Museum Hours

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 re...

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 ...

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 obse...

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 hop...

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 riv...

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. Wonderf...

So,  The Miniaturist  (warning - spoilers abound).  It looked amazing and all. It really, really did. Those interiors were straight out of a Dutch still life. The framing and perspectives were painterly.  Someone spent a lot  of money on the costumes; the silks looked as though they cost more than the entire budget for many programmes. The casting was pretty fabulous even if Anya Taylor-Joy is more familiar playing a witch/alien/robot  of an evil cast of mind and one rather expected her at some point to transmigrate into a rabid monster doll, crawl unbidden from the depths of the dolls house (on which more below) in the manner of Ringu  and consume half the population of Amsterdam (in 1686) before flooding the dykes and sinking the city beneath the waves. That might actually have made more sense. I may still have been dazed from LFC just buying the most expensive defender in the history of the world. I may not have drunk enough to...