Museum Hours

The annual countdown which was particularly tricky this year given that the top three films were amongst the best I've ever seen. On another day these might have ended up in a different order. There is also still room for late drama given that before midnight tomorrow I am aiming to have seen two other films that will be contenders: Roma and Shoplifters . So there may be an addendum but for now here goes .... 1.  The Favourite  about which I have waxed lyrical  previously . It absolutely requires your attention, preferably wearing a postmodern take on a periwig. 2.  Leave No Trace   Perfection. Incredibly moving yet utterly understated both in style and as a corrective to the predisposition to judge without taking the time to gauge where value resides for others. Everything is precisely measured right down to the very final image of a piece of bracken curled naturally but in such a way as to resemble a seahorse. The full resonance of that image will stay with me f

“A whole way of life lies before me. I sense the loves, the secrets, the souls of all those who worked so that this woman in front of me on the tram should wear around her mortal neck the sinuous banality of a thread of dark green silk on a background of light green cloth”. The Book of Disquiet is full of such amazing, heart stopping moments captured in limpid yet often hugely dense prose. The genius of Pessoa is obsession with the fragmentary and the momentary and yet appreciation that behind each fragment and moment lies a whole world. A ‘whole way of life’.  Such it is with the green thread on a woman’s dress on a tram in central Lisbon. An everyday journey with everyday people and yet the thread, perhaps a cousin to the madeleine in Proust which stimulates memory of specific past events, is a surface glimpse of an entire past which is comprised of all of the separate individual contributions that have led to that woman wearing that dress with that thread being in

Wandering around this kaleidoscopic  exhibition  at the Tate put me in mind of so many other artists that I began to wonder whether Albers was a conduit for their influence or whether I was simply engaged in a procession of imagined serendipity. It may seem strange to begin with a sculptor given that Albers primarily worked with textiles but I was constantly reminded of Brancusi. The wonder of Brancusi is that he aims to reveal and develop the inherent nature of the material whether stone, wood or metal. The form that he finds is therefore perfectly suited to the stuff with which he is working. What is striking with Albers is that she does exactly this with the techniques applied to different types of material. Development In Rose (one of my favourite pieces in the exhibition) is made from linen and the impurities and imperfections in the thread are used in essence as highlights. The slightly muted colour also captures the often slightly faded nature of the linen

Any film that contains a character credited as 'Nude Pomegranate Tory' is deserving of our attention. It transpires, however, that this is only the most modest of reasons to be interested in The Favourite , the magnificent new film by Yorgos Lanthimos which as a parable for our troubled times provides precious little by way of encouragement. The film looks amazing. Baroque starts at the point when the dial has been turned up to eleven, so now we are at, to coin a phrase, eleventy stupid. Pictures, tapestries, wallpaper, dresses, wigs are all off the scale and then there is an amazing improvised routine that starts somewhere in the vicinity of a formal dance like a Rigaudon before moving into something more akin to a high kicking Tarantella as envisioned by a New Romantic practising to be a cheerleader. Clearly that doesn't end well. There are vaulting sexual politics in that all of the men are treated as dolts and idiots by the three women at the centre of the c

David Lean would have used this material to make a three and a half hour technicolour epic in the style of Dr Zhivago. That would have been a legitimate artistic choice given the vaulting ambition of the subject matter juxtaposing the romantic relationship of Zula and Wiktor and the entire history of Europe in the mid 20th century.  In contrast,  Pawel Pawlikowski  covers the ground in a brisk and economical 88 minutes of crisp black and white but by the time the iconic Glenn Gould interpretation of the main theme of Bach's Goldberg Variations  starts playing at around 85 minutes the tears will rise unbidden. This is a film which brilliantly engages with history and period and how we deal with the inheritance from the past. The point of departure is Polish folk song and dance as a way of showing national resilience and pride after the horrors of the Second World War but also as the expression of a newly minted state which has to develop its own way of recognising the i

The biggest cheers of the whole speech given by Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour Party Conference in September were generally reckoned to go to his plea for an end to the oppression of the Palestinian people. There is indeed much to applaud in this. Labour has traditionally been a party of the oppressed and the Palestinian people are widely acknowledged, including in several UN Resolutions, to have legitimate demands for restitution, focused particularly on the annexation of land by Israel following the 1967 war.  For many in the Labour Party Palestinians are, however, seen as uniquely oppressed.  Moreover, support for Palestine allows some in Labour to turn a blind eye to antisemitism. Worse, support for Palestinians for some Labour members moves over into being actively antisemitic. So why are some in the Labour Party so concerned with Palestinian rights compared to many other oppressed people across the globe; why is antagonism towards Israel as a state so much s

I am in love with bathos. Bathos may not know this and would doubtless find the whole concept a touch overblown.  Rather than an overwhelming crush one should have a mild disposition towards bathos. Otherwise it would doubtless need to take things down a peg or two.  If bathos were French it would not pirouette or stoop to a proper moue  but merely shrug you a bof.  If you look up bathos on Wikipedia (rather than Tinder) you will be see it defined as a literary term, coined by Alexander Pope, to describe amusingly failed attempts at  sublimity    In particular, bathos is associated with anticlimax, an abrupt transition from a lofty style or grand topic to a common or vulgar one. This may be either accidental (through artistic ineptitude) or intentional (for comic effect).  So why the love?  As a staple of satire, bathos is one of the great ways of puncturing and undermining the arrogant and the self obsessed. At a time when there are more people than i

Rachel Whiteread's recent  exhibition  at Tate Britain included this quite astonishing piece. The most bizarre scale model or cast that one can imagine; it is positively spectral both clearly inhabiting this world but also seemingly shifting in and out of our consciousness as our perception of the exterior and internal spaces are constantly confused and confounded. Made in polyurethane and light purple in colour it has the amazing quality of being both translucent and opaque. The effect is extraordinary because perception of the interior is never consistent. Visibility depends on the angle of sight and the specific point being viewed. It is possible to glimpse some of the interior - a staircase; a room; a corridor - but never to perceive it fully. There are also shafts of real space intruding into the material that offer sight lines through which one has to squint to try to see more clearly what is happening inside the structure. This is generally a forlorn hope. On

Two multi million pound businesses reach agreement for a prominent employee of one to start working for the other in exchange for a very substantial payment as compensation for early termination of a contract of employment.  This must happen reasonably frequently throughout commercial environments and mostly passes without comment.  When the businesses concerned are football clubs it can amount to something close the end of the world with a torrent of comment and contumely, metaphorical rending of garments akin to a funeral during the Trojan Wars, triumphant celebrations in one capital, fearful reading of the auspices (to mix metaphors) in another and a general sense of the world turned on its axis even on a day when we have the ghastly VSG being more geniuser than anyone has ever been. The reason for this is not hidden. Football clubs inhabit a space that extends well beyond the commercial into communal bonds and culture, shared history, local and national rivalries an

Some reflections on last year at the cinema including five absolute turkeys to be avoided at all costs. First the best .... 1.  Zama  : A simply wondrous existential fever dream of disappointment and dashed hopes with a stunning walk on llama adding further bathos. 2.  Personal Shopper  : Grief and loneliness have rarely been as fascinating. The contemporary world expands the opportunities for communication whilst enhancing the resonance of the insight that you can be most lonely in a crowd. Coming to terms with loss involves psychologically either believing that what has been lost is in fact still there or the fact that it truly has gone. The account of that process in this film is a tour de force. 3.  Toni Erdmann  :' He's less a dentist; more an architect'. Side splitting, disquieting and moving and brilliantly performed and directed. 4.  Columbus  : The quiet comforts of modernist architecture and dumb phones. Wonderful to behold. 5.  The K