Early morning, not even properly awake my brain grabs the first thought
that flits through it and somehow won't let go. Since I'm barely
conscious this thought - whatever it is - runs like wildfire, a
computer virus that's gained control, a rogue thought running
everywhere... This morning it was Shakespeare. I had some image of
Shakespeare, I have no idea why. Maybe from the Dr Who
episode that had him in a while back. Maybe cos we walked near the
Globe a week ago. Or I dunno. But suddenly I was thinking Shakespeare
and Time Travel. And then, still lying there, in the bed you
understand, eyes not even open yet, I was thinking about what if you
could make a movie about Shakespeare travelling in time. This stupid
thought then skidded around in many ways I can't even recall but soon
became an idea of a movie where Shakespeare arrives in Hollywood and is
put to work writing movie scripts. The whole thing seemed to be in the
area of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure... (which I can
hardly remember.. maybe I didn't even see it).. But in this idea that
was happening pretty well unbidden in my head Shakespeare was going
round LA to pool parties, heading out to the desert and having script
meetings..
But then, off to one side, there was a variation on the idea that it
should (or could?) be two modern-day scriptwriters that have somehow
gotten hold of Shakespeare, maybe abducting him via time travel and
keeping him locked prisoner in a motel and where he can work on scripts
for them; they have some heavy deadlines for costume dramas. Before
long I was thinking maybe these two guys might have a whole stable of
writers from the past locked up there in little rooms - Hemmingway
maybe, Austen, Conrad, Tolstoy - all of them working away in their
rooms with the curtains drawn, on projects they can hardly understand.
The two scriptwriters would be trying to keep their captives a secret
but also at the same time they'd have to introduce them to the 'modern
world', blowing their minds so speak with information and situations
they could use in their scripts. taking them to kewl parties, driving
them around in 4x4's, showing them TV, internet gaming etc.. Bill & Ted/The Man Who Fell To Earth...
And then I was thinking yeah but how do the two guys get the
time-travel to abduct these writers from out of chronology in the first
place? What's that all about? Is it like the geeky-kid brother of one
of the scriptwriters that's been dabbling in home time travel and
offers to help them when they get to the first impossible
writing-deadline on some historical movie?... Or?... And then finally
(I am waking up more properly by this point) I start wondering the
really big question - i.e. why am I even thinking about this stuff in
the first place? Its totally stupid.
Shit. If there was a way to direct (and harness) these early morning
flashes of mental energy I think they could be pretty useful. But in
the meantime I'm destined to produce more half-baked ideas for movies
that couldn't really be made and for which there's no particular use,
rhyme or reason.
My performance-for-sculptures collaboration with Elmgreen and Dragset, Drama Queens gets last word(s) in each of two round-ups about the Münster Sculpture Project this week; here from Ossian Ward in Time Out and here from Adrian Searle in The Guardian.
If I remember correctly it is hillarious according to one and "not
pompous" according to the other, which has to be good news. Münster runs until 30th September.
A Stinking Cancerous Tumour in the Middle of an Exquisitely Beautiful Valley
Wednesday, 27 June 2007
Reviews all over everywhere tag Lukas Moodysson's fifth feature Container
(2006) as boring, irritating, pretentious, disappointing - especially
those writers that bitterly regret his shift from character and
narrative to more troubled and abstracted art-house territory. I liked
the earlier films - Together is great - but for my money Container
is more interesting. It's rather brilliant in fact - an uncompromising
piece of hard work, hard to take, hard to watch, audacious,
single-minded. I was more or less holding my breath for 77 minutes.
Afterwards I couldn't think of a single word to say.
Moodysson's extraordinary monologue for actress Jena Malone feels like some kind of post-internet Samuel Beckett crossed with Kathy Acker and
runs through the entirety of the movie, almost without pause. Malone's
performance is the heart of the film, whispering, rambling and fighting
itself, over an image track that is shot in black and white and which
borders on the incomprehensible. Below there's a short clip from the
text. Does anyone know where I can get the whole of it? I'd really love
to see it on the page.
"My particular interests are:
celebrities,
the second world war,
collecting different things,
different methods of torture,
different dead porn stars,
like for example Savannah, God, Jesus, Mary,
as well as various catastrophes like for example nuclear disasters,
like for example the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl,
I can see it all before me inside my head there is like
a box labelled catastrophes,
and inside that box there is another
labelled nuclear disasters,
and inside that box there is a third
labelled Chernobyl
then I take a carton of yogurt
and the yogurt symbolize all of my life force,
then I pour all the yogurt, I mean, my life force
into the box labelled Chernobyl
because I'm going to cool the reactor with the yogurt
and everything turns white
because I am a superhero who helps mankind"
Here's Moodysson talking about the film:
"The strongest memory I have of the shoot is something that isn’t
even in the film. (Every film is full of things that aren’t visible,
but that lie behind.) A Gypsy family that lived on a rubbish dump
outside Cluj in Romania. The rubbish dump was situated like a stinking
cancerous tumour in the middle of an exquisitely beautiful valley.
There was a clear line between the rubbish and the beautiful natural
environment. The father of the family told me that they’d once built a
house (no, not a house – a hovel made of old cardboard) some metres
from the rubbish dump on the green grass. Then the police came and tore
their house down. They weren’t allowed to leave the rubbish dump.
People with autism have a different perception and cognition than
those who are "normal", but who is "normal" really? A different
perception can mean: difficulty in sifting and working out their
impressions through sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. A different
cognition can mean: focusing on details, difficulty in differentiating
relevant and irrelevant information, not knowing where to start,
difficulty with the concept ”to be finished with something”. Container
is an autistic film. I can’t sift it. Everything rushes straight at me."
Someone pointed me at this site. Quite nice - a kind of fragmented internet lost memory drama.
Mention of Forced Entertainment's Bloody Messat last week's Meltdownin The Observer yesterday, here. And a rather more engaged and effusive blog review here.
The whole recent Modern Painter's article by Nuit Banai surveying Vlatka's work is now online here. Great to see her work getting serious attention.
And finally, via BoingBoing, interesting work from British artist Tim Knowles. Check especially his Spy Box
piece in which a digital camera placed inside a parcel looks out
through a small hole and captures images of its journey through the
postal system.
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