Why Guitar?

Rock music is an extremely well known type of music; hence a lot of people like to become skilled at guitar playing. It has become popular to spend time playing guitar. Your attractiveness increases exponentially if you play a guitar skillfully. The guitar is all around us. It’s a versatile instrument. Because of its marvelous popularity it has become a symbol of social revolution.

There are a few teenagers who’re really serious about a profession as rock stars, but in most cases most people plan to study guitar for the sake of learning. A good number of people lose hope very soon and give up their own vision, because they cannot find out the most advantageous way to learn playing a guitar.

Your View Of Guitar

How do you view a guitar? What is it that you would like to be? A guitar owner, a guitarist, or perhaps a music performer who conveys music using a guitar!

If you want to be only a guitar owner, you only need an adequate amount of money to purchase a guitar. Then guitar is just one more gadget, just like a portable play station, a computer game, or a fashion accessory. If you decide you fit in with this segment, how much time will it take you to have fun with a guitar? 30 minutes? You basically really want people to see you playing the guitar.

If you wish to be described as a guitar player, you have to be no-nonsense about it. You have got to dedicate a great many time gaining knowledge of the basic principles of guitar playing. Will you be studying all on your own or from your close friends? How Long can it take you to learn about guitar? You better understand that it �±s really a life long process.

When you are a musician who uses guitar to share his music, you also are focused entirely on your playing. At this level you without a doubt know precisely the total breadth of music. When you’re a superb music performer, you not only play your guitar beautifully but can also intelligently discuss music. People in this particular segment listen to, read, and examine all genres of music. How much time should it take these guitar players to learn guitar? They know that it is a practice for their complete lifetime.

What’s the prime variance between Individuals who would like to be guitar players, and musicians who showcase their music through guitar? Well, the guitar players are just guitar players, while a few musicians grow to be legends.

Internal Motivation Or External Influence

People who find themselves inspired by external influences commonly don’t have the discipline required to become guitar player. Whenever they understand that they should put in a significant amount of effort, they throw in the towel and proceed to a subsequent ‘smart’ activity. Work and delayed gratification are definitely not what they bargain for. In contrast, should you have an internal motivation to master guitar, you will learn it, no matter what it takes.

Learning guitar is much perspiration and inspiration, but it is equally crucial to love the process of practicing guitar. Learning to play the guitar does take a long time. The length of time, depends absolutely upon you.

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Indiegogo.com

Launched in 2008, Indiegogo is a very popular crowdfunding site that was founded by three partners: Danae Ringelmann, Slava Rubin, and Eric Schell. Each of them bring different skills to the table in terms of finance, marketing, and IT. It has seen 3,500 projects uploaded from 100 different countries around the world. So, as long as you have a bank account, you will be able to participate.

Like the majority of crowdfunding sites online, Indiegogo is free to add your proejct to, and also like a majority of the sites online, Indiegogo takes a commission from the successful site. At the time of this writing, it’s a 4% fee, so when you’re deciding on how much money you need to complete your project, add that amount into your request.

Kickstarter.com

Another very popular crowdfunding site is Kickstarter. Unlike Indiegogo, your project on Kickstarter will have a particular deadline. You have only that amount of time to collect all of the donations you’re requesting, or the project fails and you get no money at all. The upside for contributors is that their credit cards won’t be charged. The upside for the project owner is that deadlines usually help people to take action faster.

And that’s a differentiation that Kickstarter makes plain. People who donate to your crowdfunding project are not investors. They have no say in how the project goes from the time you get the funding until it is complete. They don’t get their money back for any reason, and it’s up to the person who put the crowdfunding project up to fulfill on the promises made in return for donations.

On the other hand, your project will run on Kickstarter until the dealine you set for it to be fully funded. If your project is funded early, people can still donate and you’ll end up with more than you asked for. For example, a recent project for social marketing software asked for a mere $10,000 and came away with $181,535!

International members are permitted on Kickstarter as long as they have an Amazon Payments account. The fee for a successfully funded crowdfuning project on Kickstarted is 5%.

There are also specific crowdfunding sites for people who want to do specific things. SellaBand,com is for musicians, Quirky.com is for inventors, and CreateaFund.com is for people who want to create their own crowdfunding site.

You can participate in crowdfunding on many different levels and you can get funding for just about any project you want to get funded. To learn more about any of the issues involved with crowdfunding and how it works, visit us at http://90MinuteCashAdvance.com.

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This posture stems from the so-called free-rider problem, a cornerstone of rational-choice theory. The problem, as described by Mancur Olson in his classic book, “The Logic of Collective Action,” is that even those who share a presidential candidate’s policy goals will reap no significant material advantage by donating their time or money. After all, with cash donations legally capped at $2,300, even donors who give the maximum have no realistic hope of influencing an election’s outcome. Nor can any individual volunteer — even one whose efforts resulted in hundreds of additional votes for his candidate — realistically hope to tip an election.

Although the logic of the free-rider problem may seem compelling, people’s behavior strikingly contradicts many of its predictions. Die-hard proponents of self-interest models sometimes counter that by becoming involved in campaigns, volunteers reap a variety of personal advantages. They often meet interesting people, for example, or they may learn about attractive employment opportunities. Major donors, for their part, are often rewarded with ambassadorships or other prominent positions when their candidate wins.

Researchers at the intersection of economics, psychology, sociology and other disciplines have had interesting things to say about the anomaly inherent in collective action. Albert O. Hirschman, an economist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, was one of the first to grapple seriously with it. In his 1982 book “Shifting Involvements,” he acknowledges that self-interest indeed appears to be the dominant human motive in some eras. But over time, he argues, many people begin to experience disappointment as they continue to accumulate material goods. When consumption standards escalate, people must work harder just to hold their place. Stress levels rise. People become less willing to devote resources to the public sphere, which begins to deteriorate. Against this backdrop, disenchanted consumers become increasingly receptive to appeals from the organizers of social movements.

Eventually, Mr. Hirschman argues, a tipping point is reached. In growing numbers, people peel away from their private rat race to devote energy to collective goals. The free-rider problem ceases to inhibit them, not only because they now assign less value to private consumption, but also because they find satisfaction in the very act of contributing to the common good. Activities viewed as costs by self-interest models are thus seen as benefits instead.

From an informal survey of 20th-century American social movements, Mr. Hirschman concluded that these cycles have an average duration of about 20 years. But sometimes patterns take much longer to recur.

Self-interest is surely an important human motive, perhaps even the most important motive much of the time. But it is never the only important motive. And during at least some moments in history, narrow self-interest models miss the essential story line completely. This may be one of those moments.

Read the full article at The New York Times.
Robert H. Frank is an economist at the Johnson School of Management at Cornell University. E-mail: rhfrank@nytimes.com.

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Having recently released “Power to the People and the Beats: Public Enemy’s Greatest Hits”, to document their immense and far-reaching legacy to the development of hip hop music, how did Public Enemy catalyse the transition of rap music from minority interest to establishment juggernaut?

Public Enemy have released a ‘Best of’ compilation of their music after near on twenty years of beats and rhymes, to consolidate a rich and pertinent legacy to the development of hip hop that helped to kick-start the whole Gangsta Rap sound and, indirectly, the co-option of hip hop by the music industry. In 1987, when Public Enemy’s impact was first heard with a resounding boom-bip, Rap music was a minority interest, either derided or patronised. Their sonic and verbal militancy caused a major shit-storm in the media, engendering the kind of outrage and moral panic that tends to surface on slow news days, and enabled hip hop music to carry the mantle of bête noire that it used so successfully to market itself beyond the urban streets to the callow youth of suburbia.

The concerns of hip hop music have now shifted from politicisation to accumulation; from rebel to label. Chuck D memorably coined rap music as the “Black C-N-N” whereas now it has become the “ghetto QVC” – from radical to superficial in twenty short years, leaving the once mighty PE irrelevant in its wake.

Hip hop music began in New York in the mid-to-late seventies when disco was still at its height and party music was the order of the day. (MC’s rapped over R&B music backdrops to create a feel-good vibe amongst the revellers, the music had many parallels with reggae toasting and indeed, may have been inspired by it). It was an underground, D.I.Y. music that was a world away from the mainstream.

Rappers Delight by the Sugarhill Gang changed everything. Released in 1979, probably as a novelty single, it became a surprise hit and is still a favourite of a lot of people (mostly blokes) who are obsessed with being able to recite it word-for-word throughout its fifteen minute running length. It was fun, funny but, most of all, it was funky and served notice to the hip hop music community that this kind of record could sell. The many early conquistadors of rap and hip hop music came, saw and conquered the shit out of the nascent form, introducing a number of innovations; Grandmaster Flash, Mantronix, Kurtis Blow, Afrika Baambaata, Kool Herc, Sugarhill Records, Whodini, Keith LeBlanc, Stetsasonic, Marley Marl, Eric B & Rakim, LL Cool J, Ice T and Run DMC all pushed hip hop forward in terms of lyrical form, cutting, scratching and sampling at a time when soul music was becoming increasingly mediocre.

The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five was another landmark, pushing the lyrical content further than any rap record had done so far. Released in 1982, and sounding like an electro update of Stevie Wonder’s Living for the City, it was a stone cold classic relaying, in forensic detail, the lives of society’s bottom-feeders, tingeing its stories with anger and despair. The delivery of the lyrics was by-and-large less bombastic than other rap records (excepting Melle Mel who could sound dramatic reading out a shopping list) with the rappers preferring to be downbeat, cementing its documentary realism with dense passages of pithy prose (“my son said, daddy I don’t wanna go to school ‘cos the teacher’s a jerk, he must think I’m a fool, and all the kids smoke reefer, I think it’d be cheaper if I just got a job, learned to be a street sweeper”) and still keeping the rhyming right on point. The Message lived up to its title, providing dancefloor beats for the head as well as the feet. hip hop had now begun to carry the torch of the socially conscious agenda of 70′s soul that had been blanded out by disco and bedroom R&B.

So, rap music was considered a novelty that occasionally spiced up the charts but was still expected to die out after having been assimilated. Constantly criticised for its apparent lack of musicality, hip hop continued to break through with minor hits until Run DMC officially staked rap’s ground in the mainstream with the extremely radio-friendly Walk this Way. It’s a record that I can barely stand to hear nowadays, because of its middle-of-the-road commercialism and the fact that it was played to death, but it created the first rap superstars (if you didn’t know who Run DMC were, you needed to check in to the nearest coma ward) and ensured that hip hop would continue to have a voice. That voice would continue to speak to the party hardy, but was also the voice of the street incorporating braggadocio, bedroom entreaties and stories from urban realities.

In 1987 rap found a revolutionary voice that laid the foundations for the golden age of hip hop. Rebel Without a Pause was a milestone, signalling its intent with its opening sample declaring “brothers and sisters, I don’t know what this world is coming to” before slamming into a squealing saxophone break over thunderous ‘funky drummer’ beats. This was the sound of hip hop entering its maturity, refusing to give a shit about mainstream sensibilities, the Public Enemy sound, as produced by the Bomb Squad, had an edge so sharp that it created an instant love-or-hate-it divide; blowing open Pandora’s Box for a whole generation of Black artists. The furious, dissonant mixture of beats and samples was dubbed “music’s worst nightmare” by Hank Shocklee of the Bomb Squad and as such, it played right into the hands of those who would decry Rap for its lack of musicality. Except their opinions didn’t matter anymore; the Bomb Squad’s confrontational sound created a rallying point for the future of Black music.

As shocking as the music was, it was matched by the emceeing of Chuck D; polemical, urgent and declamatory he took no prisoners as he cut a swathe through all the forces that would rail against him. He delivers the Public Enemy manifesto with his authoritative baritone, building thought upon thought and rhymes within rhymes, never looking back, never standing down.

Politically aligning himself with Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, the radicalism was there for anyone who would care to listen. It was an untamed new voice full of righteous anger and intelligence that delivered its message in tones reminiscent of Black political leaders from Malcolm X to Stokely Carmichael to Farrakhan himself. Through Chuck D, hip hop had found a political voice that was not only lucid but embraced the radical politics of the, decidedly non-mainstream, Black Power movement.

The album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back followed up the promise of Rebel Without a Pause covering the politics of the Black experience thoughtfully and uncompromisingly with practically every tune a classic. This was their second album – their first, Yo! Bum Rush The Show, released only a year earlier seems almost primitive in comparison, with its beats less furious and bragging emceeing reminiscent of LL Cool J – and is now considered the greatest hip hop album ever. Flavor Flav played the fool to Chuck D’s straight man, delivering off-the-wall material that felt in perfect counterpoint to the harsher realities of Chuck D but was still weird nonetheless, often spouting complete, almost surrealist, nonsense with his own inimitable enunciation – although Flavor Flav is probably as responsible for inspiring as many emcees as Chuck D – oddball rappers abounded in the years after Nation of Millions all the way to Eminem today. – They released the almost perfect Fight the Power in 1989 as part of the soundtrack to Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing – containing what is probably their most famous lyric soundbite – “Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me” – before releasing the much anticipated Fear of a Black Planet. Flav came into his own on this album, delivering top-class tunes such as 911 is a Joke and Can’t Do Nuttin’ For Ya Man, while Chuck D pushed the manifesto message even further with tunes like Burn Hollywood Burn and Welcome to the Terrordome. The Bomb Squad, again, provided beats and samples that were pant-shittingly good.

Following up the work started by Public Enemy, a group emerged in 1988 called Niggaz Wit Attitude (or N.W.A. to give them their less provocative acronym) who displayed their anti-authoritarian rage with the release of their single Fuck Tha Police. This was as incendiary a statement of intent as has ever been delivered in music and N.W.A.’s notoriety was assured. Although they were less politically astute, their tales of urban resentment were still cloaked in Black Power rhetoric, warning of the consequences of creating a large Black underclass whilst revelling in the lurid violence and misogyny of their position. Gangsta rap was born and set out to hijack the mainstream through its explicit and shocking imagery both on wax and on the streets.

Hip hop’s greatest creative period followed, with several hip hop legends-in-the-making beginning their careers. The diversity of acts that came in the wake of Public Enemy was immense with a new act born practically every week. The roll-call of artists coming up out of this period (from 1987 to 1997) included Big Daddy Kane, Young MC, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, The Jungle Brothers, KRS-1, Gang Starr, Naughty By Nature, Cypress Hill, House of Pain, EPMD, Pete Rock, The Pharcyde, Black Moon, Mobb Deep, Jeru The Damaja, The Roots, Xzibit, Outkast and The Wu-Tang Clan. Many of these records were commercially successful and hip hop fashions were changing constantly. The various political agendas of these groups tended to revolve around the notion of Black Power and the disaffected underclass, whereas the more explicitly political groups took the liberal high-ground. The voice of rap was being dissipated amongst a multitude of talented individuals, each with their own take on society and their place therein.

However, the one dominant voice during this time was that of Gangsta Rap with its East Coast-West Coast beefs and explicit lyrics providing the better stories, and which sound-tracked the racial unrest in America that ignited 1992′s LA riots. Its leading exponents were Ice T, Ice Cube and Dr. Dre -the latter two embarking on solo careers, having once been part of N.W.A. – but while the Ices were embroiled in the business of authority baiting, Dr. Dre took his old George Clinton records to put together The Chronic, a hip hop masterpiece, on which the main guest rapper was Snoop Doggy Dogg. The Chronic sold extremely well and created a real anticipation for Snoop Doggy Dogg’s solo project which, when Doggystyle was released in 1993, went stratospheric. The future was here and it was wearing a bubble-perm. In the post Doggystyle years, hip hop gained wider acceptance and progressively wore the mantle of mainstream mediocrity (niggas, bitches, violence, sex and bling).

Public Enemy’s output continued (Apocalypse 91: the Enemy Strikes Black, Greatest Misses, Muse Sick N Hour Mess Age, Chuck D’s masterly solo album The Autobiography of Mistachuck, He Got Game, There’s A Poison Going On, and Revolverlution) but the Bomb Squad were no longer taking complete control over production duties and, while the deeper and bassier production was anticipating the West Coast sound, the edge was being lost as hip hop moved on at breakneck pace. Chuck and Flav were still magnificent but were becoming increasingly irrelevant as the acts that came after them commanded more of the attention. Having put rap at the forefront of innovation, Public Enemy found they were falling behind in terms of a public that was constantly searching for the next new thing; they also lacked the killer tune that might have put them back into the limelight. At the time when hip hop was joining the mainstream, Public Enemy quit their record company and began releasing records independently, thereby leaving them without the money and marketing that might have led to a successful reinvention – their brand of agitation and polemic was no longer useful to an industry that was becoming as apolitical and bland as soul had become in the eighties.

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Ken Loach is unassuming. His work has a richness and complexity, so often absent in modern movies, that marks a strongly humanist outlook on life and society – and yet, the films are shot in a guileless, almost documentary style allowing the audience to engage with the story and characters without any overt directorial signposting. He is the kind of artisan who brings an incredible amount of craft to their work; the kind that if you notice what they are doing, if any heavy-handedness intrudes, are not doing their job properly.
“The criterion always is to carry the story forward or reveal the character and just explore the content rather than just explore the narrative line.

“One thing is to cast people who have something in common, at least, with the part they’re playing and then they reveal themselves and they bring that depth into the films. That’s a key element and so that you try to suggest a hinterland beyond the film. It’s just a question of finding people who will have that depth and be able to reveal it and, if it works, brings a sense of a life beyond the film. That’s what you try for.”

Work of such depth is not made in isolation and Loach’s method of working relies heavily on collaborating with writers who share his humanist and political sensibilities. The writers (including Nell Dunn, Jeremy Sanford, Jim Allen and Paul Laverty) bring a strong sense of character, place and humour to the projects.

“I’ve been very lucky and worked with a few writers for a long time. The writer I’m working with the moment, Paul Laverty, and I and Rebecca [O'Brien, Loach's producer] will talk about what’s come out of the films we’ve done in the past, the last film, and then just talk around different ideas until one really seems the one that has to be made. It comes from long conversations with the writer. The writer is the most important person in the process, often more important than the director.”

His work comes from a long tradition of social realist cinema that, arguably, began in the forties with Italian Neorealism, continuing through aspects of the French nouvelle vague, through to the British new wave of the sixties which included the work of directors like Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger who dealt explicitly with the dissatisfaction and social problems within Britain. Beginning his career in television, Loach made a name for himself with the hugely innovative Cathy Come Home (1966) before moving into cinema with Poor Cow (1967) and particularly with Kes (1969) which for many remains his signature film. He continued to alternate his work between television and cinema throughout the seventies until he found himself marginalised during the eighties because his political viewpoint did not chime with the right-wing ideologies of Thatcherism. Although he was met with direct censorship, Loach refused to give up on his ideals.

“Films do, whether you want them to or not, interpret the world because you’re taking a picture of people and places. You are interpreting the world whether you want to or not, and if you’re going to interpret it then your interpretation should be, at least, coherent. Obviously, a film can be anything, a film is like prose, but if it’s to have any merit then I think that there must be some ideas that are reflected in what you do and then you have to test the validity of those ideas.”

Loach’s resurgence in the nineties, brought about by Channel 4 funding and producers Sally Hibbin and Rebecca O’Brien, has produced headline cinema; from Hidden Agenda through Riff-Raff, Land And Freedom, My Name Is Joe, and Bread And Roses, to last year’s Ae Fond Kiss; Loach’s films have garnered international prizes, critical accolades and commercial success. The uncompromising nature and integrity of his work has been bolstered by the integrity of the working relationships he has developed. And, although his films seem at odds with commercial cinema, his immediate future seems assured.

“All the films we’ve done have either made money or broken even and they are commercial enterprises, otherwise we wouldn’t survive. What we spend to make the film is linked to what we can get back either through the box office or sales to television or whatever. They are commercial projects and the budgets reflect what will be recouped.

“The people we have been working with, we’ve been working with a long time so it’s a well established pattern of finance, if we did two or three and they’d all lost heavily, well, we’d struggle. We’d be in trouble.”

The consistently high quality threshold that he maintains has helped him become one of World cinema’s respected elder statesman coupled with the bravery that sees him make films that are more complex than the norm. Generally, cinema is about winning, someone always has to win; there are obstacles in our hero’s path and they are overcome in a series of increasingly dramatic events culminating in an uplifting ending and a return to some kind of status quo (hopefully, not the denim-clad longhairs) leaving the audience little changed by the experience. Loach’s films are better than that because he knows that the world isn’t about winning or losing but the life that happens in between, that cinema can intelligently reflect and comment upon what is real rather than just being an expensive palliative.

“We try to explore just the way people live together and the interaction between social circumstances and private lives and the effects of politics on the way people live. It all interacts with the other; people don’t live in a vacuum, they live in a world determined by political and economic decisions that affects them down to the most private, the most inner part of their lives.”

Important British cinema is being made by relatively few people nowadays, the industry preferring either feel-good fare or variations on a gangster theme. Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Michael Winterbottom are the only British directors who consistently garner international praise and have refused the temptation to ‘go Hollywood’ – hopefully, to be joined by Shane Meadows and Lynne Ramsay – and while Ken Loach and Mike Leigh are often bracketed together, Loach’s projects are more political and immediate whereas Leigh’s fables tend to explore emotional ground more explicitly.

“I’ve known Mike a long time, he’s a friend – yes, I always enjoy his films. I think we do quite different films and present people in a different light. Although the films are often placed in a similar social milieu or similar locations, we’re interested in making different kinds of films; different kinds of statements. I think the similarity is more apparent than real.”

Ken Loach is in a World class of directors who continue to show that cinema can still have important things to say in an era when Hollywood, the dominant cinema in the world, seems to be ingesting itself in its quest for fatuousness.
“Writers have to write what they feel compelled to write and the same is true for filmmakers. I think European filmmakers, by and large, take a more complete view: their films reflect a more complete view of the world they experience.
“Because the American industrial cinema is so driven by formula, by how to maximise their profits, they turn film into hamburger. It’s equivalent to McDonalds, instead of being equivalent to a series of restaurants. Everything is geared to exploiting the markets rather than to making a relevant communication. So inevitably that has an impact on the kinds of films that it produces.
“I think that Asian cinema produces very complex films. Southern American cinema is very interesting and some of the most progressive films are coming from Southern America. So maybe North America should learn from Southern America for once.”

Ken is currently in post-production on his new film, The Wind That Shakes The Barley starring Cillian Murphy, looking at the Irish struggle for independence and the lead-up to the civil war of 1922.

“We’ve just finished the first cut and we’re just starting to go through and throw a lot of the stuff out. So, we’re just at quite a good stage of this … but when you’re close to it, it’s sometimes hard to say whether it’s any good or not. It may be a load of old rollocks. You never know.”
Unassuming. As ever.

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• LOIN DU VIETNAM – Far From Vietnam

Paulo Gerbaudo looks at the parralels between film and war then and now Loin du Vietnam is both a failure and an inspiring experiment in war cinema. The film – a politically committed documentary dealing with the war in Vietnam – after its release in 1967 proved a commercial flop and was the victim of harsh critiques and early oblivion. One rare copy of the collaborative work of a number of great politically committed directors of the period such as the French Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, William Klein, Agnés Varda and the Netherland’s director Joris Ivens has been recently screened at Cine Lumiére of the Institut Francais.

The project of the film sprang out of the convulse atmosphere of 1967 during the escalation of military operation in Vietnam, and was the result of incipient ‘68 politics with their stress on participation, assemblies and direct democracy. The film, while dealing with a decisive political issue of the period, also aimed at questioning the French film industry and the one author canon to stress the importance of collaborative work of the film crew and of different directors. On the other hand the challenge was to realise an alternative representation of the war as seen in its multifaceted and often “distant” manifestations.

To do this Loin du Vietnam undertakes an expressive experiment in the documentary format by mixing together heterogeneous materials that compose an instable collage, notwithstanding the intelligent work of Chris Marker in the cutting room. In the film different inspirations and footage, documentary and fiction, converge. The long monologue scene by Godard about the political role of the cinematography in face of the war together with scenes from La Chinoise, interviews with Fidel Castro and Ho-chi Minh sided by brief visual clips and other cinematographic virtuosities. However some of the best moments of the film are the ones that stick more directly to documentary cinema, such as the war and everyday life in Hanoi under American bombings filmed by Joris Ivens and his wife, William Klein’s documentary footage about demonstrations in the United States and Lelouch’s sequences from an American carrier.

The film represents the war in Vietnam in the form of a historical tragedy staged on different scenes. Not only battlefields, but also North Vietnamese villages, American barracks, occupied cities, TV sets in living rooms, and demonstrations in the streets of Europe and America. Hence war emerges not as a simple military confrontation but rather as a mechanism of violence and conflict spreading its tentacles through supply lines, news programs, minds and hearts.

The two themes, evoked in the film’s title, Vietnam and distance, grasp a pair of great ideas which is what the film is all about. First of all, Vietnam within this film is not just a name for a particular country in South East Asia, 10 000 miles away from American shores, but also the name for a particular political, military, social and cultural conflict, characterised by harsh oppositions both in national and international politics. Thus the film represents Vietnam not only as a war between nations but also as a civil war, as any modern war has to be. In a long sequence by William Klein in front of Wall Street, during a huge peace demonstration in New York, a group of brokers shout “Bomb Hanoi! Bomb Hanoi!”. Demonstrants engage along the march path in harsh verbal confrontations with war supporters. New York appears kidnapped by a vibrant hysteria.

The film then slides along a theatre of operations that spans through the globe. Going from the streets of Paris crowded by demonstrants and policemen to a village in North Vietnam where people are assisting to a theatre show blaming Johnson and United States, to a paddy field where a unit of the National Liberation Army is training in hiding, to the mountains of Cuba. Distance, in turn, can be read as the description of the condition of civil populations in western country during such a war and its being exposed to a mediated war fought far away but capable, at the same time, of destabilising internal society and politics. As New Yorker reporter Michael Arlen put it, the Vietnam War, was a “living-room war”. Distance is also the principle that underlies the hypertechnological war machine deployed by the U.S. in Vietnam: a system controlling death and destruction from afar. The image that opens the film is a load of bombs being moved from a supply ship to a carrier. Lelouch’s camera follows those bombs while they are stored and eventually armed on the aircraft. In the middle of the ocean, far away from the dead bodies of the American bombings it enables, the carrier becomes a metaphor of a war machine that acts from afar. Distance thus emerges as instrumental to power. A removal of the horror of war through the media and thanks to its being out-of-sight. As one of the demonstrants appearing in the film says “Americans support the war because it is far away. Would they think the same, if their cities were attacked?”. The answer is as elusive today as it was then, best exemplified in the voting patterns of the American people post 9/11.

Notwithstanding the timely political rethorics that in some parts of the film tend to lean towards an apology to Vietnam, the work provides a vibrant description of the conflict in Vietnam and the social unrest that surrounded it. After the release the work was also criticised for its ‘easy ironies’, but it is actually through those ironies that the film shows the hypocritical goodwill justifying a distant war. This is also what the film does through the way it is cut. For example by joining a popular pro-war song with the reality of a Saigon populated by prostitutes, or by showing a speech of general Westmoreland through a damaged TV screen.

Viewing such a film today inspires a reflection about the similarities and differences between the media propagation of that war and of the current one, the war in Iraq in which the U.S. and its coalition are engaging in. Vietnam was a fortunate topic for cinema, and before that, it was extensively and crudely covered by television and newspapers. The American army had, at least initially, favoured the work of journalists and camera men on the front (much more than ever happened before and after that) for propaganda reasons. So Vietnam became the first televised war, and the war began losing consensus when too many dead corpses on the screen began to disgust the American public’s dinner time.

The Iraq war has undergone a more technically developed coverage that pretends to transmit battle images in real time (through embedded journalists) as if it were a football match and always jumps quickly to the site of an attack or a bombing. In this rapidity of news coverage something has been lost. The media war coverage of Iraq has not only censored the images of blood, tortures and body bags. It has also disminished the importance of other aspects of such a war: the conditions of the civil population in the occupied country and the unrest uniting millions of people across the world in the biggest anti-war protests ever. This erasure of such decisive aspects of war is what Au loin du Vietnam tries to overcome by following the many links that the war ties through conflicts and solidarities all around the globe.

Iraq wars have, until now, not been as fortunate as Vietnam in their representations within contemporary cinema. The only fiction titles deserving attention are David O. Russell’s Three Kings (1999), the recently released Jarhead (2005) by Sam Mendes both dealing with soldiers’ stories during the 1991 conflict in Kuwait when Iraq invaded. Also Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Robert Greenwalth’s Uncovered: The War On Iraq (2003), both documentary films, deal with the current war in Iraq even though focusing on its role in American politics. Moreover all these films and documentaries are somehow limited to an internal vision of war as seen through the individual experience of American soldiers, citizens and their nation’s destiny and fail in providing a radical representation of war in all its complexity.

With its real-time – as much tempestive as anaesthaetised – war representation, television has produced an overload of recurrent images about the war in Iraq, restraining any space for debate, comprehension and radical analysis. In this condition it is hard to develop a committed war cinema without getting lost in easy political pedagogy a là Michael Moore or in rank paternalism in Live 8 fashion. Au loin du Vietnam can, in contrast, be an inspiration for a cinema that intends to observe war and represent what the war in Iraq means not only in terms of military and political experiences and events, but also in everyday life’s impact, in London as in Baghdad. A cinema able to document its incumbence on western countries and its consequences on the civil population of Iraq. A cinema capable of seeing war at a distance.

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Exils or Exiles tells the spirited, energetic and heartfelt story of Naima (Lubna Azabal) and her lover Zano (Romain Duris) on their journey to the land of their fathers, Algeria. Lost in the perils of immigration, these two children of the Diaspora defiantly take to the road with music as their only belonging, or as Zano puts it “music is my religion.”

Tony Gatlif, himself an immigrant to France in the 1960′s has explored the theme of Diaspora, of returning to his roots, “from my yearning to consider my very wounds. It has taken me 43 years to return to the land of my childhood,” explains Gatlif.

Shot in a simple documentary style, Exils explores displacement and the emotional place of Second Generation immigrants in France at a timely juncture, shot before the riots of October last year, it captures the anger and frustrations felt by this generation, epitomised in the displacement both Zano and Naima face. “I’m an alien wherever I go,” states Naima, having been asked “where are you from.” Her Arabic looks and name allow her a certain acceptance in Algeria, but also allows hostilely targeted at her western clothes and lack of hijaab (head scarf) and burkha (long coat). When she finally dons it, she is unhappy with her appearance, “I look like a witch,” she declares and hurries to take it off, whilst justifying it with the explanation, “I need some air.” Gatlif is careful to avoid a long discourse into the place of women in Islam and the West’s opposition to it, but succeeds in showing Naimas predicament as a young girl brought up in the West and feeling the suffocation of an alien culture that she has long ago rejected. The story unfolds of Zano and Naimas wounds being healed through their physical and emotional journey played alongside the musical journey. This reaches its climax when they are invited to heal their wounds by a Sufi Mystic, through music and dance Naima and Zano reach a trance-like state and are able to escape themselves and gain enough strength to overcome their fears and frustrations.

Gatlifs own life is mirrored in the story of Zanos father, having left Algeria at the turn of the ‘60s he arrived empty handed in France and became a street kid, experiencing delinquency and juvenile correction homes. According to his press notes Gatlif decided to meet with the actor Michel Simon, who he idolised. Simon, it is reported wrote a letter of recommendation for his agent. Next came the acting classes and five years later Gatlif secured a part on the TNP stage and wrote his first script based on his experiences at the correction home. After a series of films based around ‘drop-out’ characters, Gatlif directed Pleure Pas My Love and then Gaspard et Robinson, a buddy-movie social comedy dealing with un-employment. Latcho Drom (Safe Journey) took the audience through a vivid musical journey and is a true tribute to Gypsy music, charting the route gypsy music may have taken, through Rajasthan, Andalucia, Egypt, Turkey, Romania, Hungary and France.

Gadjo Dillo (Crazy Foreigner) followed a foreigner (again played by Romain Duris) arriving in a gypsy village in Romania looking for a missing singer who is the missing link to his dead father. Again the music plays a heavy component to this film, and like Exils, the music helps release him from his wounds. Gatlif wrote the original score for Exils and is no doubt as passionate about music as he is about film.

Whilst dealing with serious social issues Exils manages only to scratch the surfaces of them, yet remains a charming, surprising, hilarious and touching tale.

Exils is currently showing on general release.

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Meeting at the UK Pavilion. Dealing with passes and accreditations. Sorting out the usual mumbo-jumbo required to cruise through the festival.

‘Volver’ from eternal ‘enfant-terrible’ Pedro Almodovar is on show and has the usual red-carpet treatment. Penelope Cruz – gorgeous in a white Balanciagga dress, or is it? – and Carmen Maura, the co-stars are with him. Penelope returns to our first director and says: “There is one and only one Pedro, he is my priority in all fields. He writes for women who are 14, 35, 50 or 80 years old, this film is perfect example; there are lots of female characters of all ages in his films. I’m sure that my career wouldn’t have been the same without Pedro, my life wouldn’t have been the same without him. I hope that in the future that this will continue. I am very grateful to possibilities given to me somewhere else, it is interesting, one can learn a lot, but I worked in the United States for seven years, and in Europe for about fifteen, but Pedro still remains truly exceptional for me.

As for Pedro Almodovar. You can’t help but feel that each film is a complex description of his obsession for his mother…A bit like Woody Allen and his New-York or Spike Lee and…well New-York too… This is what the master had to say: In Volver, I speak of the women around me when I was a child. I was brought up by women, the men being in fields, whom I practically never saw. Volver speaks of the way I grew up, listening to these women. I would hear them singing whenever I went along the riverbanks with my mother; I accompanied her from my very earliest age. That’s how I learnt a lot about dramatic art, there are many roles that I have written which were inspired by my sisters or my mother, by characters firmly anchored in reality, even if they belong to the realm of fiction. They are characters who spin extraordinary tales, which has always immensely impressed me.”

Another Palme d’or favorite is: Fast Food Nation which casts a critical eye on the fast food industry in the US, via the destinies of three main characters: a marketing executive of a fast food chain, an employee of the same chain, and a clandestine immigrant working for slaughterhouse. For this movie, Richard Linklater has been able to recruit A-list cast with Ethan Hawke, Greg Kinnear, Patricia Arquette, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Patricia Arquette and Bruce Willis.

Apparatchiks aplenty in sight for the tribute paid to Russian filmmaker Sergei M. Eisenstein yesterday with the screening of two of his films – Bezhin Meadow and October – Headed by the Cannes Film Festival President Gilles Jacob, the director of the Russian State Archives for Literature and the Arts Tatiana Goriaeva, the director of the Eisenstein Memorial Naum Kleiman, and the vice-president of the Russian Film Festival Kinotavr, Igor Tolstounov, a stellar night devoted to the director of the masterpieces The Battleship Potemkin and Ivan The Terrible.

20th & 21st May

We have been given a lot of business cards and collected a more impressive number. As always in Cannes, during the festival, we have late, late nights and early mornings (12:00 AM). The mix of sleep depravation, the crowd, the expectation, open the floodgate to a huge array of emotions from fascinating to scary, to fun, dull, exciting all in one. The mood changes minute by minute. Survival is the key here.
Samuel L. Jackson was dining in the Majestic on a table next to us. Al Gore on the red carpet… Otherwise you do see lots of people you think might be someone but you can never really be too sure. But that is not why we are here: We have to sell our projects and establish contacts/bridges with the industry.

The first French Film in the running for this year Palme d’Or, was Charlie Says It does re-introduce us to the films of filmmaker-actress Nicole Garcia, who was a Jury Member in 2000. Nicole Garcia returns to an essentially male world, twelve years after having directed the trio Gérard Lanvin/Bernard Giraudeau/Jean-Marc Barr in The Favourite Son. This time, the film revolves around a quartet of actors – Benoît Magimel, Jean-Pierre Bacri, Benoît Poelvoorde and Vincent Lindon – and a child – the famous Charlie embodied by the young Ferdinand Martin – whose destinies appear to criss-cross on screen. Not in a ‘crash’ way as Benoit Poelvoorde will put it: “This film is so ‘Nicole’. She is the one who entirely carries the film, the actors are relieved of any pressure. That’s why we clown around!” – Benoit stole a few grins with that one.

Nicole has made over the years, her business of filming complex male interactions and stories. Charlie Says could be another stone brought to her body of work:

“Men have this photo genius, this blend of robustness and fragility which fascinates me. They bear in them contradictions which make us wonder what they are going to become. It is these contrary tendencies which interest me. In Charlie Says, it is a question of variations on various kinds of men, about corpulences and various psychologies. This is a territory which I wanted to explore.”

After Wesh, Wesh (2002), a highly remarked debut feature film, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche introduces us to ‘Bled number One’ in the section Un Certain Regard, the “follow-up” (or prologue) entitled Bled Number One. “The end of Wesh, Wesh,” he explains, “ends with a shot of a pond after a car chase between a cop and Kamel. We then hear a gunshot but we don’t know if Kamel has been killed or not. The only thing which I do know is that Kamel was a victim of the double punishment, therefore we could make a second film: double punishment, double film! We already foresaw a follow-up by making Wesh, Wesh. Whether it takes place before or after is of little importance. Why always consider time as something purely chronological?” Kamel is barely out of prison and is expelled to his country of origin, Algeria. This forced exile obliges him to cast a critical eye upon a country in full effervescence, transformation, torn between a youthful desire for modernity and tradition.

Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche wanted to show: “The energetic manner of filming can recall that of documentary cinema, but it is true that we aren’t for all that dealing with current events. It is another relationship with time, when it isn’t necessarily a question of filming some immediate reality, in realistic way. It is simply a proposal, just to present things, not to bear judgment. (…) To write Bled Number One, I didn’t return at all to Algeria to capture something about today’s youth there. I wrote this story based my holiday memories. But it is also because I felt that things hadn’t really changed, that time passes differently there. You have the time to reflect and be, faced with the elements. (…) A film is a gesture, a burst, a job, an enterprise, an action. An action in life, a pure lesson of life. It is here that we seize something alive. For it is necessary to remain alive, no matter what happens.”

Which leads us to what Cannes, has been famous for the world over; Parties…’Snooty’ French can do parties too: The Cannes Mix program has a DJ set headed by Fred Elalouf at the Beach Cinema.

The Menu? :

- Soundtracks of French films of the 60s and 70s
- Made in Bollywood

This didn’t give us enough opportunity to find our beds. We swapped showers for after-shaves and headed the next day. – After a brunch at the Majestic….always Brunch there if you can afford it! – for the international village, where we crossed the borders from Maroc to the Netherlands and back again. It reminded to some of us, the town of Basel in Switzerland where you can cross three borders within walking distances (France, Germany, and Switzerland). We also saw a film by Daft Punk. Very interesting.

We were also moved by Nanni Moretti’s The Caiman…Great filmmaker always seem to have that obsession, they tend to film time and time again. Nanni is no different. He again speaks about politic and democracy, but avoid acting in it, which is a first, five years after having won the Palme d’Or for The Son’s Room. It’s his 10th feature film, and the 5th presented in the Official Selection. Released in Italy in the middle of the controversial elections, a few days before Romano Prodi’s victory, The Caiman is the story of a young filmmaker (played by Jasmine Trinca, also in The Son’s Room) who wants to make a film about Silvio Berlusconi, and appeals to a producer in crisis of serie “Z” movies (Silvio Orlando, Moretti’s old buddy) to finance her movie. Moretti says: “The Caiman is a love story, a homage to cinema and a political films,” resumes the director, who clarifies his intentions: “I tried to tell, using the means of the motion pictures, a reality which we are no longer able to see or perceive. I think that our problem is one of habit: we’ve become used to characters and situations however truly incredible for the sake of democracy.’

Another particular highlight of the day was the last piece of a trilogy about China The Orphan of Anyang (2001) and Night and Day (2005). This time, the filmmaker allows his camera in the life of a schoolteacher close to retirement, who set out to search for his son. His wife, gravely ill, would like to see their son one last time before dying. He hasn’t given any news for a long time. The father will be welcomed by his daughter who does shifts as a hostess in a nightclub…Brace yourself for a solid family drama with confrontations aplenty.

“Luxury Car,” explains Wang Chao, “falls within the continuance of the reflections and criticisms already expressed in my first two films, on the reality and historic and political allegories of contemporary China. Here, the gap between the rich and poor, the distance which separates people from happiness, the contradictions between the social system inherited from past and the burden of the present are so many problems which I myself, as a full-fledged member of the people, feel all the weight and intensity. That’s why it made me decide to shoot the picture.”

On the party radar, at the Cannes Mix. The new wave soundtracks are honored. Can’t wait for my suit and sunglasses and rehearse my JL Godard ‘A Band apart’ moves…Which implies another night without sleep. I know, I know…

22nd & 23rd May

The ‘babe’s battle’, Halle Berry and Rebecca Romijn: Sublime visions of nature’s most famous achievement on the red carpet. For your eyes only…Their presence allegedly being required for the promotion of the third X-Men movie… As for the film, wait for the DVD release, or PSP, or Podcast, or Palm, or…On a more serious note, ‘Bamako’ by Abderrahmane Sissako. Born in Mauritania, raised in Mali, read film at the prestigious VGIK in Moscow before releasing his first work in 1990 (Le Jeu). After string of international awards (Fespaco, Perugia,…) Cannes awaited to be seduced in 2002 by Waiting for Happiness. ‘Bamako’ is out of competition…As is the seminal film about French ‘demi-god’ Zinedine Zidane. Helmed by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, acted by none other than double Z or ‘ZZ’ himself. The film celebrates the bizarre cult of Zidanemania, shot in real time during a Madrid game supported by no less than 17 high-tech HD cameras, aimed solely at the artist Thierry Henry refers to as ‘the man who do stuff with his foot, you could only dream of doing with your hands’…It’s a pity the film didn’t really try to develop a narrative we would follow but rather lays on the technological foundations pitched to us beforehand. But if you enjoy seeing master at work, be my guest!
To the International village and another trip to Germany and Canada, then South Korea…That’s where the buzz is at the moment…
Kidulthood by Menjah Huda from the UK was also screened over there at 12:00 PM…Couldn’t make it, but should be up for DVD viewing, back in London…

ON THE PARTY RADAR: For two nights, the Didier Riey Group, a gypsy jazz collective will take over the Cannes Mix programme opening for the outdoors screening, made of a selection of twelve animation-shorts by Canadian Norman McLaren, featuring Horizontal Lines, Stars and Stripes, and The Grey Hen. On Wednesday, The Holy Mountain a tale about a quest for immortality by Chilean director/artist Alejandro Jodorowsky. A student of the mime Marcel Marceau (other prestigious alumni include Michael Jackson….), friend of the surrealists Topor & Arrabal. ‘El Topo’ his first mainstream movie, became a cult classic in 1970. When work dried out in films for the Chilean director, he went into comic books, working with fellow cult author Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud – Lieutenant Blueberry, adapted for the silver screen by Jan Koonen of ‘Doberman’ fame in 2004 – Van Hamme, Gal,…achieving cult-status within the comic book fraternity when releasing l’Incal and working on its follow-up: ‘The Meta-Barons saga’. If you want to grasp his influence in modern western comic-books, you would have to speak of him in the same breath as a Hayao Miyazaki(Nausicaa), Akira Toriyama (Dragonball), Katsuhiro Otomo, (Akira) or a Chris Claremont (X-men)…

24th & 25th May

TELEGRAM:

Was in Monaco. /Stop/ couldn’t be bothered to be in Cannes. /Stop/ had a few business dealings to handle. /Stop/. Didn’t have time to blog lately, sorry. /Full Stop/

Telegram, heh? What a funny thing…How many of you remember what it was to send a telegram at the other end of the world? Here we are taking this world for granted. Anyone who’s been on the French Riviera during that period of the year is aware of the fact that we are reaching the high points of the season with the Monte-Carlo tennis tournament, the Cannes festival, the Monaco grand prix, then Avignon festival in Provence, (equivalent to the Edinburgh theater festival…) and so on…We stopped in Grace and St-Tropez too…bumped into Michael Stipe, Robin Aubert, the director and lost our lawyer inside a casino…in Monaco…also known as the ‘Millionaire’s playground’ …
Formula One is the toy here…The noise, the smell, the gas, the sheer pollution it creates and with the little amount of overtaking opportunities, due to the tight confines of the roads, the Monaco Grand Prix must be an ecologist idea of hell.

With preparations in full swing it is quite difficult to drive through the city. Remember, the Monaco grand prix is the last of its kind, as the race track is made of the principality’s own streets. It’s the world’s most famous street track…

An open city as was Rome in January 1945 when the remnants of the German army occupying the ‘eternal city’ are about to surrender …A priest and a communist worker, the two pillars of post-war anti-fascism in Italy will join together to defeat Nazism. The movie buffs among you will recognize the pitch for ‘Rome, open city’ and the birth of Italian neo-realism. Black and white movies, with strong ‘real’ characters shot in the streets, as Cinecitta the babylonesque studios built by Mussolini had been bombed during the war. Serge July, editor of left-wing daily newspaper Liberation, directed a short-documentary called ‘Once upon a time…Rome open city’ showing in Cannes…

Another graceful vision, Barbie Hsu. Her sensual and timeless interpretation left very few moviegoers untouched. The actress is the lead in ‘Silk’ by Taiwanese director, Chao Pin Su: “We tried to make the best possible feature film on all levels,” explains the director. “Usually, in all Taiwanese films, the action is relatively slow and the atmosphere rather dark. I believe that we impose limits on ourselves due to various points of view, even when due to creative talent. This time, we had the good fortune of securing solid financing, which allowed us to develop our ideas with complete serenity. The entire crew is very satisfied with it. This picture is really different from the rest of Taiwanese productions.”
As for Barbie: “It was a true challenge to take on this character, I had a lot of fun playing her. Furthermore, there are terrible deaths in the film, which I greatly enjoyed from this point of view. Not to mention the end, it really touched me.”

Another timeless vision, but this one celebrates a movie dynasty. Like the Douglas, the Van Peebles, etc…Here come the Coppolas! Sofia, the daughter of Francis is back in Cannes with Marie-Antoinette (Her third movie after ‘Virgin Suicides’ – Director’s fortnight – and ‘Lost in translation’). The film charts the life of. ..’Marie-Antoinette’, queen of France during the 1789 revolution and famous for answering to a starving crowd asking for bread: ‘Let them eat cake!’
For me, Marie Antoinette has remained, first and foremost, the symbol of a totally decadent style. I didn’t realize to what point these people, who were called upon to govern a country, were in point of fact no more than teenagers. Daily life in the Château de Versailles is also, for these adolescents, a form of apprenticeship set in a tense, difficult environment. It is this position and the complexity of the character of Marie Antoinette which interested me.” (Sofia C.)
A few recognizable faces in the casting like Steve Coogan (yes…I know!), Marianne Faithfull, Kirsten Dunst and Aurore Clement…However, Sofia is adamant she never tried to make a political statement: ‘I wasn’t making a political movie about the French Revolution, I was doing a portrait of the character Marie Antoinette and my themes are in the film. She was a symbol of decadence. It was very interesting to read and research more about Marie Antoinette, more about the human experience of this young girl who went to Versailles when she was 14 and how she developed in the Cour de Versailles. I thought she was an interesting character. I have always been attracted to the 18th century in France. I knew so little about the personal side of her. The story is about teenagers in Versailles so I wanted it to have the energy of youth, a teenage feeling to it.” I am making one if I tell you that the movie is adapted from a book written by Antonia Margaret Caroline Pakenham also known as CBE lady Antonia Fraser…?

Anyone who’s been on the French Riviera during that period of the year is aware of the fact that we are reaching the high points of the season with the Monte-Carlo tennis tournament, the Cannes festival, the Monaco grand prix, then Avignon festival in Provence, (equivalent to the Edinburgh theater festival…) and so on…We stopped in Grace and St-Tropez too…bumped into Michael Stipe, Robin Aubert, the director and lost our lawyer inside a casino…in Monaco…also known as the ‘Millionaire’s playground’ … Formula One is the toy here…The noise, the smell, the gas, the sheer pollution it creates and with the little amount of overtaking opportunities, due to the tight confines of the roads, the Monaco Grand Prix must be an ecologist idea of hell.

With preparations in full swing it is quite difficult to drive through the city. Remember, the Monaco grand prix is the last of its kind, as the race track is made of the principality’s own streets. It’s the world’s most famous street track…

An open city as was Rome in January 1945 when the remnants of the German army occupying the ‘eternal city’ are about to surrender …A priest and a communist worker, the two pillars of post-war anti-fascism in Italy will join together to defeat Nazism. The movie buffs among you will recognize the pitch for ‘Rome, open city’ and the birth of Italian neo-realism. Black and white movies, with strong ‘real’ characters shot in the streets, as Cinecitta the babylonesque studios built by Mussolini had been bombed during the war. Serge July, editor of left-wing daily newspaper Liberation, directed a short-documentary called ‘Once upon a time…Rome open city’ showing in Cannes…

Another graceful vision, Barbie Hsu. Her sensual and timeless interpretation left very few moviegoers untouched. The actress is the lead in ‘Silk’ by Taiwanese director, Chao Pin Su: “We tried to make the best possible feature film on all levels,” explains the director. “Usually, in all Taiwanese films, the action is relatively slow and the atmosphere rather dark. I believe that we impose limits on ourselves due to various points of view, even when due to creative talent. This time, we had the good fortune of securing solid financing, which allowed us to develop our ideas with complete serenity. The entire crew is very satisfied with it. This picture is really different from the rest of Taiwanese productions.” As for Barbie: “It was a true challenge to take on this character, I had a lot of fun playing her. Furthermore, there are terrible deaths in the film, which I greatly enjoyed from this point of view. Not to mention the end, it really touched me.”

Another timeless vision, but this one celebrates a movie dynasty. Like the Douglas, the Van Peebles, etc…Here come the Coppolas! Sofia, the daughter of Francis is back in Cannes with Marie-Antoinette (Her third movie after ‘Virgin Suicides’ – Director’s fortnight – and ‘Lost in translation’). The film charts the life of. ..’Marie-Antoinette’, queen of France during the 1789 revolution and famous for answering to a starving crowd asking for bread: ‘Let them eat cake!’ For me, Marie Antoinette has remained, first and foremost, the symbol of a totally decadent style. I didn’t realize to what point these people, who were called upon to govern a country, were in point of fact no more than teenagers. Daily life in the Château de Versailles is also, for these adolescents, a form of apprenticeship set in a tense, difficult environment. It is this position and the complexity of the character of Marie Antoinette which interested me.” (Sofia C.) A few recognizable faces in the casting like Steve Coogan (yes…I know!), Marianne Faithfull, Kirsten Dunst and Aurore Clement…However, Sofia is adamant she never tried to make a political statement: ‘I wasn’t making a political movie about the French Revolution, I was doing a portrait of the character Marie Antoinette and my themes are in the film. She was a symbol of decadence. It was very interesting to read and research more about Marie Antoinette, more about the human experience of this young girl who went to Versailles when she was 14 and how she developed in the Cour de Versailles. I thought she was an interesting character. I have always been attracted to the 18th century in France. I knew so little about the personal side of her. The story is about teenagers in Versailles so I wanted it to have the energy of youth, a teenage feeling to it.” I am making one if I tell you that the movie is adapted from a book written by Antonia Margaret Caroline Pakenham also known as CBE lady Antonia Fraser…?

Left the sea, s… and sun…for gritty, rainy London. But Cannes is not over yet. I have to give you a few tips for the ‘Palme d’Or’ …This year’s festival has been very ‘serious’ and has featured movies with ‘gravitas’. The president of the jury is Wong-Kar-Wai filmmaker renown for his uncompromising style. Two films spring to mind, when thinking about the Palme d’or or Jury’s prize. The two have wars at their core: ‘The wind that shakes the barley’ by Ken Loach and the excellent ‘Day of glory’…

The movie is about the Algerian, Moroccans, and Tunisians, Senegalese soldiers or goumiers dead and forgotten during the Second World War, who liberated France from Nazism. The director, Rachid Bouchareb, has assembled a stellar ensemble cast, made of some of France’s finest actors: Sami Bouajila, Rochdy Zem, and the two icons of French’s suburbs youth culture, Sami Naceri (Taxi 1 to 3) and Djamel Debbouze (Amelie…).

Rachid Bouchared, the director knew straight from the get-go what would be the major stumbling block for such a movie and forecasted it in his approach: the cinema is a vehicle for encounters and emotions, perceived by audiences first as feelings, even if it gives them more to discover. It was only in this way that I could carry the story and creates a tie with the audience,” he adds. “I didn’t want to be didactic, which serves nothing. We developed the screenplay over two and a half years. We needed 25 versions to be able to step beyond history and concentrate on the human subject matter, on all the tiny details of daily life which reflect life far better than any speech.”

Sami Naceri as always very intense, took the bait with hesitation first, before putting ‘a lot into this film, to the point of even learning Arabic. I literally charged into the story. It isn’t a vindictive picture, nor political. But those in school should learn that these North Africans were the first to fall under German bullets for the liberation of Marseilles, Toulon and Corsica.” Djamel Debbouze, who is considered as one – if not the one – of the most bankable actor in France at the moment had to chip in to get the project going: ‘On the one hand, we come up with budgets in the several million euros to produce comedies where audiences want to see me slipping on banana peels, and on the other hand, I see that a project such as Rachid’s which was non-stop revised downwards. France still has difficulty in coping with its own past.”

Djamel Debbouze, the actor has fulfilled most of his dreams emerging as a disabled kid from the suburbs to one of France’s most recognizable face but the producer was looking for a strong project to sink his teeth in, refusing the usual farces, he is now renowned for: ‘ After Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, I received a multitude of scripts of the kind Asterix vs. the North Africans or Rabin Hood, and I was extremely skeptical. While Rachid’s film presented pleasant and noble challenges to be defended. It was therefore perfectly normal and logical to go all the way for such a film. As co-producer, I am proud that Days of Glory is presented at Cannes, it’s all the better for us. To put together funds for this film, I was even compelled to go meet Sarkozy, which really taught me a lesson!”

R. Bouchardeb went one step further, by asking rai icon Khaled (worldwide hit, ‘Didi’) to score the music for the film, despite early reservations: ‘in normal times, I sing of love and peace, so I was somewhat taken aback when Rachid suggested to me working on the music of a film about war. He then explained to me that it wasn’t really a war picture, its goal was rather to honor those people who helped lead to the Liberation and who brought us the joy of doing certain things. It is out of respect for his people who died for us that I joined Rachid.”

From one master to another: Sydney Pollack, the American director and actor with more than 40 years in the trade and 20 films under his belt. His filmography includes ‘Out of Africa’, ‘Three days of the condor’ and as an actor, the last Kubrick’s work ‘Eyes wide shut’. The night is called ‘A Film master class with Sydney Pollack’. His first words were: ‘I just have to say that anything I am presenting that has the name” master class ” is enough to ring every alarm bell in my brain,”. A master-raconteur, Sydney Pollack cruise through the night dispensing words of wisdom like: To be absolutely honest, I don’t think of myself as a visual director. That’s an area that I work very hard in because it’s my weaker muscle. My stronger muscles are with performance. Because I feel that I am stronger in performance, I try to concentrate as hard as I can on the visual aspects of the movie because it isn’t my forte. There are great visual styles that I admire immensely like Bertolucci. The danger with somebody like me who comes from the theatre as an actor is to follow along with two-people talk scenes and I like to do those. My films are full of them.” Sydney Pollack was also presenting out of competition ‘Sketches of Frank Gehry’, the patron of the arts and founder of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao among other things…

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Roger Corman’s B-movie factory of the sixties and seventies produced a number of leading film talents like Francis Ford Coppola,Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson and James Cameron who have become big cheeses in Hollywood. They’ve each created large niches for themselves and become marquee names whose presence will guarantee a following. Even more regular cheeses like Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovitch, and Monte Hellman have become known for their idiosyncratic visions and their adherence to signature styles. Graduates from the Corman studios tended to become iconoclasts, probably as a result of Corman’s high concept, high turnover approach forcing directors, writers and actors to think on the run and be brave with their decisions. Fellow Corman graduate, John Sayles has always been different – one of America’s best independent filmmakers, he has worked with genuine skill and clarity as a writer, director, editor, actor and script doctor for nearly 30 years. What separates John Sayles from his peers is his refusal to play out his work in terms of a simple hero/ villain morality, his refusal of the strictures of iconoclasm.

Silver Star, Sayles’ latest release due out in late July, is three films in one: a detective story reminiscent of Chinatown, a satirical look at the political and intellectual credentials of George W. Bush, and an indictment of the weakness of mainstream journalism in pursuing politicians and their paymasters. John takes us through his gallery of shady deal-makers, migrant Mexicans, leftist bloggers, cynics and the disaffected to delineate his vision of what really has gone wrong with the American political system, using an extraordinary cast headed by Danny Huston (who, after his performances in this and Ivansxtc, is as amiable as freshly buttered toast and should be in every American film made from here on in). The film feels like 70’s conspiracy thrillers in the vein of Winter Kills or The Parallax View with an overriding air of pessimism rather than paranoia – the bad guys can’t be caught, nothing really changes by the end of the film and the only victories are relatively minor human ones.

Silver Star flies in the face of prevailing Hollywood wisdom (leftist documentaries aside), being both political and not particularly heroic. Most, if not all, Hollywood films have a very simple structure: present the hero as someone in whom the hopes and ideals of the audience can be vested, introduce and play out a conflict that the hero must overcome, and finally see the conflict resolved. Simple. Except that life is rarely ever that simple, even if information is increasingly skewed to this model; witness the last Gulf War where first we see Bush and Blair as heroes fighting terrorism introducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction wielded by Sadam Hussain (the pre-eminent bad-guy of our times), secondly the exposition of this conflict through various media, and finally ‘shock and awe’ – roll credits. The good guys win, the bad guys are made to suffer, and we, the audience, are invited to cheer. The duplicity of this structure is that you either go with it or you refuse to suspend your disbelief, there is no active engagement with the scenario and no nuances to discuss or modify. John Sayles’ work displays exactly the opposite sensibility drawing on stories that are as much about the society in which they are based as they are about the people that inhabit them. His work tends to act as a social, political and emotional travelogue rather than a straight-line narrative. The films are all about nuance, all about the compromises that exist between individuals and the society in which they live; points of view being drawn richly, sympathetically and non-judgmentally (he mostly eschews didacticism in favour of letting the audience make up its own mind). Community and social mores emerge as lead characters in his stories and, since changing society is as difficult as twisting a melon, his stories tend to have downbeat or open-ended conclusions.

After graduating with a Psychology degree in 1972, Sayles worked in a series of blue collar jobs whilst penning short stories for magazines and working on novels. He eventually found work with Roger Corman as a writer, producing scripts for Piranha, The Lady in Red and Battle Beyond the Stars (all, quite frankly, derivative of other more successful films but fun with a nice line in characterisation), learning the rudiments of film-making along the way. Using the money saved from writing these films, he made his debut as a director with The Return of the Secaucus 7, a warm, dialogue-heavy comedy of character and connections whose story structure was followed three years later by Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill. The film was a critical success but not a commercial one and John went back to his day-job, writing scripts for films such as The Howling and Alligator (both of which are terrific monster movies, The Howling in particular being a witty and postmodernist update of the werewolf myth and just about the best werewolf film ever made) whilst raising money for his second film Lianna, dealing with issues of sexuality and its social and emotional fall-out. His first studio film, Baby It’s You, again showed Sayles’ ability to write wittily and incisively about personal and social issues with a story about a high school romance that falls apart in the post-school years because the social gulf between them is just too wide. Sayles never worked for a studio again because of arguments over the final cut of Baby It’s You.

His independence allowed him to make a string of American film classics exploring the emotional, social and political landscape of America working with a regular cast of actors including David Strathairn, Joe Morton, Chris Cooper and Gordon Clapp. The Brother from Another Planet looked at Harlem through the eyes of a mute alien on the run from bounty hunters, Matewan used a Western scenario to present a complex look at union politics, Eight Men Out presented the story of a sporting scandal in rich and illuminating detail, City of Hope used a multiple narrative to show the workings of a city bathed in compromise and on the edge of despair, Passion Fish showed the often fractious relationship between two very different women and earned a best original screenplay Oscar nomination, Lone Star distilled issues of community and race from an investigation into a 20 year old murder using multiple narrative and gained another Oscar nomination for best screenplay, Men With Guns was filmed entirely in Spanish and uncovered the harsh politics of an unnamed war-torn Latin American country, Limbo is a parable about three people trapped on an island tinged with ideas about the death of community, Sunshine State was another multiple narrative tale about a real estate development in Florida, and Casa de los Babys which was a study of six women who travel to South America in the hope of becoming adoptive mothers. In between films Sayles works as a script doctor, lending his intelligence to films like Apollo 13 and Mimic amongst others.

A john Sayles film has a ‘no bullshit’ guarantee, he strives as he scribes to find the emotional and intellectual truth in his material with dialogue that is pithy, witty and wise (and often all three at the same time). Like Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, his films are heart-felt and humanist, although he tends not to involve caricature as much as Mike Leigh and works on a broader canvas than Ken Loach. Like Robert Altman, Sayles’ technique of using multiple narratives offer the opportunity of looking at a subject in different and sometimes contradictory ways but unlike Altman, whose approach produces a compendium of short stories, Sayles uses it more as a novelist would, to deepen and enrich the story. John Sayles may well be the most politically aware director working in America who has pursued his writing career with a blue collar work ethic. He is a true individual, telling complex stories with precision and, in turn, should be seen as a real icon.

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News From Nowhere: Visions Of Utopia promises to be one of the largest art events in London this year. A number of public sites in North East London, including The William Morris Gallery, the Changing Room Gallery, The Waltham Forest Theatre situated on an island and surrounded by a moat, Lloyd Park, and a massive building site in the centre of Walthamstow, The Vestry House Museum and Walthamstow Town Hall will be used as stages for exhibitions, interventions, installations, audio visual works, music performances and public art activities during September/ October 2005.

CarnegieBased on the title of the William Morris novel News From Nowhere, and set in and around his birth-place, the project aims to re-examine the legacy of utopianism: upheld by the idealists of the 19th and early 20th century, who believed passionately in the possibilities of radical social change, with visions of a future egalitarian world, it is a distant cry from our post-modern, post-ideological times.

An international line-up of artists, designers, musicians, writers, thinkers and performers will be presenting their work in the context of the various spaces. The events, works in progress and completed pieces will be documented and published on-line in the Visions of Utopia web site. The site will also provide a global forum for open contributions, reports and sightings of utopia.

A special limited edition newspaper, News from Nowhere will be published and distributed, including essays, documentation and interviews with local and global residents, as well as those of the participating artists and organisers. The 18th-century Water House, Morris’s family home from 1848-1856 is now the William Morris Gallery. It is the only public museum in the world devoted to this country’s best known and most versatile designer with internationally important collections illustrating Morris’s life, achievements and influence.

Art Utopia For the first time, a selected group of artists, designers and writers will be given a unique opportunity to place work within the House and permanent displays, resulting in a series of juxtapositions and interventions alongside the work of Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites; featuring the legendary Tony Benn, designers Ralph Ball and Maxine Naylor, architect Meredith Bowles, artists Stephen Williams, Liane Lang, Anderson Inge, Malcolm Barrett, Luis Gonzago Barriera Bras Keith Ball and Steve Wheeler. With sonic work by Isobel Jones and video performance from Claire Robins.

Other Venues
The Changing Room Gallery
Vestry House Museum
Arcadia (a massive building site)
Waltham Forest Theatre, The Moat, Lloyd Park

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