City Of Tiny Lights

This is a properly difficult one.

It kept bringing to mind "Bus 174", a billiant, cold-eyed documentary about a compulsive, truly nerve-jangling horror-stricken hostage scenario in a bus in Rio de Janeiro. The documentary film that comes with the DVD of City of God is similarly gripping, unarguably real. "You might say it's not a job, but it is" says one guy about his life in the favela.

"City of God" itself is too awash with flashbacks, cheeky captions, crowd-pleasing music, self-consciously knockabout comedy, stagey changes in film stock, and lengthy chase scenes to build up real menace or engagement with "Rocket", the likeable kid who wants to be a photographer.

There are a few moments when it comes alive: Little Ze stalks the nightclub, genuinely out of control, needing to take revenge on any figure he can pin his rage on. In some ways, the film is too small for anything but this 18-year-old's volcanic anger, and in trying to capture another personal story or deliver an impression of a community the film simply gets too diluted.

The Gentle Art Of Keeping It Simple

The always-inspiring Union Chapel on Upper Street in Islington was our venue for John Hopkins and King Creosote, playing a jointly recorded LP venture.

As is my wont recently, I pitched up for this entirely on the strength of a general liking-the-idea of it, and the enthusiastic recommendations of Chris and Sean, who'd actually taking the trouble of listening to the songs beforehand so that I didn't have to.

This was incredibly fragile music, with none of the robustness of verse-chorus-verse, or anything you'd call a beat. The vocal melodies were almost choral in their repetitiveness and undemonstrativeness. Even when KC's content is ostensibly emotional, there's very little emoting about it.

The electronics-enthusiast in me kept hearing the empty spaces where the Hopkins bounce of joyfully complex techno would normally be; the longer the songs went on, the more apparent it became that this would overload the show with unnecessary musical detail. Hopkins ended up playing more of his upright piano that he did the computer.

Halfway through the show, Chris told me that the ambient sound at the start of the first track was the field recording of dinner-table talk at someone's house: clattering, indistinct chatter, room air and the sound-scape around a house. This immediately placed everything in an almost painfully-intimate domestic frame, and the Talking-Heads-esque restraint in how much each person on stage did made for a genuinely magical gig.

Baest Foot Forward

Our friends Baest were in sparkling form at an almost-cabaret bill in aid of a shamefully-forgotten charity at the Old Boy's Club near Gillett Square in Dalston a couple of weeks ago.

Dense sheets of guitar texture did that is-it-a-wave-or-is-it-a-particle? thing and kept the ebb and flow of the tracks running without ever really having to do anything as crass as sound like there was the hitting of a chord or picking an arpeggio.

There was an even denser world of Laptopiary; I was hearing the carefully-judged breakbeat techno of Finitribe and laser-guided pop dynamics of 'Technique' for the first track or 2, until the electronics and guitar began to speak to each-other properly and the sound became it's own.

Lovely stuff!

Dreams Come True

These two films, which I watched back-to-back today in an influenza haze, are both about sojourns in dream-spaces; both almost sermonizing in their lessons about the education of a more-or-less deliberate journey to a radically different reality. Both holiday films, more or less.

Stalker (on both watchings; I saw it, mesmerised, 3 years ago) has lost none of it's war-reporter power. Everything in the film is cracked, flooded, rotten, decayed, abandoned, broken, deserted. The dream-destination is alive with shards, a silent and oddly benevolent dog, crumbled objects, bird-sound, drips and splashes of unseen water, the occasion far-away train, leaving the complaints and dissatisfactions of the seekers-after all the more isolated and pathetic.

The breathing-in of the three men, particularly the Stalker himself, is raspy, laboured, shallow, a festival of effort and dried, cracked discomfort. Travelling toward something as undeniable and burdensome as everything-they-ever-truly-wanted at the centre of the Zone, the effort of speech is difficult to muster up. It's striking on a second watch, how little there is to say about the relationships between the three men, given that they spend more than 2 hours of screen time in the same, long shots together.

If Stalker is a film about desire and locality, then Spirited Away is it's sister movie about rite of passage and social locality. There are the apparently-obligatory ectoplasmic monsters and preposterous plot holes but a ghostly and hallucinatory visual imagination at work; the submerged train tracks, Kumajii's arachnid limbs, the almost nauseatingly plummy bath-token manager Aogaeru.

The theme of submerging as a transitory device is common to both; one of the few still, slow visual moments in Spirited Away that isn't ruined by truly dreadful American dubbed dialogue or brutal plot gear-changes is the over-the-sea train, it's tracks a couple of feet below the surface, station platforms rising out of the water like dreams of their own. Tarkovsky uses languid pans across detritus drowned in low pools, usually sunken tiled surfaces, mildewed and cracked, as staging posts within Stalker. His very-slightly-hokey loudly Oriental wind instrument is heard here too, signalling a respite from the brutal visitation of the unknowable within the spaces the men inhabit.

Both travellers come home, both to their families (weirdly after the passages they've endured), and neither seem likely to return.

Test Transmission

This was a quietly delirious farrago of scratching, hesitation, desultoriness, repetition and heart-breaking regret.

As Michael Chion puts it, "when we dive into our memories, we are diving not into our past, but our present".

The voice from Krapp's 'past', is almost painfully dislocated from the man we see on the stage, shambolic and frail, though it speaks for him more plainly than his 'real' voice ever does. His fiddling and frustrating attempts to get the correct tape from his archive and into the machine beautifully stage our faltering and fragmented relationship with our memories and the fruitlessness of trying to get those same memories to speak or live for us in the now.

The sparse room in which the 'action' takes place is almost an antechamber or waiting room for forgetfulness, in which Krapp's number is never called.

Swan So Long

I hear Natalie Portman got a gong or two for this, which is believable enough; it's a florid and hysterical marathon, with more than enough Feelings to make an American film panel feel like it had been hit by a train.

Portman does a good job of having the sheer stamina to deliver a drama queen with no life skills; the bulk of the film away from then dance sequences has all the electricity of a desultory early rehearsal for a dance routine nobody gets yet.

The characters are without exception manipulative, preening, self-serving, hackneyed, and living at a fever pitch of performativity.

The central theme of transformation and duality ends up imploding, as the credible character required to act out (and when I write Act Out, I mean act out) these processes is completely absent.

Any of my (few) readers who gave this vomit of a film any house room needs simply to be directed to the glorious drama and globally choreographed "The Red Shoes". There's even a full review of it earlier in the blog.

TV Sky

The gangways and cobbled dockside spaces at Liverpool were almost spectrally quiet, even at the weekend; I flicked my eyes over my shoulder regularly, waiting for the packed throngs of gallery-shufflers who just never appeared. Like Tate After The Triffids.

There's a genuinely meditative air around some of the pieces, particularly the candle being CCTV'd and re-projected on the walls of the space it sits in, surrounded by the paraphernalia of camera, tripods, wiring.

At moments it all looked very dusty and old, the battered instruments that he disembowelled and jury-rigged with barged wire and glued-on detritus appeared as if they really belonged in Paik's garage, as they carried only a very poorly mediated folk memory of the incidents they lived and were destroyed in.

As if the Aktion, performance, Moment that was constituted by the physical violence visited on them necessarily meant their uselessness as Memoriae of that event. The pianos, especially, were almost bathetic, only ever gesturing at what was absent from them.
The 'family' of robots, even though apparently the most recognisable of Paik's work, were quite sad specimens, museum pieces, garden-shed approximations of an idea.