Jam Cafe is hosting a Doppelganger season this month, as part of its regular Cult Movie Night event. The season includes Ingmar Bergman's Persona, which will be screened on 13th August. (Previous Cult Movie Night seasons have included American Independent Month, Anime Month, 'So Bad It's Good' Month, Philip Seymour Hoffman Month, and Noir Month.)

18th Short Film Marathon

The 18th Thai Short Film & Video Festival will begin later this month, screening a selection of around sixty titles chosen from over 500 films submitted. Before the Festival opens, all 500+ submissions are being screened at BACC from 2nd July until 6th August. All screenings are free.

Tomorrow's Marathon session includes the short film ยานศรนารายณ์: ระหว่างวงโคจรดาวอังคารและดาวพฤหัสฯ. The film was made by a recognised Thai indie director, though it was submitted anonymously and will be shown without credits. (I'm sworn to secrecy.) It's an extract from a feature-length film, though some of the dialogue has been self-censored to avoid accusations of lèse-majesté. The film it was excerpted from was inspired by George Orwell's 1984, a novel which has since become an anti-coup symbol.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Here & Now

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Here & Now is the exhibition catalogue for the Cartier-Bresson retrospective held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris earlier this year, though it also serves as a complete survey of the photographer's life and work. The book was written by Clement Cheroux, who also curated the exhibition. The English translation is published by Thames & Hudson, and its title was inspired by a phrase suggested by Cartier-Bresson in 1953, "ici et maintenant".

Cartier-Bresson was most often associated with photojournalism, though arguably he was the greatest of all photographers. He is best remembered for his concept of 'the decisive moment', which became the English-language title of his monograph Images A La Sauvette. (The Decisive Moment, Cartier-Bresson's masterpiece, will finally be reprinted later this year, accompanied by a booklet written by Cheroux.) Derriere La Gare St Lazare, a photograph of a man jumping into a puddle, is probably his most famous work, and it captures the essence of the decisive moment.

There have been numerous Cartier-Bresson books published since his death, including several from Thames & Hudson. The Man, The Image, & The World, which includes 600 photographs and a comprehensive bibliography, is the most extensive Cartier-Bresson monograph. His writings are collected in a single slim anthology, The Mind's Eye.

Here & Now divides Cartier-Bresson's career chronologically into three broad periods: early experiments with Surrealism, political photojournalism, and post-war reportage. It's a significant collection because it includes some rare and non-canonical photographs, such as a snapshot taken at scout camp when Cartier-Bresson was a teenager. It also features several of the magazine spreads that Cartier-Bresson was assigned to photograph, so the photos are presented in their original contexts. Some of these photo-spreads are printed in colour, and these colour reproductions are especially valuable as most Cartier-Bresson monographs are exclusively black-and-white.

The book's extensive selection includes over 500 photographs and sketches, which are reproduced from archive prints. Consequently, many of the older images have an off-white tint and occasional blemishes, as Cheroux recognises: "The use of contemporary prints, with their special tonality and, in some cases, their defects, contrasts with the digitized versions used in most recent publications." This was a deliberate policy of Cheroux's, to avoid what he regards as a homogenous presentation of Cartier-Bresson's work, though the images are therefore not as glossy or crisp as we might have expected.

American Independent Month

Bangkok's Jam Cafe is hosting an American Independent season this month, as part of its regular Cult Movie Night event. The season continues tomorrow with Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. (Previous Cult Movie Night seasons have included Anime Month, 'So Bad It's Good' Month, Philip Seymour Hoffman Month, and Noir Month.)

Reservoir Dogs was one of the most impressive directorial debuts in American independent cinema. Tarantino's follow-up, Pulp Fiction, is a masterpiece. Without exception, his subsequent films are outstanding: Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, and Django Unchained.

La Fete 2014

La Fete, Bangkok's annual French arts festival, opened on 4th June, and will close tomorrow. Unlike previous years (including 2013, 2012, and 2011), there are no film screenings at this year's festival, though the highlight this year is Galleries' Night, with many galleries staying open until midnight tonight.

The Jim Thompson Art Center will be taking part in Galleries' Night, and will show Araya Rasdjarmreansook's triptych video installation Chant For Female Corpse. Araya's other video works include Reading For Female Corpse (shown in From Message To Media), Conversation (shown in The Suspended Moment), and The Class I-III (shown in Dialogues).

Spiritual America 2014

After the Metropolitan Police Service removed Richard Prince's photograph Spiritual America from Tate Modern's Pop Life exhibition and catalogue in 2009, Xenofon Kavvadias made Freedom of Information requests to read correspondence between the Tate and the Met. This material, some of which was redacted before it was published, forms part of his Masters of Fine Arts degree show.

Kavvadias will also exhibit a copy of Prince's photograph (which is included in Controverses), retitled Spiritual America 2014. The degree show exhibition, at Goldsmiths College in London, runs from 10th to 14th July.

The 1st Silent Film Festival In Thailand

Next month, Thailand's first Silent Film Festival will be held in Bangkok. The Festival, organised by the British Council with restored prints supplied by the BFI, begins on 7th August. Most screenings will take place at Lido, though the final screening will be at Scala.

Three silent films by Alfred Hitchcock will be shown: The Pleasure Garden (his directorial debut; 7th and 10th August), The Ring (an atypical Hitchcock production, and his only solo screenwriting credit; 8th and 10th August), and The Lodger: A Story Of The London Fog (13th August, at Scala). All film screenings will be accompanied by a live pianist, to recreate the original silent cinema atmosphere. (The acclaimed composer Somtow Sucharitkul will be one of the pianists for The Lodger; previously, the BFI commissioned an orchestral score for the film by Nitin Sawhney.)

The Lodger, an Expressionist thriller based on 'Jack the Ripper', is certainly Hitchcock's greatest silent movie, and arguably one of his masterpieces. It's the first truly Hitchcockian film, and the Silent Film Festival provides a rare opportunity to see it on the big screen. (The lodger's arrival at the boarding house influenced a similar scene in The Ladykillers.)

House 10th

This year marks the tenth anniversary of House RCA, Bangkok's only independent cinema. To celebrate, the cinema has organised a season of films, House 10th, which starts tomorrow and runs until the end of the month. Highlights include Last Life In The Universe, by Pen-ek Ratanaruang (director of Ploy, Invisible Waves, Nymph, and Headshot), screening for free on 11th July; and City Of God, by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, screening on 16th July.

Relics

The largest ever retrospective of Damien Hirst's work was held last year, though not in London or New York but in Doha. Relics, curated by Francesco Bonami, was Hirst's first solo exhibition in the Middle East, and was accompanied by a 300-page catalogue published by Skira.

The catalogue begins with an extended essay by curator Francesco Bonami, who discusses Hirst's place in art history: "He is reversing the Picasso paradigm. Everybody knows Picasso, but fewer know his art. Now everybody knows the vitrine with the shark, the butterfly paintings, the Spot paintings, the diamond skulls, the sliced cow and the rotting cow's head, but fewer know their author." There is also a brief essay by Michael Craig-Martin (famous for his conceptual installation An Oak Tree) on Hirst's career prior to the Sensation exhibition, and a Hirst interview by Nicholas Serota (director of the Tate), though these are both reprints from a 2012 Tate catalogue.

Bonami's essay and Serota's interview both emphasise the significance of Hirst's installation A Thousand Years (a self-contained ecosystem, with a cow's head surrounded by flies that hatch and die). Bonami argues: "The paradox is that this work, centered on death and decomposition, is maybe the one that has granted Damien Hirst a slice of immortality in art history." (Arguably, though, the piece is about the life cycle of the flies more than the death of the cow.) In the Serota interview, Hirst says that A Thousand Years is important yet impermanent: "the fly piece was the most exciting thing - still is, possibly - the most exciting piece I made. [But] the fly piece is always something that will need my involvement, need my upkeep - it's high-maintenance."

Relics features many of the signature pieces from Hirst's Natural History series, such as A Thousand Years, Mother & Child (Divided) (a cow and calf, each bisected in vitrines), and Away From The Flock (a sheep preserved in formaldehyde). His iconic diamond-encrusted skull (For The Love Of God) is also included. Arguably Hirst's most famous work, The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living (his shark in a tank) is missing, though there are three other preserved sharks: The Kingdom, The Immortal, and Leviathan.

The first Hirst retrospective was organised by Charles Saatchi in 2003 (with a catalogue titled Pictures From The Saatchi Gallery), though it was curated without Hirst's approval; one of Hirst's greatest solo exhibitions, Romance In The Age Of Uncertainty, was also held that year. I Want To Spend The Rest Of My Life With Everyone, One To One, Always, Forever, Now (published in 1997) remains the definitive Hirst monograph, though Relics is useful for its updated chronology and bibliography.

Hack Attack

Nick Davies, an investigative journalist for The Guardian, was the first reporter to reveal that News Of The World reporters had hacked the voicemails of hundreds of public figures. The scandal led to the closure of the News Of The World, the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics, and the Old Bailey trials of former News Of The World editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. (Brooks was cleared of all charges, though Coulson was found guilty of phone-hacking.)

Hack Attack: How The Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch is Davies's comprehensive account of his investigation into the phone-hacking scandal. Davies was motivated by his distaste for the criminality of Murdoch's tabloids, as he makes clear: "inside the walls of Murdoch's castle, there was something like a mass grave full of several decades of buried secrets, so big and so stinking that once you started to dig, there really was no doubt at all about what was down there."

In addition to his chronological narrative of the hacking investigation, Davies examines the recent history of British press crimes and misdemeanours, particularly the tabloid excesses of the 1980s and early 1990s. He also summarises Murdoch's influence on British politics (such as Margaret Thatcher not referring the Times takeover to the Monopolies & Mergers Commission, Gordon Brown's "five tests" preventing Britain joining the Euro, and David Cameron socialising with Rebekah Brooks) and the abortive bid for complete ownership of BSkyB.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger discussed Davies's uncovering of the hacking story in his memoir Play It Again. Davies also wrote the excellent Flat Earth News. Michael Wolff's The Man Who Owns The News is the definitive Murdoch biography.

ေအာင္ရင္ၿငိမ္း

An erotic novel, ေအာင္ရင္ၿငိမ္း by Aung Ying Nyein, has been banned in Burma. The novel, set in a world of 'romanbots' (romance robots), was withdrawn from sale by its publisher, Pinlae Thit, after pressure from the government. The author is now facing obscenity charges.

Film Noir: 100 All-Time Favorites

Film Noir: 100 All-Time Favorites, published by Taschen, is an illustrated guide to 100 classic noir films. At almost 700 pages, it's one of the most substantial Noir film guides, though it's more of a visual celebration of the genre than a work of reference. It has hundreds of large, glossy stills, making it a perfect coffee-table book for cinephiles, though there's no bibliography.

Film Noir was edited by Paul Duncan and Jurgen Muller. Duncan has previously written monographs on Stanley Kubrick (Visual Poet) and Alfred Hitchcock (Architect Of Anxiety), and has edited many other Taschen books, including Horror Cinema, Art Cinema, and Cinema Now. Muller edited Taschen's 100 All-Time Favorite Movies, whose format Film Noir has adopted. Fourteen films are included in both books, with the reviews and illustrations from 100 All-Time Favorite Movies reproduced exactly in Film Noir. (Even the mistakes are replicated, such as the bizarre phrase "smirking toilet seat" in the Psycho chapter.)

The films were selected based on a fairly broad definition of film noir. The Expressionist masterpiece Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, for instance, is not usually regarded as a noir film. (Noir was partly inspired by German Expressionism, though Caligari influenced the horror genre more than film noir.) Similarly, Vertigo, Psycho, and Taxi Driver are all-time classics, though I wouldn't necessarily describe them as noir films. Nevertheless, the lavish illustrations (particularly for Caligari) are ample justification for their inclusion.

Milestones from the original noir cycle such as The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Out Of The Past, and Touch Of Evil are all included. The contemporary neo-noir movement is represented by films such as Chinatown, Blade Runner, Pulp Fiction, Memento, and The Dark Knight. There are a few surprising omissions: the B-movie Stranger On The Third Floor, the experimental Lady In The Lake, and Citizen Kane (not film noir per se, but an important stylistic influence on the genre).

There are a few misquotes and factual errors. In Double Indemnity, Walter says "I killed him for money, and for a woman. I didn't get the money, and I didn't get the woman", though the book lazily paraphrases this to "I killed him for the money and the woman, and I didn't get either". In Notorious, the wine cellar was not "an opportune venue" for the famous extended kiss, which didn't take place there. Some mistakes may be due to poor translations from the original German text: Walter's confession in Double Indemnity was made after he was shot, not "at gunpoint"; in Pulp Fiction, the 'Gold Watch' sequence (not "The Golden Watch") happened in a regular family house, not "a children's home", and Vincent revived Mia instead of bringing her "back to life".

Panorama Du Film Noir Americain, by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, is the founding text of film noir. Twenty years later, Paul Schrader's essay Notes On Film Noir provided a summary of the genre for American audiences. Schrader's essay is included in Film Noir: 100 All-Time Favorites as an introduction, though it's already been widely anthologised; another introductory chapter, an extended visual analysis of The Lady From Shanghai ("seldom in the studio era has there been a movie with such innovative visual language") co-written by Jurgen Muller, is much more interesting.

Recent noir scholarship has been dominated by Alain Silver and James Ursini, who co-wrote Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference To The American Style (updated as Film Noir: The Encyclopedia), the Film Noir Reader series, and The Noir Style. Silver and Ursini also wrote Film Noir for Taschen, edited by Paul Duncan, and they are among the contributors to Film Noir: 100 All-Time Favorites.

501 Must-See Movies

The fourth edition of 501 Must-See Movies, edited by Emma Hill, contains only minor changes compared to the third edition. Four films (Troy, Crank, United 93, and The Reader) have been deleted from the list of 501, and four new films (The King's Speech, The Artist, Skyfall, and The Avengers) have been added.