The Filter

DSEi film version2

2011-07-25T03:14:00.000-07:00

The ultimate retail experience

2011-07-24T03:11:00.000-07:00

My best of 2010

2010-12-30T05:35:00.000-08:00

Film
The biggest disappointment for me this year was in cinema - I thought it was a terrible year, even by recent standards. 3D seems to be everywhere (and I loathe it) and most mainstream fodder seems like light entertainment. I have zero interest in the superhero/effects/avatar/inception nonsense that everyone seems to get so worked up about, but there were some gems in the dungheap...

1. Dogtooth. I loved this pitch black Greek story of family imprisonment and psychological torture.
2. Henri-Georges Clouzet's L'Inferno. Wonderful documentary about the great French director's doomed production that went badly off the rails. Full of amazing experimental test shots and Romy Schneider is amazing. Gorgeous.
3. White Material. Colonial nightmare nail-biter from Claire Denis, with superb performance from Isabel Huppert.
4. Katalin Varga. Rape revenge in the Carpathains - looked like it could have been shot in the middle ages. One brilliant scene on a rowing boat. Good effort from brit director Peter Strickland.
5. The Kids Are Alright and Please Give. Two US comedies from female directors that both had their moments. Whilst a lot of fuss was made of the lesbian relationship under scrutiny in TKAA, the film was at heart a fairly conservative family film, but very funny. PG had some laugh out loud moments and Catherine Keener was, as ever, great.

Gainsbourg was surprisingly inventive, but the film tailed off towards the end, much like Serge's life . I haven't seen The Arbor or Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, but have heard good things about them. I was really looking forward to the Mexican Cannibal family horror We Are What We Are... but it failed on so many levels.

Art
Spoilt for choice in 2010 - clearly my favourite show was Ordinary Monsters in Brick Lane. However, I also liked this lot...

1. Surreal House / Barbican
2. Marina Abramovic / Lisson
3. Paul Nash 'The Elements' Dulwich Picture Gallery
4. Gauguin / Tate Modern
5. Van Doesberg / Tate Modern

Music
A great year for music in all formats - especially live. So much out there but I particularly enjoyed...

Albums
1. Beach House / Teen dream
A truy wonderful thing - if Fleet Foxes were actually any good, they'd sound like this.
2. Gil Scott Heron / I'm New Here
Slim pickings - only about 4 great tracks - but an astonishing re-invention.
3. Eels / Tommorrow Morning
There's very little in this world in my opinion as good as a good Eels album - and Tomorrow Morning is great.
4. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse / Dark Night of the Soul
Moody and effective collaboration with guest singers including Iggy Pop, David Lynch, Black Francis, Flaming Lips etc What's not to like?
5. Edwyn Collins / Losing Sleep
Edwyn continues to rediscover his groove with this punchy, punky pop album stuffed with his famous music pals

Music - live
1. Patti Smith / Sepentine Sessions & Union Chapel
2. CW Stoneking / Borderline
3. Arcade Fire / Hackney Enmpire
4. The Caesarians / Bardens
5. Edwyn Collins / Bloomsbury Ballroom

The Readers, British Sea Power, John and Jen, Gil Scott Heron also very good

Books
1. Just Kids / Patti Smith
2. When Marina Abramovic Dies / James Westcott
3. Goodbye London: Radical Art and Politics in the Seventies / Peter Cross, Jon Savage, Astrid Proll
4. Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste / John Waters, Simon Doonan
5. Almodovar on Almodovar

Film 3

2010-08-26T10:42:00.000-07:00

FABLES

2010-07-23T10:59:00.000-07:00

Streetwise Opera is an amazing organisation that stages professional operas performed by people who have experienced homelessness. They recently commissioned me to create 4 x images for their upcoming winter production FABLES. The four fables are The Boy Who Cried Wolf, Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale & The Rose, Hey! Come On Out! by Shinichi Hoshi, and the story of The Hartlepool Monkey. The performances are to be filmed and screened as the highlight of this winter's Shoreditch Music Festival.

Dance clip 3

2010-07-13T14:06:00.000-07:00

Dance clip 2

2010-07-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

Dance clip 1

2010-07-13T11:28:00.000-07:00

New work

2010-07-06T05:08:00.001-07:00

This new painting is a sort of follow up to the Cyclists painting from a couple of years back.

My Ideal (Surreal) Home Exhibition

2010-07-01T08:40:00.000-07:00

The Surreal House at the Barbican is a fantastic show - filled with things I absolutely love. The visitor wanders through a maze of specially-constructed rooms (Mad Love, Blasted Architecture, A Home for Birds) which are packed with surrealist treats, familiar and new. Some of the stand outs for me were Joseph Cornell's boxes, Man Ray's tiny photographs of Antoni Gaudi's buildings in Barcelona, Dali's Sleep and Magritte's Lovers (what a painting!), Robert Longo's massive drawings of Freud's apartment, and the Louis Bourgeois marble figure with a house for a head Femme Maison.

The show makes fasnicating connections between seemingly unrelated exhibits: I found out that Edward's Hopper's painting House by a Railroad was the model for the house in Psycho, and also 0001 Cemetery Lane, the house where the Addams Family lived in the 60s TV show.

The exhibition is great for film lovers. They are showing two typically brilliant Švankmajer shorts (Jaberwocky and Down to the Cellar), the amazing Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill Jr., and great clips from Godard's Le Mépris and Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice.

Best of all, there's a mini-cinema called the Electric Palace screening Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête - possibly the most magical and mysterious film ever made, and my all time favourite.

Spooky, sexy, mind-boggling and clever, The Surreal House succeeds in showing how the darkest sides of human nature and desire continue to inspire really profound, haunting, and exciting work. So don't miss it!

Film 2

2010-06-27T11:31:00.000-07:00

Film

2010-06-27T09:31:00.000-07:00

Strip

2010-06-27T04:11:00.001-07:00

Hurt

2010-06-27T01:58:00.000-07:00

Hate...
I eventually got 'round to watching The Hurt Locker. I found it boring, dumb and unengaging. I hated all the "characters" and couldn't wait for them all to get blown up. The POV was exactly like that of a video game. Congratulations, Kathryn, you've made a big noisy action film which glorifies soldiering and objectifies the 'enemy', just like all your male counterparts in Hollywood do. Have another Oscar.

Rate...
For a really good film about white people being in countries they really shouldn't (and also directed by a woman) I recommend Claire Denis' latest White Material. I was lucky enough to see a preview last week and thought it was disturbing, beautiful, and puzzling.