Top Ten Films Of The Year

An annual requirement and this year easier than has often been the case. So here is my list with a very short and often specific explanation of just why ...

1. Blue Is The Warmest Colour simply the most wonderful piece of film making, 3 hours slips by in a flash, you want another 3 hours and then more but there are also bravura pieces of directing which are breathtaking. For me the sequence when the two main characters are first sitting on the bench which recurs as a setting throughout the film is astonishing. They move closer and closer together in real time but time is simultaneously suspended. Heart stopping.

2. The Great Beauty provides yet more swoon inducing cinematography and a main character who is fascinating as much in what he doesn't say as what he does; an increasingly acute and self-reflective observer of a world gone mad as the privileged pursue their obsessions and ignore the rest.

3. Museum Hours on which I have already said my piece ...

4. 12 Years A Slave which is shocking for the acute observation of exploitation not just in the most obvious ways but in other insidious forms, particularly in respect of gender. For me, it also suggests (and I use that phrase carefully because I am absolutely not positing any kind of equivalence with slavery as shown in the film) some things about the current trend towards workers surrendering of all their rights as a the price of simply having a job.

5. Gloria which is simply glorious and has the courage to take head on the love lives of the middle aged in a completely frank way. The dance sequence at the end of the film makes you leave the cinema smiling broadly even as the cheesy soundtrack booms around the auditorium. The central performance is jaw dropping

6. A Field In England which is astonishing in its audacity, is 'set' in the English Civil War but channels some much deeper themes about the weirdness of the land and just how dangerous it can be when civilisation falls away. Aided by some hallucinogenics the visceral nature of nature comes to the fore. And it contains one of the single most worrying and chilling sequences in any film that I have ever seen

7. Before Midnight a fitting conclusion to a great trilogy (or will it be just one more step in a longer sequence of films) and one of the most sophisticated and mature takes on relationships that I've seen. The acting is top notch and the film is compulsive viewing. And for those of us who have grown up with the characters and see ourselves getting old with them it is even more emotional ...

8. I Wish (not quite sure whether I saw this in 2013 but anyway ...) a fantastic central conceit, heart warming and brilliantly observed and boy does it make you root for the characters

9. Lore is grim but great. The period right at the end of the Second World War as it is clear that Germany has lost and the allies are closing in not often portrayed on film from the perspective of those who have been part of the Nazi regime and are now cast adrift in a world that has changed utterly. The experience of Lore guiding her siblings towards possible safety with relatives and starting to come into contact with those who they have been taught to hate is extraordinarily well handled.

10. Suzanne which may not be released in the UK but is a second film by Katell Quilevere who made Love Like Poison which was in last year's top 10. Its another fantastically well observed piece, compulsive and superbly acted. You really don't know where its going next. And given that the information on ImDB is almost completely lacking here's a review from a probably less than surprising source.

And that's it for 2013.

Liz Vernon: 16th Century Metalhead?

As regular readers will appreciate, this blog eschews the portentous, self important or indeed sententious in favour of scholarship worn so lightly as to take flight, or indeed fright, in the slightest breeze. So it is to be hoped that, on this occasion, they will allow a departure onto more serious terrain given the potentially ground breaking work undertaken by this blog over many minutes which seeks to follow humbly in the revisionist footsteps that writers on art history of the stamp of Dan Brown have developed in recent years.

The point of departure for what can, sadly, only be the merest apercu is a picture currently to be seen hanging innocently in the back room of this exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

The subject is Elizabeth Vernon, the Countess of Southampton at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I but to distinguish her from the monarch we shall hereafter call her 'Liz' which we feel is also more in keeping with the style to which she aspired and of the all consuming passion to which we believe she was secretly an adept.

Looked at quickly and in an unsuspecting manner one might simply see another example of just how extraordinarily oddly proportioned Tudor people must have been. We do indeed have to be thankful for the subsequent development of the human form that has allowed our bodies to catch up with our heads.

One might also see in Liz, perhaps with some justification, the kind of annoying self regarding head girl qualities of the proto Sloane.

But we ask you to look more closely since all of that disguises something else. For this is an example par excellence of hiding in plain sight.

For we consider Liz to have been a secret and early devotee of what was then only emerging as a cult for the most recondite minds in the country. Not the first movement towards Arminianism in the English church. Nor indeed any dalliance with the Earl of Essex (Liz was in any case too busy with her own dalliances to have time for such an obvious loser).

No, we believe that the picture hides a yet deeper secret and one that she was desperate to signal to the small number of followers of the cult that over successive generations, and aided in particular by the much later development of the automobile industry in the West Midlands, flourished into what we now know as heavy metal.

Look at the way that she holds her left hand. Those devil horns are now the collective signifier of the metal aficionado. At the time this was incredibly dangerous. The country was riven by concern about atheism. After all only a few short years before Richard Baines had testified against Christopher Marlowe and others and the Privy Council saw signs of distemper throughout the land. So Liz was being bold, one might even say courageous, in being so open.

Then there is the problem of the comb. Art historians have puzzled for decades over why an upper class woman was seemingly unable to know which way round to hold what would have been an everyday object.

There are several possible explanations.

One is that bored with sitting for the portrait she had just finished an extravagant upwards sweep with the comb and was flourishing it in jubilation. Maybe too this was an outward signal of rebelliousness generally kept more carefully under wraps. But we think not. After all this was a woman bold enough to contract a secret marriage.

Or perhaps she was indicating the availability of the comb to her husband, Henry Wriothsley, to whom we should now turn. It is clear from one look at him that a comb would be an important part of his wardrobe.

But we think the hair is again an example of hiding in plain sight. For it hard to imagine that Liz could have kept her secret with someone other than a soul mate. Indeed, one can now see with the benefit of hindsight how decades of hair metallers have modelled themselves on him. Dave Lee Roth indeed might even make sense when one looks at antecedents like Henry.

What we don't know is whether in later years he moved more in the direction of a more rigorous cropped head and goatee. But it boots little. For those who know where to look the signs are obvious.

However, we think the deeper meaning of the comb lies with the fascination that Liz had with mirrors. One constantly hears of Tudor noble women spending hours on their appearance. But we think that with Liz there was more to it than just looking one's best. We think that she was an early practitioner of reciting lyrics in front of a mirror. Indeed, so overtaken with this was she that when sitting for the portrait she was holding the comb in the manner that might have made more sense when seen in reflection.

Again, this would have been obvious only to the chosen few.

There is more, so much more, that could be said but we hope that these insights will allow readers to look afresh on Liz now that it is safe for her secret to be revealed. For she was an early example of the kind of posho sophisticate who wants to be at the cutting edge simply because that's as far as it is possible to be from the hoi polloi. One can only wonder what she would now make of a cult that extends its reach to millions across the globe. We hope that she would be pleased that it remains utterly incomprehensible to everyone else.

This article is deeply indebted to exchanges with Geraldine Rowe and to a couple of glasses of red wine. All opinions expressed are, of course, entirely unreliable.

Shunga: Not Setting The House On Fire

One of the more interesting aspects of this exhibition at the British Museum of the Japanese erotic art form generically called shunga, is the rather peculiar notion that shunga calligraphy and script was considered to be capable of protecting your house from catching fire. Whilst that would be a clear benefit in 18th century Japan, it is less welcome in the context of a show in which something catching fire would frankly be a blessing.

I'm quite surprised at how positively this exhibition has been reviewed, including in my own newspaper of choice. It just seems to me be rather relentless; just how many drawings of various exaggerated and/or energetic activity can you take before it all becomes, well, just a bit dull?

Afficionados and art historians would certainly argue that shunga occupies a space with which the West has always struggled, hovering between art and pornography. 

However, if looked at in terms of the latter, this show rather reinforces the sense that pornography is generally very repetitive and frankly boring precisely because it completely ignores the kind of emotional engagement which provides excitement and interest.

On this I'm with some of those who have commented on the positive reviews including one person saying: 'It is pornography and like much of its kind it often has to pose couples in unnaturally contorted positions in order to display the relevant bits'. 

So most of the action does look forced and it is salutary to remember that the society in which this stuff was produced was massively patriarchal in structural terms.

The elements which really spark are those which illustrate how shunga was used to parody. Such parodies could be very rude indeed but are frequently very amusing. It is perhaps not too surprising that when the art makes you smile rather than sigh about yet another extraordinarily detailed and meticulously depicted bout of po faced activity the whole thing comes to life.

On the other hand, if looked at in terms of the former, this is one occasion on which a defence of artistic merit is easy to make. The skill and attention to detail is extraordinary. Indeed, towards the back of the exhibition there is a profoundly depressing example of how shunga was overtaken in the early 20th century by photography which produced dull, unimaginatively naturalistic images completely lacking in skill and foreshadowing the kind of stuff turned out in industrial quantities with which we are now all too depressingly familiar. The quality of the beautifully designed shunga from earlier periods has been entirely lost.

Finally, there are some walk on parts for cats. They often look bored and they may well be asleep. But on occasion they look as though they are having a better time than the humans.

Museum Hours

A new blog which fittingly has a first post about the film which provided the inspiration; a quite wonderful, wry look at a few days in the life of a museum attendant in Vienna. There have presumably been easier pitches in the history of cinema but we should be deeply grateful that this gently subversive piece made it through.

For this is a film that shouts quietly.

About the way that we all too easily jump to conclusions about people based on what they look like and what they do; indeed how in a gallery we ignore or look down on the watchers without reflecting that they may be rather more acute in their observation of us. Our attendant relatively early lets slip that he spent much of his former life on the road with rock groups and in one particularly droll moment slightly hesitantly announces to an amused Mary Margaret O'Hara that he does still like heavy metal whilst looking as though he would be considerably more likely to put on a CD of Mantovani.

About the way that we fail to appreciate the context within which the art before which we now genuflect was made. In one rather fantastic passage Dutch still lives are compared to bling-tastic rap videos: expensive tat plied high to impress the onlooker. Now we see the genius of the painting. Then the man who paid for the work simply wanted it known what he could afford.

About how we want to see art as timeless and high minded but ignore the inconvenient details which suggest that those who created it had other things on their mind, as indeed do many of the younger visitors who in the rather splendid summary of Horrible Histories more often than not are on the lookout for poo, vomit, death [and sex].  Of which there is rather a lot, including in paintings now often on the proverbial chocolate box.

Indeed, there is a bravura sequence in the middle of the film in which a guest lecturer spends quarter of an hour talking about several pictures in the stunning collection of paintings by Pieter Bruegel in the gallery gently correcting the rather comfortable view of the painter held by her listeners as producing timeless and charming vignettes of peasant and town life. The degree to which some of them find this to be not what they had paid their money to hear is illustrated tellingly by mobile phones being removed from pockets, the modern sign par excellence which screams 'bored now'.

Instead, as she observes and as Michael Frayn rather wonderfully developed in his novel Headlong, he was a painter very much of his time. If one looks closely it is clear that Bruegel is describing a world which is very far from comfortably quotidienne. In fact it is governed in a manner which we would now probably describe as a police state. Bruegel was living through a reign of terror in the Dutch states in the 1560s. A telling, lingering shot of some of the tiny detail hidden in the paintings of gibbets and bodies left tied to the upturned wheels on which they were broken speaks volumes.

About price and value. How we often have little appreciation of the circumstances in which the art which is now hanging on the wall was produced. All of it now has a high price but it was often acquired for very little in the past. It is time and scarcity that has now increased its positional value.

About the nature of chance in what is treated as art. There are some passages which are reminiscent of Agnes Varda's The Gleaners And I as people wander through knick knacks and discarded objects and photographs are left lying on the ground, disintegrating the rain. What ends up on the wall and what ends up in the gutter are perhaps separated by less than we might wish.

About how we are indulgent and amused by a heritage industry which often has roots in some deeply unsavoury aspects of our past. The red and white striped poles with pointed ends propped up outside houses in Vienna have their origins in the wars with the Ottoman Turks and the Great Seige in the 1680s. However, as the attendant remarks, modern Austrians (and by no means only Austrians) don't react very differently to Turks and other foreigners now. 

But it also observes how curiosity about culture can bring us together when we are open to difference and intrigued enough to want to understand better. There is a sequence at the end of the two main protagonists in a tiny bar at an increasingly rowdy but good humoured music night for one immigrant community. I was charmed. An affirmation of multi-culturalism. A recognition of how music and beer can bring us together. 

But isn't that what we call world music ....