Museum Hours

  This year I have adopted a slightly different approach given that it is hard to recall the pre-pandemic period; time has felt both stretched and condensed making perspective harder; films seen in the cinema will always be a different experience to films seen at home; and films seen in sparsely attended secure screenings, whilst a precious opportunity, inevitably feel a little peculiar.  Accordingly, I have one clear winner (seen pre-pandemic in the cinema) and then two groups of eight films seen under widely differing circumstances which seem worthy of note. Groups of eight because I had 16 films on the list but why films are in group one or group two is simply chance although it will be apparent that there are some types of film that I really do like (such as American indies directed by women!) and that this year I think lockdown has actually led to more smaller scale films being made available to wider audiences via early streaming. It also strikes me that whilst I watched a lot of

  The only film I have seen on successive evenings in the cinema and a late juvenile infatuation which has lasted for decades. Yes, this is The Draughtsman's Contract by Peter Greenaway. What is the strange hold of a baroque infused murder mystery  set (oh so precisely) in 1694 over what passes for my adult self? To truly love this film I think you have to take absolute delight in your mind being engaged though your senses, to secure great pleasure from the brain being stroked and tickled by all manner of curlicued tricks and feints.  The overwhelming nature of the film is that it fires up your synapses with aural and visual cues as you allow your mind to be wired directly into a weird baroque fuse box, the switch is flipped, the currents play and the brain lights up.  The film offers a positive cornucopia of sensory inventiveness that takes the kinked pearl at the heart of the baroque and polishes it anew conjuring Purcell with pulsing minimalist rhythms that variously have a coc

In the wake of the success of Grayson Perry’s Big American Road Trip , we recently sat down in Williamsburg with the still little known Elizabethan divine (no, of course not that  one) at the start of his speaking tour of the Atlantic Coast which had been stimulated by seeing a potential new congregation.  Perkins had just arrived on The Gadfly after a journey of several months. The original plan had been to launch a new ship (prospectively called  The Mayflower) but the whole enterprise had become bogged down in disputes about sourcing the timber and the precise kind of knots to use on the rigging. He entirely understood the need for rigour on these issues but still harboured hopes that the new ship would eventually secure at least a degree of renown. It would certainly be more comfortable.  He looked paler than usual even for someone who generally exclusively inhabits the library and the seminar room and made some initial remarks suggesting a degree of envy towards ‘Greta’ who seem

  We caught up with the famously reclusive author  in his favourite cafe in Lisboa to discuss just how disquieting he is finding it to have his heteronyms speaking simultaneously on different parts of social media.  Readers will be aware that Pessoa has so far  created about seventy five characters who speak for themselves in different styles. Some could be said to represent different aspects of an overall personality. He has dubbed them heteronyms.  We met in Cafe Brasiliera where he has now had a statue put up outside to allow his fans to take their selfies without bothering him unduly.  "In the past it was so much easier. Pen and ink on some scraps of paper.  I never used to publish anything, just throw it in a cupboard. Now there is stuff out there before I even know." In some respects Pessoa should be comfortable with the idea of self curation. He's been doing it for decades speaking with different voices at different times. Crucially though he has always considered

Vegas. It wasn’t his town. It wasn’t anyone’s town.  That old Italian guy had it right with his rings around hell. This was nothing but a clip-joint full of booze hounds and grifters.  They’d flown in from Phoenix and put up in a two-bit motel on the outskirts, but they needed wheels before they took the run out past Death Valley. So there they were in the diner watching the ball game and listening to the clients bump gums. They put the maps on the bar counter. Three hundred miles before they hit the mountains. They needed a clean sneak the next morning. No clues about where they were going. They hardly knew themselves.  And what if the maps didn’t seem to match up. That was one for the wise heads.  Saturday early they pinned on their diapers and headed down for breakfast. It was quiet as a morgue. Nothing out of place. Plastic. No taste to the food. No smell to the coffee. It looked like a set up. It looked alien. But they had miles to go yet before they reached Area 51.  He wanted ri

"Point of view is becoming my subject" says Sofia, the central character of this fabulous novel. This is indeed a densely imagined discussion of points of view: how we view ourselves and how we are viewed by others and how the two are interpreted, particularly by - and through - language. The text of the novel is prefaced by a short quote from Hélène Cixous' The Laugh of the Medusa  and one could see what follows as an exercise in ecriture feminine ; the approach to writing that Cixous proposed which would allow women to describe themselves in ways which reflect how they engage with the world and their own consciousness.   Sofia's estranged father who left her mother many years before perhaps encapsulates the perspective which enraged Cixous:  ‘Sofia is a waitress for the time being’ my father said in Greek. I am other things, too.  …I do not resemble an acceptable femininity from my father’s point of view.  ' ‘How do we set abo

‘I don’t want to talk about it now’ But you must” she said firmly ‘You are history’ There is no conceivable way to do justice to the absorbing, subtle complexity of this novel in a few, inevitably rather schematic, observations. But here goes. All that you really need to know is that the main protagonist (Saul) suffers two traffic accidents, both on the zebra crossing made famous by the cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road album. These incidents occur in 1988 just before the fall of the Berlin Wall and in 2016 just after the referendum on UK membership of the European Union. Two pivotal events in European history.  The book is concerned with the way that the perception, experience and recollection of events is mediated between the individual and the wider world. One lives through events in both senses of the word: through in the sense of being present on the journey and through in the sense of being an actor - doing, and not doing, things during those wider events.

The first few weeks of lockdown and the relative dearth of new films have allowed some delving back into previous decades, in particular the 1960s and 70s for reacquaintance (including the stellar MUBI retrospective of Jean-Pierre Melville including Un Flic,   Le Doulos  and others as well as Bresson's  Les Dames Du Bois De Boulogne  which I haven't covered here) and new discoveries. The Last Metro  (technically 1980 but hey) which felt like such an appropriate film for the moment - the power of art to survive the worst of circumstances. Powerhouse performances from Deneuve and Depardieu and by the time the swelling romantic music rolls over the credits there's not a dry eye in the house. The Innocents  (1961) Much imitated, rarely if ever fully bettered, this is one of the great psychological horror films. The setting, direction, cinematography and foley are pitched perfectly. The casting seems inspired: Deborah Kerr conveys just the right balance of pri