Crossover

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook's video The Class, in which she teaches a class of shrouded corpses, is currently on show at BACC. Crossover: The Unveiled Collection, an exhibition of Thai artworks on loan from various private collectors, opened on 20th February and will close on 14th June.

The Class was previously shown in Dialogues, also at BACC. Araya's other videos include Chant For Female Corpse (La Fete 2014), Reading For Female Corpse (From Message To Media), and Conversation (The Suspended Moment).

Cinema Diverse

The annual Cinema Diverse: Director's Choice event begins at BACC on 23rd May. The season of free screenings will conclude on 28th November, when Apichatpong Weerasethakul (director of Uncle Boonmee and Syndromes & A Century) will introduce the Chilean film No. Highlights from previous years include The Good, The Bad, & The Weird introduced by Nonzee Nimibutr and Tears Of The Black Tiger introduced by Wisit Sasanatieng.

Ten Must-Watch Movies

Film Studies For Dummies, published this year, includes a chapter titled Ten Must-Watch Movies. The chronological list of "ten essential films from the entire history of world cinema", compiled by James Cateridge, is as follows:

• Sherlock Jr
  
• Casablanca
  
• Singin' In The Rain
  
• Rear Window
  
• Breathless
  
• Don't Look Now
  
• Blade Runner
  
• Pulp Fiction
  
• Spirited Away
  
• City Of God

“We have prepared article 44...”

Prime Minister Prayut has asked the King to authorise the cessation of martial law. The law has been in place since 20th May last year, when Prayut imposed it unilaterally. At the time, Prayut told the public that “[t]he invocation of martial law is not a coup d’etat”, though two days later he launched a full-scale coup. Prayut’s declaration of nationwide martial law was unconstitutional, as a royal decree was not issued and the constitution authorised the military to declare martial law only “in a certain locality as a matter of urgency” (article 188).

Yesterday, Prayut announced that he was ready to exercise his authority according to article 44 of the interim constitution: “We have prepared article 44 and will use it soon”. Article 44 states: “NCPO Announcements and Orders... shall be all deemed lawful, constitutional and final”. The withdrawal of martial law is therefore largely symbolic, as the interim constitution gives Prayut the power to act without any checks or balances.

Former politicians are becoming increasingly vocal in challenging some of the junta’s actions, and the Pheu Thai and Democrat opposition parties are both calling for a referendum on the next constitution. (A referendum was held in 2007, though this time the junta has made no such commitment.) In a 9th March interview with the Bangkok Post, former Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva directly criticised a proposal to enable the PM to dissolve parliament if it rejected a government bill: “This is a step backward for democracy. It will snatch democracy away from the people”.

The Thai political situation was effectively summarised in a cartoon by Heng Kim Song published in the International New York Times on 2nd March. Thailand is depicted as a car heading for a metaphorical cliff, and the military’s promise of the sunlit uplands of democracy is presented as a deceptive illusion.

Photography Visionaries

Photography Visionaries profiles seventy-five photographers, with four pages devoted to each artist. The selection includes masters such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, and Robert Capa, and contemporary photographers such as Sebastiao Salgado, Andreas Gursky, and Nan Goldin. There are some notable omissions, though: the Vietnam War is represented by two Don McCullin photographs, though his contemporaries Eddie Adams and Nick Út are not included; there are very few 19th century images, and pioneers such as Joseph Niepce are missing; and fashion photography is limited to the works of Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz, while Irving Penn is excluded.

Photography Visionaries, published by Laurence King, is similar to Taschen's Photographers A-Z, and both have their strengths and weaknesses. Photographers A-Z is more substantial (a hefty volume profiling 400 photographers), though its illustrations are rather small. Photography Visionaries is more selective, though it includes many full-page images. Photographers A-Z contains detailed individual bibliographies, while Photography Visionaries features concise essays explaining the significance of each photographer.

Mary Warner Marien, author of Photography Visionaries, also wrote Photography: A Cultural History (arguably the best general history of photography) and 100 Ideas That Changed Photography. The Photography Book, by Ian Jeffrey, is another A-Z of photographers, with each represented by a single photograph. The first history of the art of photography was Beaumont Newhall's The History Of Photography, and Naomi Rosenblum's A World History Of Photography is a more recent example. The Focal Encyclopedia Of Photography is a comprehensive reference.

Top Ten Lists: Movies

Top Ten Lists: Movies is a collection of film lists classified by theme and genre. Author Rob Hill (who co-wrote 501 Must-See Movies) lists his top ten films in the introduction:

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Star Wars IV: A New Hope.
3. The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly.
4. Brazil
5. Tokyo Story
6. Evil Dead II
7. Kind Hearts & Coronets
8. The Awful Truth
9. Seven Samurai
10. Spirited Away

The English Roses Collection

The English Roses Collection, limited to 1,500 copies, consists of two children's books written by Madonna: The English Roses (in a slipcase) and The English Roses: Too Good To Be True. The books are presented in a numbered box (mine being #204) with a print signed by illustrator Stacy Peterson. The Collection's main (or only) selling point is that it includes a letter autographed by Madonna. She clearly didn't take much care when signing it, and her signature is therefore little more than a scribble, though at least it's a genuine Madonna autograph.

Madonna wrote The English Roses (quite a departure from her previous book, Sex) in 2003. It was followed by Mr Peabody's Apples, Yakov & The Seven Thieves, The Adventures Of Abdi, Lotsa De Casha, and The English Roses: Too Good To Be True. (These were all picture books, intended to be read aloud to young children.) She then co-wrote a further dozen books in a new English Roses series: Friends For Life!; Goodbye, Grace?; The New Girl; A Rose By Any Other Name; Big-Sister Blues, Being Binah; Hooray For The Holidays; A Perfect Pair; Runway Rose; Ready, Set, Vote!; American Dreams; and Catch The Bouquet. (These were longer 'chapter books' aimed at slightly older children.)

Penguen

Two Turkish cartoonists have received jail sentences after being convicted of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. They were sentenced yesterday to fourteen months in prison, though the punishment was then reduced to eleven months and finally commuted to a 7,000 lira fine.

The cartoon in question, by Bahadir Baruter and Ozer Aydogan, appeared on the cover of the satirical magazine Penguen on 21st August last year. It depicts Erdoğan meeting a civil servant, who is buttoning his jacket with one hand while greeting the President. A reader complained to the government that the civil servant's hand gesture was an insult implying that Erdoğan was gay.

Penguen previously faced prosecution in 2011, when it published a cartoon containing the words "There is no Allah". In 2005, it was sued by Erdoğan (who was then Prime Minister) after it depicted him as a variety of animals. Earlier that year, newspaper cartoonist Musa Kart was fined for depicting Erdogan as a cat. Erdoğan sued Kart again last year in relation to another cartoon. In 2006, Erdoğan sued artist Michael Dickinson, who had depicted him as a dog in the collages Good Boy and Best In Show.

ผลงาน Masterpiece ของ Alfred Hitchcock

Tomorrow, the Pridi Banomyong Institute in Bangkok will screen two films by Alfred Hitchcock: Rope and The Trouble With Harry. The screenings are free. (The Institute was also the venue for Design Nation in 2012, and Flashback '76 in 2008.)

Rope was Hitchcock's first colour film, and his first independent production. It was filmed in a series of long takes in order to create the illusion of continuous action (more than fifty years before Russian Ark, which was actually completed in a single take). Rope is also notable for its matter-of-fact treatment of homosexuality: the two male leads share a bedroom, and the film was based on the notorious Leopold and Loeb gay murder case.

The Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower: The 300 Meter Tower is a folio reprint of a book originally issued by Gustave Eiffel in two volumes: one containing construction photographs by Edouard Durandelle (similar to those of Theophile Feau), and another featuring architectural drawings of the Eiffel Tower. The reprint, published by Taschen, includes an introduction written by Bertrand Lemoine.

The Eiffel Tower was built in 1889 for the Exposition Universelle, and has since become one of the most celebrated icons of modern architecture. In The Shock Of The New, Robert Hughes calls it "the one structure that seemed to gather all the meanings of modernity together". A World History Of Architecture discusses the Tower's significance in the pre-skyscraper era: "Not until the completion of the Chrysler Building in New York was Eiffel's tower exceeded in height, and it remains the largest iron construction in the world".

Robert Hughes argues that various innovations at the turn of the 20th century (the Cinematographe, the x-ray, the Kodak camera, the motor car, and powered flight) offered new vantage points from which to see the world. He cites the bird's-eye view from the Eiffel Tower as the most significant of these new perspectives: "This way of seeing was one of the pivots in human consciousness. The sight of Paris vu d'en haut, absorbed by millions of people in the first twenty years of the Tower's life, was as significant in 1889 as the famous NASA photograph of the earth from the moon".

Film Manifestos& Global Cinema Cultures

Scott MacKenzie, in his introduction to Film Manifestos & Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, points out that manifestos written by filmmakers are often marginalised from traditional narratives of film history. Cinema history is usually classified into genres, time periods, or national film industries; even auteurist approaches to film history focus on the directors' cinematic styles rather than their written delineations of those styles.

MacKenzie's aim is "to outline a theoretically informed counterhistory that places film manifestos, often neglected, at the center of film history" and "to reconsider the status of the film manifesto in film theory". He has compiled a comprehensive and inclusive collection of film manifestos: his anthology "brings together film manifestos from the global history of cinema, constituting the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture."

Many of the manifestos have a similar recurring theme, denouncing the traditional film industries of their respective countries, largely influenced by François Truffaut's "deliberately pessimistic examination... of a certain tendency of the French cinema". India's New Cinema Movement manifesto states: "A reaction to the vulgarities of the established commercial cinema has been in existence for several years in many countries, crystallising in many places, into a regular, conscious movement for better cinema." Mexico's New Cinema Group called for a "new cinema in Mexico, which without a doubt will be a far superior cinema than the one today." The New American Cinema Group proclaimed: "we know what needs to be destroyed and what we stand for". The Oberhausen Manifesto put it even more succinctly: "The old film is dead. We believe in the new one."

Manifestos associated with major artistic movements such as Futurism (cinema as "polyexpressive symphony"), Constructivism ("the vitality of the cine platform of constructivism"), and Surrealism ("the sexual instinct and the death instinct" in L'Age d'Or) are included alongside more obscure manifestos such as Nick Zedd's Cinema of Transgression ("We... propose to break all the taboos of our age by sinning as much as possible"). I've been collecting film and art manifestos for several years, and the book includes several that are new to me. B Ruby Rich's essay The New Queer Cinema is the only notable omission.

Some of the essays are among the most famous works of film theory: John Grierson's criticism of Berlin: Symphony Of A Great City as "the most dangerous of all film models to follow", Glauber Rocha's Cinema Novo: "Our originality is our hunger and our greatest misery is that this hunger is felt but not intellectually understood", Stan van der Beek's "expanded cinema, as a tool for world communication", and Laura Mulvey's psychoanalytic study of "the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form." Collating so many key texts in a single volume is a rare achievement, and the book ranks alongside Film Theory & Criticism and Movies & Methods.

My only criticism is that MacKenzie's introduction is quite repetitive: one paragraph explains that the book "brings together film manifestos from the global history of cinema" and the next paragraph tells us that it "brings together key manifestos of the last 110 years". Also, the footnotes include a surprisingly catty comment about how the Village Voice "couldn't get any worse".

A few of the essays are also included in 100 Artists' Manifestos. The first manifesto anthology, Manifesto: A Century Of Isms by Mary Ann Caws, covers art movements though not cinema. Icon magazine published a Manifesto Issue containing fifty design manifestos in August 2007. Unlike some texts in other anthologies, the manifestos in Film Manifestos & Global Cinema Cultures are unabridged, with the Salamanca manifesto ("Spanish cinema is still a cinema of painted dolls") being the sole exception.

Essential Eames

After a long hiatus, Bangkok's TCDC is once again hosting a major design exhibition. Essential Eames: Icons Of 20th Century Design, a Charles and Ray Eames retrospective, opened on 20th March and runs until 31st May.

Charles and Ray Eames were arguably the greatest furniture designers of the last 100 years. As Charlotte and Peter Fiell wrote in 2000: "Charles and Ray Eames did more to change the public perception of Modern design than just about anyone else in the 20th century" (Industrial Design A-Z).

The Eames plywood LCW chair (1946) epitomised the Mid-Century Modern style, and was named the greatest design of the century by Time magazine in 1999. Their lounge chair and ottoman (models 670 and 671, 1956) are included in TCDC's permanent collection (What Is Design?).

Essential Eames is curated by Eames Demetrios (grandson of Charles Eames), and is based on his book An Eames Primer. The exhibition was organised by furniture manufacturer Herman Miller; a previous Herman Miller exhibition in Bangkok, Get Real, also included several Eames chairs.

An Eames Primer

An Eames Primer serves as an introduction to "the key projects, themes, ideas, and arcs of the lives and work of Charles and Ray Eames." The author, Eames Demetrios, is Charles Eames' grandson, and director of the Eames Office. The book was the inspiration for the Essential Eames exhibition, which opens tomorrow at TCDC. The revised edition includes a chapter assessing Eames publications and other resources.

Charles and Ray Eames were most celebrated for their Mid-Century Modern furniture designs, especially their plywood LCW chair (1946), lounge chair (model 670, 1956), and ottoman (model 671, 1956). As Charlotte and Peter Fiell wrote in Industrial Design A-Z: "Charles and Ray Eames did more to change the public perception of Modern design than just about anyone else in the 20th century."

The Modi Effect:Inside Narendra Modi’s Campaign to Transform India

The Modi Effect: Inside Narendra Modi’s Campaign to Transform India is an authorised account of Indian Prime Minister Modi’s 2014 election campaign. Modi won a rare overall majority in the world’s largest democracy; as David Cameron told him, he “got more votes than any other politician anywhere in the universe”.

Author Lance Price was granted “several hours of interviews” with the PM: “Modi had agreed to give me unprecedented access to help me analyse the campaign that had brought him to power. No other writer, Indian or foreign, was to be allowed the same privilege.” (Price begins by describing their first meeting: “as a gift I gave him a copy of my second book on British prime ministers and their relationship to the media [Where Power Lies]. He told me he didn’t really read books any more, which was a little disheartening”.)

Modi’s election campaign was highly presidential, emphasising the personality of Modi himself: “The name Bharatiya Janata Party translates simply as the Indian People’s Party. Its motto is ‘country first, party second, self last’. Yet... you could have been forgiven for thinking it was now, ‘Modi first, Modi second, Modi last’. It was an unashamedly, some might say shamelessly, presidential campaign”. Famously, he appeared at hundreds of rallies simultaneously by means of holographic projection. During a state visit to the US after his victory, he appeared, like a rock star, at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Price is clearly impressed by Modi’s oratory and charisma, though as a former spin doctor he retains a healthy skepticism: “in my conversations with Narendra Modi I did my best to listen politely to what he had to say, and to bite my tongue when the temptation arose to respond with ‘oh, come off it’, as it sometimes did... I didn’t feel able to take everything he told me at face value”.

Becoming Steve Jobs

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution Of A Reckless Upstart Into A Visionary Leader, by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, is a biography of the late Steve Jobs authorised by Apple and Jobs's family. (Schlender wrote the May 2012 Fast Company cover story The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes, amongst many other articles.) The authors interviewed Jobs's widow Laurene Powell Jobs, Apple executives Tim Cook and Jony Ive, Pixar's John Lasseter, and Microsoft's Bill Gates.

The most revealing anecdote comes from Tim Cook, who confirmed that he offered to donate part of his liver to the terminally ill Jobs: "Cook decided to undergo a battery of tests that determine if someone is healthy enough to be a living donor." Cook recalls Jobs's angry refusal of his offer: "'No,' he said. 'I'll never let you do that. I'll never do that!'... Steve only yelled at me four or five times during the thirteen years I knew him, and this was one of them."

Walter Isaacson wrote a fully authorised Jobs biography in 2011, and Apple's unusual decision to co-operate with Schlender and Tetzeli perhaps indicates their dissatisfaction with Isaacson's book. Becoming Steve Jobs quotes Tim Cook: "I thought the [Walter] Isaacson book did him a tremendous disservice." In an interview with The New Yorker last month, Jony Ive was equally critical of Isaacson's biography: "My regard couldn't be any lower".

The World Of Ornament

The World Of Ornament is a reprint of two French studies of ornamental designs: L'Ornement Polychrome by Auguste Racinet (published in two volumes between 1869 and 1888) and the less well-known Art Industriel: L'Ornement Des Tissus by M Dupont-Auberville (1877). Both works are early examples of chromolithography, and both were heavily influenced by Owen Jones's classic study The Grammar Of Ornament (1856).

The plates from Racinet and Dupont-Auberville's works are beautifully reproduced in two volumes, though they have been renumbered and rearranged into a single chronological sequence, and the respective Racinet and Dupont-Auberville plates are not identified. The book comes with a keycard providing access to online reproductions of the individual elements within each plate, though again there is no attempt to label the Racinet and Dupont-Auberville plates.

The reprint, published by Taschen, includes a brief introduction by David Batterham discussing encyclopedias of ornamentation. However, Stuart Durant's book Ornament, published twenty years earlier, contains the most authoritative survey and bibliography of ornament encyclopedias. Durant praises L'Ornement Polychrome for "the splendor of its chromolithographic plates", and describes it as "the most extensive published compendium of decoration". Racinet's Le Costume Historique has also been reprinted by Taschen, as The Complete Costume History.

Memento Mori

Paul Koudounaris, author of the excellent The Empire Of Death, has written another guide to the display and veneration of human skeletons. Memento Mori: The Dead Among Us is more global in its coverage, featuring examples of ornamental and ceremonial human remains from Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. Less Gothic than its predecessor, Memento Mori is also exquisitely designed, with a blue satin cover and full-page colour illustrations (including a fold-out spanning four pages).

Memento Mori includes some of the ossuaries featured in Koudounaris's first book, though the photographs are previously unpublished and are even more dramatic than those in Empire Of Death. An overhead shot of the Lampa ossuary (Peru) is particularly striking. New material includes chapters on secular memorials and Bolivian 'natitas' skulls, and photographs of decorated 'kapala' skulls. An annotated introduction cites Georges Bataille, amongst others. (Restless Bones, by James Bentley, is a similar guide to human relics, focusing on those of saints and Biblical figures.)

Hitchcock On Hitchcock II

Hitchcock On Hitchcock: Selected Writings & Interviews Volume II has been published twenty years after the first volume of Hitchcock On Hitchcock appeared in 1995. Like the first volume, it's an anthology of interviews and articles written by Hitchcock (or "articles with his byline", as authorship of publicity material is hard to verify). Editor and Hitchcock scholar Sidney Gottlieb wrote one of the best essays in 39 Steps To The Genius Of Hitchcock.

The texts have been transcribed from newspaper and magazine articles published between 1919 and 1978. Highlights include two newly translated interviews by Francois Truffaut from Cahiers Du Cinema, and A Lesson In Psycho-logy, in which Hitchcock explains Psycho's marketing campaign. There are also a few previously unpublished pieces, including an extensive transcript of a conversation between Hitchcock and Stage Fright's production supervisor Fred Ahern.

Hitchcock has been written about more than perhaps any other director. Paul Duncan's Hitchcock: Architect Of Anxiety is an illustrated summary of Hitchcock's career. François Truffaut's book-length interview Hitchcock, and Donald Spoto's filmography The Art Of Alfred Hitchcock, are both essential reading. There are shorter Hitchcock interviews in Who The Devil Made It (Peter Bogdanovich) and The Men Who Made The Movies (Richard Schickel). Bill Krohn wrote the concise Masters Of Cinema: Alfred Hitchcock and the excellent Hitchcock At Work. Spoto's The Dark Side Of Genius is the standard Hitchcock biography, and John Russell Taylor wrote Hitch, an authorised biography. Laurent Bouzereau's Hitchcock: Piece By Piece and Dan Auiler's Hitchcock's Notebooks both contain material from the Hitchcock archives.

Harmonia Macrocosmica

Harmonia Macrocosmica Of 1660: The Finest Atlas Of The Heavens is a Taschen reprint of a celestial atlas by Andreas Cellarius. It's a perfect companion to Joan Blaeu's Atlas Maior, and these two atlases represent the pinnacle of the golden age of Dutch cartography. (It was originally published by Johannes Janssonius, Blaeu's chief competitor.) Michael Benson described Harmonia Macrocosmica as "one of the greatest celestial atlases" in his book Cosmigraphics.

The reprint, a facsimile of the original 1660 Latin edition, features twenty-nine magnificent double-folio plates, with an introduction by Robert van Gent (a contributor to David Woodward's ongoing History Of Cartography project) and a concise bibliography. The introduction outlines the history of astronomy and uranography (celestial cartography), from geocentrism (the Ptolemaic system) to heliocentrism (the Copernican system), and the hybrid model of Tycho Brahe.

Most of Harmonia Macrocosmica's ornate Baroque plates illustrate the inaccurate Ptolemaic model, though Taschen's cover shows a detail from one of the few Copernican plates. Gent singles out the 'scenographia' plates, depicting the celestial and terrestrial hemispheres simultaneously, as "universally admired for the breathtaking beauty and originality of their design".

Silhouette

Silhouette: The Art Of The Shadow, by Emma Rutherford, is the first international survey of silhouettes for seventy years. (E Nevill Jackson, author of the first history of silhouettes, also wrote Silhouette: Notes & Dictionary; it has since been reprinted, though the original 1938 edition has an embossed cover and several colour plates.)

Rutherford's book traces the history of the silhouette from the eighteenth century onwards, with individual chapters highlighting silhouette production in Britain and America. There are many full-page illustrations, and a bibliography.

The Anime Encyclopedia

"The world's most comprehensive book on anime", The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide To Japanese Animation Since 1917, was written by Jonathan Clements (author of Anime: A History) and Helen McCarthy (author of The Art Of Osamu Tezuka). The second edition, published in 2006, adds 1,000 new entries covering animated films and television series produced since the first edition of 2001.

This revised edition also includes entries on genres, studios, and directors: "new thematic entries offer not only signposts to more in-depth discussion of certain topics within anime, but also concise histories of the medium itself". The cover depicts Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, "erroneously described as the first TV anime... it was the first anime to be broadcast abroad." The World Encyclopedia Of Cartoons (Maurice Horn) contains some entries on Japanese animation.

Cinema Winehouse

Bangkok’s Cinema Winehouse schedule this month includes a triple bill of the original Star Wars trilogy (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi), screening tomorrow. City Of God (Cidade de Deus) will be shown on 25th March, and Lawrence of Arabia on 30th March.

India’s Daughter:The Story of Jyoti Singh

Leslee Udwin’s Storyville documentary India’s Daughter: The Story of Jyoti Singh was broadcast yesterday in the UK on BBC4. It was originally scheduled to be shown in India later this week, though the Indian government has prevented its transmission. Police in India banned it on the grounds that it included an inflammatory interview with a convicted rapist, though the authorities did not actually view the film before prohibiting it.

The documentary examines the case of Jyoti Singh, who was gang-raped and murdered in 2012. The fatal attack on Singh led to protests in support of rape victims, and a national debate about attitudes towards sexual assault. The programme interviews one of the rapists, Mukesh Singh, who shows no remorse and even blames the victim for his crime.

Cosmigraphics

Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, by Michael Benson, contains 300 examples of celestial maps and diagrams, revealing how the cosmos has been depicted by astronomers and artists over the past 3,000 years, beginning with the Nebra Sky Disc, "the oldest-known graphic depiction of celestial objects in human history." It's a remarkable visual guide to the history of cosmology, though unfortunately it has no footnotes or bibliography.

Some of the most elaborate illustrations are taken from Harmonia Macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius (1660); several of his plates are reproduced, as are a selection of volvelles from Peter Apian's Astronomicum Caesareum (1540). Some of the examples are well-known, such as the panels representing the six days of creation from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). Incredibly, an illustration of the void before creation (1617) by Robert Fludd pre-dates Kazimir Malevich's famous Black Square by almost exactly 300 years.

Rebel Heart

Last December, Madonna digitally released six tracks from her forthcoming album, Rebel Heart: Living For Love, Devil Pray, Ghosttown, Unapologetic Bitch, Illuminati, and Bitch I'm Madonna. A further three tracks were digitally released earlier this month: Joan Of Arc, Hold Tight, and Iconic. The full album will be available next month.

Rebel Heart will be released three years after Madonna's last studio album, MDNA. (That album inspired The MDNA Tour and the live album MDNA World Tour; Madonna also released the promo single Broken in 2012, and produced the short film secretprojectrevolution in 2013.)

The catchy Living For Love and Unapologetic Bitch are among the album's strongest tracks, as are the powerful Ghosttown and the autobiographical Rebel Heart. The least successful tracks are those featuring other artists: Nicki Minaj reappears on Bitch I'm Madonna, and Iconic opens with convicted rapist Mike Tyson. (Curiously, the album does not include any liner notes; guest vocalists are credited, though producers and other collaborators are not listed.)

The self-referential Bitch I'm Madonna echoes the final line of MDNA's I Don't Give A ("There's only one queen, and that's Madonna. Bitch!"). S.E.X. clearly evokes the infamous 1992 book Sex, though it feels too much like self-parody. Veni Vidi Vici's lyrics are a collage of titles from previous Madonna tracks ("I expressed myself, came like a virgin down the aisle..."). Holy Water, like 1993's Deeper & Deeper, quotes several lines from Vogue ("Ladies with an attitude...").

Rebel Heart will be available in three versions, each with a different cover: the 'standard' edition (featuring Madonna wearing a red sweater), the 'deluxe' edition (featuring Madonna's face bound with chord), and the 'super deluxe' edition (featuring a red-tinted cover). The standard version contains fourteen tracks: Living For Love, Devil Pray, Ghosttown, Unapologetic Bitch, Illuminati, Bitch I'm Madonna, Hold Tight, Joan Of Arc, Iconic, HeartBreakCity, Body Shop, Holy Water, Inside Out, and Wash All Over Me. (Strangely, this version doesn't include the title track, Rebel Heart.) The standard version is also available in a censored 'clean' edition.

The deluxe version adds five more tracks to the original fourteen: Best Night, Veni Vedi Vici, S.E.X., Messiah, and Rebel Heart. (This is the version released on vinyl.) The super deluxe version contains the original fourteen tracks, the five deluxe tracks, and a further four tracks: Beautiful Scars, Borrowed Time, Addicted, and Graffiti Heart. A bonus track, Auto-Tune Baby, is available in Germany.

Decorative Arts

Decorative Arts From The Middle Ages To The Renaissance: The Complete Plates contains all the illustrations from Kunstewerke & Gerathschaften Des Mittelalters & Der Renaissance, first published in three volumes (1852, 1857, and 1863). Like other Taschen reprints (such as the Atlas Maior), this is a lavish, folio-sized book, with several fold-out pages.

Kunstewerke & Gerathschaften was illustrated with hand-coloured copperplate engravings, many of which were produced by Jakob Heinrich von Hefner-Alteneck. In the original publication, he is listed as co-author alongside Carl Becker; in the introduction to Decorative Arts, Hefner-Alteneck is recognised as the primary author, though strangely Taschen gives Becker sole credit on the cover.

Shortly after the first volume of Kunstewerke & Gerathschaften, Owen Jones pioneered the use of chromolithography with The Grammar Of Ornament. Jones was concerned with ornamental patterns, reproducing isolated details and motifs, though Becker and Hefner-Alteneck focused on decorative artefacts themselves, celebrating them as objects d'art.

Decorative Arts was edited by Carsten-Peter Warncke, co-author of Codices Illustres (reissued as Masterpieces Of Illumination) and a two-volume Picasso monograph. In his introduction, he quotes Becker and Hefner-Alteneck's aim of presenting objects "whether they be everyday or luxury items, for ecclesiastical or secular purposes". This inclusive approach made Kunstewerke & Gerathschaften particularly useful as a survey of applied arts, as it was not limited only to the realms of liturgy or nobility.

Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber's definitive History Of Design begins in 1400, thus there is some overlap with Kunstewerke & Gerathschaften. John Fleming and Hugh Honour's encyclopedic Dictionary Of Decorative Arts covers a wider historical period, as does Judith Williams's glossy Decorative Arts.

Are You Charlie?

A new book published in Japan has reprinted a selection of Charlie Hebdo's most controversial cartoons. The book, Are You Charlie? イスラム・ヘイトか、風刺か, also includes several Mohammed cartoons from Jyllands-Posten. Mohammed's face has been pixelated in each cartoon reprinted in the book, though the cartoons on the cover have been only slightly blurred.

Are You Charlie? includes all of Charlie Hebdo's Mohammed covers (2006, 2011, 2014, and 2015), and its back-page Mohammed cartoons from 2012. Oddly, in the cartoons of Mohammed naked, only his face has been pixelated, while his genitals and buttocks remain uncensored. Also, the pixelation is not entirely successful: two images have been mistakenly pixelated, even though they depict generic Muslim men rather than Mohammed; only the larger of the two Mohammed caricatures on the Charia Hebdo cover has been pixelated; and two covers featuring adverts for La Vie De Mahomet Part 2 have not been pixelated.

Meanwhile, following the attack on Charlie Hebdo's office last month, there has been an attempted assassination of Danish cartoonist Lars Vilks in Copenhagen. A lone gunman fired into a cafe where Vilks was holding a meeting on Sunday morning; one person inside the cafe was killed, though Vilks escaped unharmed. (A previous plot to murder Vilks was uncovered in 2010, and cartoonist Kurt Westergaard's life was also threatened earlier that year. Vilks became a target after he exhibited caricatures of Mohammed as a dog in 2007.)

"C'est dur d'etre aime par des cons"

"C'est dur d'etre aime par des cons", a documentary directed by Daniel Leconte, profiles the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and its staff as they defend themselves against a lawsuit brought by the Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of French Islamic Organisations. (The magazine was acquitted in 2007, and the BBC programme Bloody Cartoons also covered the trial and its aftermath. Last year, Charlie Hebdo was sued by the Muslim Judicial Defence League.)

The documentary takes its name from a 2006 Charlie Hebdo cover which depicts Mohammed weeping and complaining that "It's hard being loved by idiots". The cover appears in the film, and was even included on its theatrical poster, and Leconte's choice of title immediately dispels any notion of impartiality. (Charlie Hebdo's current issue again features a weeping Mohammed on its cover. The documentary was made before the infamous Charia Hebdo issue, and the terrorist attack on the newspaper last month.)

The film also features the twelve Jyllands-Posten Mohammed caricatures, a front-page France Soir newspaper cartoon commenting on the controversy, preparatory sketches of Mohammed drawn by Jean Cabut and Georges Wolinski, and a cartoon inspired by Kurt Westergaard's drawing of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. A featurette on the DVD includes a rejected version of the film's poster, depicting a cartoonist stabbed in the back after drawing Mohammed.

International Film Heritage Festival

The International Heritage Film Festival will take place in Bangkok later this month, from 26th February to 6th March. The Festival's theme is Memory!, and it will include screenings of several classic comedy films. All screenings are free.

The opening film, the Georges Melies masterpiece A Trip To The Moon, will be shown on 26th February at Alliance Francaise. (It was previously screened at the 5th World Film Festival of Bangkok, and the restored version was shown at La Fete 2012.) Later screenings include Alexander Mackendrick's Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (27th February, also at Alliance Francaise) and Buster Keaton's The General (1st March, at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya).