Credo / Mark Oliver

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

The Turkish film maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has taken some amazing photographs of Turkey while making his latest film, Climates. I saw some prints of the photos at the National Theatre in London. He has a great website, which has all of the ones from that exhibition ... and is very stylishly done.

An aside: while looking at the photographs it was quiet in the theatre hallways as the shows were ongoing and two of the theatre ushers - a man and a lover - were having a row in a corner. Where they lovers? As we walked around they moved to the other side ... which we then went to as we had not seen those photos and the guy actually complained to her that we were "following" them around!  Lucky he was round a corner - I tell you - because I was up for fighting (he looked quite weedy and middle aged, naturally).

The photos made me want to see Ceylan's films; I am trying to get hold of a 2002 one called Uzak (Distant), which was the one he made before Climates. I also really want to visit Istanbul, and hope to do this sometime this year.

Star Wars on parade

photo: KWC

 

            

costumepractice3 
  Originally uploaded by bonniegrrl.

Storm troopers on parade at something called the Rose Parade in California.  The top image is the parade and the ones below it are from the rehearsal.

Sheffield Docfest

I spent a couple of days at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival, which I have been to once before, in 2002. Back then, I think I took two days as holiday and wrote a festival review for Guardian Unlimited Film.

This time, I went to write some posts for News blog and do some podcasting. There are around 100 documentary films and many of them - I would say at least a third - have a newsy or current affairs kind of slant. To make a current affairs documentary you obviously have to invest many months, or even years, of research and filming effort, and I thought it was a good idea to try and report on the most interesting offerings.

I saw half a dozen films and the one that left the most intense impression was Crude Awakenings: The Oil Crash, a Swiss film about the world reaching peak-oil production and what life will be like without it. I knew that the world's oil was running out but the penny had not really dropped for me how calamitous this could be for living standards; also I was kind of spellbound by the idea of mankind using up all of the oil in like 200 years in which I was lucky enough to live.

There was a beautifully-shot film called The Chances of the World Changing about a New York writer who one night spent $20 to save a turtle from a Chinatown restaurant and then ends up having on-the-hoof turtle conservation take over his huge apartment and his whole life. It is a really sad story about how you can try to change the world and the world just kind of crushes you but there is something really heroic in what e tried to do and the sincerity of his beliefs. The footage of the turtles swimming in various tanks is beautiful and memorable. (Read my GU post here)

I also saw a film called War Hospital on a place in Kenya, over the border from Sudan, which for years has been caring for Sudan’s war-wounded.

I did a podcast interview with filmmaker Sean McAllister after an interesting debate about the differences between the artist/director and mainstream media broadcast journalism. Some of the interview did not record onto the edirol machine and it did not have all of the right context, which was a shame, but I guess we are slowly getting better at doing podcasts, which does require different skills. The most time consuming thing is the editing. I think in future I will try and have set questions and a set structure to help speed this up. I was using one of the new edirol's which was quite nifty.

Before the festival started I interviewed a US filmmaker, Alan Berliner, about his film, Wide Awake, which is about insomnia. He has suffered from this for the best of four decades, though he clearly feeds creatively on working at night. He was an interesting person to talk to and I kind of identified with this obsessive streak he had in hoarding archive films, sound effects and newspaper cuttings. This reminded me of plans I had to buy a pen scanner to better record and hoard stuff that I read.

Berliner said that period novels and journals indicate that people slept around nine and a half hours in the Victorian era. "We are, at least in western culture, averaging seven and a half or so" he says.

So you see the curve of average sleep is going down and it is never going to go up again there are too many stimulations and pushes and pulls of technology. Once the light bulb hit and opened up the space and the time of the night the idea of everyone getting optimum night's rest went out the window.

All things being equal, I would like to go back to the festival next year but prepare for it much further in advance so that I had seen most of he films I was interested in writing about and had teed up video clip extracts that we could use on GU.

Miguel Calderon paintings

Thinking about The Royal Tenenbaums reminded me about these painings, by Mexican artist and writer Miguel Calderon, the first two of which are on the walls of a room in one of the film's scenes. Years ago I went to a screening of the film which director Wes Anderson was at and he joked that he put the paintings - which he owns - into the film to increase their value.

Goodness knows what is supposed to be going on in the paintings, but you can't deny that they are powerful and cinematic and, well, "suggestive of story".

Waking Life

I have just watched Waking Life, which I was inspired to check out after seeing A Scanner Darkly. This earlier Richard Linklater film using rotoscope - from 2001 - is much more like his Before Sunrise and Before Sunset movies, with lots of intellectual talk - indeed the Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy characters from the Before films make a cameo.

There are lots of interesting things in it. The Delphy character talks about how a second of dreaming feels like a long time and the Hawke character says that the roughly six to 12 minutes which your brain is supposed to keep functioning for after you die could seem like a second life time of dreaming.

The main character can not get out of a dream after being hit by a car and begins to fear he has been killed. It says on the Wiki page about the film that the title is a reference to George Santayana's maxim that "[s]anity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled".

Linklater himself appears at the end and tells this dream story about how really everyone is just caught in one moment of saying no to joining god and death is the moment of saying yes.

Some of the characters the main guy meets / dreams about are very cool - this guy who talks about how insignificant he is, before self-immolating himself with a can of petrol. Then the guy who has rigged up speakers to his car like a campaigning politician and is giving this insightful rant, slamming political parties as both being on the opposite side of truth.

I have heard before about people trying to control their dreams and I sometimes think about this as I am drifting off to sleep.

A Scanner Darkly

I loved the rotoscope technique, apart from when Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) and others are wearing the identity-scrambling suits, which made my head hurt. On a handful of occasions I looked at one of the characters faces and felt they had not been rotoscoped enough for a second, and you could see real faces coming through, which was kind of freaky. I would like to see Linklater's earlier rotoscope film, Walking Life.

In A Scanner Darkly, there is something about it which tugs you in, even though it is quite slow-burning. The more I think about the movie, the more I like it and I agree with CultureSpace that it "rewards your patience" at director Richard Linklater's technique, which pushes a sense of disassociation. The representation of surveillance is scary - especially the scene where a police operator is following various subjects and can order an arrest with a flick of a button.

It is all about the desparate mood of the addict. Reeves' undercover agent is compellingly lost; he is as addicted as the addicts he is targeting. I like the scene where he thinks back about his earlier, normal life where he lived with his family in the house which is now a dishevelled drug den. Wearing a suit and clean from drugs in his past life, he hits his head on a kitchen unit and looks up and sees his kids and wife and wants to escape. Nietzsche describes such a moment like this:

The great liberation comes for those who are thus fettered suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: the youthful soul is all at once convulsed, torn lose, torn away – it itself does not know what is happening. A drive and impulse rules and masters it like a command; a will and desire awakens to go off, anywhere, at any cost; a vehement dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames and flickers in all its sense. “Better to die than go on  living here” – thus resounds the imperious voice and temptation: and this ‘here’ and this ‘at home’ is everything it had hitherto loved! . . . A victory?  Over what? Over whom? An enigmatic, question-packed, questionable victory, but the first victory nonetheless ...

But the undercover Reeves talks of a desperate life among the addicts, with the compensation of irregular "wonderful moments". Reeve's character later seems to do a 180 degrees and wanders through the house saying it should be confiscated and that "a family could live here". The ending is clever and kind of satisfying; I left the cinema not 100% sure what happened and enjoyed trying to think back and work it out. Check out this quotation (thanks to Dr Zeus) from the original Philip K Dick story:

In Southern California it didn't make any difference anyhow where you went; there was always the same McDonaldburger place over and over, like a circular strip that turned past you as you pretended to go somewhere. And when finally you got hungry and went to the McDonaldburger place and bought a McDonald's hamburger, it was the one they sold you last time and the time before that and so forth, back to before you were born, and in addition bad people -- liars -- said it was made out of turkey gizzards anyhow. They had by now, according to their sign, sold the same original burger fifty billion times. He wondered if it was to the same person. Life in Anaheim, California, was a comercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze... Someday, he thought, it'll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald's hamburger as well as buy it; we'll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms.

James Bond, Britain's consolation

  Casino Royale Poster 
  Originally uploaded by Stair of Juno.

I have to confess that I did not really know as much as I should have done about the Suez crisis. There is a great piece in this week's Economist outlining what happened 50 years ago. What caught my eye was a section about how Anthony Eden recuperated from the crisis in Ian Fleming's house, Goldeneye, in Jamaica. The Economist says:

"It was an appropriate choice, as it was Fleming who was to mythologise the new relationship in his James Bond novels. The first, “Casino Royale”, was published to little attention in 1953, but the series took off in the years after the Suez crisis, offering some sort of literary consolation to a country coming to terms with its new, humbler status. The partnership between Bond and Felix Leiter, a CIA agent, reflected the way the British now liked to see things, the one suave, smart and endlessly resourceful, the other with a lot of money and a slightly plodding manner."

I think Tony Blair might sometimes fancy himself a little as a James Bond figure. He does sometimes where those Paul Smith shirts with silouettes of women on the inside of the cuff.

I read Casino Royale earlier this year, and really enjoyed it. I have seen the trailer for the film and don't really recognise half the scenes from the novel, which is quite a tight story with most of the action happening in the casino. The first lines of the book are fantastic:

"The scent and smoke of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high-gambling - a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension - becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it."

Young Adam

  Young Adam 
  Originally uploaded by fled is that music.

Alexander Trocchi’s novella has a gripping plot revolving around a blocked writer/ bargeman in Scotland whose ex-girlfriend accidentally slips fatally into a river while he is with her; an innocent man is put on trial for murder.

Adam, who has the soul of a drifter / literary outsider, struggles with his conscience about whether he should intervene but worries he will only end up in the dock himself.

He is a paid hand living cheek by jowel on a barge with Leslie and his wife Ella, who he starts an affair with the day they, coincidentally, fish the dead woman out of the water.

The development of the affair, in such cramped quarters (his little room is right next to the marital bed), is compelling because it seems so risky and vulnerable to discovery.

Adam’s unease at admitting he was with his ex-girlfriend when she died seems to chime with his general unwillingness to commit to any kind of responsibility in his life. He lived with her earlier on, before they split, and she supported him as he tried, and failed to write some kind of original type of book. She tells him he should have been rich. His background as a kind of working class intellectual, forced to take manual jobs, means that he is basically geared towards surviving first and foremost – principally surviving the noose. He often wonders about going overseas.

After the affair is discovered he is quietly horrified by Ella’s remark that “We seem to have settled for one another”, and he fears she is encroaching on his identity.

I am a rootless kind of man. Often I find myself anxious to become involved with other people, but I am no sooner involved than I wish to be free again. Ten years ago I walked out of a university one spring morning with a small overnight bag. I never returned. Since then I have worked when I needed money, because I felt like moving, because I had to break out of a situation in which, though the necessities of life were provided for me, I felt myself being crushed.

You are left thinking that his life would have been much better if he had stayed with his girlfriend. He survives and retains his independence, but his lack of connections to anyone, even though it is cloaked in the tough glamour of the outsider, seems a desparate way of living.

He fails to write and seems to find only release and transcendence in seduction (the book was first published by Olmypia Press in Paris in 1954 and must have been pretty racy stuff then). It is like he channels his difference from those around him in the working class world into a sexual attractiveness – a consolation for his position as a kind of Jude the Obscure, and maybe one of the mechanisms that is trapping him there. There is a memorable custard / S and M sex scene.

Coincidentally, I read a New Statesman piece today by Ryan Gilbey about Michael Mann’s new film, Miami Vice, which dwelled on similar themes about heroic loners. It said Mann’s films held up this kind of character, who he said seemed most happy when living alone in minimalist flats, but criticised him for having a lack of “emotional maturity”. Gilbey says Mann depicts families as entanglements; Mann seems to want us to admire the professionalism of Tom Cruise’s loner assassin in Collateral. Gilbey also quotes the memorable line by the Robert De Niro villain in Heat who tells how he was once advised that you should always be able to walk away from anything in your life in 30 seconds. A credo which, apparently like Young Adam’s, is rooted in survival.

So there you go: similarities between the outsider hero of the barges in 1950s Scotland and Crockett and Tubbs.

Trocchi's style is sparse; there are great moments of characterisation. Adam, a seemingly hopeless womaniser, has sex with Ella’s sister Gwendoline and then she picks up her cigarette, which she has left smouldering in the grass. Her mouth is described as being like “blood on porcelain”.

It is a short, tight direct book, which evokes a powerful atmosphere very economically. Raymond Carver said that it was important to write as "subtly as a waterstream" and even though there are such broad plot strokes as a death of a lover, an affair and a dramatic trial, the texture still feels light and earned.

Incidentally, the film of Young Adam, starring Ewan McGregor, which I saw a few years ago when it came out, is one of the most faithful adaptations of any book that I have ever seen.

Congratulations Danny

My friend Danny Beck has won a competition at the Brit Doc festival for his short film, using great  archive footage, about the amazing story of how a huge volcano eruption led to the creation of the bicycle.

The secret salacious world of the Munchkins

You have to love that headline from the Mail. Irvine Welsh has written a new play, Babylon Heights, which tells of the crazy orgies the dwarf actors had when they made when they were involved in fiiming the Wizard of Oz. The thing was, many of them had never met other dwarves before and they were basically having the time of their lives.

There seems to be a trend emerging here. I am sure I read, years ago, something similar happening with the actors who played the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. It makes you wonder what the Oompa Lumpas got up to.

Welsh has a new novel out, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chef, and has been giving lots of interviews. In one  to the Sunday Telegraph last week, headlined 'I did well out of Thatcherism' (good angle for the paper's demographic), he talks about writing things with a bit of an edge (there is an unspeakable sex scene in the book).Welsh says:

You need an almost psychotic disengagement from the world to be able to write about certain things. You go into a zone, like driving into the centre of the sun and finding it cold. It's a very selfish, one dimensional place to be ... I try to limit my journeys.