Devils on Mars

Something of a busman’s holiday, this. But I think this might be my favourite astronomy pic ever.

School for rogues

Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.

How to be the real thing. But which rogue would pay the fee?

So much for my big idea

“It’s said that in the beginning was the word, but for me the beginning is always an image.”

The production designer and the egg

The FT recites the commonplace observation that curvaceous, minimalist 1960s commercial designs look “space-age”, as if inspired by 1960s SF films, principally 2001: A Space Odyssey:

which might indeed stand comparison with, say, Maurice Calka’s PDG Desk:

The writer, Josh Sims, says there’s a similar “stripped back, wipe-down, germ-free” vision of the future in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. I think he might want to refresh his memory of this film:

But more generally I think he’s missing the point I made rather eloquently in my last post. Isn’t it more likely that, rather than furniture designers looking at film designers, they were all looking at the slightly older generation of modernist sculptors?

Barbara Hepworth in space

Barbara Hepworth, unknown and Icon (1957); Discovery One spacecraft from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Barbara Hepworth, Oval Sculpture (No. 2) (1943); EVA pod from 2001; Barbara Hepworth, Spring (1966); Death Star from Star Wars (1977).

Shirin

When I wrote about the pernicious fascination of images and the Islamic suspicion of them and how that might perhaps have influenced some Iranian films, I hadn’t been to see Shirin: a whole film that rests on denying the image. Not to say that there isn’t plenty of eye candy in all that raven hair, shining, almond eyes, chiselled cheekbones etc, not to say that watching emotions ruffle beautifully lit faces of any kind isn’t fascinating, but there’s no forgetting that we’re watching a film that is about not watching a film; if you want to really engage your imagination, the audience of which you are part is in the position of the screened film that the screened audience in the film you are watching is watching. The complications don’t stop there. The film whose place in space you share never existed except in your actualization of that place, behind your eyes and the eyes of other audience members like you, because the women on the screen were, reportedly, actors sitting in Abbas Kiarostami’s living room looking at dots above the camera, and the narrative they are apparently following so avidly was chosen afterwards. It goes to show what a great thing Lev Kuleshov’s editing experiment was. I wonder if Kiarostami was also thinking of Salaam Cinema, made by his intriguing counterpart Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a film made of filmed auditions for a film that turns out to be the film we’re watching, in which the director is shown insisting that his would-be movie stars must be able to cry on demand. Makhmalbaf is already implicated in Kiarostami’s hall of empty mirrors in Close-up, about which it would be wrong to give too much away, except to say that it features an impostor and their impostee both playing themselves.

The comparison with Andy Warhol’s Blow Job

– what’s really going on down there? Does it matter? – and Screen Tests might be obvious, but I’m going to make it anyway: we just love looking at other people, that’s what nearly all paintings and photographs and films are for, and if you take away the frame of context and narrative we expect in a film, we still love it. On that subject, if you ever ever get a chance to see Tim Etchells performing Down Time, do. I wonder how he would now remember what he was thinking.

Where you fall to if you’re not tied down

Imagine someone pays for you to go to the Antarctic and make a documentary. Dramatic, beautiful vistas, as pure as the mathematics of air flow and crystallization, which your viewers won’t have seen for themselves. Extraordinary cold. Cliffs of ice. Danger. Explorers enduring unimaginable hardship in the name of science. Penguins. What a nightmare. Where could you possibly start? How could you avoid all the above clichés without ignoring everything that is recognizably Antarctic?

By force of character. That, at least, seems to be Werner Herzog’s method,

Addicted to images

Idriss, a teenage goatherd in the Sahara, encounters two French people in a Land Rover. One, a young woman with blond hair and bare legs, takes his picture. She is taken aback to find that Idriss knows enough French to ask for the photo. She promises to send it once she gets back to Paris and has it developed. No photo arrives. But at a wedding party, he has a revelation:

Heart of Darkness

I love Joseph Conrad’s writing. So I’ve always been disturbed to hear that people think Heart of Darkness is racist. I first read it years ago, and I remembered that black people don’t get a very flattering portrayal in the book, but I thought that if you gave Conrad the benefit of the doubt it wasn’t that unflattering either; and anyway, the book was about Europeans; and although anyone would of course at first assume that the heart of darkness was something to be found in Africa, it was really, as I remembered it, in those Europeans – in particular, the European city like a white sepulchre in which the narrative ends.

Then someone whose opinions on most things I trust read it for herself and said its racist reputation was horribly justified.

silencio

I’m ashamed to admit that I love The Silentists.