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Saturday, March 8, 2014
Saturday, March 8, 2014
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Wes Anderson was God the world would be a much nicer place. Over the course of his cinematic career he's woven unique cinematic style; creating a fractally detailed, synchronised universe. This is a world where every tiny thing on screen is a jigsaw piece in a bigger picture; the fabrics used in the productions, the style of beards; the fonts on the cover of books; the dents on cars and tiny sound effects and a thousand other minute, carefully considered elements adding up to a sumptuous feast - a beautiful world, an aesthetic world - a better world.
The Grand Budapest Hotel is pinnacle of Wes Anderson's style; a geometric, symmetric and rectilinear caper through beautiful spaces populated with the cream of modern acting talent. After watching this it's difficult to imagine how a film could be any more Wes Anderson than this; every frame packed to the rafters with his idiosyncratic style.
At it's core, the film is the story of a hotel. Set in the cartoonish fake Eastern European country of Zubrowka, the film quickly reveals a pleasingly onion-like structure. We open with a modern woman visiting a monument to a famous Zubrowkian writer known only as "The Author". As she opens a book we flash-back to 1985 where the middle-aged author is explains his methods and how he gets his ideas. From here we flash-back once more to the mid 1960s, where the author (now played by Jude Law) stays at the hotel; now bedraggled, largely unoccupied and suffering under a shabby Kubrickean refit. Here he meets the unassuming owner of the hotel. The two men have dinner and the elderly owner recounts the tale of how he came to run this building.
Now we're in the meat of the story: it's 1932 and Zubrowka is on the verge of war. The hotel is its prime, every aspect overseen by the exacting eye of concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) with the assistance of his lobby boy protégé Zero (Tony Revolori). With the death of elderly patron Madame D (Tilda Swinton) and her subsequent bequeathment of a painting to the concierge, the stage is set for adventure. For the rest of the film we plunge into an energetic, fast-paced farce as Gustave and Zero battle assassins, the military police, prison guards and sinister in-laws of Madame D. The plot twists and turns across Zubrowka, taking in cities, countryside and mountain-tops, showing us every inch of a country which usually only exists on the front of a chocolate box.
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| It's always nice to see Jeff Goldblum in a film. |
As with most Wes Anderson films, you'd be hard pressed to put together a better cast he can. Every few minutes a hugely talented actor pops up, does themselves proud then vanishes back into the crowd. But though we see some memorable turns from luminaries like Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel, Edward Norton and Adrien Brody, none of these can really touch Ralph Fiennes. Quite simply he's marvellous, combining a brittle pansexual grace with a military man's attention to detail. Often, (sometimes within the space of a single line of dialogue!), he's paternal, horny, cruel and touching. It's a masterclass of a performance; turning what could have been a prissy Basil Fawlty type into a weirdly noble action hero.
One aspect of Wes Anderson's writing I deeply appreciate is the sincerity of his characters. They wear their passions on their sleeve, announcing their loves and fears at the drop of a hat. There's no ironic winking in a Wes Anderson film, when someone declares their love - whether it be for a hotel, an elderly lady or a resourceful baker, the film takes them at their word. It's important not to take this transparency as shallowness, just because these characters don't have secrets doesn't make them any less dramatically fascinating. My own theory as to why Anderson's characters behave so oddly is that they're children's ideas of what adult behaviour is like.
This is at the forefront of most of his films; the childish revenge of Herman Blume in Rushmore, the arrested development of the children in The Royal Tenenbaums; the swashbuckling (apparently) 'ideal' Dad Steve Zissou of The Life Aquatic. Most of all it's at the forefront of his last film, the excellent Moonrise Kingdom, with two young runaways besotted with each other to the confusion of the neurotic adults. In Grand Budapest we see Anderson's child-like world butting up against realpolitik, from the opening sequence we realise that this idealised 1930s world will be crushed under the boot of concrete realism - innocent childhood gradually and acceptingly replaced by the cool utilitarianism of adulthood.
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| This is a very pretty film. |
This is furthered in the visual style of the film, the watercoloured matte-paintings and landscape wide-shots of Grand Budapest recalling children's pop-up books, the objects whizzing and wobbling through the scenery in a pleasingly analogue manner - looking like hand-made papercraft. In fact, of all Wes Anderson's films, the closest aesthetic relation is the stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox - a film that's literally children's literature in motion.
With the clear divisions between goodies and baddies and fast-paced rhythmic action The Grand Budapest Hotel succeeds largely because it follows this basic template of children's adventure story, with laser-perfect moments of swearing and the odd bit of gruesome violence. This is pure escapism - a retreat into a reassuring world of order and beauty. The camera movements, locked into horizontal or vertical geometric motions underline this vision of an ordered universe, which ultimately becomes represented by the clockwork running of the titular hotel.
This is an absolute pleasure to watch from start to finish, tapping into the same base level of wonderment as you get when you peer into a miniature village, or pull open the doors of an extravagantly detailed doll's house and marvel at the detailing on every tiny piece of furniture. Under Anderson's steady hand everything in the film pulls in the same direction, the best moment being a pursuit up a mountain where every single sound effect squeaks and beats in time to Alexandre DeSplat's masterful score.
The Grand Budapest Hotel makes no grand claims to sociological importance. It has no pretensions to tell us anything about the modern world. The message, such as it is, is essentially about the importance of good people sticking together -hardly news to a seasoned audience. Yet there's something to be said for simple beauty, humour and craftsmanship in cinema. For a film to quite simply make you happy is reason enough for it to exist: with The Grand Budapest Hotel now out there in the world, things are minutely happier.
★★★★★
The Grand Budapest Hotel is out now.
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Thursday, March 6, 2014
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They sing their hearts out in front of thousands, surrounded by the most famous musicians. They're responsible for some of the most famous hooks of all time; the "do do-do do-dos" on Walk On the Wild Side, the "alllll rights" on Young Americans and that sonic missile that blasts out of the middle in Gimme Shelter: "RAAAPE, MURDER! It's just a shot away, it's just a shot away!". Yet despite their voices ringing out of our headphones and speakers every day they're invisible, anonymous and nameless. Twenty Feet From Stardom is going to remedy that; bringing them into the spotlight, exploring their unchronicled lives and trying to work out just what it means to be a backing singer.
Quickly you realise that it's depressing, largely thankless drudgery. Your job is to melt into the background and present a undistracting vocal performance that's got to be technically excellent, yet devoid of any personality lest you distract the audience from whichever star is vainly gyrating in the spotlight. They stand gently swaying in unison, the spotlight tantalisingly just out of their reach - the eyes of an arena looking at you, but also through you.
All of the women featured in the film are astonishing singers and each are living out their own miniature melodramas. Best illustrative of the injustice that director Morgan Neville wants to expose is the story of Darlene Love. She was a Motown fairytale princess; a beautiful and astoundingly talented singer unjustly locked into a contract by sinister Svengali Phil Spector, who credits her wonderful performances to other singers. After suffering years under his fierce whip she quit, her lack of actual credits or royalties leaving her broke - reducing her to cleaning houses. It was while she was scrubbing shit off some snooty WASP bitch's toilet that she heard the radio down the hall. She was playing on it, proudly singing Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) - the disc jockey excitedly crediting some bozo with her performance.
There's some very neat editing in this movie that really rubs salt into these wounds; one of the best contrasts is showing the radiant Lisa Fischer singing her guts out in front of a huge audience and then cutting to her queuing in a dingy, striplit Fedex branch, ignored - just another face in the crowd. Neville does a great directorial job in setting up this contrast; picking the most glamorous, hi-saturated pieces of footage from a youthful, beautiful singer with the light of ambition burning in their eyes and then walloping us with the dull, desaturated and miserable reality of their current life.
Understandably these singers have got a bit of a chip on their shoulder about this ill-treatment, the image of exploited black women used and cast aside by rich white musicians is obviously a sympathetic one. This contrast between the superstars and their backup comprises the meat of the film: an autopsy on the crucial difference between a successful musician and an unsuccessful one. Neville interviews luminaries like Mick Jagger, Sting and Stevie Wonder, all of whom have an aura of guilt to them as they can't help but compare their own megabucks lifestyles to these forgotten women whom they know all too well are more technically talented than they are.
The key word there, I think, is 'technically'. There's an intangible 'it' in music that some people possess and some just don't. It's a slippery little fish, impossible to define and often difficult even to detect. David Bowie has 'it', Bette Midler has 'it', Ray Charles has 'it' - Lisa Fischer, undoubtedly talented though she is, doesn't have 'it'. Cynical people would argue that this ephemeral divinity is the product of clever marketing - we're told this person is special and therefore we behave as if they were. But, as the film points out, clever marketing can only go so far - some musicians just don't have what it takes to be superstars, no matter how much talent they've got, how much work they put in and how much they truly, deeply want it.
Late in the fiml there's image of a mountain of failed solo albums from backup singers that neatly sums up this Sisyphean struggle. Glittering, optimistic eyes smile out of record sleeve after record sleeve, burning with the conviction that this record is the one that's going to catapult them out of anonymity towards money and fame. But sadly not, these records hail from the rubbish dump of musical history - the vinyl detritus that clutters up the 50p bins in charity shops.
This litany of shattered dreams and wasted potential understandably leads to quietly simmering resentment against those who've 'made it' and those who remain in the shadows. This seeping negativity makes its way into the film, with broadsides aimed at musical trends that don't need people wailing as loud as they can in the backgrounds or production techniques that eliminate the need for backing singers. Particularly short shrift is given to autotuned vocals; with a gallery of bearded muso types shaking their heads sadly at this 'perversion of technology'. I guess they haven't heard Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak.
The documentary is at its best when it's showcasing the amazing things these women can do with their voices. A vocal tune-up by Lisa Fischer is one of the most impressive musical things I've seen in a film, Merry Clayton's isolated vocal track from Gimme Shelter gets me all a-quiver and a group performance of Lean on Me lead by Darlene Love is something special. There's a beautiful moment where they explain the thrill of falling into the 'flow', finding your own vocal part within a song and falling into synchronisation with everyone around you. The most evocative is when they explain that the human voice is the purest instrument of all, the direct sound of the singer's inner beauty or turmoil.
Twenty Feet from Stardom is a well-made and glossy documentary. Over the course of its run-time it gently dips into the civil rights struggle, feminism in pop music and the nature of fame. But while always compelling it's also perverse; celebrating the achievements of backing singers while concluding that it's intolerably awful to be stuck as one.
★★★
Twenty Feet from Stardom is released on 28th March 2014
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
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Early man? Early me more like. Bleary-eyed and reduced to emitting a series of guttural grunts I stumbled into the Natural History Museum at just past 8am on Friday morning. The exhibition I'd been invited to, Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story, charts the history of the various brands of human that have inhabited this rainy little island. The exhibition takes four or five rooms to get from a shambling, barely literate simian subhuman to bright-eyed and bushy tailed homo sapiens. I did it in just four cups of strong black coffee - not too shabby.
The exhibition begins with one of those scary timelines that make you feel rather insignificant. Geological timelines show modern humans as a tiny slice at the end of a vast ocean of history. This timeline 'merely' charts the known history of humans on the British Isles and the emergence of modern man is still a tiny chunk at the end. You and every single person you've ever heard of just a tiny spark in the raging forest fire of life.
It sends shivers down your spine right? Throughout the exhibition this immense weight of time presses upon you. Care is taken to align us with our ancestors, forcing us to imagine ourselves as prehistoric men and women, to associate their desires, fears and needs with our own. Much of this is done through subtly clever writing and visual displays. Nearly all of the descriptive signs are written in nicely poetic present tense;
"The vast open grasslands are dotted with wildflowers, and horses graze in the sun. A group of robust humans cluster around a dead rhinoceros, carving it up with their hand-axes. Women, children and men, everyone takes part. In the distance, hyenas are sniffing the air, attracted by the smell of blood."
Similarly, while it's relatively common knowledge that hippopotamuses once wallowed in Trafalgar Square, it's striking to be confronted with a wall-size photographic mock-up showing these prehistoric beasts stalking the frontage of the National Gallery. Obvious care has been taken to place us within the continuity of human history, to understand us as the logical extension of their cave-dwelling, flint-knapping, mammoth-hunting lives.
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| homo neanderthalensis |
One of the things I find most intriguing about the development of modern man is the idea of different species of human living alongside each other. We know for a fact that homo neanderthalensis and homo sapiens co-existed; many of us carry the evidence in our cells, a cheeky slice of Neanderthal sneaking in alongside our homo sapiens DNA - meaning one of our ancestors way back when had a refreshingly open mind when it came to getting their bone on.
It's difficult to imagine a human society that contained two distinct species of mankind, each with their own skills and weaknesses. After all, we have enough problems with racial discrimination as it is even though we're all pretty much genetically identical to each other. Who can say how you'd react to meeting a person who really did think in a different way to you? It seems inevitable that there was violent inter-species conflict; tribes of slender homo sapien squaring off against the stocky Neanderthals for territory, food or just simply because they didn't like the look of them.
You can see this mutual suspicion in the centrepiece of the exhibition; two specially commissioned waxworks stand, tacitly acknowledging each others presence. The Neanderthal hands clasped insouciantly behind his back, a challenging and cheeky expression etched into the crags of his face has a weird charm to him. If you passed this guy in the street you might think in passing that he looked a bit odd, but there's nothing too alien about him.
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| homo sapiens |
Surprisingly, it's the homo sapiens who looks weirder. He's got that creased, stretched, leathery look to him that you see in guys who started raving in the mid-90s and never stopped - a constant fixture at the back of festival tents to this day. With a twig contemplatively popped between his teeth, he peers at us through a dismissive squint, as if examining his descendants and finding us wanting. Despite these two men being genetically separate species, they obviously have far more in common with each other than they do with our pudgy, cosseted, moisturised 21st century selves.
The waxworks are magnificent creations, constructed with precision, artistry and so much humanity that you half expect them to step down from their display and wander off into the Kensington Streets in search of an auroch to slay. But these guys aside, the exhibition doesn't have that much new stuff to offer. Some of the prehistoric skeletons on display will be familiar to anyone who knows the Natural History Museum's collection, and there's the occasional slightly tatty looking bit of taxidermy on display that feels a little cheap in a paid exhibition. There's also a hell of a lot of flints here; and while I recognise the importance of these artefacts there's no getting away from the fact that they're all largely identical.
The exhibition finishes with a bizarre picture of an imaginary future city with organic buildings floating around the streets and a video of various celebrities talking about what their genetic heritage means to them, a neat enough idea but one that contains some rather eye-rolling statements. Bill Bailey, who is usually pretty on the ball, draws a parallel between his ancestor's millennia-long migrations across Europe and his personal sense of ambition. It's a nice thought, but it feels a touch wishy-washy after so much precise science.
Despite all that the chance to get up close and personal with these two great waxworks makes it largely worthwhile. It's a reminder of the infinite ways there are to 'be' a human being; whether from an extinct species, born into a chaotic hunter-gatherer lifestyle or walking around modern London, smartphone clutched in sweaty paw.
Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story is on display until the 28th September 2014, ticket £9 adults, £4.50 concessions.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Thursday, February 27, 2014
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When someone asks you if you want to wear a mask made of human hair and stalk around a crypt distributing pomegranate seeds to people there's really only one answer - YES! This is how I wound up spending my Wednesday night; sequestered in a brick-line, corpse-vacated vault, spookily tip-toeing about, shoving a plate piled high with sticky chunks of redness under innocent noses and demanding they have a gobble. All this was in service of Live In Your Dreams!, an exhibition that aims to reimagine this crypt as a "collective dream", an underworld where subconscious symbols can frolic in the moody subterranean halflight.
This is a mini-labyrinth, a tangle of curved corridors and dusty alcoves. This space once contained the coffins of those notable enough to be bunged underneath a central London church. They've all gone now, dispatched to wherever it is they send the dead when those in charge want to get rid of a load of dusty bones. Tonight they've been replaced with an art pic n' mix; every nook and cranny home to work covering a vast amount of mediums. This was a high quality exhibition, but though I liked damn near everything on display I don't have time to write about every little thing - so here's my personal highlights.
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| Susan Beattie - Loop Curtain |
First up a big pile of guts. Susan Beattie's Loop Curtain lurks just inside the entrance. Composed of sheep's intestine, ox bung and raw sheep's fleece it lies in an organic, slightly nauseating, tangle. The whole thing looks maggotty to me; especially the large ox bung (which I think is a cow's rectum/anus) sitting in the middle. A big old heap of maggots isn't exactly a pleasant sight to come across, but then we're in a place expressly designed to accommodate the process of decomposition. As gross as maggots are they're a direct manifestation of new life from death. It's interesting to look at this place as the home of the evicted dead tenants - and what would the dead have bouncing around their skulls if not maggots?
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| Susie Calvert - Microcosm |
Though a morbid shroud hangs over the crypt there's pinpoints of brightness glimmering in the gloom. Susie Calvert's Microcosm consists of pop-inflected urban environments drawn in crayon on plywood. Using a chunk of masonry as a stage they're a shattered kaleidoscope; an individual's snatched memories of a city able to be assembled in infinite configurations. When we dream of a physical place we assemble it from a jigsaw puzzle of subconscious details. A half-glance at a lamp-post, a broken window that catches our eye, the way the sunlight casts shadows across the frontage of buildings - all of these become recombined in our dreams to form a shade: our individual impression of a location. Purely on an aesthetic level it's a breath of fresh air nestled deep in the dank grey and browns of the crypt.
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| Boris Raux - the space divider - mushrooms version |
Similarly lightening things up is Boris Raux' the space divider - mushrooms version. I met Boris before at the Experimentations show last November; there he had condensed seawater into thousands of squishy spheres, here he's created a smell dispersal device: two tubs of coloured liquid with a fan blowing across the top. A sweet smell wafts around the entire gallery, apparently the smell of cave and psilocybin mushrooms. Boris has just a touch of the mad scientist to him, marrying an idiosyncratic personal alchemy onto new kinds of technology. The piece looks vaguely like a satellite, the two pools of liquid solar panels between them. Physically it's no great shakes; though the liquids glitter and swirl in enjoyable random fractal swirls. But this art doesn't stop at the borders of the installation, it hangs in the atmosphere - tiny molecules of vaguely hallucinogenic liquids suspended in the air, embedding themselves within the noses of all who enter. So Boris has literally succeeded in getting inside his audience's head; impregnating us with his ideas and philosophies.
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| Andy Flett - Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me |
In terms of work that creates an immediate physical impression, there's few things in the gallery that stood out as much as Andy Flett's Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me. Dreamland can be understood as an infinite land where anything is possible, where all the impulses, fears and desires that lurk within us come out to play without supervision. His piece, a roll of paper containing descriptions of his dreams in ever-decreasing type, is an unfiltered gate between his mind and the paper. His dreams, ranging from the banal to the bizarre, are thrown into one long stream of thought. The dreaming mind has no real concern over whether what it's putting out is fun, normal or pleasant - just spewing the disconnected detritus of what's rolling around in our brains back at us.
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| Mona Choo - Stuck |
The final piece I particularly dug was Mona Choo's Stuck. Here the passages of the crypt become home to small, tangled up doodles of people on twisted up acrylic. They cling to the walls, wrapped around each other with a childlike vulnerability - the plastic rolling up like one of those fortune-telling fish you find inside a Christmas cracker. The figures sway in the drafts that breeze through the tunnels, giving them a strangely quivering sort of life. One pair of tangled up people twirls in the breeze, intertwining in a vaguely Picasso-y way. This felt like the dream of the crypt itself; the spirits of the dead remaining in its memories even though their physical remains have long departed.
If you like exploring subterranean secrets and touching the fabric of the subconscious, then Live in Your Dreams! is easily worth checking out. The work on display complements the space fantastically, breathing some life and imagination into these dusty old bricks. Aside from what I've mentioned there's a tonne of other great stuff there, so pay a visit - you won't regret it!
Live in Your Dreams finishes on the 3rd of March - opening times 12-6pm.
Monday, February 24, 2014
Monday, February 24, 2014
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It's perverse that a film where women get repeatedly punched in the face, pissed on, fucked up the arse, slapped, gorily whipped and generally humiliated all round should wind up as one of the most straightforwardly feminist works of cinema around. But that's Lars von Trier for you. It's impossible to go into this film without preconceptions, but funnily enough, after all the breathlessly prurient press hype about hot n' heavy porno cinema, there's nothing in these sex scenes that's particularly shocking. There's a small thrill of novelty in seeing bobbling boners and quivering quims blown up to enormous size across a cinema screen, but all thefucking is in obvious service to an intellectual message and never feels remotely gratuitous or for the matter, particularly erotic.
Nymph()maniac isn't even a particularly difficult film to decode; von Trier explicitly outlines his argument throughout - that society is shot through with hypocrisy when it comes to dealing with the spectrum of female desire. Over two films comprising four and a half hours, von Trier performs an exhaustive autopsy on misogyny: delving deep into how we instinctively judge 'fallen' women, how we compartmentalise female sexual desire and just how constrictive our supposedly enlightened post-sexism society is.
All that and we also get lessons on (among other things), fly fishing tactics, the Fibonacci sequence, the 'satanic' tri-tone, Bach's use of polyphony, the perfect way to park a car, a short history of the division between the Eastern and Western Christian churches and the lifesaving qualities of the Prusik knot.
The primary vehicles for this are the titular nymphomaniac Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), who finds her bloody and beaten in an alley. Refusing both ambulance and police, Joe is helped back to Seligman's dingy flat where he gives her a cup of tea and asks what happened to her. The rest of the film is Joe's self-told life story, beginning with the immortal line "I was two years old when I discovered my cunt." (oh Lars...). The rest of the run-time is divided into chapters, obliquely titled things like "The Compleat Angler" or "The Little Organ School".
After Antichrist and Melancholia, neither of which can really be described as pleasant experiences, it's surprising how lighthearted much of Nymph()maniac is. Throughout Part I the cinema rang to the sound of laughter, von Trier confidently creating a kind of farcically absurd atmosphere - a distant comedy relative of Chris Morris' Jam. It's in Part II where things darken up a bit, though no matter how disturbing things become they're always leavened by the bedrock of humour that underpins the film.
By anyone's standards this film contains an embarrassment of cinematic treasures; the decadent run-time allowing von Trier the space to properly work through his argument. This is laid out upon a blank cultural canvas; though we see 40 or so years in the life of a woman we don't begin 40 years ago and we don't end in the modern day. The world of Nymph()maniac feels dislocated in time; a kludge of 1980s to contemporary fashion, technology and architecture - landing somewhere between Britain and Scandinavia, but never quite one or the other.
By anyone's standards this film contains an embarrassment of cinematic treasures; the decadent run-time allowing von Trier the space to properly work through his argument. This is laid out upon a blank cultural canvas; though we see 40 or so years in the life of a woman we don't begin 40 years ago and we don't end in the modern day. The world of Nymph()maniac feels dislocated in time; a kludge of 1980s to contemporary fashion, technology and architecture - landing somewhere between Britain and Scandinavia, but never quite one or the other.
In terms of performances there's a split between the von Trier veterans and the newcomers. Throughout Part I, which covers the first 25 or so years of Joe's life, she's played by newcomer Stacy Martin. It's difficult to believe this is her first film, such is the gusto with which she hurls herself into the role - the prime weapon in her arsenal a devastating deadpan indolence. At times there's an eerie numbness as her face peers over the shoulders of the many men humping her - giving the camera the bored expression you'd see on someone waiting at a bus stop. At others, when she's at her most predatory, we detect the sadist lurking behind those big eyes, regarding the men around her like a snake might regard a mouse.
Practically everyone else is great though; from Uma Thurman's bizarre scorned wife to Willem Dafoe's paternal gangster - all launching themselves into the material with total fearlessness. Particularly impressive is Jamie Bell as the s&m dom 'K'. He runs a strip-lit utilitarian dungeon that looks like what the NHS would come up with if they started running a therapeutic sadomasochism service. K is unreadable, clinically exacting and horribly violent, yet (as fucked up as this sounds) when he viciously beats Joe you sense the love in his blows. The only real misstep is Shia LaBeouf as Joe's on/off longterm partner; his accent is one of the dodgiest I've heard for a long time, one moment somewhere around London, the next Sydney - then perhaps a short stop off in Cape Town.
Though there's a ton a of A-listers here, the real prima donna of Nymph()maniac is von Trier himself. Every frame of this movie beats with his idiosyncratic heartbeat. There isn't another director alive with an ego big enough to pull off some of this stuff; leaving his audiences open-mouthed as he launches into a stout defence of paedophiles who never act on their urges, pausing to argue that being anti-Zionist doesn't make you anti-semitic or, most bizarrely, a brief debate as to whether its acceptable to use the word 'negro'. At these points the characters (particularly Joe) transparently become mouthpieces for the director. It'd be easy to view this as a flaw in the movie but I enjoy this audacity, the marvellously bonkers self-confidence of a director who'd even consider putting this in a film. Anyway, despite the shaggy dog narrative, the digressions into trivia and the eyebrow-raising sociological arguments the film is never boring - an impressive feat given the gargantuan run-time.
At it's heart, Nymph()maniac is a baldly feminist statement about the hypocrisy of a society that supposedly strives for equality yet instinctively denigrates, slut-shames and abuses women that express themselves sexually. One of the biggest character developments in the movie comes when Joe finally accepts that her proclivity for promiscuity is neither unnatural nor immoral - refusing to be characterised as a 'sex addict' and proudly adopting the label 'nymphomaniac'. Throughout we also get jabs against rape culture - von Trier going out of his way to underline that no matter how many men a woman has slept with, no presumptions can be made as to whether she's going to sleep with you.
The film goes so far as to equate feminine sexuality with religious awakening; orgasm associated with divinity and the labia visually linked to the spiritual 'third eye'. In this vein, von Trier encourages us to view the beaten, bruised and damaged body of Joe as suffering passion in both the sexual and religious senses of the word, drawing direct parallels between Joe and Jesus Christ, both possessing a divine nature and both suffering under the fists, boots and scorn of a humanity that senses enlightenment and instinctively moves to crush it.
Modern culture tends to the juvenile, and consequently to the prudish - you only need to look as far as the kerfuffle surrounding this film's release to get an idea of just how immature a modern audience can be to a film that has a bit of fucking in it. It's deeply refreshing to see a film that's unapologetically positive about the whole of the sexual spectrum, casting off vestigial puritan moralities and presenting us with an unvarnished view of the world as is. Cinema is an art form that allows us view the world around us through others eyes; yet all too often these visions have blinders on them. In a von Trier film you never sense any restrictions as to what you're seeing - he alone apparently having unfettered access to the full range of human experience on film.
Nymph()maniac is a intelligent, beautiful and brave piece of cinema. If you don't enjoy it then it speaks more to flaws within you than it does to any problems with the film. To know that there's people like von Trier out there with the guts to make these sprawling, messy, wonderful pieces of art that make this fucked up planet just about tolerable to live on.
★★★★★
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Saturday, February 22, 2014
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My heart lies in Whitecross Street. If I was to be trapped there forever I think I could just about cope: there's a cinema, a supermarket, numerous great restaurants, kickin' takeaways, a world food market and a smattering of art galleries. It's these that I appreciate the most, little cultural flavour bombs - the glace cherry in the middle of a delicious Bakewell tart.
Curious Duke used to be tucked away in a little ground floor / basement shop at the top of the street. It was cosy enough but those heading downstairs risked bonking their heads onthe low ceiling and it was easy to overlook among the throbbing hum of weekday burrito-seeking office workers. Nobody's going to miss Curious Duke now though, they've relocated to the handsome corner space at 173 Whitecross Street.
With sunlight streaming in through the windows, the faint perfume of baking pizza dough from Cozzo over the road and the clickety-clack of hammer on wood from the framers in the next room its undeniably a step-up for Curious Duke, a chance for them to spread their wings and show the world what they got. So it's appropriate that this opening exhibition is a kind of 'Greatest Hits', a parcelling up of the London-focussed, pop-inflected and gently humorous themes that I've seen across Curious Duke's last few exhibitions.
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| Watchtower (the Hill has Eyes) - Darragh Powell |
As someone that loves London I've always got time for art that explores the psychic undercurrents and symbols that power the city. So perhaps its predictable that the first thing I gravitate to is Darragh Powell's paintings of London occupied by hordes of crows. In Watchtower (the Hill has Eyes) we see a familiar piece of street architecture surrounded by a murder of crows in flight. Everyone is familiar with the legend of the ravens of the Tower of London: "if the ravens leave the Tower, the kingdom will fall…". Fortunately for Queen and country the Tower raven's wings have been sufficiently mutilated to physically prevent them from flying away (which seems like a bit of a loophole to me). But Powell's crows are in rude health and full flight, making a mockery of their captive cousins. Perhaps the crow is the more appropriate modern symbol of London anyway; intelligent, beautiful and yet a scavenger - feeding on the remains of others.
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| London Slithers - Tannaz Oroumchi |
Continuing these askew views of London are Tannaz Oroumchi's London Slithers and London Bobble. They're maps of the City of London and the surrounding neighbourhoods, entirely stripped of all explanation - making them next to useless as aids to navigation, but fascinating as a psychogeograpical way to understand the development of the city. My favourite of the two, London Slither, shows the street plan of the city as a quasi-organic structure, something you might see growing inside a Petri dish. It's a reminder of the way this city evolved: Anglo-Saxons walking down ancient Roman roads, Tudors building atop the filth of the middle ages, Victorians cramming slums on top of those ramshackle buildings and finally we Neo-Elizabethans sinking huge towers of steel and glass right through these historical strata, deep into the primordial London clay.
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| One of Sam Peacock's Unseen Landscapes |
This theme of analogue biological fuzziness continues with one of Sam Peacock's Unseen Landscapes. They're impressively tactile works, odd materials bulging out from the a metal surface, capturing the light flickering across every single crenellation. There's something disconcertingly sludgy about these pieces, the rusty reds and browns on top of metal looking like a toxic waste spill, heavy metals leaching into rivers and streams. On a slightly more positive note this gooeyness also could be life giving too, the coastline of some faraway planet, or an undersea amoebic soup pregnant with life. Either way it's pretty neat to look at.
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| Miracle - Roys People |
Much of what's on display here showcases a slightly removed view of the world, something that's at the forefront in Roy's People's miniature dioramas, featuring teeny-weeny models of people engaged in surreal behaviours in urban landscapes. A man waters a dandelion that's burst through concrete, someone pushes a cart laden with tiny berries across a huge road, but my favourite is I Come in Peace, showing two tiny army men with guns squaring off against a snail. There's a whiff of 1950s atomic age science fiction to this; the picture in the same tradition as the giant ants of Them! or the prehistoric killer molluscs of The Monster That Challenged the World. Somehow the snail has a kind of deadpan insouciance, clearly not giving a toss about the guns or barked warnings thrown in his direction. Roy's People are going to be holding an exhibition here in a few months - I can't wait.
This was a kind of artistic buffet, a manifesto of the themes and imagery that Curious Duke wants to explore. I'm pretty fortunate that a gallery that aligns largely with my own sensibilities has opened up not far from my house, and I can't wait to see what they're going to do with this prominent position on the street. In the midst of a cold, grey and wet winter, it's stuff like this that brightens up the dull days, sending much-needed shards of sunlight piercing through the clouds.
Curio-City is at the Curious Duke Gallery until 28th March, 173 Whitecross Street, EC1Y 8JT
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
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New lands, new spaces and new ambitions: ]performancespace[, cosily burrowed like a hermit crab into a warehouse near the Hackney Wick canal has upped sticks and moved to nearby Fish Island. Their new building, squirreled away within a maze of drab Victorian brickwork and sarcastic pop-inflected graffiti, feels like a rabbithole away from the frantic outside world. The decor here is so new you can smell the paint drying, the cushions unsullied by the crease of human backsides and the walls a pristine, virginal white. But they wouldn't be pristine for long!
Saturday was the inaugural event at this new location; the building freshly stocked with the fashionably dressed, the interestingly haircutted and the artistically open-minded. Waiting in the wings was a swarm of artists ready to unleash an embarrassment of performance art that would baptise this place with paint, spices, charcoal, makeup, minerals and marbles.
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| Sarah Zaltash |
Setting the tone for the night was Sara Zaltash, with a durational performance that lasted most of the night. Sat on the floor she recited a mantra while drawing a neverending charcoal circle around herself. Round and round she went, the circle getting thicker and more defined as she used more and more charcoal. In retrospect these marks outlined the themes we'd be seeing tonight; transforming the space into a canvas. There's something faintly magical about the idea of sitting within a self-made circle, the lines acting as a protective barrier against the outside world. For me this protection extends outwards; the walls of the gallery allowing the artists to safely explore concepts; the water surrounding Fish Island creating a bubble of artistic expression - we can even go so far as to say that Goldsmith's circles recall the M25 - a protective loop around London itself.
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| Marita Fox |
Marita Fox was up next. Dressed all in black with circular black shades on she moved with a wiry insectoid grace. With Kafka hanging gently in the air she writhed like a pupae in a bubble wrap chrysalis. Emerging from within she unfolded her limbs and with a sudden thump, elbow-dropped a cardboard box. Within was more bubble-wrap, cotton wool - and deep within that two white hands. She cradled these with her own black gloved hands, showing them to us with a look of incomprehension etched upon her face. Visually it was striking as hell, Fox mixing theatricality with the kind of style you'd usually expect to see staring out of a photoshoot from a mid 90s issue of Skin Two.
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| Zoya Sardashti |
Zoya Sardashti was on next, dancing to a projection of graffiti. The picture was of an emaciated, skull-like Statue of Liberty, and she danced an kind of aggressive, strutting semaphore at it. With a mean look on her face she stomped back and forth in front of the projection, daring it to respond. As she marched she kept a fixed, fierce look on her face, often making eye contact with the audience, implicating us within the work and subtly asking us which side of this conflict we're on. It looked cathartic and personal: an opportunity for her to work out her frustrations with a symbol of the unblinking might of cultural imperialism.
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| Charlotte Law |
Soon after was Charlotte Law with a brief (yet memorable) performance. Nearly naked, she picked up a handful of ochre (I later found out this was a combination of iron ore and olive oil) and rubbed it all over her body. Then she smooshed herself against the clean gallery pillars, using her body as a human potato printer and leaving a reddish-brown imperfect silhouette. Job complete she left, leaving us staring at the handprints and impressions she'd left behind. Once again we see the gallery undergoing some kind of weird blessing; the minerals Law slapped on inextricably melded with the sterile walls of the gallery. I'm a big fan of brevity, generally preferring the tightly focussed statement to the meandering and freeform, so I liked this. Within the space of a few quick actions Law created three striking images; first her own body covered in the ore, then her communing with the pillar; then finally the pillar on its own - pregnant with her presence.
Luisa Amorim's performance marked a bit of a change of pace. Miming to a backing track (of her own voice I think), she asked the crowd to perform various tasks while standing in a big tub of blue paint. Perhaps it was the young girl running around in front of Amorim, but there was an air of children's TV about this. The clear diction and friendly presence was simultaneously friendly and authoritative, and getting us involved in the various tasks she laid out kept everyone engaged. Throughout people around us unexpectedly piped up, having been given cue cards in advance - dragging us into her light, eccentrically creative and pleasant world.
Performance art generally concentrates on stimulating our eyes and ears, though the immediate aspect of the medium easily allows for all of our senses to come into play. With that in mind I always enjoy work that gets taste, touch and, in this performance, smell involved. Nicolina Stylianou's performance involved her mixing various spices with water and spitting that into a jug. I'm no spice expert, but I think I could detect the smell of cumin and cinnamon. When she left there were smears of spices mixed with water on the floor, laid out in mixtures like paint on an easel and a tangy whiff hanging in the air.
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| Tim Bromage |
After this we switched gears to Tim Bromage. Dressed in a smart suit he launched straight into a solemn poem about the story of Icarus. My heart sank a bit; "oh well, you can't win them all". But then with perfect comic timing he broke out of his reverie and flipped things around; raising his eyebrows and remarking candidly that this was all a bit too serious. En masse, we exhaled in a burst of relieved laughter. But it was what came next that was truly interesting. Picking up a banjo he began to play, but stopped mid-way through having, (as he put it) "lost it". Again he tried and again he stopped. And again. The crowd grew anxious. Tim seems like such a nice guy that we all wanted him to succeed - and then it struck me that this collective will for him to succeed might have been the whole point of the exercise.
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| Charlotte Hailey-Watts |
Next up was Charlotte Hailey-Watts with an audio piece. With butcher's grass lain on the floor, the scratchy sound of the inner loop of a Tears for Fears record infinitely brushing away, a backing track from a laptop playing and a mic in her hand she slowly constructed a sonic soundscape. The bit I found the most interesting was how she positioned herself within all this. Supplicated on a rectangular mat Hailey-Watts looked as if she was engaged in Salat - the Islamic prayer. It created a interesting frisson between her free-form, outsider style rubbing up against a thousand years of concrete institutionalism. At the conclusion of the performance she lay down and went to sleep on the mat, creating an oasis of calm. This dead stop was apparently the cue for another performer to begin, but for me it worked as a much needed meditative break.
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| Emma Louvelle |
Entering the final stretch was Emma Louvelle's dance piece, set to Madonna and a musician I didn't recognise (if anyone knows please comment, it was a nice song!). Louvelle frolicked within symbols of mainstream femininity: makeup, body hair removal, cuddly toys and pop music; transforming mundanity and fluffy stereotypes into a viciously sharp weapon. Lit from behind like a detective conducting an interrogation she ran a razor over her legs and smeared rouge over her face, ending up as a shamanic, over-the-top caricature of what a woman 'should' be.
After that was Christian Patracchini, who rolled a series of silver-spray painted marbles against a wall. After the vicious energy of what had just come before this felt a little too austere for my liking. Sure you can get a dab of kinetic enjoyment from the clickety-clack of the marbles bumping into each other and the randomness of their interactions was at least pretty interesting to look at, but it seemed oddly subdued compared to what had comed before. We were heading towards the end of the night now, so this sudden drop in momentum was a bit disappointing. That said, towards the end he started hurling the marbles at the wall so hard that they pinged back towards the us at high velocity. That's the kind of stuff I enjoy: particularly watching members of the audience quietly yelping in surprise as they took a high velocity marble to the shin.
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| Ram Samocha & Gerald Royston Curtis |
The final performance was a joint work between Ram Samocha and Gerald Royston Curtis. They popped up two black and white sheets of paper on the wall and began to draw on them with huge, exaggerated motions. I think Gerald was writing 'zapamiętać' in overlaid letters on his (Polish for 'memorise') while Ram was running through a numeric sequence. As the drawings became more built up the meanings collapsed into a tangled pile of loops and lines, something compounded when they switched sides and began to draw on each other's work. Consciously or not, these pictures summed up many of the marks we'd already seen made that night; the loops of Sara Zaltash, the smeared iron ore of Charlotte Law, the dust in the air the spice of Nicolina Stylianou and the painted footprints of Luisa Amorim.
At the end of the night the gallery felt properly inaugurated, the space now inhabited by the same spirit of playful adventurousness that characterised everything I enjoyed about the old warehouse. I'm already looking forward to the next time I'm there!
(apologies for anyone's performance I didn't cover - I had to pop out for a bit and I think I missed at least one. Let me know if I've gotten anyone's name wrong.)
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