Andre Benjamin played a meandering set of free-improvisational flute music, ostensibly based on his album New Blue Sun, at All Points East in Victoria Park last week. Here are images of his flutes. That’s it. That’s the post.
See also: Showing Up (2023) in which Andre Benjamin plays a supporting role as a ceramics teacher at a small arts college in Oregon.
I live in a city (London) which is culturally diverse and has a very unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity, and I’ve had the opportunity to visit a good few ‘high contrast’ cities before. Cities like Jerusalem, Hong Kong, New York are all fascinatingly uneven and contested places, but none of them quite prepared me for Cape Town. The Mother City is the most contrasty, contradictory place I think I’ve been. For the most part, the well-to-do areas on the coast and on the foothills of Table Mountain combine breathtaking natural beauty, developed world opulence and a sensibility that is cued-in to current trends. Further inland, neighbourhoods in the Cape Flats are on a sliding scale that runs from modest homes that are properly hooked up to municipal utilities to self-constructed dwellings with corrugated metal walls and roofs, where running water and reliable electrical supply is not taken for granted.
This disparity is absolutely on show in the image above, where a small cluster of unofficial dwellings cluster in a former quarry just off Chiappini Street on the edge of Bo-Kaap. These houses are two blocks from a tall office building and directly underneath a house with a swimming pool at the top of the hill.
Regardless of the conditions in which they live, the vast majority of people were warm, frank and engaging. While I attempt to get my head around the experience of the last two weeks, here are some stills I shot from the rooftop terrace of the hotel bar. These are the arm’s length touristy shots that are the opposite end of the spectrum of filming I went there to do.
Cape Town Bowl is the central business district, and has a lot of International-Style tall buildings interspersed with colonial Dutch and British architecture, and a good bit of Deco concrete, which looks great on bright, clear days.
Looking southwest towards the V&A Waterfront, a quasi-public space which is the most touristy part of town. It has a gentrified docklands feel to it, and is clearly designed to be a place where many of the more problematic aspects of Cape Town are kept at arm’s length by exclusionary urban design strategies and policing. Despite this, it is not a total Disneyland, which is a testament to the enduring spirit of the city.
Table Mountain is ever-present, no matter which neighbourhood you’re in.
Lion’s Head in the background. Bo-Kaap is the brightly painted neighbourhood in the middle ground.
With the Everyday Journeys documentaries I shot in Cape Town over the past fortnight, I have delved into the city at street-level and through the eyes of the people who live there. As I edit the footage I’m really looking forward to moving from a strategic overview of the city into a close-up lived experience of the people and place.
On the morning of Wednesday 24th August I was hooded by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kent along with eight other PhD graduands and a host of BA, MA, and PGDip recipients. The title of the thesis, which was read in full just before I received my degree is Mythical Middle England: Illuminating the Aesthetic Potential of English Non-Places Through Narrative Cinema. It has been a long process, and one which has changed the way I think about my topic of study, the way I approach my work and my sense of self. I don’t feel like recounting much about the thesis itself in this post right now, but I do want to cite the acknowledgements publicly here.
I have many people to thank for helping me reach this stage in the PhD, and my continuing artistic voyage into deepest Middle England: firstly Lavinia Brydon for her unflagging guidance and support throughout bewildering changes in global and personal circumstances, Frances Kamm and Murray Smith for stepping in towards the end of the process to help me over the line, Richard Misek and Mattias Frey for their guidance at key points in the earlier stages, Lawrence Jackson for film folklore tips, and Angela Whiffen for interpreting university administrative liturgy into vernacular speech. The time you have all given me is precious.
Resources are also useful, especially for PAR projects, and I would like to thank the School of Arts and the University of Kent for the Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship award for the financial support.
Also within the field of academia, I would like to thank Dr. Jane Adams for our conversations about healing with water and Dr. Catherine Robson for encouraging my academic and teaching career more generally.
Outside the university, a great many people have given their time and their skills to make the creative output of this project possible. I acknowledge that contributions of cast, crew, and documentary subjects in the credits of the films but I cannot thank cinematographer Alexandru Grigoras, editor Svitlana Topor, and script editor Margaret Glover enough times for their contributions to the films, and for being the kind of collaborators who save me from bad filmmaking decisions.
The cartographical parts of this study would have been impossible without the help of Beth Manghi, whose GIS coding helped me plot the settings of British films.
This written thesis and the two films are all dedicated to the memory of Dr. John Harcup, who was my grandfather’s GP, and who later became my documentary subject, historical adviser to the short film Water Cure, a supporter, and a friend. It is rare to meet someone who blends a natural authority and the power to make things happen with curiosity and good humoured humility. He is missed.
Immediate family have also been crucial. David and Leonie Creighton for helping with outlandish requests, storage, and places to sleep, Duncan Graham and my sisters Caitlin and Rhianon Graham for keeping me moving both physically and psychically, and of course Courtney Hopf for more than twenty years of shared growth, enduring the demands of my muse, constant notes and reassurance and, yes, proofreading.
The soundtrack to my writing at the moment is being absolutely dominated by this expertly curated, diligently mixed (and in some cases re-mixed), eight-hour session called The Deep Ark. It’s a selection of pastoral British electronica that absolutely hits the spot if you came of age in the English countryside in the 1990s. It features ?-Ziq, Autechre, Future Sound of London, Sabres of Paradise, an amazing Funkstörung remix of Björk, and some really tripped-out deconstructions of Saint Etienne. Oh, and of course a number of tracks from Aphex Twin (and his various aliases) and Brian Eno. The digital liner notes are exhaustive, and include a justification for each individual track along with a lot of history of the scene that produced these sounds. It is clearly an absolute labour of love for mysterious DJ The Arkitekt, who assembled the whole thing, commissioned photos, and even published a book about the mix with Broken Sleep Press.
I’ve been so busy that I didn’t notice one of my favourite hauntological synth musicians released a new album. Pye Corner Audio’s fifth album, The Endless Echo has been out since 5th April.
As per usual, it’s a miasma of unheimlich cinematic analogue synths floating over a bed of satisfyingly crunchy beats. Absolutely the score for the subterranean Middle English hauntological dystopia film I yearn to make.
I’m absolutely delighted to be working on narrative design, English localisation, and directing voices for this beautiful mystery narrative game set in the Pacific Northwest. Marcus and the rest of the Backwoods development team just released a new demo for the game, and a trailer teasing the story. Both demo and trailer feature the voices of our talented cast, including Amy Quick (Unforeseen Incidents, Eve: Valkyrie), Morgan Taylor (Choo-Choo Charles), Alan Adelberg (Marvel Avengers Academy, Iron Fist), Terrance Addison (Dragon Siege, Mafia City) and Francesca Meaux (Hades, Dunk Lords, The Riftbreaker).
I’m going to be in Toledo all next week attending the Conecta European TV networking event, and sticking around a couple of days afterwards for a little city break which will probably involve bicycles at some point.
When I mentioned to my friend Svitlana that I was going there, she told me the city was beloved by Luis Buñuel. A little digging, and it turns out before the Spanish Civil War, when they were all alive and on speaking terms, Buñuel, Dalí and Lorca visited Toledo and, “fascinated by the mysterious air it gave off,” were moved to invent their own semi-satirical religious order/artists collective, the Order of Toledo. More about it in this article by Roberto Majano.
The principle activity of the order was “to wander in search of personal adventures” and the induction ceremony was to be stranded alone in the darkness of Toldeo at the toll of the 1am bell. This reads to me very much like a precursor to the Situationist activity of dériving around Paris. Perhaps Guy Debord drew inspiration from Buñuel?
Bonus anecdote: Buñuel hired a sex worker in the city, not apparently for sex, but in order to hypnotise her, because surrealist research doesn’t have to answer to ethics committees.
I’m very excited to share the first fruits of my work with Backwoods Entertainment – some fun stuff is coming up next week, which I can’t get into specifics about right now. So in the meantime, here’s one of my favourite talks from Adventure X 2023, which I shot along with my friend Laura Spini. UbiSoft Reflections developer Khan shares some wisdom from her time in the voice director’s chair.
I just dug out my venerable MiniDisc player out and hooked it up to my amp to play some tunes that I don’t have on MP3 or CD. I love MiniDiscs – they never went mainstream, so there’s something about them that just feels sci-fi, which probably explains why they appear in The Matrix and Strange Days.
One day I will own a LaserDisc player, which I will only be able to use to play Bladerunner, and it will be absolutely worth it.
At the moment I’m checking out films about models and photographers. It’s part of my research for the short I’m developing.
Denys Arcand’s film Stardom (2000) is a high-pace satire. Tina Menzhal (Jessica Paré) is plucked from small-town Canadian obscurity and is launched into a whirlwind of money, fame and failed romances. Starting with cable access station footage, the film makers show Tina through the lenses of the media circus that gathers around her. There’s the fashion reporter with her video camera and aggressive style; there’s the genuine artist and camera nerd photographer who follows her, shooting black and white 16mm with an Aaton on his shoulder; there are news reports and chat shows. What we don’t see is Tina on her own terms. She is subject to constant attention, the invasion of her privacy, and endless demands. Everyone wants a piece of her. Men (including great turns from Dan Aykroyd and Frank Langhella) ruin themselves on what they think is her behalf, without ever figuring her out.
The event that ends the hysteria and concludes the film leaves a little to be desired. Awarding a prize to a ruggedly handsome doctor who has won a marathon, Tina falls in love. The notion that the key to happiness is a bun in the oven given to her by a stand-up guy from her hometown is the kind of simple and regressive formulation that the film has been skewering for the last hour and a half. But up until that point it’s been such a hell of a ride that you’re willing to forgive Stardom its mis-step.
Alasdair and I had an amazing morning grading “The Library of Burned Books” with Maria at Narduzzo Too on Monday. Now all we need to do is have the sound mixed, and we will be ready to launch the film on the festival circuit. I’ll post some stills from the final graded version soon. Thanks also to the good folks at diRoom for their work on the previous cut of the film.
David Lynch was thrust into development of Dune too early in his career, it seems. The producers’ idea was to profit on the success of Star Wars by creating another sci-fantasy epic, but a standard length feature film is not a big enough container for Dune, with all its plotting, counter-plotting and Messiah-creation.
I’ve now seen both the original theatrical release, on which Lynch has the director’s credit, and the TV edit, which is attributed to Alan Smithee. It was the Smithee version that I just watched. The producers, showing an absolutely dreadful grasp of the possibilities of film, front-load about three hundred years of exposition using a dull voiceover and a bunch of hastily assembled paintings, some of which recur multiple times. The aim, apparently, was to save time in order to cut to the action quicker, but seeing as it takes about ten minutes to outline everything, it is deathly, deathly boring.
I think most people who are aware of Dune know that Lynch had to struggle to trim his rough cut from about four hours down to about two and a half, and that as a result the story is unclear and under-motivated. It feels as if a missed opportunity flies by every five minutes, but despite this, there is still something interesting buried in the narrative rubble. Much of the time the production design is evocative and hints at a society that exists beyond the screen, and there is something that sticks with you in the dream sequences — which is what you’d expect from Lynch’s direction. Performances from Kyle MacLachlan, Max von Sydow and Patrick Stewart are commendable, and there’s an almost unparalleled moment of male objectification when Sting steps out of a futuristic shower clad only in a large white nappy while his uncle, an evil duke, coos and drools over him.
Probably the best way for Dune to be brought to the big screen is as a trilogy, pitched somewhere between the original Star Wars movies and the Lord of the Rings. One would hope the latest crew to attempt to make it would dig Lynch’s early four-hour rough cut out of the archives as part of their research, because as imperfect as it is, there is something worth salvaging.
The missus is re-reading David Mitchell’s number9dream for the dissertation. Every now and then she reads a bit aloud for me.
I watched for a while longer. Not much happens in Paris Texas.
“Sort of slow, isn’t it?”
Buntaro licks his hand.
“This, lad, is an existentialist classic. Man with no memory meets woman with huge hooters.”
I really enjoy days when I write and she reads.
A River Runs Through It is Robert Redford’s 1992 period feature about three men and their relationship to God, fly fishing and each other. Seeing as God and fishing are two of the subjects most likely to put me to sleep, I was astonished to find that not only did I stay awake throughout, but that I genuinely enjoyed it.
Much of the credit for this film being watchable has to go Redford. His style is relaxed to the point that it appears effortless, but getting this much authenticity into a film takes serious effort. The cast is excellent, Redford allows them time to find their own cadence, and editors Lynzee Klingman and Robert Estrin cut sympathetically with those rhythms. The way that characters continue living outside the boundaries of the frame is reminiscent of Renoir’s French Can-Can; the shots of Montana rivers and mountains are gorgeous without being pretty; the whole thing is so very sensibly restrained and wise that if I were a more religiously informed person, I’d say for certain that it’s designed to evoke the feeling of the Presbytarianism that crops up throughout the film, but as it is, I can only guess.
You know that festival organizers are on the ball when they send each filmmaker an individual email with a link to where to buy tickets for their film’s screening. Thanks, Boston!
Click here to buy tickets for “Julie, Julie” at the Independent Film Festival, Boston.
Warning: spoilers after the jump.
It feels as if Samuel L. Jackson has spent the last few years sliding into self-parody in formulaic big-budget films, so I was keen to see him exercise his craft in Lakeview Terrace, an exploitative little thriller set in the LA suburbs. Likewise with its director, Neil LaBute, who caused a stir fifteen years ago with misanthropic indie movies like In the Company of Men, but whose last credit before this was a nasty-looking remake of The Wicker Man, which I refused to see on principle. The idea of both men reminding us why they’re worth watching by getting back to basics is very appealing.
Lakeview Terrace pushes on the pressure points of race relations. Young bi-racial, college educated, hybrid-driving couple Lisa and Chris Mattson (Kerry Washington and Patrick Wilson) have just moved from Oakland to the LA suburbs and are celebrating their freedom from the supportive but smothering influence of parents. Abel Turner (Samuel Jackson) is their cop neighbour, a friendly and authoritative lawman who works a tough beat in the inner-city and spends his off-duty time policing their suburban neighbourhood for fun. But of course, in films like this suburbia is never what it seems on the surface. The threat to normality is present from the very beginning, as Lisa and Chris check the reports on the summer wildfires to be sure that their new home is safe.
I’ve spent this week up to my armpits in jpegs, pngs, html, css, mp4s and H.264, and this is the result. Please, friends, take a look and send me screenshots and news of how the site works for you. I’m especially keen to find out how it works on Windows computers running Internet Explorer, because as a Mac user, I am sheltered from the vagaries of Microsoft’s browser. For all I know it might display in cyrillic on Windows.
Notice how the “Screenings” page of the website lists two festivals! Hopefully the first two of many.
The Film Council’s new service, Find Any Film looks like it could turn into something rather good. At the moment it can tell you the nearest cinema that’s showing a film of your choice. This has been a feature of www.imdb.com in America for years now, but is apparently a first for the UK. It can also tell you if the film you’re looking for is due on TV, or is available on disc or for download.
More features are due to be added, which is necessary if it is to become more than just a good looking UK-specific imdb clone in order to succeed.
It would be great if they could sign a deal with the BFI to carry reviews and/or synopses from Sight & Sound, but I’m not sure how they could do so without killing Sight and Sound’s circulation. Anyhow, I’m looking forward to using it properly when I return to the UK in June. Let’s hope it helps small exhibitors attract larger audiences and promotes small, interesting and British films.
A seventies filmic retelling of Candide by director Lindsay Anderson, writer David Sherwin and star Malcolm McDowell, O Lucky Man! is a rare example of the picaresque in cinema. Starting as a coffee salesman, McDowell’s Mick Travis (the same name, but perhaps not quite the same character as he played in If….) journeys through Britain’s regions, classes and professions veering from cynical capitalist to idealistic altruist. Finally he learns that the best one can hope for is to not die like a dog, and that even if our best shot at understanding the variety and confusion of the world is through the imprecision and contariness of art, at least we can turn our attempts into entertainment.
McDowell is ever-present as a boyish, charming everyman, his strange open face and piercing blue eyes the perfect vehicle for a character who can pass through corruption, torture and victimisation and still emerge fresh and apparently innocent on the other side. Around him an ensemble cast, including Arthur Lowe, Ralph Richardson, Mona Washburn and Helen Mirren, recur in multiple roles, bringing the film’s artificiality to the fore.
This is a low-key romantic drama starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, with a couple of good supporting turns from Isabella Rossellini and Elias Koteas. I expected a solid piece of drama, and that is what we saw. Joaquin Phoenix plays Leonard Kraditor, a late twenty-something living in Brighton Beach, a far flung New York neighbourhood. Suffering from bi-polar disorder and low self belief after his planned marriage is scuppered by his future in-laws, he has returned to living with his parents and working in the family business as he tries to put his life back together. His father, Reuben, owns a launderette which he plans to merge with one owned by Mr. Cohen, another Jewish businessman. The two families meet for dinner at the Kraditor’s place, and it becomes somewhat clumsily obvious that the two fathers are planning to cement the business merger with marriage. Sandra Cohen, played by Vinessa Shaw, appears to be a pleasant and unremarkable woman, and as much out of a sense of obligation as anything else, Leonard plays along with the game set up for him by his parents until he a chance meeting with a beautiful and engaging neighbour, Michelle, played by Gwyneth Paltrow.
Two Lovers is a well-made movie, and plots its course from one event to another in a steady fashion, but at no point does it do anything exciting or inventive. It’s set in a humdrum part of New York, and the filmmakers evoke that mundanity precisely. Much of the movie consists of close and medium shots, the interiors of apartments and launderettes, and little attempt is made to find beauty in these spaces. It seems that Leonard harbours some ambitions in the direction of photography, which would perhaps offer him some escape from his feelings of entrapment, but the only photos of his we see are head-on shots of local businesses. At no point do either the viewer or Leonard have any respite from the everyday, and the everyday is presented as being dreary. The tone of the film is inflected by Leonard’s subjectivity, but only the sad part. It seems the filmmakers missed a trick by not investigating the possibility of seeing the world through Leonard’s eyes when he’s “up.”
Or, in the original Swedish, Låt den rätte komma in is the sweet and troubling coming-of-age story of Oskar, a young boy who finds the confidence to fight bullies and assert his place in the world when he falls in love with the girl next door. However, as he gets closer to Eli he realises there might be something sinister about her. Of course there is: she’s a vampire.
Last month I caught up with Twilight, the yardstick by which teenage vampire movies are currently measured. The American vampire movie had plenty of thrills and spills, but it rarely strayed from the established good-girl-meets-dangerous-guy formula – a bit like Dirty Dancing with lots of white goth makeup and little emotional honesty. Let the Right One In is quite different. The tone is measured and, while it’s not as intentionally halting or sparse as Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor or Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without a Past, there’s a similar buttoned-down nihilism underpinning proceedings.
A fascinating documentary about the trial of superstar film director Roman Polanski on a variety of charges of sexual misconduct with a thirteen-year-old girl. It’s very sympathetic to Polanski, but it should be noted that the director/producer is a woman, and doesn’t ignore the suffering of the victim. The worst aspect of the entire case was the conduct of the judge, Laurence J. Rittenband, who courted the press throughout and changed the sentence several times in order to appear to be hard enough in front of the press. He was so bad that even the lawyer in charge of the prosecution thinks Polanski was hard done by.
Daniel Auteuil and Gerard Depardieu pay the bills in this stylish French police suspense movie. Their collective star power almost diverts from the fact that they’ve both eaten too much foie gras to play active, hard-edged policemen. There’s plenty of double-dealing and blurred moral boundaries, but the script sets up the dead bodies a little too obviously. Will there ever be a cop movie in which the officer who’s on the verge of retirement actually lives into his dotage? Or one in which the pretty wife of the hero doesn’t have a torrid time?
Even though this is pretty standard fare for these two stars, it’s still tighter and more dramatically interesting than similar Hollywood genre flicks. And given that 36 Quai des Orfèvres is the French equivalent of Scotland Yard, the filmmakers suggest that corruption and shady dealings are endemic even in the upper echelons of French law enforcement. It’s a smart movie, and delivers exactly the kind of thrills you expect. The pairing of Auteuil and Depardieu is clearly a French attempt to emulate the De Niro & Pacino pairing of Heat or Righteous Kill, and although I understand exactly why they cast it that way I think the movie would have been dramatically stronger with a pair of leaner, hungrier actors.
If you live in a world in which you have a choice between this and, say, Righteous Kill, go for the French movie, you won’t regret it.
Was I half-asleep or was it never adequately explained why “There can only be one?”
Highlander was a complete pile of nonsense, with a barely anglophone Belgian, Christopher Lambert, playing a Scotsman and Sean Connery playing a Spanish-Egyptian swordfighting dandy. Lots of latent sadomasochistic homosexuality and some utterly unreal lighting, including gutter-level strobe lights.
It was showing on ITV, so there were frequent advert breaks, but oddly there were no real adverts, just solicitations to watch other programmes on ITV. Has the credit crunch killed TV advertising?
