COUNTERpoint

Picturehouse Film Club - May

2011-05-10T09:37:00.000-07:00

Last night's WEA Film Club at Clapham Picturehouse was great fun and the films were about as big a set of contrasts as you could imagine.

The feature was Hanna and a post-film discussion ranged over how sympathetic the lead character was, how well it mixed the thriller and fairy-tale elements, the (intentional or otherwise?) trajectory of Joe Wright's career, the publication history of the Grimm's stories, and the veracity of Hollywood accounting methods...

Then it was downstairs to the bar for a Staropramen (or whatever), a collection of short films and a chat with the makers.

We kicked off with two from Alan Walsh, whose impressively "just get on with it" approach meant that, when he realised he needed another film for the event, he just went out and made it. But first there was Mirror Mirror, a quirky little film that's a reinterpretation of something that his film school managed to destroy.

Mirror Mirror from Alan Walsh on Vimeo.

That was followed by his new one, so hot off the metaphorical moviola that, announced as Coffee, it had been retitled Short Changed.

Alan talked about his training in Prague before his regular collaborators Anthony Cozens and Ben Jeen Williams joined in to give us an insight into where they get their inspiration from and the way they work.

After that there was a distinct change of mood with three films from Rebecca Feiner.

Based in the East End, Rebecca makes films, curates, writes etc. She brought along three of her films.

Skin Code is the film element of an installation that she took to the Cannes Film Festival. In a one-person cinema, the viewer watches extreme close ups of a man's body to a soundtrack of Gregorian chant. Amusingly, while lots of Cannes visitors liked it, they were mostly men who were keen to reiterate that they didn't like it in that way...

Exhumation is another installation film, screened in the Belfry of St John's church in Bethnal Green as part of Ghost II, an exhibition curated by Sarah Sparkes and Dr Ricarda Vidal. It's another semi-abstract piece very much concerned with the body.

Rebecca was interested to see her films in different circumstances from the ones they were conceived for: a room full of people rather than a one-person box and on a screen rather than a wall and, à propos Hanna, touched on their gender concerns.

EXHUMATION from Rebecca Feiner on Vimeo.

Next up was a free-form documentary, Spirit of Hackney Wick, which roams over the 2009 Hackney Wicked Arts Festival, which is organised by local artists in the shadow of the gates which have divided Hackney preparatory to the 2012 Olympics. Afterwards we talked about how the film undercuts the official propaganda about the Olympics and how it is increasingly difficult for artists to find affordable places to live and work.

Next month's film (13 June) is the documentary Senna, when director Asif Kapadia,who will also be interviewed before we move on to another selection of short films and directors (that's the films that are short, not the directors. Though, of course, if you are a short director...)

As before, feel free to get in touch if you'd like the chance to come along and show your films.

Show Your Shorts

2011-05-02T06:20:00.000-07:00

I've started hosting a Film Club for the Workers’ Educational Association London, in association with Clapham Picturehouse (76 Venn St, London SW4 0AT, two minutes walk from Clapham Common tube).

It'll be happening every second Monday of the month, 6pm to 10pm, and the format is that after the main feature there'll be a discussion, then we'll go up to the bar to watch some short films and discuss them with the film-makers. £10 for the evening.

There's a full list of dates and details of how to submit your films at the bottom of

this post.

Meanwhile the next event is on Monday 9th May at 6pm:

HANNA, the new action/fairy tale/thriller from director Joe

Wright, plus post film discussion

"invigorating to the extreme; a feast on the eyes and ears… the most stylistically engaging recent release to come out in quite some time. …. this is new territory for Joe Wright. Two of his previous three feature films were the period pieces, Pride and Prejudice and Atonement.

Without Wright at the helm, this would have been a mediocre film with a fantastic central performance. He has transformed the material into a hip work of art with incessantly strong visual flair. Clearly influenced by many different sources, Wright puts his inspiration to good practice. His use of tracking shots, extreme close-ups, extreme long shots, handheld camera work and much more all contribute to Hanna’s singularly high-powered style. He also keeps a lot of the action in camera, making the choreography stand out. Whether creating an engaging hyper-stylistic action set piece or subjectively aligning the audience with Hanna’s experiences, Wright always has motivations for his choices and it is a delight to work through them while watching the film."

Catherine Stebbings at Criterioncast

8.30pm Intermission and a chance to get a round in

9pm Show Your Shorts: two short films by Alan Walsh and three by Rebecca Feiner, with both filmmakers in conversation

ALAN WALSH

MIRROR MIRROR. The story of one man and the lengths he’ll go to fit in. Told through his relationship with his mirror, we see him try to re-invent himself to the demands of society

COFFEE. First screening of Alan Walsh’s new short!

REBECCA FEINER "mixes the confessional style of Tracy Emin with the objectivity of American conceptualist, Joseph Kosuth" - Mark Currah, Time Out, Sept.1999

EXHUMATION. "the only ghosts that haunt are the ones we carry with us." Exhumation explores memory & the ghost of violence. To survive and preserve our identity we suppress memories and choose to forget. Exhumation is the first film where the artist has chosen to place herself as performer. Originally screened in 2009 as the main installation for GHOST II, an annual exhibition in London curated by Dr Ricarda Vidal & Sarah Sparkes.

SKIN-CODE. Reversing the camera's traditional gaze, Skin-code gets up close and personal, exploring masculinity, body as landscape and the notion of a male muse. Premiered at the Cannes film festival 2003 as part of the centenary of the Lumiere brothers cinema, in an unsual DIY cinema for one - a wardrobe (Variety)

SPIRIT OF THE WICK. Capturing the spirit of the area through the annual arts festival Hackney Wicked, contradicting glossy propaganda promises of Olympic regeneration. The festival is organised by the artistic enclave living and working in the shadow of London's 2012 Olympics site, whose high security walls and infamous "blue gates" have sliced Hackney Wick in half. Premiered on 23 July 2010 as part of Spirit of the Wick, a festival of 31 short films, installations and sculpture curated by Rebecca Feiner at Stour Space, an old converted wine warehouse on Fish Island, Hackney Wick, London.

FUTURE DATES (all on the second Monday of the month at 6pm):

13 June; 11 July; 8 August; 12 September; 10 October; 14 November; 12 December

If you'd like a chance to Show Your Shorts, drop me line or contact Steve Rushton at WEA

Blackmail

2010-10-27T06:51:00.000-07:00

Something I've been meaning to flag up for a while is Hitchcock's Blackmail at the Barbican, on Sunday 31 October at 8pm, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra performing a new score by Neil Brand. This will be about the fourth score I'll have heard for it but if Neil Brand's past scores are anything to go by, it should be good.

Years ago (1993, a little research rather scarily tells me), I remember seeing Jon athan Lloyd's score which, after an initial flurry, doesn't seem to get done much any more. Perhaps the fact that the Lyons Corner House scene featured a set of variations on the (still-in-copyright) Tea for Two is a disincentive. Youmans comes out of copyright in 2016, so hang onto your hats...

Oddly enough I was only doing a session comparing the sound and silent versions a couple of weeks ago, so this will be an interesting addition to the mix.

Shamefully, you have to go to Germany to get a decent DVD of both the silent and sound versions of Blackmail [Erpressung] (even though it uses NFTVA material. It also turns up in a nice, but now, I see, quite expensive box called Master of Suspense, though the selection of titles is a bit random: Champagne (1928), two Blackmails (1929), Murder (1930) and its German-language equivalent Mary [Mord - Sir John greift an] (1931), Rich and Strange (1931) Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941) and Under Capricorn (1949).

Hopefully the BFI's Olympic project of restoring all nine of Hitchcock's surviving silents and commissioning new scores will bring forth a grand box to replace some of the less than satisfactory transfers that we currently labour under, perhaps (and this is mere speculation) including this new Blackmail score.

In the meantime, there's still a chance to donate to the restoration fund and, of course, to have one last look in the loft for that print of The Mountain Eagle!

Russian Film Festival

2010-10-26T06:04:00.000-07:00

Autumn's always a busy time for me: immediately after the London Film Festival, there'll be the Russian Film Festival

Rather than try manically to blog as we go I'll try to put a bit of perspective to both events. But a heads up for a couple of RFF strands.

They'll be marking the centenary of Tolstoy's death with a few films, including a complete War and Peace (Война и мир) - presumably the proper widescreen print rather than the TV pan-and-scan that occasionally turns up! and, even rarer, Vengerov's Living Corpse (Живой труп, 1968). Should be fascinating to see this after the LFF's revival of Ozep's silent version a couple of years ago.

The animation strand is, as usual, strong, with retrospectives of Garry Bardin and Irina Evteeva.

Bardin's dark 1990 fable Grey Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood (Серый волк энд Красная Шапочка) was on Channel 4. Once. About 15 years ago. Probably at about 3am. So it'll be interesting to see how he deals with Andersen's The Ugly Duckling, (Гадкий Утенок, illustrated above) especially as, keeping fine old traditions intact, it was banned from Russian TV.

Among Evteva's work is a version of Pushkin's Little Tragedies (Маленькие Трагедии) which again should prove an interesting compare-and-contrast with Mikhail Shveitser's 1979 effort. Evteeva races through in 38 minutes what took Shveitser (as so often in his career) a lumbering 240 minutes. A propos Tolstoy, Shveitser's Kreutzer Sonata always seems longer than its 158 minutes, though it might have been nice to include it in the festival as a little nod to Oleg Yankovsky, who died earlier this year. I've not seen his 209-minute Resurrection (Воскресение) from 1961. But there are so many Tolstoy adaptations to choose from...

Anyway, back to what is in the festival, there's a whole load more, of course focusing on recent films, so I'll report back in due course.

Paris exhibition

2010-10-26T05:27:00.000-07:00

I should flag a festival happening in Paris' Cite de la Musique, under the banner Lenine, Staline et la Musique.

A whole series of fascinating events will entertain Parisians from now until the middle of January. Apart from the big names: Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian etc, there'll be chances to catch undeservedly lesser-known talents like Artur Lourie (who turns up in a veiled reference in Akhmatova's Poem without a Hero), Vladimir Deshevov, Nikolai Roslavets and Alexander Mosolov. Some of them are seen as 'one-work' composers (e.g. Deshevov, for Rails), so this will hopefully be a chance to correct that impression.

More info on the festival here

Also worth noting is the very impressive (256-page) accompanying catalogue (the cover is illustrated above). I had the pleasure of penning the cinema essay - the first page of which is on the left.

Cinéphilia West

2010-07-28T02:02:00.000-07:00

Whilst I don't want this blog to become yet another outlet for obituaries, it's definitely worth passing on the very sad news that Cinéphilia West - I welcomed their exhibition of Polish film posters here - has been forced to close.

An edited version of their announcement, which you can read in full on the site:

The short story is that our ex-partner and landlord, Mr Amin Taha, has reneged on an existing agreement to enter into a new lease, at market rate, at our premises at 171 Westbourne Grove, Notting Hill, and has re-taken possession of the premises with a view to sell the entire building as vacant and without an existing tenant in situ. As Cinéphilia West was occupying the premises under a temporary arrangement ahead of the formal execution of a long-term lease we have no choice but to cease operation there and seek alternative premises for our business. This is with immediate effect, as no notice was given but bailiffs imposed to re-possess the premises, leaving us completely exposed to the damage to our reputation as though the business itself was not viable or successful, which it was, and giving the impression that we are in any way at fault, which we are not. We have been torpedoed by a very unscrupulous man, but do not have the substantial means to challenge his behaviour through legal channels, despite having the full force of the law in our favour.

As you can see, this isn't any failure on their part but - well, I suppose I'd have to be careful to word this in a non-actionable manner!

Perversely, I hope that the landlord has a real buyer: it would be doubly annoying if it stays empty after he'd been persuaded to "put it on the market" by some over-enthusiastic estate agent.

Thankfully, undeterred, they're looking for new premises and asking for suggestions. The alliteration and assonance of Cinéphilia South would appeal to me - let alone the improved proximity.

Farewell, UKFC

2010-07-27T08:15:00.000-07:00

AND SO, IT STARTS…

If culture was hoping for a stay of execution until October’s Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), yesterday it was disappointed. 55 organisations chopped or merged, the most high-profile demise being the UK Film Council.

The UKFC bestrode a huge – perhaps unbridgeable – field. Simultaneously making the economic, cultural and educational cases probably proved an unmasticateable mawful, and in film funding it often tried to make sure the toast fell jam-side up, with minority shares in semi-bankable projects.

Their First Light fund successfully supported young filmmakers but there’s little for experimental and artists’ film: Nowhere Boy and Hunger, whatever they are, aren’t cutting-edge and arguably Taylor-Wood and McQueen could have found their money elsewhere. And the UKFC wasn’t interested in gallery video art.

Not that that’s necessarily bad: The senior management’s background was overwhelmingly commercial, and wisely chose to channel money to organisations who knew the subject. But there was precious little of it.

The BFI used some to programme and release on DVD artists’ films, and even commission installations from people including Mat Collishaw and the Wilson Twins. Then there’s the Independent Cinema Office, onedotzero and others servicing (usually) slightly different groups. The Digital Innovation in Film programme (co-funded by NESTA – relatively safe under its endowment) helped some small (and not so small) companies.

Beyond that are bodies largely or wholly independent of the UKFC. Having been kicked around far too much in past years LUX, with its superb archive of artists’ films is an ACE client – though they’ve also been helped by UKFC. no.w.here does some great work with precious little. There are galleries such as the Tate and the (possibly, still troubled) ICA and publisher/distributors like Wallflower Press. Outside London, though, the picture is patchier.

So how might the UKFC’s demise affect artists who work in film? At the moment it’s hard to say, but the temptation is to say “not much”. Their money – when they have it – comes from elsewhere.

So, we still await the CSR…

Thanks to axisweb, which commissioned this piece and ran it here

Varèse

2010-04-09T01:39:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the sheer challenge of presenting a work and the exigencies of concert-planning can mean that even the most important ones exist more by reputation.

So it is with Edgar (or, depending on how he felt at the time, Edgard) Varèse. It's impossible to conceive of 20th-century (and even 21st-century) music without him, yet when was the last time you saw anything performed? Ionisation (his greatest hit) needs 13 percussionists for just 6 minutes ("What are they going to do for the rest of the concert?", thinks the administration). So here's a version broadcast on ZDF (BBC4, anyone?)*

And what about the first piece that he admitted into his canon, Amériques, with its 27 woodwind and 29 brass complemented by correspondingly large string and percussion sections? Déserts? The taped "interpolations of organised sound" might put concert halls off (though on the up-side it only needs twenty performers) but that doesn't explain why Pierre Boulez omitted them from his first recording. And then, again, from his second.

So a big welcome for the South Bank Centre's mini-fest Varèse 360, which doesn't just play the music (including a couple of UK premieres) but has added stagings and video projections.

I haven't seen it yet but it's entirely in keeping with Varèse's ideas: another of his classics, Poème électronique, was written for the Philips Pavilion at Expo '58 in Brussels, where it was broadcast through 350 or 400 speakers in a stomach-shaped space designed by Le Corbusier's assistant (later a composer) Iannis Xenakis. Le Corbusier himself oversaw the accompanying images and film clips. Though the pavilion itself was dismantled, we do have various designs, notes and stills and a stereo version of Varèse's composition, so that it was possible to make a sort of virtual recreation.

Among Varèse 360's sidebar events is a screening of the 1920 Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde (an uncredited Varèse played a police officer), for which Scanner has sampled the composer's works to create a new score. Safe to say that it's very different from whatever Hugo Riesenfeld might have written for the original release.

Varèse has fared a bit better on disc. Given that two, admittedly very full, CDs will seal the deal, pretty much any single disc (and actually there have been quite a lot) constitutes a significant collection, while shorter pieces like Ionisation and Density 21.5 for solo flute turn up on a number of compilations. But there have been several more or less complete surveys starting with Robert Craft, graced with a great psychedelic cover, but, like his equally pioneering Webern set, occasionally more enthusiastic than accurate. After that came [not comprehensive and in no particular order] Pierre Boulez, Kent Nagano and Christopher Lyndon-Gee.

Riccardo Chailly (carrying the imprimatur of Varése's amanuensis Chou Wen-chung) includes a couple of byways that are otherwise unobtainable and presents the original version of Amériques - Varèse's later, less resource-heavy version is generally performed. But even without those, Chailly's is the single set to get. For historical interest, you can also get the boxily recorded Frederic Waldman etc al "volume 1" (there was no volume 2) that inspired Frank Zappa.

For those who want a preview, I'll be presenting two one-hour shows as an introduction to Varèse and his works on Resonance 104.4fm (8pm on Wed 14 and Thurs 15 April). Then we'll glue them together and broadcast a single two-hour extravaganza at some point in the future.

*There's also a performance by the Ensemble InterContemporain and Boulez on Youtube: it sounds better but the close-ups and panels that come and go made me concentrate on the individual performer (actually, usually their hands) rather than the whole ensemble.

Maska and Stanko

2010-04-06T05:21:00.000-07:00

Trumpeter Tomasz Stanko's Barbican concert reflected the two halves of a career split by tragedy.

In 1963 he joined the brilliant composer-pianist Krzysztof Komeda's band, becoming his closest colleague. Komeda, one of the pioneers of European jazz, was equally inspired by classical music and free jazz and, after Roman Polanski's early short Two Men and a Wardrobe (Dwaj ludzie z szafa, 1958), scored around forty films. In 1969, aged 38, he died (depending on who you believe, as a result of a car accident or when some drunken horseplay went wrong).

Stanko, who had up to then been content within Komeda’s group, set out on his own, but continued to play his friend's music, climaxing with the 1997 album Litania, which itself became a classic.

But the evening began with the world premiere of the Brothers Quay’s new short film, Maska, based on Stanislaw Lem’s 1976 short story. Anyone who has seen their work (this excellent two-disc set collects their short films) will know what to expect: odd animated marionettes playing out oblique but disturbing dramas in gelid, granular light. Maska showed their usual love of craftsmanship: even a shot that could be achieved in a few minutes in live action - a diaphanous cloth being drawn back - was carefully animated. Rich, luminous visuals – the dense shadows of the cavernous set, pierced by shafts of glowing highlights, are accompanied by a soundtrack that included sections of Penderecki’s De Natura Sonoris.

A being, created limb by limb, transmutes first into a woman and then something more, taking us from mystery, through unease to mythic near-horror.

Ignoring the story's possible political interpretations, the Quays are more interested in the robotic Frankenstein: a protagonist that describes its own birth and development, re-forming itself by sheer force of will; shape-shifting and obfuscating its personality, making us wonder about its old husk (or heart?), leaving us peering in on a strange cold world, as compelling as it is unsettling.

As the last credit held the screen, Stanko’s sextet appeared and launched into a selection from his own score to the 1999 film Egzekutor. Starting insouciantly, Stanko’s husky trumpet was shadowed by soprano Justyna Steczkowska, each taking turns to ride over the other. Saxophonist Adam Pieronczyk occasionally joined in, adding more subtle colours to the duet. Meanwhile Steczkowska, in her spangly mini-dress, once or twice broke into a brief, self-absorbed, gentle wiggle. In the middle Pieronczyk’s dense and harder driven solos contrasted with pianist Dominik Wania, who alternated fluid runs with cool but decisive chords.

The second half was the Komeda tribute – majoring on his films with Polanski – minus Steczkowska, but with accompanying visuals: archive and original footage, clips from Knife in the Water and live relays of the musicians. In the event, it was dominated by the live relays – of the rest there was too little to be something and too much to be nothing.

The highlight was an extended medley, Wania again showed his versatility punching out a jagged but contemplative opening and later returning for a dreamy Debussian response to Pieronczyk’s tightly frantic solos. It was all held together by Stanko’s recurring Spanish-tinged trumpet.

For an encore, the dream sequence from Rosemary’s Baby was accompanied by one of Komeda’s greatest hits – riotously welcomed by the crowd – Sleep Safe and Warm again with Stanko and Steczkowska leading. The sextet beautifully captured the music’s lullaby mood, but abandoned the original orchestra’s bitterly ironic saccharine tone - and of course ignored this sequence's hypnotically somnolent soundscape. The new approach reflected the deep well of Komeda’s creativity, making a fitting end to the evening.

Waterloo (near Waterloo)

2010-04-06T04:44:00.000-07:00

A quick note to point out (to those who don't already know) that I'll be at the Royal Festival Hall on Thursday 22 April introducing Karl Grune's 1929 film Waterloo, with the Philharmonia Orchestra playing the UK premiere of Carl Davis' score, under the composer himself. The film starts at 7.00 but I'll be talking at 5.45.

Shutter Island

2010-04-04T01:56:00.000-07:00

Somewhat belatedly (the problem of coordinating diaries), I just saw Shutter Island. A lot of reviews have concentrated on the labyrinthine (dare I say implausible?) plot though the "twist" - guessable in essence, if not in detail, within the first few minutes - bothered me less than in The Sixth Sense, which simply wasn't good enough to stop me being annoyed at how its self-proclaimed USP had failed.

Others have dissed it because of the plethora of movie references, majoring on the acrophobic Vertigo and Black Narcissus and another film which, were I even to mention it, might give my smarter readers (as if you aren't all smart!) a clue as to what happens. As if it's the first time Scorsese's ever done something like that!

But back to Shutter Island and a number of critics have talked about the music. Scorsese does use original scores: Howard Shore followed on from a blossoming relationship with Elmer Bernstein that was cut cruelly short by the composer's death* (or the intervention of Harvey Weinstein, if you believe what some say). But many of his soundtracks rely on pre-existing music in a way that's worth a study in itself. Still, it works for Woody Allen, though a more pertinent comparison - which we'll come back to - is Kubrick.

The music was chosen by Scorsese's old friend Robbie Robertson - The Last Waltz is their most famous collaboration but he's been involved with several other films. Now, looking at the playlist, the first name to come to mind would not be the driving force behind The Band, though Paramount were so excited that their press release didn't even bother to mention the names of the actual composers.**

But think about the filmic associations of some of the names on the list and the fog lifts slightly. 2001, The Shining and The Exorcist share Shutter Island's needle-drop aesthetic and all feature the "acceptable faces of modernism" Ligeti and Penderecki. Shutter Island and The Shining even share Ligeti's Lontano. In later years those two have been joined by Alfred Schnittke (who duly turns up here).

The soundtrack divides into three types of music. There are some vintage pop songs while the mournful post-minimalism quotient is filled with Ingram Marshall, John Adams, Lou Harrison and the oscillating On the Nature of Daylight by Max Richter, best-known for Waltz With Bashir. At the end of the film, it returns as a new underscore to Dinah Washington's recording of This Bitter Earth.

But there's also a gratifyingly large chuck of unrepentant modernism, though as usual such music accompanies threat, madness, violence, etc. The aforementioned Lontano with its wonderful thick yet fluid textures, dark and glistening, the hypnotic ritual of Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel, a bit of middle-period Gianto Scelsi - the surprising step-father of TV Times' former agony aunt and Eurovision Song Contest presenter Katie Boyle - which precedes his later, Zen-like utterances. Probably the most extreme piece is Nam June Paik's Hommage à John Cage, a post-fluxus mixture of pre-recorded tape and the sounds of random live performance. But undoubtedly the 'tune' that most of the audience will go out whistling is Penderecki's long-gestating Third Symphony. The insistent passacaglia theme (actually more of a rhythm) sits as solid as Shutter Island itself.

As is the way with film soundtracks, a lot of the pieces are abbreviated or overlaid with dialogue so it's great to think that soundtrack purchasers will be exposed to the full, mad glory of Nam June Paik, the middle section of Christian Zeal and Activity with its looped recording of a preacher, or the near sub-ambient Brian Eno - all things that would probably have passed them by in the sound mix.

Anal emo teenagers will point out that Mahler's Piano Quartet, a long-ignored student work, wasn't actually premiered until 1965, eleven years after the film in which a record of it is played was set and might even question why Max von Sydow makes a point of mentioning its key signature: nobody who actually knows about classical music bothers with that kind of detail and anyway it's the only one he wrote (that we know about). Anal emo pensioners will point out that This Bitter Earth came out in 1960 (though we can bat them aside by pointing out that it's a non-diegetic track).

For me, the film that came to mind was Cape Fear. They're both genre pieces that weren't generated by Scorsese: Cape Fear started out as a Spielberg project and Shutter Island moved from Wolfgang Petersen to David Fincher before he picked it up. Nevertheless he made them both his own and, ironically had two of his biggest hits. And the relentless and increasingly frenetic Penderecki, a thick block of sound coming out of Polish sonorism can't help but remind us of Bernard Herrmann's original Cape Fear, as channelled by Elmer Bernstein.

Anyway, you can get the soundtrack from Rhino Records, here.

*Having said that, he's also used ... errrrrr ... Philip Glass and U2.

** For your delectation here's a proper track-list (some of the pieces are on slightly obscure labels so I'm giving them a leg-up, with links):

1) Ingram Marshall: Fog Tropes. Brass Sextet from the Orchestra of St Lukes, pre-recorded tape/John Adams
2) Penderecki: Symphony No 3 (passacaglia). National Polish RSO/Antoni Wit
3) Cage: Music for Marcel Duchamp. Phillip Vandré (prepared piano) [written for Hans Richter's film Dreams That Money Can Buy]
4) Nam June Paik: Hommage à John Cage [tape and live performance]
5) Ligeti: Lontano. Vienna Philharmonic/Abbado
6) Feldman: Rothko Chapel 2. UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus, David Abel (viola), Karen Rosenak (celeste), William Winant (percussion), California EAR Unit
7) Cry. Johnnie Ray
8) Max Richter: On the Nature of Daylight. Max Richter
9) Scelsi:Uaxuctum: the Legend of the Mayan City, Which They Themselves Destroyed for Religious Reasons. Concentus Vocalis, soloists, Vienna RSO/Peter Rundel [the soundtrack album only has a section of the full piece]
10) Mahler. Piano Quartet. Prazak Quartet
11) Adams. Christian Zeal and Activity. San Francisco SO/Edo de Waart
12) Lou Harrison: Suite for Strings (Nocturne). The New Professionals Orchestra/Rebecca Miller
13) Brian Eno: Lizard Point. Brian Eno [not easy to find on the website but it's on their re-release of Ambient 4: On Land]
14) Schnittke: Hymn no 2. Torlief Thedéen (cello) Entcho Radoukanov (double bass) [sadly, I don't think that Borodin Quartet cellist and dedicatee Valentin Berlinsky ever recorded it]
15) Cage. The Root of an Unfocus. Boris Berman (prepared piano) [For what it's worth, Merce Cunningham, for whom it was written. said this piece was about fear, awareness of the unknown, struggle, and the final defeat]
16) Ingram Marshall: Prelude: The Bay [originally the musical element of Alcatraz, a multimedia piece about the island]
17) Bennie Benjamin and George David Weiss: Wheel of Fortune. Kay Starr
18) Lonnie Johnson: Tomorrow Night. Lonnie Johnson
19) Clyde Otis (arr. Max Richter) This Bitter Earth, Dinah Washington (and Max Richter)

Avatar

2010-02-11T02:46:00.000-08:00

Copyright seems to be going into some sort of hyperdrive-meltdown: on the one hand, the internet increasingly seems like the free digital repository of anything you might need, while Australian band Men at Work is hobbled by a perverse and in many ways incomprehensible ruling in favour of the copyright equivalent of an ambulance chaser.

Unsurprisingly, Avatar (left) is coming in for a bit of similar treatment. There's already been a 'heated debate' about whether or not it rips off the Strugatskys' World of Noon books (1961-85).

In this post-, even anti-imperialist series,

set in the 22nd-century, the planet Pandora is filled with fantastical flora and fauna. In the fifth book, Disquiet (Беспокойство, 1965) humans set up a laboratory to study the mysterious biosphere but thereafter the book and the film only fit where they touch.

English translations (mostly from Macmillan) appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. But, despite some attempts to stir up a controversy (evil westerners ripping off a Russian icon), the surviving Strugatsky (Boris) seems sanguine, unsurprisingly since, after the death of brother Arkady, he approved of a collection of other writers' tales set in the Noon universe.

Anyway, bunking off from Paradjanov duties yesterday, I went to see Avatar. This isn't the place for an in-depth review. Briefly: it's a great experience but a pretty poor film that mixes up the Mayans, Yggdrasil and any other myths that came to hand. One (unintentional?) moment of hilarity came with the apparently serious use of the word "unobtainium" (hopefully Cameron cleared that trademarked name!)

But I was struck by the music.

As you might expect, it was by James Horner, who isn't entirely unfamiliar with accusations of - shall we say - being .... errrrrr .... 'overly-influenced' by other composers. Still, the usual 'victims' are Khachaturian, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and as they say, if you're going to steal (and who says he is stealing - certainly not me!) steal from the best.

Musically, it's a bit of a hodge-podge. With the percussion and ethnic chanting I occasionally thought it was going to break into something like Karl Jenkins' Adiemus.

But then - leaping lizards - there's a fantastic theme for the Na've tribe. Damn, it sounded familiar. So I upset Melissa by humming it a bit too loudly in the few quiet bits of the film to remind myself and - yes - it's definitely hovering around Kutuzov's theme from Prokofiev's War and Peace - 47 seconds into this:

Now, sometimes things like that are unconscious and sometimes they have a meaning. Hans Zimmer convincingly argued that his Gladiator 'borrowings' from temp-track standby, Holst's Mars, were a deliberate counterpart to Ridley Scott's ironic references to Triumph of the Will.

Actually in this case, I'm willing to give Horner, the benefit of the doubt (or a get-out-of-jail-free card). Sadly the Youtube clip of the end of the Bolshoi production of War and Peace can't be embedded but the chorus takes up Kutuzov's theme to sing:
We came to fight to the death. To fight to the death, the people came forward. With our blood we have defended Russia. We have defended our mighty land. Our Field Marshal led us onward, led us rightly into battle for our country.
Compare Kutuzov's theme to Avatar - hop to around 5'10" in this compilation (though you'll have to wait for it to buffer), where it begins to gel.

Find more videos like this on Soundtrack Fans

Perhaps Horner is drawing a parallel between the Napoleonic attack on Moscow and the events in Avatar? Perhaps so - in both cases the victims strategically withdraw to come back with renewed vigour.

Then again, Horner also seems to have been rethinking his music for Glory (1989), but what Avatar's got to do with the American Civil War, I don't know.

Beyond that, it's not for Horner to explain why Prokofiev - himself an inveterate self-devourer - used Kutuzov's theme in Ivan the Terrible (1944) - he was working on War and Peace at around the same time - in a more downbeat version, as a lament for the Tartar steppes.

Obviously it works for Horner: Avatar has picked up his tenth Oscar nod. As far as the Academy is concerned the film itself is probably like Goldman-Sachs - too big to fail, so will pick up the statue. Might Horner join in the celebrations? Perhaps - he won for Cameron's last outing, Titanic.

But then again, given the film's story and its subsequent commercial success, perhaps Horner would have been better quoting this:

Paradjanov

2010-02-10T04:33:00.000-08:00

Looking forward to the Paradjanov Festival, which centres on a season at BFI South Bank, starting on 1st March.

Before that, there's a pre-amble this Friday 12th February. Layla Alexander-Garrett, the festival organiser, will give a talk about the director at the Society for Cooperation in Russian and Soviet Studies. Kick-off's at 7pm and tickets are a fiver (£3 for members).

There's also a symposium about the director on 6th March, so I'd better sign off and get down to writing my paper!

You're the Stranger Here

2010-01-20T04:02:00.000-08:00

Apologies for not flagging up my mate Tom Geens and the retrospective/premiere in the London Short Film Festival at the ICA. Not only did Tom manage to finagle getting his new feature film (Liar) programmed (how does that work in a 'short film' festival?) but he went on to win "Best Short Film 2010" with his new short, You're the Stranger Here. It's an ideal film for those who enjoy witnessing outbursts of inexplicable and disturbing violence in surreal and unsettling Ceausescu-ish places (Hammersmith, if I recall).

So, belated congrats... and hopefully Film4 (who part-funded it) will pull their fingers out and get it on TV.

You can see a teaser trailer for You're the Stranger Here here (hear, hear!) along with clips from Tom's other films at Chicken Factory

Tom's now developing another feature that sounds like it'll have his trademark dark comedy and needling of the middle classes with uncomfortable silences...

On a personal note, Stranger marks my entry to IMDb. After months of workshopping over three continents, Tom felt that I was ready to play (triumphantly, even if I do say so myself) 'Man in the Waiting Room'. It would have been a cough and a spit (if he left in the coughing or the spitting).

An event for your Diary

2009-11-18T06:48:00.000-08:00

Second Run have recently released Márta Mészáros' Diary for My Children (Napló gyermekeimnek, 1982) on DVD. Even better, the rest of the trilogy (Diary for My Loves, 1987 and Diary for My Father and Mother, 1990) will follow, so we'll all be able to ditch the VHS's from the C4 screenings all those years ago!

In the meantime there's a special screening of Diary for My Children at the Renoir Cinema on Sunday 22nd November at 2.15, at which I'll be interviewing the uncredited co-writer, and director in her own right, Éva Pataki.

It's a wonderful, semi-autobiographical film about the teenage Juli, returning to Hungary in 1947, having spent the war exiled to the USSR, where her parents died. It perfectly captures the contradictions of post-war Budapest (as I imagine!): the freedoms of western-type fashion shows and the impositions of the regime; moments of personal joy and grating bureaucratic idiocy, and memories and strange dream sequences set against quotidian banalities. All seen through the eyes of Juli, growing to be a woman, discovering love and developing the cinephilia that will lead her to film school.

Zsuzsa Czinkóczi's fantastically touching performance captures Juli's frustration at the lies, dissembling and surreal paranoias that surround her. She carefully balances the solemn and melancholic retreat into memories of pre-war happiness with the steeling of Juli's resolve to counter what she sees around her. Exactly as Mészáros herself does in the film.

You can read more about the film, on Second Run's website, here

Here's the Renoir cinema page, with details of the event.

Benya Krik

2009-11-11T12:56:00.000-08:00

It seems a good moment to mention a forthcoming screening of Benya Krik at the Purcell Room on 29 November 2009. Among other things, it's a fascinating view of early 20th-century Jewish life, apparently shot partly on location in Odessa.

Made in 1926, it was directed by Vladimir Vilner, while Isaac Babel based the script on his own short stories The King and How It Was Done in Odessa. The Russian texts and the 'kino-povest' (illustrated, left) are here, and Jeff Glodblum - that's Goldblum - reads The King (in English) here.

But Krik, the leader of a bunch of criminals, is hardly admirable and the film had something to offend everyone.

For starters, Krik's gang seems to be first precursors of, and then profiteers from the Revolution. Even though they're ultimately foiled by the Bolsheviks, the regime, obviously, was not impressed.

Meanwhile, Jewish groups were alarmed that it might inflame anti-Semitism.

The Soviet Union spent 1921-22 struggling economically in the face of what Lenin called "the elemental forces of the petty-bourgeois environment", before initiating a limited return to capitalism, even de-nationalising some enterprises - excluding, of course, the 'commanding heights' of heavy industry, banking etc. This 'New Economic Policy' became increasingly divisive: on one hand it made available luxuries - and even some essentials - that state and collective organisations were so signally failing to provide, but NEP-men were despised as spiv-like semi-gangsters and, plugging into Russian anti-Semitism, were often seen as Jewish.

In such an environment, Krik couldn't do right for doing wrong. Not only did it upset the authorities, but it was accused of ignoring the proletariat and concentrating on Jews (as if they were inimical!). But of course, it 'concentrates' on them only to criticise them as cynical petty thieves who are happy to trash tradition and their Jewishness in the pursuit of profit.

A few months later Babel's astonishing play Sunset opened, in which Krik, fearing disinheritance, beats his father up then arranges an abortion for his gentile girlfriend, and forces his sister into marriage to obtain the dowry. After all this, he is praised by the local rabbi.

Ethnically even more confusing is that Babel based Krik on the well-known Odessa gangster Mishka 'Yaponchik' (Mike the Little Jap) Vinnitsky, though I'm not sure why - he was Jewish and born in Odessa. Allegedly this is a portrait.

He's also the subject of Juliusz Machulski's Polish film Déjà vu (1988), which takes the action to Chicago: I suppose the archetypal US gangster city - it's where Balabanov's Brother II goes. Babel, perhaps seeing that he had created a potentially long-running franchise, didn't kill Krik in the books but he does die in Vilner's film, suffering a fate based on Mishka's death. Maybe Babel felt (or was advised) that the more popular medium needed to show retribution.

Krik is still a popular hero, largely thanks to the panache which Babel gave him - the Russian movie Мишка Япончик (Mishka Yaponchik, 2007) is part of the series Great Russian Adventurers! You can see a silent movie style trailer here.

Vilner's film was released in January 1927 but pleased nobody. It was almost immediately banned in Ukraine and never shown in Moscow. It has since fallen into that huge well of forgotten curiosities. After a couple more films, Vilner returned to the theatre, from when he had come.

Nevertheless Eisenstein recommended the script to Ivor Montagu, whose English translation was published by Collett's in 1935 in a numbered edition of 500. That sold well enough to go to another numbered 500. I've never seen this tome but I suspect it's the 1925 script that Babel wrote with Eisenstein, who later remembered the author observing that "writing a script is like calling the midwife out on your wedding night".

Eisenstein, whilst eating stewed apples, sharing vodkas with Malevich, and corresponding with Stefan Zweig, was dividing his time between Krik, 1905 (aka The Battleship Potemkin) and a wartime front-line brothel comedy called The Bazaar of Lust. In 1932 he praised the 'laconicism' of 'the vastly underestimated play Sunset', though it had been heavily criticised and dropped from the repertoire five years previously. Babel got permission to go to Paris for a year and on his return he and Eisenstein would work on the banned and destroyed Bezhin Meadow. In 1939 he was arrested for being an 'anti-Soviet Trotskyite spy' (recruited during his time in Paris) and 'a member of a terrorist conspiracy'. He was shot in 1940 and dumped in a mass grave.

You can get a silent DVD of Benya Krik from The National Centre for Jewish Film, but better go to the South Bank where klezmerish live music is provided by Robin Harris in a screening that's part of the Jewish Music Institute's Jewish Culture Day.

Schnittke

2009-11-10T10:26:00.000-08:00

In case you thought I'd forgotten about it - a heads-up/reminder of Between Two Worlds, the Alfred Schnittke festival led by the LPO and happening at various places in London from 15 November to 1 December to mark what would have been his 75th birthday.

It's hard in the course of such a mini-fest to do justice to the enormity of Schnittke's output (even if you think - as I don't - that it's wildly uneven). Of course there are things I'd want to have seen, primarily the hallucinogenically terrifying First Symphony, and one of the last symphonies, and perhaps a survey of the concerti grossi (and of course, more films!) but over all it's as balanced as it could be in the time available.

The LPO has a minisite devoted to him here.

The main stuff is:

15/11. The Gogol Suite and the (brilliant) Monologue followed by Prokofiev 6 at the RAM.

18/11. Royal Festival Hall. A 6.15 pre-concert event with the 3rd SQ (his best?) played by the Harpham Quartet. Then, in the main concert, rather than just doing the Faust Cantata, there are excerpts from the opera that swallowed it (basically as Act 3). These are semi-staged, so perhaps Jurowski is moving towards a very welcome production - in which case, hopefully he'll be conducting what Schnittke wrote rather than the 'Hamburg edition'. It's preceded by Haydn 22 (is the subtitle the only link?) and bits of Parsifal. Here's a bit of Arte's broadcast of Historia von D. Johann Fausten. Would that BBC4...

19/11. Back at the RAM for a visit from the Moscow Conservatory Chamber Choir and a good belt of Russian choral stuff. The Concerto for Choir is another cast-iron masterpiece.

21/11. An all-day symposium at Deptford Town Hall under the aegis of the Alfred Schnittke Archive at Goldsmiths. Even those usually averse to academic conferences might be tempted by the world premiere of the Concerto for Electronic Instruments. This includes four ekvodins (a 1930s Soviet synthesiser), a crystadin (something to do with Oleg Losev's research, I assume), a camerton piano (errrrr...?) and a shumophone (even more errrr... but it sounds polyglottally tautological: 'shum' [шум] being Russian for 'noise' and 'phone' being Greek for 'sound'). In such company the theremin that the estimable Lydia Kavina will be playing seems almost workaday!

On 22/11 those able to keep up will be headed to the South Bank Centre for another all-day-er. Amongst the talks will be an unmissable interview with animator Andrei Khrzhanovsky, director of, inter alia, The Glass Harmonica fresh from his debut feature (of which more anon) A Room and a Half. The other music will include the hilarious Music for an Imaginary Play, the fantastic Epilogue from Peer Gynt and the Kandinskian Der gelbe Klang, which I seem to remember being really interesting (if only I could find that decade-or-so old off-air cassette).

25/11. Ater a couple of days rest you'll be ready to venture back for a kaleidoscopic look at old musics: Stravinsky, the venerably double-barrelled Bach-Webern, Schnittke and Safronov. That's at 6pm, after which there's another concert: Webern, Lindberg, Berg and Schnittke's Third Symphony. I prefer Schnittke's (more secular) odd-numbered symphonies and this is one of my favourites - a piece I find endlessly fascinating.

Films are covered at Pushkin House on 26 and 27 (The Ascent and Commissar) and 28 at the RFH (Agony). Later on the 28th at the RFH there's a concert with an interesting pairing: Schnittke's Second Cello Concerto (which uses some of Agony's music) and Haydn's Seven Last Words. The Schnittke is being played by Alexander Ivashkin (he and conductor Vladimir Jurowski are the main movers behind the festival), who, just a few days ago, was in Moscow playing and conducting a concert of Unknown Schnittke. Hopefully there'll be a CD or at least some more performances.

Things are wrapped up on 1 December at the QEH with the String Trios by Schnittke and Tchaikovsky.

Alexander Ivashkin's written several books about Schnittke, including a biog-intro (published by Phaidon) that should be every anglophone's starting point

As an adjunct I'm doing a one-hour intro to Schnittke and his music for Resonance 104.4fm on Friday the 13th at 8pm. Also listenable on-line.

Double Take

2009-10-23T09:47:00.000-07:00

Johan Gimonprez’s Double Take (shown recently in the London Film Festival) is a post-modernist mash-up-CGI-mockumentary-philosophical-essay/gag-reel (that started life in 2005 (very differently) as the installation Looking for Alfred). But if that description hints at its porous structural borders, it takes an equally liberal view when it comes to revealing its subject matter.

At its core is a monologue by British guerilla-provocateur-situationist-author Tom MacCarthy in which Hitchcock meets his younger self on the set of The Birds. But that in turn is based on a short surreal autobiographical tale by Borges in which the author meets his older self.

As the film’s narrator says: “They say that if you meet your double you should kill him, or he will kill you; two of you is one too many.”

But of course, even when you’ve killed your doppelganger, you won’t know if you are actually unique so life becomes, paradoxically, a lonely trawl for others of yourself. Whom you must kill.

I suspect Borges would have enjoyed this ‘hitching’ to another author and he was very cinematically minded, thinking Hitch’s The Thirty Nine Steps greatly superior to Buchan’s novel. En passant, I should say that the Borges source material is its own doppelganger, existing in two forms: The Other and August 25 1983 (according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, a day on which nothing of note occurred).

From there, Double Take enters a hall of mirrors so complex that the viewer (and possibly director-scriptwriter Gimonprez) becomes (perhaps deliberately) almost completely lost.

There’s the impressionist Mark Perry listening to a recording of Hitchcock, twinning his voice to loop (in both senses of the word) an explanation of the Maguffin (maybe Peter Bogdanovich was charging too much, or maybe he was just too good and would have knocked it off first time?) There’s the well-known Hitchcock lookalike Ron Burrage who, curiously, was born on Hitchcock’s thirtieth birthday, 13 August 1929, (Borges was born in the same year as Hitchcock but eleven days later: Gimonprez was born the day before, 1962, while Hitchcock was being interviewed by acolyte Truffaut, and making The Birds, the backdrop to MacCarthy’s monologue). There’s the story of Hitchcock’s two dogs and their appearance/non-appearance in The Birds; and there are that film’s two lovebirds (as well as Hedren and Taylor). Finally(?) of course there’s Hitchcock himself. Hitchcock walks down the street and has an uncanny, Borgesian-MacCarthyesque encounter with Hitchcock. There are the famous cameos, where Hitchcock sometimes ‘plays’ ‘Hitchcock’. And there are all manner of Hitchcock jokes from the openings of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including Hitchcock staging a Hitchcock lookalike competition (and losing); And there are five cringeworthily sexist adverts for Folger’s Coffee – sponsors of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Double Take has been something of a festival hit and there are five trailers on Youtube but they make it seem like it is just going to be a witty exploration of ‘the idea of Hitchcock’ and doublings – but there’s more. So here's a clip that is less of a hard sell and hints a little more at what the film is like.

But even that largely excludes Double Take's wider concerns. There are the mirrorings of Kennedy and Nixon in the fateful Presidential debate (broadcast on both radio and television but with very different ‘results’); Nixon also crops up as a counterpoint to Khrushchev in the Kitchen Debate. Of course, that leads us to Capitalism vs Communism, their respective contributions to the space race (and the arms race) and the Bay of Pigs (and Laika the dog). Meanwhile Cuba hovers between the two; Fidel makes a speech as fiery as the Cuban sun before visiting Nikita to cavort in the Soviet snow.

At the bottom is the commodification of fear, and the way that the idea of ‘the other’ is reinforced to justify all kinds of official actions.”Two of you is one too many.” Who will kill whom?

And it’s all recorded by the increasingly dominant television (slowly strangling its parent, cinema) as “History” (Gimonprez’s previous film was called Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y) is controlled by (or through) the media. I could push it further and talk about Double Take’s zapper-like (or even hypertext) editing, but I’ll leave that to you.

Though it all centres on the very early 1960s, we’re brought up to date with Reagan-Gorbachev and Clinton-Yeltsin as new Nixon(s)/(Kennedy?(s))-Khrushchev(s). Even more contemporary resonances come with shots of New York skyscrapers, the story of how the Empire State Building was hit by a plane in 1945, and an approximation of the famous 911 “falling man” footage.

It all ends with Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous “known knowns and unknown unknowns” speech, guaranteed to raise a laugh with audiences amused by the assonant riffing but which to me – no Rumsfeldian - seems surprisingly clear-sighted, despite the unsavoury ends which it was used to justify.

Doubles and coincidences are all very well, but once you start looking, you can, if you care to, find them pretty much anywhere you look. Given the film’s deeper meaning, Gimonprez obviously decided to miss out on some of the most obvious ones: the two Blackmails, the two Ma/(e)/n Who Knew Too Much, the Hitchcock/van Sant Psychos or the many other Hitchcock doppelgangers. Being a film, Double Take largely ignores the non-visual radio (home to several Hitchcock adaptations, sometimes starring the same and sometimes different actors) and books (both as source materials and post-film adaptations) and the various remakes and sequel (troublingly for the film’s premise, often, as with The Birds, not limited to a single reincarnation). It’s also a bit unfortunate that inescapable history means that the thread that ties the Cold War to Hitchcock is one of his weakest films (albeit set partly on Cuba) Topaz.

Double Take has a fun surface and at its core is a vital idea, but it tries to cram so much in that in the end I began to feel like Frenzy’s Chief Inspector Oxford faced with his wife’s ‘cordon bleu’ meal; so rich as to be indigestible. Or even that Hitchcock himself – eventually overwhelmed by contemplations of geopolitics - has been turned into the film’s very own Maguffin. But without that, the premise and montage of archive material could start to look like something by Adam Curtis.

By the way – Frenzy has two scores: Ron Goodwin stepped in when Hitchcock decided he didn’t like Henry Mancini’s. Of course, also Topaz was Jarre’s second attempt to work with Hitchcock: he was supposed to replace Herrmann on Torn Curtain but that gig ended up going to John Addison. And so it goes on…

Russian Film Festival

2009-10-16T02:06:00.001-07:00

We're just about half way through the London Film Festival (a couple of posts to come) and already on the horizon is the Third Russian Film Festival which precisely abuts it, starting the day after the LFF (30 October) and running until 8 November.

As usual it concentrates on the newest Russian cinema (this year with ten UK premieres), but they've expanded the docs and shorts section and there's an archive strand showing the five great Alexandrov-Orlova musicals. All this with the usual set of guest speakers and debates.

The features (which I'll quickly cover here) are dominated by films from the big names. Sergei Soloviev has two titles: Anna Karenina (literary behemoths have made popular source material recently). Somewhat unexpectedly, Soloviev sees a companion piece to Anna Karenina in his other festival film, Assa-2, a sequel to his cult perestroika rock classic from 1988. Amongst its cast is the great violist Yuri Bashmet, who began as a bassist in a rock group.

More literature with an updating of Chekhov's Ward 6 (Палата 6) from Karen Shakhnazarov. In between running Mosfilm, Shakhnazarov has made some intriguingly structured films, often intertwining humour and dark, moral ambiguity, so it will be interesting to see this tale of mental disintegration.

Nikolai Dostal's Pete on the Way to Heaven (Петя по дороге в Царствие) might sound like a sequel to his wry 1991 comedy Cloud-Heaven (Облака рай) but, though it features another simpleton in nowheresville, it's more politically engaged. Another film about the events of 3 March 1953? That sounds almost like the beginnings of a season in itself.

The flight of Yuri Gagarin is another historical moment that's had a recent cinematic outing: though appearing only briefly, the cosmonaut was central to the plot of Alexei Uchitel's (to me, slightly disappointing) Dreaming of Space (Космос как предчувствие, 2005). In Paper Soldier (Бумажный солдат) Alexei German Jnr takes a darker view of the events.

More literature, this time Nabokov, with Andrei Eshpai's The Event (Событие). Nabokov isn't generally remembered for his plays and Eshpai avoids it being a simple filming. He comes from a line of composers (Yakov Andreyevich and Andrei Yakovleyevich), and he brings a similar degree of musical sensitivity to the film - central to it is the music of Bach, adapted by his father.

Melody for a Street Organ (Мелодия для шарманки) continues Kira Muratova's recent strong run of films. Muratova is wonderfully attuned to the soundscapes of her films (though sadly its an aspect of her work that's often overlooked) and here, as in some of her others, the score is by the great Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov.

One genre that isn't really associated with Russia is the mockumentary, but while in the west it's often a chance for some gentle humour at the expense of a tangentially important subject, Russia 88 (Россия 88) strikes at one of the country's hearts: patriotism, nationalism and xenophobia. Like all successful mockumentaries there's an ambiguity about the central character and there's been a huge debate about whether it actually promotes the neo-Nazism that it portrays - an effect that is disturbingly intensified by the unprompted vox pops that support such views.

Despite some more positive prognoses for the country there's still a supply of bleak films and Nikolai Khomeriki's Tale in the Darkness (Сказка про темноту) fills that role here. A brutalised far-Eastern population and child cruelty beings to mind Freeze Die Rise Again (Замри умпи воскресни) but this is a contemporary - and harrowing - story, though some critics saw light at the end of the tunnel.

Undoubtedly the weirdest feature in the festival is First Squad (Первый отряд). There's an undeniable mystical streak in the national character. War films have always been popular there. They have a great animation tradition. The country has an interesting relationship with Japan. Hey presto - a supernatural WW2 anime! Clearly, 14 year-old Nadya (of course, Russian for 'hope') is no Slavic Tank Girl but First Squad can't be anything less than interesting (and must be more successful than the Tank Girl film!)

Cinéphilia West

2009-10-02T07:41:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned a couple of weeks back, Wallflower Press has a new outlet, Cinéphilia West, at 171 Westbourne Grove (close to Needham Road). There's a screening space, a gallery and a bookshop, and there'll be a regular stream of events. And, of course ... the essential caff.

Even better news is that the current exhibition of Polish posters is set to run until 31 January 2010 and some to-be-announced events are planned.

The first (Polish-themed) event is on 25 October, opening a three-part season on Polish film avant-garde, from its beginnings till now. World expert Marcin Giżycki will present a brief history of avant-garde film in Poland, from the work of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson in the 1930s to the 1950s and Andrzej Pawlowski's influential Cineforms (Kineformy, 1957). Giżycki will also discuss the work of Jalu Kurek, Jerzy Zarzycki and Tadeusz Kowalski - previously unknown in the UK. Giżycki sets Polish film avant-garde in the context of other, contemporary film avant-gardes, making this a perfect introduction to the next strand - from the 1960s to the 1980s.

It's impossible to choose a single still to illustrate the wonderfully fluid and abstract Cineforms and Adam Walaciński's music also plays a central part, so here it is on Youtube:

While you're in the area (and, presumably, in the mood), you could pop over to Patio, the excellent and veritable Polish restaurant at the Shepherd's Bush Green end of Goldhawk Road.

But back to Westbourne Grove (via Vladivostok) and little quiz for you to enjoy: which film starring Yuli Borisovich Brynner takes us from Nice, through Paris and New York, to Westbourne Grove?

Toast to Stalin

2009-09-24T06:24:00.000-07:00

Goldsmiths College is giving us a rare chance to hear Prokofiev's cantata Toast to Stalin (Здравица). Soviet national radio commissioned Prokofiev to write it as a 60th birthday present for the tyrant in 1939 and he must have had mixed feelings after after the different fates of Alexander Nevsky (a triumph - albeit temporary) and the Cantata on the 20th Anniversary of the Revolution (undeservedly, a catastrophe). Neverthless he managed to select texts (in that Soviet neologistic oxymoron, 'modern folk poems') that spend most of the time discussing the people's happiness rather than praising the man directly. It also contains a couple of hilarious fingers in the pocket.

Also on the programme is Gubaidulina's piano concerto, Introitus. While its not terribly virtuosic, it is very intense and typical of her late 1970s/early 1980s work: rich with personal religious symbolism (that listeners might not even pick up on) and extremely contemplative (there's a lot of wondering how many ways you can play an F sharp).

Between the two is a suite from Korngold's first film, Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1934). Just as the Nazis had been unable to unlink the play from Mendelssohn's music so Rheinhardt always intended to use it. It was just a question of who would edit it. Actually it was hardly a question - Rheinhardt had known Korngold since they met at the premiere of Mahler's Eighth Symphony in Munich in 1910 and Rheinhardt had no intention of taking the studio's suggestion of Franz Waxman. In the end Korngold added some bits of Mendelssohn's other works including the Scottish Symphony and orchestrations of some Songs without Words.

Much as I love Haydn, this isn't really the place to discuss him.

The programme in full:

Haydn: Symphony No 101 (Clock)
Gubaidulina: Introitus*
Korngold: Midsummer Night's Dream (suite from the film).** UK premiere.
Prokofiev: Toast to Stalin***

Drosostalitsa Moraiti (piano)*
Casey Evans (soprano)**
Goldsmiths Chorus***
Goldsmiths Sinfonia, conductor Alexander Ivashkin

2 October 2009, 19.00

The Great Hall
Richard Hoggart Building
Goldsmiths College

Tickets are £7; £5 (concs) and £3 (Goldsmiths students)

Further details are here.

Has

2009-09-18T08:37:00.000-07:00

A quick heads up the retrospective of five films by Wojciech Has at the Barbican.

Given his surrealist bent, it might seem appropriate that Has was born on All Fools' Day (1925). His forty-odd year career began just after the war with several documentaries that seem to have made little impact. In 1958 he made his first feature, The Noose (Petla) a disturbing nocturnal tale of an alcoholic. The same year saw Farewells (Pozegnania) a story of a wartime romance framed with almost fetishistic visuals.

But the highwater mark came in with two cultish masterworks from the 60s and 70s.

The Saragossa Manuscript (Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie, 1965) is a superb adaptation of Jan Potocki's extremely literary novel (actually originally published in French) which intertwines several nested stories set during the Napoleonic Wars. With a gently humorous transgressiveness, it's no surprise that it inspired film-makers like Bunuel and Lynch and, beyond that, The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia. It also inspired an alternate soundtrack version from Aleksander Kolkowski and Marek Pytel.

The last of the five films in the retrospective is The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą, 1973), after Bruno Schulz's collection of dreamy stories, with an overlaying contemplation of the Holocaust, of which the author was, paradoxically, both a survivor and a victim.

Once you've seen these two you'll want to buy the DVDs - but see them on the big screen first.

After the Barbican the season moves on the Edinburgh, Manchester and Brighton.

To go with the season there'll be a new installation at the Barbican by the Brothers Quay, long-time Has and Schulz admirers.

There's more about it at the Polish Cultural Institute and the Barbican Cinema.

LFF

2009-09-17T03:04:00.000-07:00

A quickie on the LFF. The launch was last week and after a few days of digesting the programme, here are a few of the things I'm looking forward to (and not).

As per usual the galas are nice for star-spotting (though you'll be spending most of your time at the Vue West End, while the Odeon is redeveloped to include a hotel, flats, restaurants and, sadly, smaller screens) But in reality, wouldn't you rather see the very beautiful restoration of Asquith's Underground, with live music from Neil Brand and ensemble? - actually, in a welcome reappraisal of the archive strand it is a gala! Or how about Hollis Frampton's epic seven-film sequence Hapax Legomena?

As to the East European stuff, for the minute I'll limit myself to brief details:

Tales from the Golden Age (Amintiri din epoca de aur). A Romanian-French black comedy set under Ceaucescu, that's been picked up by Trinity Films. More info here.

Help Gone Mad (Сумасшедшая помощь, Sumasshedshaya pomoshch'). A Beckettian-Kaurismakian 'bleak and lugubrious comedy' from Boris Khlebnikov.

Morphia (Морфий). Balabanov's latest, scripted by the late Sergei Bodrov Junior and based on Bulgakov. Must be a candidate for proper distribution but, as yet, hasn't been picked up.

Osadné. A documentary about the titular Slovakian village and its relationship to the rest of Europe.

Protektor. A Czech drama about a journalist and an actress who gradually realise the implications of the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia.

A Room and a Half (Полторы комнаты или сентиментальное путешествие на Родину, Poltory komnaty ili sentimental'noe puteshestvie na Rodinu). A fantasy that realises exiled poet Joseph Brodsky's imaginary incognito trip back to Russia. Director Khrzhanovsky is best-known for his animation (The Glass Harmonica is a classic) and this live-action film interpolates animated sequences.

St George Shoots the Dragon (Sveti Georgije ubiva azdahu). A WW1 Balkan epic from Srdjan Dragojevic (director of Pretty Flame, Pretty Village). It's allegedly the most expensive Serbian film ever, though if East European cinema teaches us anything, it's that there's no necessary connection between budget and quality.

Sweet Rush (Tatarak). Just as Britain belatedly gets to see Wajda's Katyn, the LFF launches his new one. Counterpointing the fictional story are Krystyna Janda's meditations on the death of her husband, cinematographer Edward Kłosiński, As yet, nobody's picked up up, but hopefully we won't have to wait too long for a proper release.

Who's Afraid of the Wolf? (Kdopak by se vlka bál?) A Czech family drama that merges into a fairy-tale world, and specifically Little Red Riding Hood. Sounds intriguing, and the LFF listing specifically mentions the score by Jan P Muchow.

Meanwhile, there's the Russian Wolfy (Волчок, Volchok). Another redemptive, fantasy-tinged childhood story, this time loosely based on the dysfunctional family of lead actress Yana Troyanova.

The Ferrari Dino Girl (Holka Ferrari Dino) is a welcome return for Jan Nemec. An autobiographical look at the footage he shot of the 1968 Soviet invasion, how he smuggled it out of the country and its fate thereafter.

Victor Alampiev's enigmatic avant-garde 8-minute My Absolution will be shown on a loop in the studio on 25 October for anyone to drop in for free.

As for shorts, there are three Polish and two Latvians. I wish they'd put them on as supports to appropriate features (like the LFF used to many years ago - even if they were often unannounced so you might end up seeing the same thing three times). But unless there's been a change of heart, here are links to the programmes in which they appear. From Poland: Chick, Don't Look Back (Nie Patrz Wstecz) and A Story of a Missing Car (Historia a Braku Samochodu). The Latvian pair, both children's films (When Apples Roll (Kad Aboli Ripo) and Magic Water (Dzivais Udens) are at least gathered in the same strand. Also, Romka-97 is a Finnish film set in St Petersburg.

In the British film Perestroika, Sarah Turner re-enacts her Trans-Siberian rail trip from twenty years ago, and readdresses the footage that she shot at the time.

Elsewhere, Trimpin: the Sound of Invention, a doc about the sonic experimenter looks worthwhile. Again, no distributor but it's showing at the ICA who, if they have any money, might be tempted to give it a week or so.

Double Take, a Hitchcock mockumentary-found-footage-CGI-mash-up looked hilarious in the LFF trailer.

Another mash-up - this time about love and creation, destruction and death - comes from Gustave Deutsch with FILM IST: a girl & a gun.

I'm hoping no-one holds me to the rash predictions I made about the 'inevitable' inclusion of Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, but there's always the possibility that it's the surprise film.

Another change is that there'll be a proper awards night (again, back to the future). Fest director Sandra Hebron said "The idea is very much to raise the festival both in terms of its public address but also in terms of its relationship with the industry. A lot of the things we’re doing are about trying to bring the festival up to a level of parity with festivals internationally that operate on a similar scale." But at the same time:"We are not an A-grade competitive festival and at the moment we are not aspiring to be one" and that she would personally resist copying the likes of Cannes by having a high-profile competition strand because it would not be true to London's aim to be a festival for audiences. So, is this the start of a (slow) march towards making the LFF more Cannes-ish, Venetian or Berlinian? We shall see.

Finally, I would say that Nowhere Boy, Sam Taylor-Wood's John Lennon biopic (though the LFF brochure denies it that description) has divided the people that I've talked to. Except I can't. Perhaps it's just who I knock around with, but everyone is shuddering with horror at the prospect. Certainly the trailer makes it look like a standard biopic, with no evidence of the 'authorial signature' that the programme cites. But who knows...

Polish film posters

2009-09-07T04:01:00.000-07:00

Polish film posters must be some of the best in the world, and there's a chance to see a selection of around 50 in a new exhibition at Cinéphilia West, running from September 1st to 30th.

Often the designers approach the job very differently than their Western counterparts do: they're more interested in capturing the film's mood or in coming up with something metaphorical. Probably this isn't best for comedies (some of them - rightly or wrongly - seem to come out looking quite bleak, if comedic at all!) but darker stories work brilliantly as the designers get to the heart of the matter in a way that hardly ever happens in the west.

A good example is Roman Kowalik's poster for Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice. The film doesn't include any (literal) crucifixions, the house where everything happens isn't shaped like a church/cross and the hero remains fully-clothed throughout. Yet this image captures the film's tortured and joyful austerity. The image that was used in the West - the finale's solitary sapling worked well enough as a symbol of hope but it almost gave too much away: even without seeing the film, Tarkovskians would probably guess that that was how it ended. Kowalik leaves us wondering how (I don't suppose 'whether' was ever up for grabs) the anonymous man will escape. Or even if he wants to.

There are too many great posters to put in a single blog entry, but here's one of my favourites: Andrzej Pagowski's haunting image for Kieślowski's A Short Film About Love (Krótki film o miłości, 1988). It brilliantly captures the film's desperate ambiguity regarding what I suppose might have once been called the ownership of the gaze.

Here's the press release from The Polish Cultural Institute and there'll be some more information on the Cinéphilia West website in due course. Note that the exhibition is at Cinéphilia West, on Westbourne Grove, rather than the HQ, off Brick Lane.

And now: a little competition, I've removed the title etc from this poster for a very famous film. Anyone identifying it will win ... a lifetime's subscription to this blog!

The Bronze Horseman

2009-06-29T14:42:00.000-07:00

Many cities have developed (either deliberately or by happenstance) an internationally recognized ‘logo’ – the Eiffel Tower, the Brandenburg Gate, a routemaster on Westminster Bridge (preferably to the accompaniment of Big Ben’s chimes, though increasingly, it’s an image of the Eye), etc. Moscow’s is clearly Red Square – or more precisely St Basil’s, but what of St Petersburg? The raised bridges appear frequently, or the Winter Palace complex. Palace Square and the Alexander Monument?

At home there’s only one contender – the Bronze Horseman in Decembrists’ Square. Unveiled in 1782, it had been commissioned by Catherine the Great with a dedication to her predecessor Peter. But the ambiguity of the phrase "From Catherine II to Peter the Great" meant that it wasn't simply a metaphorical gift, but a statement of linearity which, given Catherine's somewhat tenuous claim to the throne was an astonishing piece of chutzpah.

Be that as it may, it was soon taken to the city's heart and in 1833 Pushkin was inspired to write his ghoulish story about the statue's retribution on a man who cursed Peter's decision to build the city on a swamp. As an aside it's interesting that three years earlier he'd written The Stone Guest, a take on Don Giovanni that also climaxes with a statue coming to life. Though The Bronze Horseman (read it here) seems quite ambivalent about the city it was hailed as a masterpiece and became very popular (possibly for its embedded anti-Polish sentiments) so that its title (actually, literally The Copper Horseman [Медный всадник] was then retrofitted to the statue.

It's worth pointing to a couple of paintings: Vasily Surikov's benign view [left] and, more famous, Benois' illustrations for a 1904 edition of Pushkin's poem. Pushkin and/or Benois also inspired composers Glière and Myaskovsky but I'll leave them for another post.

Because of the myth that the city would stand as long as the statue, during the Siege of Leningrad it was – perhaps superstitiously - completely covered with sandbags. In much the same way, Britain only survives because the ravens at the Tower of London have their wings clipped.

I'll finish by mentioning a film appearance: Chiaureli’s jaw-dropping 1950 Stalin hagiography The Unforgettable Year 1919 (Незабываемый 1919 год). To the marvelously inappropriate accompaniment of Shostakovich’s Attack on the Red Hill – a miniature Rachmaninovian piano concertino (previously mistranslated as Assault on the Beautiful City of Gorky), Stalin, like a night-watchman, patrols the city, pausing only to strike a pose in front of the statue: as Peter had founded the city, so Stalin would defend it.

Actually Chiaureli wisely allows Stalin a couple of seconds of noble profile on his own before cutting to the money shot. After that, we catch up with some soldiers and, as their patrol is brought to a halt Shostakovich’s music is unceremoniously faded down.

Chiaureli’s need for, and appreciation of, music certainly seemed to come and go: perhaps he had difficulty in deciding what he wanted – or in explaining it to the benighted composer. Certainly 1919 and his previous collaboration with Shostakovich – the notorious The Fall of Berlin (1950) – feature some of the most ham-fisted music-editing ever to besmirch a film. I wonder if the shocking edits and fades up and down were a slap in the face or helped the composer cope with being forced to do such work.

Russian Diary (1)

2009-06-23T05:58:00.000-07:00

I gave a series of lectures on Russian music on a cruise from St Petersburg to Moscow. Actually I did the first leg as well (Moscow to St P), but blogging both ways would have been a bit boring. Initially, I thought that technology (wi-fi on the Volga isn’t great) would force me to forego illustrations (there are a few pix – musical, cinematic or general - that are worth posting), but that I’d rectify it when I got home. Actually, the connection’s so slow that I’m writing the whole thing as a Word document and so am posting it all retrospectively (and possibly in a slightly random order)

So: St Petersburg, starting with initial impressions.

The first thing that surprised me since I was here last, was the explosion in traffic. Not only are Peter’s weekday streets jam-packed, but in the suburbs every third business seems to be 0А0 втосервис (which implies that not all the Ladas have been replaced with BMW

s and Mercs). Parking is virtually non-existent and, of course, for a city built on a swamp, underground parking presents certain problems.

Another third of businesses are строительные материалы – building materials. Clearly lots of people are updating their dachas: saunas and bath-houses are on the up, while the trip out to Peterhof is spattered with new-build would-be Romanov micro-palaces.

The women, too, seem changed.

Many young women wear belt-sized skirts and crucifyingly high heels: we even saw traffic wardens in heels, which made me wonder how they’d cope if someone did a runner – till we saw a couple of beheeled women tottering along very efficiently.

Also, some of them endlessly get their friends or boyfriends to photograph them, in extremis, in pseudo-model poses: chest out, shoulders back head thrown back, tossing their long hair

and smiling dazzlingly in homage to fashion magazines. (Thanks to Melissa for the pic!)

Clearly, despite the popularity of Putin’s Slavophilia, the Westernisers have been making hay. Hoardings advertising Биг Макс and Heinz кетчуп are old hat, but you're increasingly likely to see shops that cause a double take, like Рив Гош. Even weirder, more and more signs are bilingual – even hopping between Russian and English in mid-sentence.

Moscow Film Festival

2009-06-16T04:58:00.000-07:00

A very quick post after an absence in Russia - of which more in due course - pointing to the Moscow Film Festival. Though it's international, obviously here I'm looking mostly at the Russian/Soviet stuff. There are a couple of potentially interesting strands.

The opening film is Pavel Lungin's The Tsar (Царь) starring, as Metropolitan Philip, Oleg Yankovsky, who died about a month ago.

Last year's Socialist avant-gardism continues with part 2, including a couple of things I'll be sad to miss, notably Kozintsev's quite rare wartime propaganda shorts. Medvedkin's Miracle Woman (Чудесница, 1936) I remember as a typically enjoyable bit of knockabout. Sadly the MIFF blurbs generally give little indication of what is avant-garde about the films but I'd be interested to see an early foray into that territory by Ivan Pyriev, director of the notorious Cossacks of the Kuban (1949), a musical comedy that celebrated the way that Soviet farmers regularly exceeded their wheat quotas, or Sergei Yutkevich who, after his early wildness, interleaved most workaday productions with under-the-radar criticisms. They've chosen his last film, Lenin in Paris (Ленин в Париже, 1981), which, from the still seems a bit more promising though the published script that I have gives no indications of it being anything other than you would expect.
Last year there was a rather odd collection of films marking the centenary of the first film showing in Russia (Stenka Razin an obvious choice but, for all its popularity, Vainshtok's 1938 Treasure Island?!) This year three films mark the seventieth anniversary of the start of the war - interesting that they take it as 1939, rather then 1941, when the USSR was invaded. Given how massive a subject it is for Soviet cinema it would have been a good opportunity to do an archival retrospective (there was something similar in Berlin a few years ago) but they chose a very partial view with three contemporary looks back.

The Georgian strand reminds us just how strong that country's cinema is. There's a neat circularity in From The Vow to Repentance - the first, directed by Mikhail Chiaureli, is an early highpoint in Soviet cinema's hagiography of Stalin, while Abuladze's Repentance (1984) shatteringly dismantles the myth. Sadly, The Vow is the earliest film being shown, so we don't get to see any Georgian silents (the country was a late starter but strong).

The Chiaurelis (Mikhail, wife Veriko Andzhaparidze and daughter Sofiko) were important in cinema in the Causasus, but even more so were the Shengelayas. Nikoloz (1903-43) was a pioneer (Elisso, 1928 is extraordinarily beautiful), and his two sons Eldar (b.1933) and Georgi (b.1937) respectively directed the hilarious comedy Blue Mountains, or an Unbelievable Story (1983) and the blissful portrait of the naive painter Pirosmani (1969). When

Sofiko C and Georgi S married, the two dynasties were linked and had a massive impact on Soviet cinema, with a welter of relations, including their director-son, another Nikoloz. Andzhaparidze was also aunt to Georgi Daneliya, linking to another whole strand. I tried working out a family tree but ran out of paper. Apart from returning to the Stalin myth, Repentance neatly brings things full circle as Andzhaparidze (whose family, despite the Chiaureli connection, were not immune from the Terror) appears in it. In fact, it's a bit of a family affair as various clan members were involved.

Elsewhere, there's documentary about Prokofiev (which I'll be reviewing at greater length later in the year) as well as tributes to Pavel Lungin, Armenian documentarian Harutyun Khachatryan, some of Karen Shakhnazarov's favourite films (good to see Some Like it Hot in there) and a massive animation programme

Beyond Russia and the former USSR, as Britain finally gets the release of Wajda's Katyn Moscow is showing his new film Sweet Rush (Tatarak), dedicated to the cinematographer Edward Kłosiński and narrated in parts by his widow Krystyna Janda.

Finally, it's worth noting that the Skolimowski tribute includes both Le Départ and Deep End. Skolimowski's first western film has been available on DVD in the past (though he thinks another, more widely available one may be in the offing) but hopefully this is a sign that Deep End's long unavailability in some infuriating rights nightmare has been resolved.

New Europe Film Festival

2009-05-02T01:28:00.000-07:00

A quick note about the New Europe Film Festival which runs at the Barbican from May 4th to 6th: six films from new EU member states, concentrating on 20-30 year-olds whose lives crossed from socialism into capitalism.

The Polish contribution is Andrzej Jakimowski's second feature Tricks (Sztuczki), a gently touching story of how two children maintain hope in the face of family breakdown.

In Vladimir Michálek's Of Parents and Children (O rodicích a detech) a father and son take their monthly walk around the back streets of Prague, revisiting and coming to terms with past wounds.

Overnight from Hungarian director Ferenc Török follows 24 hours in the hectic life of Peter a broker who is soon to be a father but faces a collapsing love life.

Estonia and Finland collaborated to produce René Vilbre's I Was Here (Mina Olin Siin), a violent, fast-paced story about Rass, who tries to balance his aspirations to be a doctor with his part-time petty crime and drug pushing.

Music (Musika) is another co-production - this time Germany and Slovakia. Living in a cramped flat, part-time jazz saxophonist Martin has to practice at the water plant where he works. But his life changes when he meets Hruskovic, a more dynamic musician, and the nymphomaniac Anca, and they decide to form a band.

Though we do get to hear the 'title song', Cristian Nemescu's Cannes and LFF award-winning California Dreamin' is called, in Romanian, Nesfarsit, literally endless. Since Nemescu died before making the last tweaks to the edit, in tribute, it was released just as he had left it, and in that sense is endless. But more bleakly it reflects on NATO and the west's interventions in the Balkans, the ongoing collaborations and misunderstandings between the two and the sometimes less than enlightened views of the locals.

Altogether the fest gives a capsule view of the struggles of a generation coming to terms with a completely new world.

From Nova Scotia...

2009-04-14T11:31:00.000-07:00

Nothing to do with film or music, but perhaps a little bit avant-garde - a heads up for From Nova Scotia to London, a new blog, belonging to an artist who works in photography and print-making.

Charity concert

2009-03-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

A friend has asked me to alert you to a charity concert. Coincidentally I've seen Marina play a couple of times and can vouch that this will be not only a contribution to a worthy cause, but an enjoyable evening. It will also be a rare chance to hear some music by Boris Pasternak, who, before embarking on the literary career that would bring him the Nobel Prize (had he been allowed to collect it) was a composition student at the Moscow Conservatory

The Jimmy Knapp Cancer Fund presents a fundraising piano recital of works by Chopin, Pasternak and Schumann by Marina Primachenko.

The Regent Hall, 275 Oxford Street, London, W1C 2DJ
7:30pm

Tickets are £15 each, to book please send a cheque made payable to "Jimmy Knapp Cancer Fund" and forward to: Laurie Bell, Unity Trust Bank Plc, Congress House, 23-28 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3UB. Please state how many tickets you require.

33 Scenes from Life (33 Sceny z Życia)

2009-03-15T12:30:00.000-07:00

Małgorzata Szumowska’s latest film, 33 Scenes from Life (IMDb entry here), made an impressive, if claustrophobic opener for the seventh Kinoteka Film Festival.

It begins with a family meal including Jerzy, a journalist, his author-wife Barbara, their artist-daughter Julia and Piotr, her composer-husband. They gently rib each other though there’s a serious undertow and we might think we know where the story’s going. But we’re blindsided when Barbara gets cancer and dies. Shortly afterwards, Jerzy has a fatal heart attack and Julia, having lost both parents, is forced to reappraise her life and work with her husband, her sister, and artistic collaborator Adrian.

33 Scenes is impressively photographed, using a muted palette and, mostly in medium shots. Going for a documentary style meant no blocking – the actors improvise and the camera follows them: hence no close-ups, though the initial idea to shot each scene, Woyzeck-like, in a single take was soon abandoned. One great shot sums up the gradual clarification of the emotional maze. Half-obscured by the doorframe, Julia sits on the bathroom floor talking to Adrian on the phone, but when Piotr enters the scene we gradually work out that what we're actually seeing is partially reflected in a mirror, with the doorways and reflections slightly confused. It adds to the oppressive atmosphere, which is lightened (if that’s the word), by touches of the darkest imaginable comedy.

But most formally surprising are several long musical interludes by Paweł Mykietyn. Acting the part of Piotr’s new orchestra piece, they make one of most impressive and uncompromising film scores I’ve heard for a long time. Though it begins with a semi-impressionistic falling theme dominated by the harp – perhaps inspired by Julia (Peter reveals it in the bedroom during a tenderly comic bedroom scene) – we soon get a Schonbergian variation, and the music continues to intensify: dark, grinding, dissonant, roaring and occasionally rearing up terrifyingly, like something from the 1960s Polish avant-garde. Against such music, shots of the orchestral rehearsals seemed banal and so, pending another idea, they were removed and replaced by black leader. When one of the German producers saw it, he thought they should remain. And so they do, like operatic interludes, bleeding slightly into the surrounding scenes, or even the diegetic, as when the obsessive xylophone is taken over by a bleak oscilloscope. The combination of music and blank screen allow us to contemplate what we’ve just seen and prepares us for the continuation.

As for the title: yes the script originally had 33 scenes but during editing that changed and Szumowska now doesn’t know how many there are. It began as an autobiographical sketch – her father was journalist/film-maker Maciej Szumowska about whom she made the documentary Mój tata Maciej (2005) and her mother the children’s writer Dorota Terakowska. This all proved controversial in Poland, though Szumowska insists that there isn’t a strict 1-to-1 relationship between reality and the film. Perhaps the original idea of doing the film in English would have helped the separation (or perhaps made it more controversial as her parents were quite well known) but in the event she decided that it was a very Polish film that would only work in that language.

Casting Julia was problematic: Polish actresses recognized the autobiographical elements and assumed that they would be playing some form of the director – exactly what she didn’t want! Eventually she saw what she wanted in the German actress Julia Jentsch in Sophie Scholl. Not speaking Polish, she learned the role phonetically and was dubbed, as was the Dane Peter Gantzler as Adrian. But, demanding more direction, Jentsch clashed with Szumowska several times on set, even threatening to leave the film. Fortunately she stuck it out, though they parted on very bad terms. Happily, when she saw the final edit Jentsch was delighted with the result and the two are reconciled.

I won't bother embedding the trailer that's on Youtube as it completely misrepresents the film, so here's part one of Paweł Mykietyn's Cello Sonata instead - you can click through to part two afterwards. Not as dense as 33 Scenes' score and there's not much to see, but enough to make me want to hear more.

Finally, with many East European films, it’s violently pro-smoking: as Szumowska says; “if I want to commit suicide by smoking, that’s my business.”

Burnt by the Sun

2009-03-11T08:29:00.000-07:00

Stage plays have always provided material for the cinema, but recently there has been a series of productions going the other way (in fact, with The Fly, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Lost Highway amongst others, you could argue that the preferred ultimate destination is opera). And so the National Theatre is showing Peter Flannery’s adaptation 1994 Foreign Film Oscar-winner Burnt by the Sun, scripted by Rustam Ibragimbekov and director Nikita Mikhalkov.

SPOILER ALERT (throughout)

June, 1936. Colonel Sergei Kotov is at his dacha with his daughter Nadezhda (Nadia), his wife Marusia and her family. An old friend (and Marusia’s former lover) Mitya arrives unexpectedly. Some years previously, Kotov had ‘invited’ Mitya to join the NKVD (predecessors of the KGB) where, under cover of being an émigré musician, he betrayed several White officers. He has received orders to take Kotov to the Kremlin to be questioned about alleged spying. Mitya finds his duty coinciding with his desire for revenge.

Though it’s obviously a Chekhovian dacha-drama, the film occasionally breaks out into the countryside, but here, apart from the swimming trip (with the dacha in the backgound), it all takes place at home, which works surprisingly well.

The film achieved a remarkable success in working well for western audiences, while embedding dialogue, music and references that added additional layers for Russian viewers. In fact the English version was slightly cut to remove some of the more Russocentric elements, and Flannery has followed that, while making some additional cuts and introducing new things, notably a subplot involving the middle-aged maid Mokhova, a virgin who flirts with a passing van-driver.

Why a reference to Hamlet was replaced by Escalus I'm not sure: a nation of Bardophiles like Russia would be completely unfazed. One minor but definite improvement is cutting the film’s destructive burning orbs, though oddly there’s still a vestigial reference to them that could disappear without losing anything apart from a few seconds of stage time. The 'Holiday of the Stalinist Balloon-Makers’ subplot is also a bit troublesome. Though it leads to the film’s impressive climax and a dreadful moment for Mitya, it's hard to imagine how it could be staged: better simply cut it altogether, as the semi-symbolism here (looking and sounding like an off-stage asthmatic dragon) probably only confuses anyone who hasn’t seen the film.

There's also a clear missed opportunity: the film starts with Mitya receiving his orders and making a desultory attempt at Russian roulette to avoid the job. At the end he slits his wrists in his Moscow bath, ironically echoing the titular song’s line about crimson waters (in the sunset) and the suicide attempt that Marusia made when he left (enforcedly) without explanation. In the play Flannery cuts the opening scene and finishes with Mitya shooting himself at the dacha: surely including the prologue would have made a neat book-ending.

But the major change is to Kotov’s daughter, Nadezhda (Russian for ‘hope’). In the film she’s irreplaceably played by Mikhalkov’s own similarly-named six year-old daughter, but here she's about ten. Practicalities (including child-actor laws) probably forced the change but it’s sad to lose the innocence that is so overwhelming in the film: the dark end of the play’s first act makes Nadia aware of how the state is overwhelming private life, whereas in the film she remains cheeky and charming to the very end, making her fate all the more distressing.

Her role is also cut back in two of the film’s tent-pole scenes: her dialogue with Kotov on the boat is given to Marusia, though he still invokes the spirit of Chapayev and conveys his intense faith in the Soviet future. But more serious is the decision to restage Mitya’s crucial story-confession. In the film it's a long scene framed by a window in which he tells Nadia a ‘fairy story’, reversing and anagramaticising the family’s names to allude to his dark mission, while the rest of the family listen uncomfortably in the next room. The complex layering of audiences (Nadia; the family; and us) is simplified on stage and his motivation flattened as it he is less torn between a sense of duty and a desire to be challenged. Here it is lesss nuanced: Nadia sleeps on Kotov's breast while Mitya's story, a semi-overt confession, is to Marusia and the whole family.

One of the film’s most evocative elements is the music, though there’s relatively little by Mikhalkov’s regular composer Eduard Artemyev. It’s more of a patchwork of popular songs from the 1930s including the almost-titular tango (the film changes it from The Weary Sun to Wearied by the Sun), which runs throughout the film as a bittersweet refrain. Originally Polish, its lyric about parting lovers meant it acquired the nickname “suicide tango”, another dramatic irony. Later, it was adapted and made a hit by Soviet jazz luminaries including Leonid Utyosov and Alexander Tsfasman. It also became enough of a symbol to pop up in Norshtein’s Tale of Tales, Kieslowski’s Three Colours: White and even (in its Polish form) Schindler’s List. I could have done with hearing it a few more times, as you do in the film.

This is the original (not, I think, the performance that's in the film).

And this is what Artyemev does with it for the trailer

Wisely they’ve kept the disturbingly manic performance of Offenbach’s Can-can, also used by Shostakovich as a symbol of a corrupt regime in New Babylon. In fact Shostakovich pops up a couple more times: on the way to the Kremlin Kotov breaks into a tune that any Russian would recognise: The Song of the Counterplan, indissolubly linked to the 1930s and a tune to which Shostakovich returned more than once, as explained in this book. At the National, Kotov simply suggests singing some folk songs (a few bars wouldn’t have come amiss, though they’d have to pay Booseys!) And there’s a brief reference to the ever-popular Aviators' March ("We Were Born to Make Fairy Tales Come True"). Finally, I wonder if the film's fragment of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth String Quartet is a little Artemyevan joke: the quartet was dedicated to the cellist Sergei Shirinsky: Kotov’s first name is, of course, Sergei. But the staging dispenses with much of the music, making the texture a bit thinner.

Burnt by the Sun is an intensely patriotic piece: Mikhalkov-Kotov saves “the people’s wheat” and fights for the Motherland and defends the future he envisages for it. Whatever Bolshevism later became, he cleaves to its initial stated aims and the play, if anything, strengthens that, with Kotov more forcefully reminding us of his peasant beginnings and the cowardice of the bourgeoisie who ran before him rather than defending their beloved lifestyle. That also slightly changes the dynamic with the rest of the family as he more openly despises them for that.

But none of these changes reduce the power of the piece and, as I said, Flannery has made it work brilliantly for a Western audience.

Meanwhile, Mikhalkov is currently producing Burnt by the Sun 2, a blockbuster two-part epic. Part one is set to open on 9 May 2010, the 65th anniversary of Victory Day, and the film will then be expanded as a 12-part mini-series.

For this he has reanimated Kotov, Marusia and Mitya who all died or were reported dead in the first film! Mikhalkov's father Sergei, of course wrote the lyrics of the Soviet national anthem and reworked them for a new audience when Putin revived it, and Nikita’s actions sometimes bring him to the edge of being an apologist for a cult of personality. Hence a visit to the set from Vladimir Putin, with his newly imposed official view of Stalinism, might raise an eyebrow but the director assures us the film will denounce the tyrant.

Finally, a small plug for Birgit Beumers' excellent guide to the film, published by Tauris.

Psycho for Sale

2009-03-04T06:26:00.000-08:00

One of the problems for students of film scores can simply be finding the materials: studios often owned not only the copyright, but also the scores and parts, so composers could neither reuse the musical material nor ensure that it was physically preserved. But actually the studios didn’t really care about this stuff: the score was recorded; unless they wanted to re-record the music as library tracks, the manuscript was useless. Hence occasional clearouts would see them skip hundreds of pages of – to them - valueless paper.

Of course, since then, the interest in film music has developed and there is a greater value to these things, though ironically Hollywood’s obsession with rights means that often the material, though it exists, is hardly more accessible.

Still, even in earlier days, things slipped through the system, increasingly as composers rose to prominence and were able to negotiate more favourable terms.

One such was Bernard Herrmann. Hence he included chunks of his scores to Jane Eyre and The Ghost and Mrs Muir in his opera Wuthering Heights. But he also held onto the material and various donations mean that the University of Santa Barbara has a handsome collection.

But not everything. Like any other piece of music, film scores go through various versions on their way to completion and so it is that Herrmann’s widow Norma has decided to sell the most significant collection of film music related material to come on the market for several years. It comes up at Bonhams on 24 March (lots 110-11, and 193-218), details, here.

The highlight is a full autograph score of the concert suite Psycho: a Narrative for Orchestra, and anyone who has 40 grand knocking around would be tempted. Though it's a fair copy, there are a few alterations but I'm not sure it's going to revolutionise our view of either the film score or the concert work. Still, a lovely thing to own, perhaps framed in the shower.

But there are also things like a typically blunt missive from Schonberg, thanking Herrmann for a broadcast performance of the Second Chamber Symphony, which he felt was good though it suffered from electrical interference (and CBS’s engineers who disliked his music, and “always distort by the mixtures the sound.”)

Amongst Herrmann’s other left-field interests was Joseph Raff (1822-82), and you can buy Herrmann’s marked up copy of the 5th Symphony (Lenore). This may have been preparatory to his self-financed recording with the LPO, which inspired an epic shirt-ironing session.

A particular bargain (it seems to me) is a collection of eighteen letters from Charles Ives, of whose music Herrmann was a regular promoter. Having said that, Bonhams’ wide-ranging £4-8,000 estimate implies that they’re not entirely sure what it might raise.

Finally, a reminder of Herrmann’s romantic roots comes from his numerous volumes of Alfred Stieglitz’s seminal Camera Work, filled with early 20th-century photography (another 30k to find!) Herrmann’s Anglophilia is nicely (though coincidentally) illustrated by Alvin Langdon Coburn’s The Bridge – London.

Vampires, Voodoo, Vixens, Victims

2009-02-18T07:55:00.000-08:00

In what might seem something of a departure from the stated specialisations of this blog, a heads up that I'll be interviewing ... errr ... Ingrid Pitt on Resonance 104.4fm. Tune in (or listen online) on Friday 27th at 5pm.

I'm sure that no-one here needs reminding of Ingrid's striking presence in Gothic horrors like The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula, as well as The House That Dripped Blood, which she is introducing on Friday 20th as part of the Barbican Cinema's tribute to Amicus (not the old trade union).

Thereafter I'll be returning to the more usual fare.

Here's the trailer for The House That Dripped Blood

Not much Ingrid there, so here's the trailer for Countess Dracula:

Kinoteka, 2009: London, Belfast and Canterbury

2009-02-16T08:17:00.000-08:00

A quick heads up on the forthcoming Kinoteka, aka the 7th Polish Film Festiwal [sic], which takes place over a variety of London venues: The Riverside, Tate Modern, the Barbican, BFI South Bank, the Prince Charles and Cargo. Look out for:

New Polish Cinema. Mostly from the last couple of years, and including shorts, docs and a focus on the (to me, unknown) Marcin Koszałka.

The Polish New Wave. Including Zanussi's study of unblinking rationality The Illumination (Illuminacja, 1973), shot by Edward Kłosiński (obit here), and Andrzej Żuławski introducing his own On the Silver Globe (Na Srebrnym Globie), a self-referential contemplation of a politically hamstrung torso.

Jerzy Skolimowski. Including his first four features and, after a seventeen year hiatus since Ferdydurke, his latest Four Nights with Anna (Cztery noce z Anna).

In addition, there'll be an exhibition marking the 20th anniversary of Kieslowski's Dekalog and its two longer offshoots A Short Film About Love and A Short Film About Killing. Some parts of Dekalog will be shown with supporting films from other directors.

Finally Michael Nyman will celebrate his love of Polish cinema with a new piece set to a montage of film clips.

After that, a selection of films will go to the Queens Film Theatre in Belfast, while Canterbury's Sounds New Contemporary Music Festival will include various Polish and Polish-themed films and several concerts including Penderecki conducting his own epic St Luke Passion, and the conference Polish Music Since 1945.

In the meantime, I'll be polishing up my collection of diacritics to comment on some of the films.

Air and Simple Gifts

2009-01-21T05:32:00.000-08:00

Perhaps odd, on the day following such a momentous event, to focus on five minutes of minority interest, but we all bring our own perspectives to things and focusing on a detail needn't exclude an appreciation of the bigger picture.

John Williams, apart from being Spielberg's house composer and spending thirteen years heading up the Boston Pops, has written various pieces of what would be called "occasional music", such as four Olympic overtures, the Liberty Fanfare for the Statue's centenary, not to mention various concertos, etc.

So it was natural that his phone should ring when a piece was needed for Obama's inauguration yesterday.

Which brings us to Air and Simple Gifts (the title omits to mention a brief coda).

Williams' decision to write a set of variations on the quaker song Simple Gifts is understandable: it's a popular tune with a 'classical' pedigree (best known as the finale of Appalachian Spring, by Aaron Copland, one of Obama's favourite composers). Classical music isn't normally a part of the ceremony but the Yale Concert Band was to usher Dwight Eisenhower into office in 1953 with a performance of Copland's Lincoln Portrait, before Republican representative Fred E Busbey (ironically from Illinois) complained about the gig being given to a commie.

I think it's probably straining things to try to see some significance in the decision to give it to the same, slightly odd ensemble Messiaen chose for the Quartet for the End of Time.

There's often a lot of talk about how film scores are now the only way that many people get to hear orchestral (read: classical) music. Williams might not have pushed the boat out in terms of the forces involved (apart from the stellar casting). Nevertheless, it's nice to think that one aspect of a great day was that a million people got to hear the piece live, and goodness known how many on TV and the web.

Meanwhile BBC viewers were treated to Huw Edwards introducing "four of the most gifted musicians in the world" before proceeding to a pointless conversation with Matt Frei, who described how, in 1841, President William Henry Harrison gave the longest ever inaugural speech before catching pneumonia and dying ("which", Frei reassured the doubtless alarmed audience, "is not going to happen this time round"). Harrison actually lasted just about a month, thus becoming the holder of the shortest ever presidency. So perfectly timed was Frei and Edwards' annihilation of the Air - they finished just before the 'tune' came in - you could imagine it was planned to save us the horrors of having to listen to the first two minutes of a five-minute piece.

Frost/Nixon

2009-01-09T13:25:00.000-08:00

I saw Frost/Nixon for the second time the other day (first in the LFF then, on DVD, during a transatlantic holiday) and liked it both times. Of course, in certain circles one isn’t supposed to say that sort of thing because it’s a Ron Howard film but he’s solid enough, though he tends to be at the mercy of his writers: he can’t save A Beautiful Mind but neither can he destroy Frost/Nixon – especially as Sheen and Langella had, through the stage show, essentially been in rehearsal for months. This isn’t the blog for an extensive review (nobody would expect one and I’ve got other things on the burner) but one thing did strike me about Michael Sheen’s portrayal of Frost.

Up to this point Sheen was probably best known for playing Tony Blair in The Deal and The Queen, though his cast of real-life people also includes Kenneth Williams, and he’ll soon be essaying Brian Clough. Incidentally, The Deal's implication that John Smith's chosen successor was Brown and Blair was a usurper put me in mind of how Lenin's will was ignored, but I doubt we'll be seeing Sheen play Stalin any time soon.

In the meantime Sheen found that Frost and Blair share a strangely similar quality: the struggle between a steely will and a child-like desire to be liked.

That’s part of Frost/Nixon’s arc: the superficial playboy chat-show host faces a panward-heading career and possible bankruptcy as no-one wants the interviews that have swallowed a good chunk of his own and his friends’ money. But he pulls himself together and sits up all night doing the research to nail Tricky Dick, saving the day and forging himself a new reputation.

Similarly, Steve Bell famously skewered the young Blair as Bambi, whose radical agenda (if it was ever there) was immediately dropped for fear of scaring the voters. But a few years later the sight of a million people marching down Whitehall did nothing to change his mind. Steve Bell’s description of him as having one angry eye and one smiley one seems to sum that up.

For Blair/Sheen the decisive moment was the death of Princess Diana but for me – and I don’t think this was simply an inability by either Sheen or me to shake off the earlier role - in Frost/Nixon there were definitely some moments featuring a strange chimera: Blast or (more likely) Flair.

Synch Sound

2008-12-05T13:37:00.000-08:00

Settling into NFT3 for the Out of Sight Out of Sync event, I read Takahira Iimura's programme note. It wasn’t promising.

Using the system of academy leader: 10 to 1, the film replaces the number to white space with bip sound (clear leader) gradually until it reaches complete white.

Could it be that simple? When the film started, my heart sank – yes it could. It seemed we were in for the filmic equivalent of strict process music or total serialism. The creator makes a set of decisions and then sets it all in train like a line of tumbling dominoes. But not so entertaining.

Of course the artist's abdication of ongoing control can lead to embarrassments like the unintentional chord of A minor that turns up in the middle of one of Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke. Oh, how we laughed at the irony…

But for me, once the system is understood, it rather negates the actual experience. The apex is possibly James Tenney’s unlistenable August Harp in which the unfortunate soloist (and listener) endure 43 grinding minutes, arpeggiating at an unchanging trudge through every possible permutation of a diatonic tetrachord, altered by use of the pedals (I’ll save you the effort: there are – count ‘em – 81). An all too representative sample is here. Tenney’s own exertions were somewhat milder as he simply wrote the instructions on the back of a post card, doubtless driving the benighted recipient literally ‘postal’.

Anyway, back to the darkened NFT. It seemed that we’d be subjected to the same sort of artistic waterboarding: the visual count down – 10, 9 (+ 1 white), 8(+2 white)… etc all the way to 1(+ 9 white) and then back up to 10 accompanied only by the intermittent blip and the hiss and pop of the track.

I confess I quickly did some mental arithmetic. Thank God, only 200 seconds.

But then – wasn’t there a missing number? An eye-slip or a knackered print? But the moment had gone. Slowly, other ‘anomalies’ appeared and the sequence began increasingly to short circuit and loop back on itself. So we went from 8 to 4 or from 3 to 7, and the sense of 10-1 being a irreducible series was paradoxically intensified and weakened as it was first broken and then reconstructed. In our heads invisible strings linked the new, artificial series, the criss-crossing creating an elegant mental cat’s cradle.

A dreaded 200 seconds mysteriously became an enchanting twelve minutes. Iimura's underselling the film.

Veljo Tormis

2008-11-27T09:28:00.000-08:00

Veljo Tormis: Works for Men’s Voices

Toccata Classics. TOCC0073

The Soviet regime was always wary of nationalist feelings in the republics but, for Estonians, music was a buttress against Russification and Sovietisation. In the four years before gaining independence in 1991 more than a fifth of the population would regularly join the so-called Singing Revolution (laulev revolutsioon), defiantly congregating in the streets to perform forbidden songs.

By then Veljo Tormis had been composing for over thirty years, concentrating on choral music and creating monumental cycles as well as smaller one-off songs.

Tormis was born in 1930, the eldest son of a farmer who was musically active in the local church in Vigala, Estonia, At 12 he entered Tallinn Conservatory but two years later the Soviets arrived and stopped the too-religiously-inflected organ class, so Tormis transferred to choral conducting, though the lack of churches restricted opportunities there as well. In 1951 he moved to Moscow to study with Vissarion Shebalin – to whom no doubt I’ll return – graduating in 1956.

The Soviets attitude to the Republics was always ambivalent: on one hand encouraging nationalism but at the same time taking care that it should not grow too strong. Tormis’ interest in Estonian folk music had been supported by Shebalin and, supporting himself by teaching in Tallinn, he went on to study the music of Orff and, after a visit to Hungary in 1962, Kodaly.

This climaxed with his first great cycle, Estonian Calendar Songs (Eesti kalendrilaulud) for mixed chorus (1967) and by 1969 was able to support himself, composing film scores, an opera and, overwhelmingly, choral music. Estonian national identity is closely bound to its choral traditions – amateur singing is endemic - hence Tormis’ importance and popularity.

Tormis himself said it best in setting the exiled Gustav Suits’ poem I’d Like to Sing a Song (Ühte laulu tahaks laulda)

I’d like to sing a song,
Just this only one:
That would rise a huge wave of sea
From the heart

You can hear (and buy) it here.

Titles like Bridges of Song (Laulusild) and Forgotten Peoples (Unustad rahvad) imply attempts to bind together misbegotten populations through music. The latter (formed of six sub-cycles) is particularly poignant as an epic memorial to endangered civilisations, such as the Izhorians and Votes. The Soviets responded by banning some of his works.

Tormis develops ancient Estonian regilaul, ‘runic’ songs, which might include imitations of natural sounds and something close to rhythmic speaking or shouting, with proto-minimalist rhythms. But Tormis avoids pared down Pärt-ishness: his musical roots are less religious than folk-pagan and very specifically Baltic-Finno-Ugrian: “It is not I who makes use of folk music: it is folk music that makes use of me.” As well as settings of modern Estonian poets, there are spells and incantations from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, and the Estonian equivalent, the Kalevipoeg.

Tormis creates a vast range of colours and textures and a huge dynamic range: the epic Curse Upon Iron (Ruaa needmine) is the highlight of the disc, running the gamut from whispering to shouting, by way of uncanny choral glissandos. You’ll have to turn up the volume for the quiet bits, but prepare to be blasted out of your chair a few minutes later. The Bishop and the Pagan (Piispa ja pakana) sets chant-like sections against, freer, more irregular music to tell both sides of the story of a 12th-century British missionary martyr. Beside these 10-minute mini-epics are catchy, witty and thrilling little pieces like An Aboriginal Song (Pärimaalase lauluke) and Incantation for a Stormy Sea (Incantatio maris aestuosi).

Tormis’ music is simultaneously ancient and newly minted, and the Svanholm Singers under Sofia Söderberg Eberhard hurl themselves into it with fantastic gusto. Tormis himself joins in, playing the shaman drum in two songs and the anvil in another, while counter-tenor Stefan Engström also does a turn on log drums. Along with some whistling, these sounds make the disc even more atmospheric.

Tormis isn’t a new name (for those in the know) but, though there have been several CDs of his music, he isn’t as widely known as his compatriot Pärt. Toccata Classics’ excellent selection, including premieres of a couple of revised pieces, is a welcome push in that direction.

Fans of choral music, and anyone with a taste for Kodaly, Orff (the insistent Musica Poetica from his Schulwerk was used in Malick’s film Badlands) or Bartók’s Mikrokosmos shouldn’t wait.

Shameless self promotion

2008-11-21T08:17:00.001-08:00

Just in time for Christmas, I thought I'd point to a few things that I've been up to (relatively) recently.

A heads-up on the arrival of my book Discover Film Music from Naxos. It comes with two 78-minute plus CDs, with examples of everything from Steiner's King Kong (1933) to ... errr .... Ifukube's Godzilla. Actually there's a disc of Hollywood music from the aforementioned ape to Spider-Man, and another covering composers from or working in Britain, Sweden, the USSR, Italy, Switzerland, France, Japan, Belgium and Poland. Not the whole of the rest of the world, I realise, but there was a word-count! Finally, there's a timeline (highlighting selected Oscar-winners and literary adaptations with notable scores) and a glossary. There's a description on the Naxos site and you can buy it from all the usual outlets. If you need any more persuading, there's a review here though you might have to scroll down a bit to get to it.

I should also point out a few other recent arrivals, all Shostakovich-related. A couple of (quite different) round ups of his cinema career that I've written appear in two symposia.

With 640 pages, Michael Mishra's A Shostakovich Companion from Praeger Publishers should keep everyone who has a sturdy enough bedside table entertained for a good while. There's a full description and a list of contents here. In brief, the first half is taken up by Michael's look at how Shostakovich's music was received through and after his life (thankfully, a section not hijacked by Testimony discussions), and an analytical biography. Then there's a series of essays (including a return appearance from the editor!) analysing aspects of selected works. Approaches range from the musicological (his passacaglias) to the more literary (his dramatic impulse seen through the two operas). Finally a trio of articles look at his pianism, his legacy as seen through his students, both official and unofficial, and, courtesy of yours truly, his cinema work.

With a cover price of £95 it might be something that you'd want in your Christmas stocking (though one kindly soul is selling a second-hand copy on Amazon for only £94.99!) Whilst the cover might not be as striking as some others, I've included it simply because I've done it for everyone else and I'm nothing if not fair.

If you're harder pressed (and happy to take a shorter essay from me - though who would want to do that?) you could shell out about half as much for Pauline Fairclough and David Fanning's Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich (details here). Where the analyses in Mishra's book often look in great detail at particular works, this takes in entire genres (though with chapters on the First Symphony and the Second Piano Sonata). It begins with musicological workouts for the symphonies and string quartets before wandering further afield. The ballet, film and theatre music is set in the context of Shostakovich's life and the political turmoil in which he was unfortunate enough to live. This approach has the advantage of including some usually overlooked pieces, like The Song of the Forests, a work better than its 'inspiration' (Stalin's reforestation scheme) might imply.

Just to reassure everyone that my contributions to these two books are different, and different again from my full-length book. Indeed, if I ever got the chance to do a second edition, I'd definitely include some of my subsequent observations from these essays as well as my ongoing research.

Finally, a more specific essay Keeping the Icons on the Wall: Shostakovich's Cinema and Concert Music appears in the trilingual (English, Russian and Italian) Dmitrij D. Šostakovic (1906-1975). Tra musica, letteratura e cinema (there's also a pdf with a little more info). I look at some of the revolutionary songs and other pieces that Shostakovich quoted in various works and see how their repetitiveness, in conjunction with the films' cinematic style, could echo the effect of religious icons, enhancing the propaganda while turning music critics off. This book's a bit harder to track down, but you can buy it direct from the publishers Leo Olschki and there's also a list of overseas sellers on the site.

Sadly, I don't get any extra money should you decide to indulge in these tomes (and I selflessly urge you to do so), but I do get a nice warm glow from knowing that I've satisfied you!

Korean Film Festival

2008-10-25T05:22:00.000-07:00

The Korean Film Festival at the Barbican looks promising, if only on the strength of the two films that I've already seen.

Kim Ji-Woon's The Good, the Bad, the Weird (Joh-un nom, nappun nom, isanghan nom) is a massively enjoyable mash-up of Leone (the title, credit sequence and train-bound opening scene are explicit nods), Kurosawa and Hong Kong wire-work with some bizarre comedy thrown in. The market gunfight with the diving helmet (you have to see it) is hilarious, while the climactic single-handed decimation of the Japanese army as they gallop through the Manchurian desert is weirdly life-affirming in its pure energising enthusiasm. The delirious, almost relentless alternation of chase-fight-chase-fight hardly lets up and the 139 minutes fly by as quickly and as enjoyably as any Keaton film. There are a few nods to 1930s Sino-Japanese relations but if you're looking for a history lesson, this isn't it.

There are a couple of screenings at the London Film Festival but the Barbican has managed to persuade the director along to do a post-film screen-talk.

Utterly different is Lee Chang-dong's Secret Sunshine (Milyang). The quiet story of a woman struggling to start a new life after the death of her husband is utterly gripping and filled with tiny but resonating signs of her recovery. Jeon Do-yeon is on screen practically constantly and deservedly won Cannes' best actress award.

The Silence Before Bach

2008-10-22T06:47:00.000-07:00

A quick heads up for a great film in the LFF: The Silence Before Bach (Die Stille vor Bach). Sadly, as so often with the avant-garde stuff in the fest it is allegedly sold out (a single show on Thurs 23 Oct at 4pm in NFT2) but if you're in the area it's definitely worth dropping in to see if there's a chance of getting in. Information here.

I'll be writing more on it in due course.

Rock Monologue (Рок Монолог)

2008-10-22T03:16:00.000-07:00

“Rock music caught me on the head when I was sixteen and it never let go.”

Russia has a huge ‘bardic’ tradition, with a sub-strand of singers who fearlessly speak against authority on behalf of the people.

Ideally they should be careless of material success; difficult to the point of eccentricity; widely known but paradoxically impoverished, and forced to work underground, using guile to get their message across: a message that is universally understood and yet tolerated by the authorities that it criticises.

Pushkin (and, after him, Musorgsky) put one at the centre of Boris Godunov: the yurodivy, the ‘holy fool’ who refuses the Tsar grace and accuses him of murdering his way to the top, but who nevertheless enjoys his protection.

In later times rock musicians began to take on some aspects of the role, one of the most famous (in Russia) being Yuri Morozov (1948-2006) a composer/multi-instrumentalist/producer/sound-engineer.

Pop and rock, like jazz, were strange beasts in the USSR. While they were so popular they demanded some official recognition, their Western influence had to be curbed. Hence they became charged with a meaning even beyond that in the West. Imagine Elvis being put in a mental asylum on the basis that his music is …. well …. anybody who’s sane can hear that it’s just wrong, can't they?

Rock Monologue, Vladimir Kozlov’s portrait of Morozov, attempts to tell something of his life, concentrating on his struggle. Unfortunately Morozov died during filming, so his interviews are framed by friends’ posthumous thoughts, supplemented by Gennadi Zaitsev’s archive film.

But it starts with the regulation counterpoint of official Soviet events (Red Square parades et al) with Morozov’s darker songs about dreams (a recurring theme in his work), dissatisfaction, and how everyday smells and noises block out everything of value. In Zaitsev’s home movies Morozov and his friends horse around, as they occasionally fled the city to the dacha, trying out different personae, dressing up in costumes (or wearing nothing at all) and prancing around the forest, filming and photographing each other.

Back home, he filled his flat with a Heath-Robinson recording set-up or used downtime in the studio to record his music, often multi-tracking himself. Since using state equipment for personal profit was illegal, he embarked on a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities, duping them by duping his songs: repeatedly cross-recording them, so the KGB wouldn’t believe that such poor quality could come from professional equipment. Alvin Lucier’s greatest hit, I Am Sitting in a Room, uses the same technique to brilliant, if very different, effect.

As for the actual music, Morozov drew on heavy metal, prog rock, psychedelia, jazz, musique concrète, '80s synth-pop, Russian folk music and anything else that came to hand, pushing it through tape effects and weird concoctions of string-and-sellotape synthesisers. A couple of album covers give some sense of the range: the Genesis-surrealist Jimi Hendrix's Cherry Garden (1973), and the near Ultravox-ish The Exposed Feeling of Absence (2005! - obviously being fashionable was not high on Morozov's list of priorities).

Oddly, for all this experimentalism and official disdain, Morozov was immensely popular. Given the number of his albums in circulation he should have been a multimillionaire, as they were widely (if secretly) circulated: apparently most of the Soviet submarine fleet had copies.

Outside Russia Morozov’s music is still pretty difficult to track down – though the web, a sort of latter-day magnitizdat (the audio equivalent of samizdat) has come to his aid. I’ve found a few mp3s to link to (there are others), though with around sixty albums to his name, plus production credits for a host of other bands including DDT, Akvarium and Chizh and Co, it’s hard to feel that anything but a substantial chunk would only be a snapshot.

Though the 1977 song Dream (Сон) starts as a fairly inconsequential bit of sub-Deep Purple, the guitar solo briefly branches into something a bit weird before it pulls itself back together. The song’s title is rather more romantic than that of the album from which it’s taken: The Cretins’ Wedding (Свадьба кретинов).

The title track from the album Странник Голубой звезды (Blue-Star Wanderer, 1980-81) begins like a cheapo-synth folk song, but finishes off with a weird theremin-ish fluttering.

Weirdest of all is the title track from the 1981 album The Legend of May (Легенда о Майя). Obviously a post-Day-in-the-Life/Dark-Side-of-the-Moon production, it leaves them in the dust for sheer unsettlingness, with its Dada-esque combination of pretty much anything, including karaoke-ing over the Beatles.

You can download five more (equally strange) songs from The Cretins’ Wedding here. Sadly the titles came out (for me) as a series of question marks so you may need to identify them from my descriptions.

The title track is pierced by a series of almost blindingly bright guitar chords, while the middle section features a Cale-ishly moaning violin.

Я смеюсь над часами (I Mock the Hours)
The slow-mo guiro under the flowers-in-your-hair folk-pop at the start is slightly disconcerting but when something more akin to industrial noise breaks in…

The relentlessly bleak Черный пес (Black Cur) combines massively over-fuzzed guitar and detuned pub piano under a throat-mangling vocal line. The end of the song gets even stranger…

The relatively ‘normal’ Кретин (Cretin) features Morozov’s sneering over a heavy metal riff, to make one of the less sonically-interesting tracks here, though they lyrics (“I feel the stars: they are as slippery as human brains”) are typically dark and poetic.

Конформист (The Conformist). Again, after the intro’s wailing electronic would-be violin, the surface initially seems, well, conformist, despite the lyric (“In muddy waters, swim flowers and rubbish”) but soon the background stuff starts to break through and various strange noises leap from speaker to speaker.

It’s quite obvious that Morozov needs some serious advocacy in the West. Kozlov’s documentary is a start and it would be good to see more screenings following on from the one at the recent Russian Film Festival. But unfortunately it concentrates on Morozov’s more conservative output. That’s odd given that it also stresses his ‘outsider’ status, admitting that he was difficult to work with: more than once he denied the existence of his wife and his increasing religiosity may have caused some problems. But he inspired adoration from some of those who worked with him. He himself excoriates the compromises of Dylan (his honorary PhD), and McCartney for his knighthood (“that’s got nothing to do with music.”) Lennon was his hero, though there’s a feeling that it’s as much for his political statements as anything on his late-60s avant-garde albums. But for a Soviet artist the two sometimes became intertwined.

In the meantime, here are the first few few minutes from Rock Monologue (in Russian, subtitled in French):

Quantum of Solace

2008-09-25T10:28:00.000-07:00

Jack White is apparently dismayed that his song for the new Bond film has been used to advertise Coke rather than being reserved for the film world's largest product-placement fest.

In other news, it's sad that Amy Winehouse's effort was dropped. Bravely, perhaps, she wrote the lyrics as a sonnet, but subversively divided it into a quatrain, a quintrain and triplet, before finishing with the tradition final couplet. However, her great coup was what can only be described as a singular rhyme scheme. I have it on very good authority that the lyrics were not:

It's a quantum of solace:
From the Hill of Dollis
Being chased by the polis
With their pack of collies.
A Bolivian bloke called Gonzales
But not being played by Telly Savalas
(actually it's Peter Sallis)
We thought about Miriam Margolyes
But, we realised, she'd have to go bra-less.
Concerning international hauliers,
The story’s desperate and lawless,
The sub-plot’s from Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß.
I admit, the song's not flawless
If you can do better, call us!

Live and Remember (Живи и помни)

2008-09-19T05:23:00.000-07:00

The Russian Film Festival opened with Alexander Proshkin’s award-winning Live and Remember, based on the novel by Valentin Rasputin.

Rasputin was born in 1937 in Irkutsk, Siberia, and was a journalist before publishing his first fiction in 1961. He’s associated with ‘country prose’, a genre that began during the Thaw and was characterised by Chekhovian understatedness and slice-of-life stories. Though popular and officially praised (Live and Remember won a State Prize) it presented a sceptical view of modern life and industrialisation, though others felt it was a romanticised Russophilia.

His 1976 story Farewell to Matyora was the basis of the best, and best-known of several film adaptations, though when director Larisa Shepitko was killed in a car crash in 1979 her husband Elem Klimov completed it in 1983. Based on Rasputin’s own childhood, it tells how a village resists the flooding of their valley for the Bratsk hydro-electric dam.* In 1965 the project had inspired a very different artistic response in Yevtushenko’s panoramic epic poem. They, in turn, were different from creatives’ views of the Dnieper dam: Esfir Shub’s K-Sh-E: the Komsomol is the Patron of Electricity (1932) or Fyodor Gladkov’s novel Energy, which, written between 1932 and 1938, was actually in production for longer than the dam itself!

SPOILER ALERT!

Siberia during the war. While most of the men are away fighting, the women work as loggers, to supply the wood vital for the war effort. When Nastya's soldier-husband, Andrei is stationed near the village, he takes the opportunity to go AWOL. As a deserter, he can't go to the village, so he lives in the woods and Nastya brings occasional supplies, while there are various attempts to find him. Ironically, after four years of childless marriage, she falls pregnant. Andrei sees it as a blessing and insists she bears it but Nastya doesn’t know what to do: unable to reveal that it is Andrei's, she claims it was a passing Red Army Commissar. The village is divided, some, including her mother-in-law, condemning her and some more sympathetic, but when suspicions grow (perhaps fuelled by Andrei's father) she sticks to her story. The war ends but Andrei still doesn't reveal himself. A search party is sent out and Nastya, hoping to warn him, sets off across the lake at night. One of her oars breaks and, realising that she may in fact be leading them to him, she jumps into the lake. At a commemorative meal, Andrei is condemned, though there is an irony when one of Nastya's friends agrees that "he is in hell", while Nastya is elevated to a 'saint'. A tug-boat sails down the river, broadcasting the Red Square victory parade and when the captain sees but doesn't recognise the unresponsive Andrei, he shouts: "Are you alive?"

Throughout Live and Remember, there’s a constant feeling of the hardness of life: the opening scenes riff on shots of and discussions about axes - vital to life in this harsh landscape. When Andrei steals a calf, there’s a montage of their eyes – beseeching? apologetic? hopeless? - before he brings down the axe.

Alexander and Gennadi Karyuk’s wintry cinematography (underlined by constant, snow-squeaking shoes) is slightly warmed by Roman Dormindoshin’s music which, though often gently minimalist, occasionally rises to muted melody.

Though Rasputin (like many writers) tends not to enjoy adaptations of his work, the appropriately named Dariya Moroz, who plays Nastya, helped kick-start the film after starring in a stage production. Book-ended by the actors playing an old Siberian game, that was dropped for the film and a new coda written. Predictably he though the film was OK but disliked the changes.

Playing Andrei, Mikhail Evlanov is something of a feature in the festival. To judge from this and his other roles, he obviously enjoys make-up and in Live and Remember he is gradually transformed from merely unkempt to being a kind of wild-man. Disillusioned, he destroys his medals and attempts suicide, in contrast with the village’s returning hero, Maxim Vologzhin.

Though there might initially be a whiff of The Return of Martin Guerre, we’re soon reassured that Andrei is indeed who he claims, but Nastya’s reminiscences of their happy marriage are brutally cut short by Andrei’s ruthless self-assessment as a wife-beater and a deserter: a double-criminal.

Counterpointing the two younger leads is veteran Sergei Makovetsky as Andrei's hyper-intense father, cannily putting together the clues about Andrei, but struggling to do the best for both his son and the village. His age and gammy leg explain why he isn’t at the front, highlighting suspicions about the young village leader, a drunken bully ironically named Nestor. Several smaller parts are taken by non-professionals. Presumably they were brought in from Irkutsk (it was actually shot around Nizhny Novgorod) to help with the peculiar local accent, which caused the Russian actors (and some Russian audiences) a bit of trouble. Following on from Rasputin, Proshkin and Moroz both wanted to contrast rural and urban outlooks: four country people, practicality – like Nastya binging food to Andrei – is a stronger expression of love than for urbanites.

Unsurprisingly, Live and Remember is a bit reminiscent of Farewell – the overwhelmingly female cast facing intense difficulties, and, in its whiteness and moral contemplations, Shepitko’s The Ascent (1976): the title is a grim reminder of Andrei’s fate, to live on and be tormented by his memories. It also has the sensitivity to rural life that Proshkin showed in The Cold Summer of ’53 (1987). But it’s its own film, and, if it isn’t quite Farewell’s equal, it's certainly an outstanding achievement. Sadly, it was given a fairly limited release in Russia (though it was well-received) but, hopefully, success on the festival circuit will help its profile, while it's also been released on DVD.

* Given the project’s birth pangs, it’s ironic that the name derives from the Russian for ‘Brother’

Live and Remember (Живи и помни; Zhivi i pomni, 2008)
Farewell to Matyora (Прощание с Матёрой; Proshchai s Matyoroi, 1983)
K-Sh-E: the Komsomol is the Patron of Electricity (КШЭ: Комсомол – шеф электрификации; Komsomol – shef elektrifikatsii, 1932)
The Ascent (Восхождение; Voskozhdenie, 1976)
The Cold Summer of ’53 (Холодное лето пятьдесят третьего; Kholodnoe leto piatdesiat tretevo, 1987)

The manifest destiny of fair comment?

2008-09-17T04:44:00.000-07:00

The news that composer Keith Burstein has been bankrupted by his libel action against the Evening Standard raises mixed feelings. On the one hand, a ‘little guy’ has been squashed by the corporate suits (and Associated Newspapers at that). On the other hand it seems like an attempt to rein in critical comment has failed. On the other(?!) hand, what are the limits of a critic's responsibilities?

The backstory: reviewing Burstein’s opera Manifest Destiny, Veronica Lee said it was ‘trite’, ‘horribly leaden’ and ‘unmusical’. And that was just Dic Edwards’ libretto: Burstein’s music was dismissed simply as ‘uninspiring’.

Hey-ho: we all get bad reviews and learn to conquer the urge to fire off an email, explaining just why the perceived ‘faults’ are actually our meisterwerk’s crowning glories, or saying that we agree but that some sheister producer/publisher/singer/fill-in-the-job-title completely shafted us and that only a critic who has no conception of what it is to be creative could fail to recognize the travails of being an artist.

Burstein began life as a conductor of modernist works but as his interest in composition grew, so he became a neo-tonalist, writing stuff like this. He co-formed The Hecklers to argue against the disproportionate public subsidy given to unpopular music, incidentally winning a libel suit against News International, which claimed he disrupted the Royal Opera's production of Gawain. He quickly left the Hecklers and has since come to see his association with the group as a bit of an albatross.

Unluckily, Manifest Destiny, which centres on a suicide bomber, premiered five weeks after 7/7, possibly setting up unintended parallels. Chris Cleave’s suicide-bomber novel Incendiary was ‘lucky’ enough to predate the attacks and, four years later, as the film adaptation is about to be released, it all seems a little distant.

For reference, here’s the Standard's review:

How horribly prescient; Keith Burstein’s opera about suicide bombers receives its world premiere a few weeks after 7/7. What a pity it’s such a trite affair. The heroine, Palestinian poet Leila (Bernadette Lord), leaves Daniel, a Jewish composer, to return to her homeland to become a suicide bomber. Her cell leader Mohammed falls in love with her, sees the error of his ways and, in order to save her, hands Leila over to the Americans. But it’s all too much for her so she tops herself anyway.

The libretto by Dic Edwards is horribly leaden and unmusical and the music uninspiring, save for the odd duet, and full marks to the talented cast of four for carrying it off. But I found the tone depressingly anti-American [there’s a synopsis here], and the idea that there is anything heroic about suicide bombers is, frankly, a grievous insult.

Burstein, who had previously written about the opera in The Guardian, took this to imply that he found suicide bombers heroic. The Evening Standard argued that it was ‘fair comment’.

Burstein felt there was nothing to do but go to law. He won the right to sue for defamation – to be heard before a jury – and was awarded £8,000. But the Court of Appeal overturned that, judging the original review to be fair comment. And ordered Burstein to return the 8k and stump up the rest of the Standard’s costs. Not having 67 grand to hand, (in the Alice in Wonderland world of law, that almost seems quite reasonable) he was bankrupted.

Burstein has vowed to fight on (with what, I don’t know), and will go to the European Court of Human Rights to argue that the denial of a trial before a jury and the fact that he had to pay the Standard’s costs before all legal options were exhausted was a travesty of justice.

The importance of trial by jury (preferably not by Gilbert and Sullivan) is a whole different topic, so let’s not go there. But it's worth returning to the review and the crucial last line. There's nothing wrong (or actionable) in saying a work of art is rubbish (and hopefully Burstein isn't complaining about that). The BBC review and a passing comment by the Telegraph probably didn't have crowds hammering down the door but artists inevitably expose themselves to that.

But Burstein is saying that if that creation is seen as a manifestation of the artist, then to say that the work supports suicide bombers is, to some degree to say that the man does. How is the critic to unhitch the two?

In a later twist, the new Terrorism Bill outlaws anything that the publisher might reasonably believe will be understood as a direct or indirect encouragement or inducement to the commission, preparation or instigation of terrorist acts. Whether that makes Burstein's work unperformable is a moot (but interesting) point, relying on the producers' (or courts') assessment of whether there are any potential terrorists in the audience who may be fired up by the opera.

The rights to the bankrupt Burstein's works have been taken by the receiver and future royalties will be used to pay m’learned friends. Quite how long this will take I don’t know: there aren’t many composers charging three figures an hour.

In the meantime, Burstein’s website, which included soundclips of his work – and perhaps even of Manifest Destiny - has been taken down. If it’s a result of the judgment, then surely that's an unintended and unfortunate effect.

However, you can (for how long?) see extensive chunks on Youtube.

I’ll risk a critical comment: I’m glad he wrote it. I’m glad I’ve seen it. I’m glad I won’t be seeing it again. Please - don't sue me!

LFF Preview (Experimenta)

2008-09-16T16:41:00.000-07:00

Again, not an exhaustive list: just those that catch my eye.

James Benning's genre might be called the "tableau film", in which a static camera watches events pass before its eye. Apparently, the titles of Ten Skies and Thirteen Lakes (both from 2004) pretty much sum up the content, but of course no description can ever encompass a film. Benning doesn't have a monopoly on the idea. Fliegauf's Milky Way (Tejút), which has had a couple of outings in London - and hopefully elsewhere in the UK, is a series of ten shots, though each contained a human narrative of some sort. Kiarostami's Five Dedicated to Ozu, immediately gave away the number of shots it contained (though the ducks were a pleasant surprise). The first 30 minutes of Sokurov's Spiritual Voices (Духовные голоса) watches dusk descend over a landscape, whilst a narrator contemplates art. Compared to these, Benning's latest film RR seems positively action packed, with no fewer than 43 (count 'em!) 43 shots. Each lasts just as long as it takes for a train to cross the frame. This is one of the festival films I'm really looking forward to.

Perhaps in the same vein is a Nathaniel Dorsky programme that promises to 'transcend daily reality and open a space for introspective thought'.

Naturally, the musical theme of The Silence Before Bach (Die Stille vor Bach) means I'll be there. An epigrammatic mosaic-study of Bach in the modern world, it sounds like 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould may be echoing in the background, but it would be no worse for that.

I may well give the Guy Debord double bill a go, if only in the faint hope that, suitably prepared, I'll actually finally make it all the way through The Society of the Spectacle.

From the LFF write-up, the Alina Rudnitskaya programme doesn't sound incredibly experimental: here we get three short docs about Russian women, not including her portrait of Russian faux-lesbian pop-poppets Tatu. I'm always slightly puzzled that the LFF doesn't have a documentary section per se (perhaps some inter-Festival 'respecting-categories' politics) and some seem to end up shunted into the Experimenta section for dubious reasons. Don't get me started on last year's Seven Easy Pieces!

Finally, a suite of shorts under the title A Sense of Place. Included is Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin's ironically entitled Lossless No 2, a latterday parallel of Bill Morrison's Decasia, which uses failed digital files of Hammid and Deren's classic Meshes of the Afternoon.

Russian Film Festival

2008-09-15T12:44:00.000-07:00

Squeezing in just before the London Film Festival is the Russian Film Festival, running from 18 to 28 September at the Apollo West End.

I'll be blogging as it goes along but here are a few tasters of what I know (or think) will be worth going for). It's not an exhaustive list.

I suppose most interest will surround Mikhalkov's Oscar-nominated 12 [above], a remake of Lumet's 12 Angry Men. The trailer implies that it's been opened up quite considerably (the original 96 minutes has become 153) and, unsurprisingly, it's another of Mikhalkov's contemplations of the nature of Russian-ness.

Live to Remember (Живи и помни - literally Live and Remember) [left] opens the fest, another historical drama directed by Alexander Proshkin (best-known for The Cold Summer of '53), while Alexander Melnik's Terra Nova (Новая земля) is a sort of Lord of the Flies, but with adult convicts. Melnik is a first-time feature director, like Marina Liubakova, whose Cruelty (Жестокост) features the wonderful Renata Litvinova.

Women directors aren't as uncommon in Russia as in the West and the fest includes Svetlana Proskurina's Best of Times (Лучшее время года). Tarkovsky and Sokurov loom large in her filmography (she's made a couple of docs about the latter), so it will be interesting to see what her own fiction looks like.

The 2003 film Roads to Koktebel also had an occasional Tarkovskian feel and one of its co-directors, Alexei Popogrebsky, has now struck out on his own with the excellent Simple Things (Простые вещи): surely here's a director to watch.

20 Cigarettes (20 сигарет) [left] looks like it could be stylish fun (perhaps it's the first Russian film to feature Slade on the soundtrack?) but these things can be taken too far. The last thing I'm pointing up is Yuri's Day (Юрьев день). It's about an opera singer and is described as "a complex tapestry of mysticism, spiritualism and hyperrealism", making me fear that it's a cross between Diva and the barely watchable 4 (Четыре).

That's not all that's in the fest, but it's enough for now...

London Film Festival (galas)

2008-09-12T07:17:00.000-07:00

The launch of the London Film Festival. Obviously it's going to take a while to plough through the programme to decide what's worth seeing, but a few things caught my eye.

Of course there are the galas, though they're films that will be opening anyway. Frost/Nixon looks interesting but Oliver Stone's George Bush biopic W had several people wondering whether it was going to be a knockabout comedy. There was certainly enough laughter at the launch.

There was an audible intake of breath at the words Quantum of Solace (chops to Eon for refusing to back down in the face of a hail of criticism at the name (though much more ridiculous and it would have turned into a Star Wars title). Most amusing, however, is this note: "As this will be the first public screening of Quantum of Solace anywhere in the world, patrons are advised that special security measures will be in place." Noticeably, such measures won't be in place for Waltz With Bashir, not, as I thought, a portrait of the Di-bothering journalist, but an incendiary-sounding animated autobiographical doc about the Middle East conflict.

Whether or not it's the skill of the trailer-maker, Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona didn't seem as bad as rumours have had it. Of course, its acreage of pulchritudineity may prove to be an embarrassment.

The worthiness quotient will be kept high by (artist) Steve McQueen's almost dialogue-free Hunger and Soderbergh's 252-minute Che.

Entre les murs (The Class) looked really promising and Easy Virtue looked like it could be avoid the ever-present danger of squirm-inducing "we're-British-but-we-can-laugh-at-ourselves" 'comedy'.

I'll drive through a few more pages later.

Len Lye

2008-09-12T01:53:00.001-07:00

I bumped into Mr Squares of Wheat the other night at the NFT .... errrr .... BFI South Bank, and he quite rightly berated me for not blogging often enough. So here's another blurt of multiple posts.

Anyway, we were both looking forward to the Len Lye event.

It's fantastic to think that seventy years ago there was an organisation that supported artists who wanted to make avant-garde films, often giving them pretty much carte blanche to do what they wanted, with the proviso that the last few seconds should include a 'message'. This astonishingly enlightened organisation was none other than the GPO (aka The Royal Mail, aka Consignia, aka The Royal Mail).

One of my more pleasant jobs was at the BUFVC, helping put the GPO collection online for educational use. The encodings are lovely and the metadata great, but, sadly, you'll need an Athens account to see them. Alternatively they are available on DVD from Panamint Cinema and the BFI are about to launch a series of restorations.

What would British film be without the GPO Film Unit? Not to list everyone is invidious, but it's hard to ignore the poetry of Humphrey Jennings and Alberto Cavalcanti, the very English surrealism of Richard Massingham and the explosive energy of Lye and Norman McLaren. Apologies for reducing these geniuses to single, only partially representative adjectives, and for omitting any of your favourites. Sit tight: I'll be returning to them.

But, back to NFT2. New Zealander Lye gave his work to the Len Lye Foundation and much of it is held at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. It ranged over painting, kinetic sculpture, poetry, and of course film, and Tyler Cann, curator of the collection ran through Lye's life and work, neatly showing its common well-springs in modernism, aboriginal art and Freud.

Then there was a screening of Lye's first film Tusalava (1929). Amusingly, the BBFC were agitated by the suspicion that it might be about sex. And if you insist on films being 'about' something, it's hard to deny, but you'd have to worry about anyone who found it arousing! The title is Samoan for 'just the same' or 'everything comes full circle' and if it's more than a film about movement per se, it's a modernist take on Maori art and photomicrography, a meditation on creation, struggle and destruction, all carried out at cellular level. Maybe it's just me, but there was also a weird Frankensteinian aspect to it!

At its Film Society premiere it was accompanied live by Jack Ellit's two-piano score, though this is now lost. Ellit scored and 'synchronised' seven of Lye's eight films up to Trade Tattoo in 1937, which may - or may not - give us a clue as to what Tusalava sounded like: his contributions included using Don Baretto and His Cuban Orchestra, and chunks of Holst's The Planets. For the NFT screening Alcyona semi-improvised appropriately organic and swirling music on one piano. Given the film's slow and smooth development, it was an achievement to insert some points of noticeable change, that were not merely tacked on.

Various people have put it on Youtube with their own soundtracks. Two of them are a bit Eraserhead-ish and there's a jazz score that doesn't really have much to do with the film but as far as I can tell (sadly, despite being in two parts, it doesn't play very well) it gets a bit better as it progresses. There's also a self-declared "avant-garde sound design" that's not bad, though it sometimes follows the action a bit too closely for my taste.

They all have different running times (I haven't done an exhaustive comparison of the whys and wherefores) and, weirdly, the first three have somehow found a copy of the film that is left-right inverted. A couple of them have the Film Society leader.

For my money, the best score is this.

Some of Lye's best-known films are Trade Tattoo, Rainbow Dance and A Colour Box. For these astonishing films Lye used heavily treated found footage, drew and painted directly onto the film, stenciled texts onto it and scratched the surface to create an electrifying result. Seeing these films, you can't help but whoop with joy.

The Royal Mail should simply show the genius Trade Tattoo every November. It would cheer up the entire country and they could use the saved advertising budget to keep a few post offices open.

Of course, Lye's films should be seen in their full glory (the web can't do them justice) and I'm looking forward to the BFI DVDs but in the meantime, enjoy Trade Tattoo. Frequently.

Maestri

2008-08-13T03:21:00.000-07:00

Cassandras would claim that classical music and television have been falling out of love in recent years and sometimes it's hard to disagree. This year's BBC Young Musician of the Year was marked by an almost complete absence of ... errrrrr... music. Instead we were treated to hours of the competitors hooking up on Facebook in between embarrassedly small snippets of the actual music. But never mind - you could see the entire performances on the web, so that fulfilled the public service requirement.

So, mine was one of the many hearts that sank at the prospect of eight 'celebrities' (from C down to about Y) in an X-Factor knockout competition to conduct the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Proms in the Park. In a nod to Marxist dialectics, the candidates ranged from untrained music-lovers, through classically-trained non-musicians, through to untrained professionals, so part of the idea seemed to be to have a kind of nature-versus-nurture debate.

Actually it wasn't bad at all.

Conducting is a mysterious and invisible art and some people, in thrall to egos like Karajan and Solti (affectionately known by London players as The Screaming Skull), think the conductor just sort of windmills around a bit, vaguely in time to the music.

It's one of those things that is best demonstrated by going hideously pear-shaped. I well remember some appalling last-minute-replacement hack managing to turn Berg's Violin Concerto into something resembling Berg's Trombone Concerto.

Maestro's band was under instructions to do whatever they were told, which goes somewhat against some orchestras' natural instincts. If they take against you, you're dead: being at the head of an out-of-control orchestra must be one of the most terrifying experiences you could have.

So it was nice to see the mechanics being explained, including getting the arms to work independently by simultaneously and repeatedly drawing a triangle and a square (counting three in one arm and four in the other) - a ramped-up version of patting your head and rubbing your stomach.

When it came to getting to grips with the dots on the page, were the untrained at a disadvantage? The assigned pieces (the prelude to Bizet's Carmen; Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King; Prokofiev's Montagues and Capulets, and a filleted Blue Danube) were all under about five minutes and, since there was no tricky Rite-of-Spring counting, after some hard slog they could be learnt by heart.

Amusingly, the untrained Goldie quickly sketched the sort of diagram he uses to convey his ideas to his collaborators, and it was absolutely in the tradition of 1960s graphic scores that arch-exponent Cathy Berberian affectionately mocked in Stripsody, where the performer is inspired to make appropriate noises by a series of cartoons.

But back to the maestri. Clips from the final concert are here.

Had windmilling been item one on the job description Peter Snow would have been a shoo-in but it was painfully clear almost from the beginning of the programme that he'd be going for an early bath. He was further disturbed by his insistence on using the score (beating time, molding the sound of the orchestra and turning the pages proved too much) though it wasn't as bad the audience's hilarity would have you believe.

The other nominee for eviction was the man universally known as Blur's Alex James who, as you may have heard, in between television and radio appearances and newspaper articles, runs a cheese farm. A former professional musician clinging on by the skin of his teeth, one felt his pain - though only momentarily. He didn't so much conduct the middle section of the Carmen, as wave his arms in an ... errr ... ecstatic(?) Ibiza moment. Also, it's embarrassing not to be able to count without moving your lips.

Of the others:

David Soul's post-Hutch pop career climaxed with Jerry Springer: the Opera. Soul plays guitar (often, though not in this case, a sign of innate musical inability), but sadly, he's simply not in control of things. Closer to following the band than leading it.

Despite having mastered the piano to Grade 8, Sue Perkins beats time simultaneously with both arms, like Marcel Marceau tossing a giant salad. Apart from being twice as much work as necessary, it stymies any possibility of doing anything else with the music. Having said that, she's progressing well with the conductor-ish gurning, if occasionally there's a look of surprised pleasure that what she wanted to happen actually came to pass. Nevertheless, unless she can loosen up, she's for the chop.

Katie Derham is possibly someone else for whom a little knowledge will be a dangerous thing. The pianist-violinist-newsreader-Classic-FM-presenter (favourite piece: Rhapsody in Blue) has doubtless spent many happy hours conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in the comfort of her own living room. But then again, haven't we all? Though my preference is for the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra. She was obviously trying to inject a bit of interpretation (a bit of rubato, etc) but is still too concerned with doing it 'right'.

Actor-comedian-entertainer Bradley Walsh is determined not to be bested, no matter how much he seems to play the clown. Obviously taking it far more seriously than he's letting on (it's on his website), he could well come up on the inside.

On the strength of episode 1, the finale will be between Goldie (an inspired natural, with minimal 'technique') and Jane Asher (a ruthless perfectionist, and a redheaded cake-maker to boot).

I'm looking forward to it.

Méliès

2008-08-04T11:39:00.000-07:00

Anyone who's passing through Paris before the end of August would be well-advised to swing by the Cinémathèque Française, where there's an excellent Georges Méliès exhibition.

The title, Méliès le magicien says what it's all about: linking Méliès' cinema work to his previous incarnation as a magician and performer.

Having bought a theatre from the illusionist Robert-Houdin, Méliès set about creating a series of magic tricks and the exhibition includes various pieces of stage apparatus and costumes. From there is was a short step to the new magic of the cinématographe. Méliès really was a polymath as is shown by some of his exquisite designs (here's the moon-landing from his famous Voyage dans la lune (1902).

Combining the techniques of the black theatre with cinema's superimposition and the tricks of editing enabled Méliès to achieve some fantastically sophisticated special effects, while a model of his studio at Montreuil, gives an idea how he used perspective tricks to achieve some of his grandest effects.

Fantastic in both senses of the word, his films often feature devils (the very beautiful Les 400 farces du diable ~ 400 Tricks of the Devil (1906) or other mythical creatures (La sirène ~ The Mermaid, 1904), while dismemberment is a regular occurrence.

Unsuprisingly, I was intrigued by Le Mélomane (aka The Music Lover, 1902) in which people are decapitated and theirs heads are strung across the five wires of a telegraph line to make a couple of bars of music. As Méliès was based in the US at the time, the melody turns out to be a snippet of God Save America, (or, for Royalists on my side of the pond) God Save the King.

Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

2008-08-04T06:18:00.000-07:00

In the depths of the Cold War Solzhenitsyn became one of the West's favourite Soviet writers. The Gulag Archipelago, his epic dissection of the prison-camp system confirmed everything that we 'knew' about the USSR, while the treatment he received at the hands of the regime only deepened that knowledge.

Without denying Solzhenitsyn's greatness as a writer, we can recognise that his reputation was emblematic of the mirror image outlooks of West and East, shackling artistic worth to 'dissidence' and 'conformity'.

In 1945 Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a twice-decorated Red Army officer when a letter obliquely criticising Stalin was intercepted. He was imprisoned for eight years, followed by three years' internal exile.

Solzhenitsyn continued to write in secret but it was Khrushchev's 1961 speech denouncing Stalin's cult of personality that emboldened him to submit One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to Novyi Mir.

Based on his own experiences, the fictionalised account of camp life is, at the end, quite optimistic, showing the importance of fortitude and small victories - the hero had enjoyed that day's work, managed to get an extra ration of kasha, and found a piece of hacksaw blade (with no immediate purpose but the thought that it could come in useful). But more than that, it shows that the regime, no matter how brutal, could not guarantee to reduce people to its level. Published at Khrushchev's express command, it made Solzhenitsyn an overnight literary sensation, though almost immediately he also attracted some now largely forgotten criticism, not least from the First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party.

A few stories appeared while he worked on the novel Cancer Ward but, though it was typeset, it was pulled before publication. Nothing new appeared in the Soviet Union after 1965.

He continued to write through the inevitable campaign of harassment, while living at the dacha of husband-and-wife cellist and soprano Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya. In 1969 Solzhenitsyn was thrown out of the Writers' Union, and the following year won the Nobel Prize. As the attacks continued Union, whereupon his hosts wrote a defence, though it went unpublished and contributed to their own fall from grace. When The Gulag Archipelago appeared in Paris in 1974, he was deported, and settled in Vermont.

For the West, this was a coup: a noble dissident, from whose eyes the scales had fallen, uncowed by the shameful treatment at the hands of an irrational tyrant.

But Solzhenitsyn soon disabused them of the idea that he would be grateful for their refuge. What the West saw as anti-Soviet was nearer to pro-Russist, and he had equally little time for the decadent West. Withdrawing to the snowy woods, his ongoing fiction was interspersed with jeremiads on how Western freedom had descended into decadence, most notably in a 1978 address at Harvard.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union he was rehabilitated, his work was finally authorised and he returned to the country that was, to misquote Stalin, "dizzy with failure."

He quickly came to hate the legalised pillage of Gorbachev and Yeltsin's perestroika, and it became clear that he would settle no more easily in Russia than he did in Vermont.

In Rebuilding Russia (1990) he argued that Russia, Ukraine and Belarus should reform as a bastion of (anti-Western-atheist) Christianity. Unsurprisingly, he opposed Ukrainian independence, though they probably took a dim view of this 'support' as he also denied that the Holodomor - the 1932-3 Ukrainian famine - was an act of genocide, denouncing those who proposed as much. Semantically he has a point. Despite the similar sound, the Holodomor ('murder by hunger') was not a Holocaust, a planned attempt to exterminate the Ukrainian nation. Rather it was a shameful exploitation - even exacerbation - of a natural tragedy. Of course, the Soviets used the same 'not-only-Jews-were-killed' logic-chopping to persuade Yevtushenko to alter Babi Yar. Still, at least Solzhenitsyn wasn't following Stalinist fellow-travellers like the New York Times' Walter Duranty in denying that it happened at all.

In 1936 Solzhenitsyn had planned an epic on the Revolution, though it was only in 1969 that he began The Red Wheel with August 1914. He revised it in 1984 before, over the next nine years, adding three more volumes to bring the story up to April 1917. It's fascinating to think what it would be like had he written it when it was conceived. Although he held out against Party membership, became disenchanted with Stalin, and later saw the Revolution as a schismatic moment when the Bolshviks severed 'Russia' from its roots, pre-Purge he was in contact with conformist writers including Konstantin Fedin. Ironically, it was Fedin who prevented the publication of Cancer Ward.

After some doubts, Solzhenitsyn became a supporter of Vladimir Putin and praised the country's new robust foreign policy, forgetting some of its new illiberalities. In return he was rewarded with the state prize. In his acceptance speech he said that memories of the Soviet period would "forewarn and protect us from destructive breakdown."

Ironically in his 1970 open letter defending Solzhenitsyn, Rostropovich cited the notorious 1948 Musicians' Conference: "Can it really be that the times we have lived through have not taught us to take a more cautious attitude toward crushing talented people?"