The Engine

From the director of THE RETURN THE BANISHMENT (CERT TBC) (Izgnanie) A film by AndreY Zvyagintsev WINNER BEST ACTOR - Konstantin Lavronenko – Cannes Film Festival 2007 Starring Konstantin Lavronenko, Alexander Baluev and Maria Bonnevie In Russian with English subtitles / Russia 2007 / 150 mins UK RELEASE DATE: 15 August 2008 Opening at selected West End Venues and selected cinemas nationwide An Artificial Eye Release The Banishment (Based on a short story by William Saroyan entitled ‘The Laughing Matter’) is Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s second feature following his Golden Lion win with The Return in 2003. This is a tale of pride and patriarchy, which illuminates the dark soul of the Russian male. The rural setting and tragic tale suggest something as earthy and epic as an Emile Zola novel or as majestic Greek tragedy. Alex (Lavronenko) returns after 12 years to the countryside. Accompanied by his wife Vera (Bonnevie) and their two children, he ...

'The Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford' (starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck) attempts to poeticise the torpid life of racist psycho (or Southern rebel) Jesse James, but is really a study in celebrity culture, the psychopathology of 'leaders'. The film details the latter part of Jesse's career as his family and other gang members are gradually whittled away, leaving only Jesse, his brother Frank and the dregs of criminality they gather around themselves from local small towns and villages. Jesse is gunned down by Robert Ford while dusting a photo, standing on a chair, a very vulnerable position, (perhaps Jesse was more famous for his housekeeping and general household role than for his gunslinging? This suggests a feminine role for Jesse, a way to breach his defences and ultimately to destroy him.) so its clear that Jesse trusted Robert Ford and his brother Charley implicitly. But he clearly misjudged the situation, a sign that his powers of m...

The German economic recession is deepening, unemployment increasing and thus we have three escapees, Christian von Richthofen, Rolf Clausen and Kristian Bader from Hamburg in London, their agitprop work 'Auto Auto'. However this work is thoroughly offbeam in a crazily Teutonic way, imagining a car as a musical instrument then dismembering it tunefully. There are some stunning moments in 'Auto Auto' and much of it is mildly humourous, but overall I had to wonder whether von Richthofen (I suppose everyone must be wondering if he is a relative of Manfred von Richthofen, the Bloody Red Baron?!? or even of Frieda von Richthofen, 'wife of D H Lawence'), Clausen et al really have enough comic material for their show? The problem, the lameness of much of the humour is the fact that it plays on certain bland, overworked cliches of Germanness, such as the German car industry, (German engineering - Vorsprung durch Technik) Adolph Hitler, even J S Bach and W A Mozart wh...

Lou Reed's Berlin (2007), dir Julian Schnabel A film that dares to talk about the birth, death and resurrection of a pop album, rather than a Messiah or a martyr, really shows us where our culture has arrived at. Lou Reed originally produced this album in 1973, but it was a commercial flop for a set of rather obvious reasons. First of all its an intensely depressing experience. A young mother, Caroline, a drug addict involved in a drug-fueled relationship, has her children taken away from her then commits suicide. Secondly, the sentiment is simply trowelled on, as in the voices and cries of little children at the end of the album. There is much to cringe about here, but also much to celebrate, for some of the songs on the album, are instantaneous classics. The route that Schnabel takes in depicting the first live concert of this album since its conception is quite predictable in form, unlike his recent film 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly', and unlike other recen...

ALEXANDER RODCHENKO AT THE HAYWARD GALLERY, LONDON Alexander Rodchenko abandoned painting and sculpture for photography, photomontage, then clearly an irritation to Stalin who clearly opposed his 'formalism' in favour of Socialist Realism. There's a fair amount of that in Rodchenko's work though, for most of his public work would have been channelled through the party, hence his snaps of marching muscled minions in Red Square replete with bobby sox and blue shorts. There are portraits of the poet Mayakovsky, who seems unusually intense, and Mayakovsky's lover, Lilya Brik. (and also a famous portrait of Osip Brik, Lilya's husband and member of the avante-garde grouping Noyvi Lef, presumably with the letters LEF in Cyrillic reflected on his glasses) Photomontage clearly had cinematic origins reflected in the fact that Rodchenko made collaborative posters for Dziga Vertov, maker of the seminal film 'Man with a Movie Camera'. Rodchenko's relation...

The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), 1963, dir Luchino Visconti, starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon This film by Visconti followed on from his major early neo-realist works Ossessione (1943) and La Terra Trema (1948), a period when Visconti was concocting internationalist spaghettis with disparate European and American talents. Some of these films are very good and Il Gattopardo is surely one of the very good ones, but sometimes they lurch towards the ludicrous side of camp (such as his Death in Venice - although it is still visually splendid). They mark a period which might be summarised in general terms as the end of the dominance of European arthouse cinema and the beginnings of a more complexly stratified Hollywood cinema, still capable but more readily capable of immense international syntheses in the same sense that European directors like Visconti were once capable of. Visconti, both an aristocrat and a Marxist, went to the novel Il Gattopardo (The titl...