A brilliant video essay explaining how the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image animée works, providing a sustainable funding model for French moving image culture, as well as helping to push Film forward as a radical, constantly evolving art form.
Emma Stone Interview – The-Talks
It’s definitely gotten better as time has gone on. I’m not so hard on myself — a lot of it was the pressure that I would put on myself. I’ve learned that anxiety in its essence is fear. And what is the major fear? Fear of death. There is nothing else to be afraid of. So utilizing the positive side of that, there is this excitement for life, you know, they say anxiety is excitement without breath. So if you breathe through it, it becomes excitement.
January means the annual appearance of David Ehrlich’s latest Best Films of the Year video.
Yes, it’s a simplistic purified distillation, a click-baity listicle at heart, a confection engineered to mine short-term cinephilic nostalgia – and yet these days, nothing rekindles my love for the incredible art form of Cinema, nothing reminds me what’s so magic about those 24 simple frames per second as much as David Ehrlich’s yearly treat.
The true magic, the actual Art, lies within the films themselves of course. However this doesn’t detract from the fact that Ehrlich is a master-editor who is able to make the best films of the year riff off each other to wonderful, emotive effect. He finds ways to draw out topical themes, strands of deeper meaning within the collective arc of the year’s artistic output, elevating their individual genius to an even greater teritory.
I often think of blogs as being like gardens. Our own tiny corners of the world that we tend, prune, water, tidy, grow. They are shaped in our own idiosyncratic image and we get out of them more or less exactly what we put in.
This one is more than a little unkempt. I have allowed the weeds to take over and the soil to go hard.
I would like that to change.
Richard Twentyman (1903-1979)
St Nicholas Church, Radford – Richard Twentyman, 1957
Emmanuel Church, Bentley – Richard Twentyman, 1956
St Chad’s Church, Rubery – Richard Twentyman, 1960
All Saints Church, Darlaston – Richard Twentyman, 1952
Bushbury Crematorium – Richard Twentyman, 1954
GKN Research Laboratories and Offices, Birmingham New Road, Wolverhampton – Richard Twentyman, 1954
Wolverhampton Gas Company Offices, Darlington Street, Wolverhampton – Richard Twentyman, 1938
The Pilot, Wolverhampton – Richard Twentyman, 1937
The Red Lion, Wolverhampton – Richard Twentyman, 1938
The Spring Hill, Penn – Richard Twentyman, 1937
Richard Twentyman, an architect from Wolverhampton, designed some wonderful Modernist buildings around the middle of the twentieth century, most of which (sadly unlike that of fellow titan of West Midlands-Modernism John Madin) can still be found standing around the Midlands today.
The influence of the Bauhaus is clear to see in much of his work, no doubt a result of his time spent studying at the radical Architectural Association in London during the 1920’s.
What I find particularly interesting about his body of work, is the curious and unlikely combination of pubs and churches that he decided to turn his hand to across the Black Country. Perhaps with Friday and Saturday nights drinking in the pub and Sunday morning at church, I quite like the idea that there were Black Country folk who may have spent most of their weekend in one of Richard Twentyman’s buildings, for one reason or another.
Sanctuary of Las Lajas, Colombia
Villa Majorelle, Nancy – Henri Sauvage
Pacifiction (2022, dir. Albert Serra)
Sasha Frere-Jones on Ryuichi Sakamoto [Paywall]
I said I wanted to make records again but was nervous because it had been almost ten years since I’d been in the studio. How does one make a good record?
‘Make a bad record,’ he said, and laughed. ‘I do it all the time.’
Putting aside the humble nature of Sakamoto’s response above, his simple advice to “make a bad record” as a creative tactic to circumvent the anti-creative judgmental power of the ego, is concise and masterful – if you’re worried about the quality of what you create, just make bad things. They likely won’t be bad for long.
The short profile of a music maestro from which this quote is pulled, peppered with first-hand conversations with the maestro himself, is a cracking little introduction to his work.
Who is B.S. Johnson?
I remember reading a very short article in Sight & Sound magazine a year or so ago about the films of someone named B.S. Johnson. The writer’s description of this quizzical yet entertaining figure tickled my curiosity, so I dropped a link to one of his films – Fat Man on a Beach – into my watchlist.
There it languished, until recently, when I finally got around to watching it. What a fantastic little jester he was!
The first thing that you notice is just how consistently hilarious he is, dropping witty one-liners, extended funny stories and beautifully naughty nursery rhymes.
But B.S. Johnson was clearly no one-trick pony. As witty as he is, there’s a reason he’s not just a stand-up comic. He was much more than that; a proficient filmmaker, a clever writer, a solemn orator – even a philosopher of sorts, incorporating profound allegorical insights into his work.
There’s an exquisite absurdist tone to much of what he presents to the camera in Fat Man on a Beach. Said with a deadpan delivery and coming so thick and fast, it’s almost hard to keep track of when he’s making a joke and when he’s being deadly serious. Maybe there is no difference. Perhaps that’s the point.
There’s also a beautifully balanced delivery to B.S. Johnson’s monologues in the film. It seems to be the wonderful balance between witty humour and extreme profundity that furnishes the film with such wisdom. It’s the carefully curated life experiences of Johnson that provide the basic structure to what he’s telling the audience, but the wonderfully funny way in which he speaks creates a disarming tone that allows the wisdom to practically slide right into the psyche of the viewer with hardly any friction at all.
But there’s also an awful sadness hanging over the final scene of the film, indeed over the entire life of B.S. Johnson. The last thing he says to the camera is “….you can go, off you go, up, up, up” as he motions to the camera (the eye of the audience) to move upwards with his arms. After this, he simply proceeds to walk into the Irish Sea, alone, fully clothed.
While that famous dictum about the thin margins between genius and insanity has always felt a bit twee to me, I can’t help but think that the closest the dictum gets to the truth is in characters like B.S. Johnson whose psyche seemed as though it had no conscious choice but to push at the boundaries of polite, sensible reality into the realms of hilarious absurdity in relentless pursuit of wisdom and truth. Unfortunately, no matter how hard you push, it’s sometimes not enough to escape the demons that are chasing you.
A few weeks after filming that scene, he ended his own life.
Fractalis - An ongoing journal 
