Tag: painting

Typist Artist Pirate King

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In these days of US-style promotion, branding and media, it’s easy to think of artists as high profile, rich and successful. While some are, that’s not what an artist is: an artist is, quite simply, someone who makes art. (If they’re a good artist, they make good art. Whatever that is.) The subject of Morley’s new road movie is the artist Audrey Amiss (1933-2013) who, although she exhibited her work a number of times during her lifetime, received scarcely any recognition in that period. She suffered from mental health issues and was in and out of mental hospitals throughout her life.

Audrey (Monica Dolan) is regularly visited in her London flat by psychiatric nurse Sandra (Kelly Macdonald). One day, she asks Sandra to drive her to an exhibition which has an open call for artists, as she’s never exhibited and feels the time has come. Sandra first turns her down, but on a later date after some consideration agrees – although she’s somewhat horrified en route when Audrey’s “local” turns out to mean “Sunderland”, the best part of 300 miles North.

Thus, the pair yet out in Sandra’s bright yellow car Sunshine band undergo a series of encounters with people from Audrey’s past. In reality, they aren’t the people from Audrey’s past, but she mistakes them as such in her mind. Just as she isn’t always convinced Sandra is really Sandra or even that she herself wasn’t taken over by an imposter at an early age (following a specific traumatic experience, which the narrative explores in the final reel towards the end of Audrey and Sandra’s journey).

There are many joys to be experienced on the way. A wise vicar (Gary Bates) breaks into a church lavatory after Audrey accidentally locks herself in and, unlike numerous media presentations of clergy, manages to say and do just the right things to help her. A hitchhiker (Issam Al Gussein), who turns out to be another artist, gets thrown out of the car after addressing Audrey as a “freak”. A van driver (Neal Barry), who gives Audrey a lift after a row with Sandra, seems a pleasant chap until he starts trying to take sexual advantage of her (a rare moment when this largely brave and original film lapses into cliché). Eventually, she visits unannounced her Sunderland-based sister (Gina McKee) who she’s not contacted for six years.

Dolan is fantastic as the woman who exhibits both a personality disorder and a talent for expressing herself visually; her performance is ably complemented by short bursts of little sequences showing three or four of Audrey’s works in rapid succession throughout. The role is a gift for an actor, not only because of the wide palette of motion and behaviour undergone by Audrey in the course of the film, but also because she has to interact with characters she believes to be a person from her past when in fact they are someone else she has never met.

Macdonald provides an anchor to Dolan’s out of control persona, while McKee, although she doesn’t appear until late in the story, proves a huge presence in the final reel, a good and generous sister.

There’s a fascinating religious (Christian) subtext to all this, too. Audrey wears a cross and, however messed up her life might be, appears to have a deep-seated faith in God as expressed in the Christian tradition. As well as the aforementioned episode in a rural church building (the name St. Christina The Astonishing can be seen on a notice board inside the premises), there are comforting religious words, there is one in-car conversation about Jesus, there are references to hymns and hymn singing which, as any Christian person will tell you, can carry and communicate great nuggets of spiritual truth, often in a clear and concise, albeit almost subliminal way. Not that the film is proselytizing, or anything like that: far from it.

Morley is far from your typical British director; she tends not to repeat herself, except for the fact that her films are consistently provocative. This new film is well up to par. As a bonus, it has a scene with Morris dancers.

Typist Artist Pirate King premiered in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally. Its UK premiere takes place at the 31st Raindance Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, October 27th. On Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, December 8th.

Walking with Peter Greenaway — exclusive work-in-progress report

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Walking to Paris might be the most wholesome movie Peter Greenaway has ever made. Known for the provocations of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & her Lover (1989) and the dense tableaus of Prospero’s Books (1991), this late-career effort is simple, sweet, and a complete delight to watch.

It tells the story of Constantin Brâncusi (played by Emun Eliott, Paolo Bernadini, Jacopo Uccella and Andrea Scarduzio due to difficulties in shooting) who walked all the way from Bucharest to Paris in 1903 and 1904. We see, in typical Greenaway fashion, a travel list: Brâncusi packing a hammer, tobacco, empty writing paper, Romanian coins and notes and various other provisions. Soon he sets on a picaresque tale, meeting various women, farmers and animals along the way.

For someone who has constantly claimed to be against narrative cinema, Greenaway’s latest is actually one of his most straightforward tales, telling a clear story of one man’s journey from A to B. There is a certain playfulness in the second narrative layer, told from the perspective of Brâncusi’s son (Remo Girone), who helps to question whether or not this journey took place at all. And while many directors would choose to over-sentimentalise such an immense trip, Greenaway prefers to focus in on the details — the practicalities of travel as well as the way it bled into Brâncusi’s work, claimed here to be some of the most important of the 20th century.

This is not realism by any stretch of the imagination — for example, we don’t follow an exact map of the so-called journey, with Brâncusi seeming to go straight from Romania to Germany — but a walk recounted through memory and representation. In the end, Brâncusi’s walk becomes an ode to all economic migrants who couldn’t afford the train fare; his work just happened to be in the sculpting business.

I was lucky enough to watch the film at a closed screening in Locarno at an art gallery, where I talked to producer, gallery-owner, and friend of Greenaway, Arminio Sciolli, before and after the film. It was originally intended to premiere at Cannes in 2016, but it has been dogged by production issues for the last few years. It is sad that such a respected auteur has been unable to release what is one of his most mellow and enjoyable works in recent years.

The film is not totally finished, needing work on the colour grading, the editing at the end and certain shots of the Eiffel Tower. Nonetheless, it still shows off what a gift Greenaway is to cinema — whether it’s recreating classical nude portraiture, his contemplative conversations, or a stunning shot of the Eiffel magically perched in a Romanian field. Once it is finally ready, they are eyeing a festival premiere next year, potentially Moscow Film Festival in April. While not a major work, fans of Greenaway’s penchant for frames within frames, full-frontal nudity and a healthy, positive attitude towards sexual relationships will be in for a treat. Here’s hoping that the film can soon see the wider release that it deserves.

P is for painting, P is for puzzle; P is for Peter Greenaway

Posted on by victorfraga

Known for his provocative statements, Peter Greenaway has repeatedly said that painting is the superior artform, most people are visually illiterate, cinema died in 1983 with the invention of the remote control and that “no student is allowed to pick up a camera until they’ve studied for three years.” He speaks from personal experience, having studied at art school for three years himself before segueing into film, combining his love of painting with time spent cutting movies for the UK Government’s Central Office of Information. He was disappointed that paintings did not have soundtracks. “So maybe what I make is not cinema, but paintings with soundtracks.”

Railing against what he calls the “Casablanca Syndrome” — the often studio-mandated requirement for all films to begin as text rather than image — Greenaway is a fierce advocate for non-narrative storytelling that prioritises the image above all else. Believing that we could’ve had a cinema of painters instead of writers, his own films have stretched the boundaries of what the form can and should do.

Much has been made of his use of painting as a means of artistic expression; taking the work of masters such as Vermeer, Rembrandt and Caravaggio and translating them into cinematic forms. Bringing painting to the film medium in a way beyond that of any other filmmaker, Greenaway uses the static image, the chiaroscuro, the use of artificial light, innumerable nudes, the excessively mannered tableau, the slow pan and the dense frame in order to expand the possibilities of cinematic language.

The writing is not on the wall

But the influence of painting is not used merely to make one marvel. It is also used as a way to obscure meaning while hiding it in plain sight. After all, a painting on its own is not a narrative object. Rather it is something one applies a narrative to. Like the heroes of The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and Nightwatching (2007; pictured below), we must study the frame for clues; for objects and gestures that hint at something larger, ostensibly taking place outside the painting itself.

Greenaway’s films are often as much about what you don’t see as what you do. A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) tells us that you never see a female leg in a Vermeer. Meanwhile, The Belly of an Architect (1987) reminds us that Rome’s glory on the world stage is due to it being in ruins rather than immaculately maintained. Likewise, as we learn The Draughtsman’s Contract: “A painter cannot be too intelligent. He must always be blind to certain events.” In this respect, his movies are immensely self-reflexive, positing the idea that even he, an audiovisual painter, cannot explain the meaning of his work. Communing with the masters of old, they are the beginning of a never-ending dialogue rather than its end-point.

Connecting the puzzle pieces

A great example of this delightful puzzle-making can be found in his first feature film, the dazzling, maddeningly Borgesian The Falls (1980). Following on nicely from the mockumentary style of early shorts such as Vertical Features Remake (1978) and Dear Phone (1976), it tells a BBC-parodying tale of 92 people whose name start with Fall struck by the VUE, otherwise known as the “Vertical Unknown Event”. Across many of these 92, often-contrasting, tales, characters lay out their theories behind why people were suddenly transformed into bird-like creatures. One analysis stands out. The Italian Coppice Fallbatteo believes the secret lies in the Brera Madonna by Piero della Francesca; specifically, the ostrich egg at the centre, an emblem of Mother Mary’s fertility and a promise of immortality. Situated within an arch, a symbolic and physical threshold between our lives and that of saints, its placement apparently holds the key to that strange film’s multiplicity of contrasting meanings.

Classical paintings such as the Brera Madonna, unlike conventional Hollywood, require active viewers. One cannot sit back and expect to understand everything at a glance. Paintings such as Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Da Vinci’s The Last Supper contain innumerable clues, still puzzling art historians until this day. We must keep looking. Again and again and again.

Greenaway gives us the clues to read his work within his own filmmaking. Nightwatching, a visually ravishing update of The Draughtsman’s Contract, which feels like an epic summation of all Greenaway’s work, gives us a template to try and pick up on his endless behaviours, symbols and gestures. Starring Martin Freeman as the petulant painter Rembrandt, it tells the creation story of The Night Watch, which Greenaway believes hides a murder in plain sight, subverting his prestigious commission for Captain Frans Bannick Cocq’s militia through the use of subtle allegory. Complemented by the documentary Rembrandt’s J’Accuse…! (2008), it implores viewers to become culturally literate, active participants. But much like what happened to the Dutch painter himself, Greenaway’s dense, accusative, morally complex work, has made him a cinematic outsider, especially from the UK, where he has never been praised in the same glowing terms as his social realist contemporaries Mike Leigh and Ken Loach.

Look the other way

Perhaps for an alternate vision into what Greenaway’s career could have looked like, look no further than The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover (1989; pictured at the top), starring Michael Gambon and Helen Mirren in career-defining roles. While containing many of the same Baroque flourishes littered throughout his work, its clear message of good versus evil, as well savage criticism of 1980s Thatcherite ethics, gave him his first (and last) real crossover success. Taking place almost entirely within Le Hollandais, a Parisian-style London restaurant, the deep, thick, garish reds of the restaurant — owned by Gambon’s monstrous gangster — is contrasted with a large-scale print of Frans Hals’ The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company in 1616 hung across the wall. A noble schuttersstuk (group militia portrait), it portrays relaxed men, crammed together at a table, all bearing similar facial expressions while being subtly organised by rank. Unlike The Night Watch, this painting is relatively straightforward, used to ironically juxtapose against the horrors unfolding below.

It’s a simple, clear and evocative juxtaposition, one from which meaning can be gleaned straightaway, helping The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover — telling a devastating story of infidelity, love, jealousy and revenge — draw its immense emotional power. What to make of the puzzling fact that his best film has the strongest narrative drive, with a clear beginning, middle and end lending it an emotional heart absent from his other works? It was by far his biggest success, and with the goodwill lent to him, perhaps he could’ve bridged the arthouse and the mainstream in a way we see today with Yorgos Lanthimos — who copied many of the mannerisms of The Draughtsman’s Contract with The Favourite (2018). But Greenaway burrowed further into esotericism and obsession, innovating with multi-layered frames in Prospero’s Books (1991) and The Pillow Book (1996; pictured below) before embarking on the dense, multimedia work of The Tulse Luper Suitcases (2003-04), which encompassed an online game, 92 CD-ROMs, four feature films and a 16-episode TV series.

Post The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, his images are not merely connected with story; they overwhelm and consume all sense of narrative. The eponymous library in Prospero’s Books is one place created with remarkable density: a huge renaissance-style recreation caught in an epic opening pan reminiscent of a large-scale painting. And like Prospero’s vast library, Greenaway’s work is best watched (and re-watched) with that cinema-killing remote control close by, in order to pause and reflect upon each densely populated frame.

Beyond the silver screen

Through his lectures and numerous art installations, he postulates ways of imagining film without a frame, wanting to liberate cinema from its so-called “nocturnal environment” and bring it out into another, perhaps more artistically valuable, dimension. Now, with the rise of digital techniques — the sophistication of which is marked quite significantly by the technological improvements between the use of super-imposed images in A TV Dante (1991) and Goltzius and The Pelican Company (2012) — we see the huge potential for cinema to keep on innovating.

Aided by the coronavirus crisis, the dominance of the traditional two-hour feature “symphony” is waning, making creatives across the world search for new forms of expression — from Zoom-only shorts, to screen-life features, to films shot entirely through social media apps. One can see today the ways in which Peter Greenaway’s predictions are slowly coming true. The image is definitely evolving, just not in the painting-influenced way he hoped for.

Never Look Away (Werk Ohne Autor)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

What is art? Why do artists make art? These questions lie behind Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s latest film, like his earlier The Lives Of Others (2006) a German story exploring that country’s history and identity. It clocks in at over three hours, but don’t let that put you off because it needs that time to cover the considerable ground it does. Never Look Away spans the bombing of Dresden by the Allies in WW2, the liquidation of people considered by the Nazis inferior and therefore unfit to live and the very different worlds of post-war art schools in first East and later West Germany. This means it also spans two generations: those who were adults during the war, and those who were children at that time and became adults in post-war Germany.

Six year old Kurt Barnert (Cai Cohrs) wants to be an artist. He is taken to Dresden by his Aunt Elizabeth (Saskia Rosenthal from Lore, Cate Shortland, 2012) to see an exhibition of Degenerate Art mounted by the Nazis. He is fascinated. She tells him she rather likes the works displayed, but warns him not to tell anyone else. Later, he finds her playing the piano nude. She extols the mysteries of art to be found in life and exhorts him to “never look away”. She’s both creatively gifted and mentally ill. Being taken away in an ambulance to be incarcerated in a hospital she again issues that same exhortation. She will never leave the hospital system, thanks to Nazi doctors who have the power of life or death over their patients.

During the war, one night Kurt watches tin foil dropped by bombers around his home “to jam radio communication” before they drop bombs on Dresden in the distance, razing it to the ground.

After the war, Kurt – now a young man (Tom Schilling) – works painting signs until his boss, impressed by Kurt’s artistic skill, has him apply to Dresden art school where he falls in love with Ellie Seeband (Paula Beer) whose gynaecologist father (Sebastian Koch from The Lives Of Others) regards him as inferior stock and tries to destroy the couple’s relationship. After a promising career as a Socialist Realist painter of murals, Kurt with Ellie in tow defects from East to West Berlin a couple of months before the Berlin Wall is built. Kurt becomes a student at that hotbed of modern art Düsseldorf Kunstakademie and later a famous artist.

It’s a lot more complicated than that, but it’s difficult to give away much more without spoilers. The whole is based on the life of internationally renowned artist Gerhard Richter, who has read the script by the writer-director and made one or two suggestions which were incorporated. However, Richter has subsequently disowned the film (despite not having viewed it). Kurt’s tutor at the Kunstakademie is based on equally celebrated artist Joseph Beuys. Von Donnersmarck describes the piece as a work of fiction, although a great deal of the material appears to be historically accurate with names changed.


This is masterful storytelling with top-notch performances. More importantly, it seems to pick at the soul of a nation (Germany). There’s a lot of very nasty material festering beneath the surface and as you watch certain elements really start to get to you. Having watched it twice, this writer can attest to its being even more powerful on a second viewing: lots of little details elude you first time round as you grapple with the shocking overall story only to make themselves known second time around as you have a chance to take in the detail.

Never Look Away garnered two well deserved Oscar nominations earlier this year, for Best Foreign Film and Best Cinematography (it was shot by Caleb Deschanel whose impressive credits include The Black Stallion, Carroll Ballard, 1979). Alongside The Lives Of Others, which dealt with the Stasi (the East German secret police), it feels as if von Donnersmarck is building a panorama of German history through a series of historically grounded narratives of which this is only the second.

Finally, the German title Werk Ohne Autor translates literally as Work Without Author in reference to the artist’s claim that the photographs which form the basis of paintings “are just photographs”. This film suggests there’s a lot more to these apparently random images than that. Possibly the most effective slice of narrative storytelling we’ll see in the cinema this year. Supremely powerful, dirtylicious stuff.

Never Look Away is out in the UK on Friday, July 5th. On VoD on Monday, October 28th.

Never Look Away is in our list of Top 10 dirtiest films of 2019.

Postcards From London

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

A real curiosity falling somewhere in between a gay movie, a London movie, an arthouse movie and a movie about paintings, this is the story of a youth who comes to London’s Soho in search, as he puts it, “of mysteries and possibilities”. He swiftly moves from homeless hopeful to successful rent boy for clients interested in classical painting. However, it turns out he suffers from Stendhal Syndrome, which means he is so overcome by great paintings that he collapses in front of them. Indeed, this is telegraphed by the opening scene in a gallery where he faints in front of a Titian.

Director McLean takes inspiration from a stylised episode in the middle of his earlier Postcards From America (1994) and the bigger than life, obviously studio-created urban environments of Hollywood musicals which eschew verisimilitude for colourful design. McLean’s sets for Soho, while reminiscent of its Sin Alley with neon signs for Girls Girls Girls and more, drip with artifice. But his bars, rooms and alleyways are all on the cramped side and the viewer longs for a set on a bigger stage to punctuate the proceedings. His style being far removed from realism, taking such a liberty would not seem unreasonable.

While Harris Dickinson carries the film, his performance is not pushed as it was in the extraordinary Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman, 2017) where he brilliantly expressed tortured and closeted homosexuality. McLean is less interested in either his actors’ performances or explicit representations of gay encounters than in stylised homoerotic imagery such as a bar full of boys and girls dressed in white sailor hats, vests and trousers. To move the plot along, he throws Jim in with a group of escorts known as The Raconteurs led by David (Jonah Hauer-King) who specialise in post-coital conversations about the great painters.

The director employs Dickinson and other cast members to stage Caravaggio tableaux for the scenes where Jim’s passing out takes him inside the world of the paintings while they are being created by the artists concerned. Yet overall the piece lacks either the social realist grittiness of that Soho artist Francis Bacon/his lover George Dyer drama Love Is The Devil (John Maybury, 1998) or the sheer shock value of horror thriller The Stendhal Syndrome (Dario Argento, 1996) which latter movie is where many cineastes will have previously come across the term for Jim’s condition.

Although there are references to Bacon and Dyer, and – even more fleetingly – Picasso, the view of art presented is here is both limited and highly specific, with few recognisable paintings on display beyond Caravaggio and Titian. True, there’s a hotel room staging of the martyrdom of St Sebastian complete with rubber sucker-headed arrows flying through the air and a twentieth century painter Max (Richard Durden) who slashes numerous canvases for which Jim was his muse, not to mention a pile of cardboard in front of which Jim swoons in an all too brief nod to more contemporary art, but these lack the gravitas of the visualised Titians and Caravaggios at the film’s centre. If the stylized Soho sets are impressive and the performances adequate, an overall lightweight feel to the whole rather lets it down.

Postcards From London is out in the UK on Friday, November 23rd. Out on VoD on Monday, December 10th.