This month’s cartoonist is Huw Aaron
Huw’s cartoon (above) appears on page 12 of our October issue. A selection of his cartoons for Prospect will be published on First Drafts over the next month. Huw’s book, “Aannual Aaron 2009″ is published later this month and will be available from www.huwaaron.com
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This June, the architects Rogers Stirk Harbour were unceremoniously sacked from a job designing a multi-billion pound housing project on the site of the former Chelsea Barracks. The reasons were not fully explained, and there may have been more than one, but the most obvious was that Prince Charles had written privately to the site’s owners, the Qatari Royal Family, urging them to reject the Rogers design.
That Prince Charles acted shamefully should not be in doubt. He showed arrogance and contempt for others, and abused the prestige of his inherited position. Having intervened decisively in a public arena, he then refused all offers to debate or discuss his action. He showed little understanding of the issues in which he intervened. He was devious and disingenuous.
Dame Edna Everidge: the audience was in on the joke
The marketing for the new Sacha Baron Cohen film Brüno is as in our face at the moment as the film’s eponymous gay Austrian’s arschenhalle was in Eminem’s at the recent MTV movie awards. The trailer is funny, but the first reviews call the film sour and misanthropic. Is Baron Cohen losing his mojo?
His mojo was firmly in his grasp in his last film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America to Make Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)—or so half the world seemed to think, judging by its massive box office and the appearance of lime-green mankinis at stag weekends. I’ve kept quiet about Borat until now because I like to write about good movies rather than bad, but the surprise in some quarters that the Brüno film might be a bit—what?—aggressive and thick, makes me want to have my say.
In the early 1990s, when I first saw Kazakh films, a world opened up. The Altay mountains in these films were as gorgeous as the Mournes in County Down in which I climbed as a boy. Newly independent, the Kazakhs were trying to work out who they were. I began writing to directors Ermek Shinarbayev and Darzhan Omirbaev, and learned about Kazakhstan’s traditions of hospitality. The country’s literacy rate is 99.5 per cent; it is fourth in the world, ahead of the US and Britain.
Until recently the Awá-Guajá tribe were one of the last indigenous peoples in Brazil to lead a fully nomadic life, surviving through hunting and gathering. There may be about 60 uncontacted Awá-Guajá still at large in a protected area of the rainforest, but most of the other 300 live in three reservations, where they are learning to adapt to village life and practise agriculture—with difficulty.
Brazil has an indigenous population of 460,000. They are the responsibility of FUNAI—the National Indian Foundation— which demarcates and protects their land, most of which is in the Amazon, and supports villages from a series of nearby “posts.” These pictures were taken at Juriti post in the northern state of Maranhao, next to a village that is home to 37 Awá-Guajá. Juriti’s administrator, Patrilino Viana, helps them grow crops, especially the starchy root vegetable manioc, or cassava. But it’s an uphill battle. Many families disappear for days back into the forest, surviving on fruit and hunting monkey, tapir and wild birds with rifles or bows and arrows.
The Awá-Guajá traditionally lived in small communities of up to 30, avoiding stronger tribes and white men, who in the past often killed them. In the 1970s the construction of a railroad devastated their territory. FUNAI tried to gather together the native population and settle them near the posts, but more than two thirds of the Awá-Guajá died, victims of malaria and flu.
I’m on the balcony of a small, shabby apartment in Cannes, the day after the 62nd edition of its famous film festival. I’m looking out to a grey-blue Mediterranean sea. Beyond the palm trees in the foreground, their fronds motionless in the twilight air, there’s a watercolour corniche and the promise of something other than film. I can smell garlic and, I think, anchovies. I reek of aftersun and my eyes have never been more tired. I’ve been here for a fortnight, during which time I chatted with Martin Scorsese about a new foundation I am setting up with Tilda Swinton. On a yacht in the Mediterranean I told Willem Dafoe that I loved Lars von Trier’s new film, Antichrist, in which he stars. And I met Quentin Tarantino, who called me a “cinetiser.” As far as I can tell, he’s the first person ever to use the word.
It’s my tuxedo self that does such stuff. The real me sleeps on a fold-out bed in a living room, hires a bike and eats cheese baguettes to save money. But most of all, he watches films. Forty films. Too much looking, perhaps. Now that the festival is over, I want to turn that looking into thinking.
The biggest thought that enters my weary brain as I sit here and the air cools is that the Cannes films were full of vengeance. Given that one of the headline movies of the festival was Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (note the anglophile u as well as the unexpected e), which is “kosher porn” about American Jews killing Nazis, it was no surprise that revenge would have one major outing. But it was ubiquitous. Jump from Inglourious Basterds’s retaliation as fantasy to Andrea Arnold’s crisp and jewel-like new British film, Fish Tank, and you’ll find a more social species of reprisal—vengeance as a response to being hemmed in. The story is set in an English housing estate. Mia, the chippy 15-year-old at its centre, pays back the man who seduced her and then lied to her by pissing on his carpet and stealing his kid. He counters in a far more male way, with a punch in her face.
Once encountered, Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise haunts many listeners for the rest of their lives. This is certainly true in my case. Perhaps that’s because the first time I heard it I started at the top. My father took me to a performance by the great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. I was hooked. I’ve heard it two or three dozen times since—and I suspect that Winterreise audiences are full of similar obsessives, permanently lured back by the cycle’s unique musical and poetic atmosphere.
Written near the end of Schubert’s brief life, Winterreise (Winter’s Journey) sets 24 Wilhelm Müller poems on themes of lost love, death and incipient madness. Unified by the metaphor of the poet wandering through the winter landscape to a final resting place, and by an insistent pulse at walking pace in the music, it’s widely deemed the pre-eminent song cycle in the repertoire.
So far, so uncontroversial. But there’s a problem with the work’s eminence. Like Everest, Winterreise is there, so everyone wants to have a go at it—including some who shouldn’t. Many opera singers fall into this ill-advised category, unable to scale down their vocal resources for Winterreise’s inward drama. The British bass John Tomlinson, who attempted the cycle in 2007, is one example. But there are some great exceptions, like the German bass Hans Hotter and (though not everyone agrees) the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers. One can see why so many try.
Since the 1980s, discussions about photography have been bogged down in the concept of “the real,” the most meaningless term in the art theorists’ lexicon. In effect this has divided up photography into two camps. Photography’s claim to show reality—otherwise known, usually in inverted commas, as “objective truth”—is posited against the various ways in which the camera and photographer alter reality by taking photographs. On the one side are the photojournalists, guided by Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the “decisive moment,” which was his definition of the way a good photographer could preserve a significant scene forever. On the other is the postmodern school of “staged” photography, and its best known exponent Jeff Wall, in whose work models pose in scenes laboriously constructed by the artist.
This tired debate has gone round in circles for decades. Now there is fresh hope we may get out of this ghastly conundrum (for which we can blame Roland Barthes and other French people) thanks to the idea that there is a third aspect to the aesthetics of photography—the thought that a photograph is itself a three-dimensional object with a material existence. It is this idea that is explored in the Photographers’ Gallery’s landmark exhibition, “The Photographic Object,” showing until 14th June. The show is tantalising rather than thorough but, if people pay enough attention, it could be a first step in revolutionising the way we think about photography.
The two sides in the debate about the “real” had one thing in common. They both treated the photograph itself as a window: merely something through which a scene could be viewed, much as a painting was thought of between the Renaissance and the end of the 19th century. The radical idea of a photographic object moves beyond that, as painting did with cubism.
It’s all to play for, as far as the history of art in our times goes. An era of cultural as well as economic excess is drawing to a close. The principles that inspired artistic production are soon likely to follow into the dustbin of history those principles by which our economies were run, carrying with them the reputations of some of the most successful artists of our times. Out will go the idea that near identical conceptual works of art can be mass produced by factory-studios until demand is exhausted; out will go the idea that high production values—shininess, the quality of fabrication—are enough to define the art of our time; out will go the idea that art can criticise greed and stupidity by imitating it. Modernism, it seems, has finally succumbed to the decadent super-sized clichés of some conceptual artists.
It’s at moments like these that new directions in art emerge, and overlooked artists from the recent past are re-appraised; and I have recently spotted what seem to be a few green shoots of artistic recovery. Last year at the Haunch of Venison gallery, I came across an extraordinary kinetic sculpture by the British artist Mat Collishaw as part of his solo show “Shooting Stars.” It was a zoetrope: an object of great technical complexity and historical resonance, based on the 19th-century precursor of the animated sequence, a rotating drum with a set of pictures inside. Glimpsed through slits, these form a moving image when spun. Collishaw’s zoetrope, however, was three dimensional, inspired by one made by Pixar which he had seen in the Science Museum. It had 180 figures and rotated under a strobe light. He had spent nine months designing it. As it picked up speed, you could see scenes of sexual activity featuring a minotaur, the three Graces, a she-wolf and a cherub. It looked like a 19th-century engraving of a bacchanal, but more pornographic.
I was intrigued by its dissonances and synchronicities. The images were slight considering the effort it had taken to create, and it was odd to see such an old-fashioned ensemble of figures brought to life by such contemporary technology. But there was also a strange harmony between subject and technology: both were hedonist, the one a purely visual pleasure, the other a sexual one. The zoetrope sat in my mind—an unforgettable work. Then, this March, I came across another Collishaw at the Haunch of Venison’s “Mythologies” show: a triptych of photographs of massively enlarged arrangements of the wings and crushed body parts of butterflies and moths, over a metre in height (one of which is pictured, left). Thanks to Damien Hirst I have become prejudiced against the use of butterflies in art, but this work was different. It looked like a dusty slide from the drawers of a 19th-century botanist which, with its intense colours, combinations of different patterns and crumbling textures, had somehow become a remarkable photographic version of abstract painting.
In my eight years of writing on cinema for this magazine, not once have I directly tackled the subject of editing in film. Given that the cut is the flickering medium’s greatest party trick, this is well nigh inexplicable. Maybe I’ve avoided the subject because it’s too big. Or maybe editing is just too close to home for me to get any perspective on it.
Whatever the reasons, I think I know why my silence has suddenly dawned on me. I’ve just spent nine weeks filming my history of cinema in Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney and Beijing. Now, suddenly, I find myself embarking on 11 weeks in a cutting room, chopping and re-arranging the results with Timo, my editor. It’s an instant, total change from one paradigm to another—and this, at its most extreme, is what an edit is. The only thing that has travelled across from the filming to the cutting room is, in this case, me.
Anyone who has seen recent films like The Dark Knight or Slumdog Millionaire knows that editing is, in a way, cinema’s claim to fame. It took the earliest directors a few years to shake off the influence of theatre but, by about 1907, the grammar of narrative cinema cutting was in place. In the century since, as a general rule, cutting rates in mainstream cinema have got faster. And the hard data is intriguing. In the 1910s in America, the average shot length (ASL) was about ten seconds (according to the brilliant film historian Barry Salt). In the 1920s, it was nearer seven seconds. By the 1970s, it was below six seconds. In contrast, cutting rates were always slower in the Europe—15, nine and nine are the figures for the same decades. The ASL of British films in the 1960s was 7.7, the same as the speedy Americans and two seconds faster than the mainland Europeans, whose films were always that bit more contemplative.
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