2 November 2011

WORLD PRESS PHOTO EXHIBITION
11 November to 29 November 2011
Level 2, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre
Open daily 10am to 11pm
FREE

PRESS VIEW: Thursday 10 November 2.00-4.00pm.
Jodi Bieber, winner of World Press Photo 2010, will attend the press view from 2.00-3.00pm To rsvp and/or to request an interview please contact Sarala Estruch on sarala.estruch@southbankcentre.co.uk

The World Press Photo Exhibition returns to Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall on 11 November 2011, supported by Investec, the international Specialist Bank and Asset Manager. World Press Photo is the premier annual international competition in press photography, bringing together award-winning photographs from around the world which capture the most powerful, moving and sometimes disturbing images of the year. This year a record number of 108,059 images were submitted to the contest from which more than 350 winning photographs were selected. Entries were submitted by 5,691 photographers, representing 125 different nationalities. Exhibited without censorship in 50 countries all over the world, the World Press Photo Exhibition offers an international showcase for all of the competition’s prize-winning entries, and is considered by many to set a standard in the field of photojournalism.
Read the rest of this entry »

HAYWARD GALLERY PRESENTS THE WORK OF GEORGE CONDO: THE ARTIST BEHIND KANYE WEST’S MY BEAUTIFUL DARK TWISTED FANTASY ALBUM ART

GEORGE CONDO: MENTAL STATES
Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre 18 October 2011 – 8 January 2012

‘It’s titled “George Condo: Mental States.”… And it’s sensational’
The New York Times

This autumn the Hayward Gallery brings to the UK the first major retrospective of the American artist George Condo. Condo has occupied a prominent position in the art world since emerging from New York’s East Village art scene in the 1980s and has influenced artists from Jake and Dinos Chapman to John Currin. George Condo also works across fashion, music and street culture, and has recently been brought to the forefront of pop culture through his collaboration with the globally acclaimed Hiphop artist Kanye West. The exhibition, which presents one of the most adventurous, imaginative, and provocative bodies of work in contemporary art, premiered at the New Museum in New York and was attended by Kanye West himself, and this October the show is coming to London’s Southbank Centre.
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I can’t believe how time flies! It has been eons since I last posted – it was last summer, and now we are in spring 2012. I saw that I was in the middle of uploading essays, so I thought I’d finish off that task before moving on.

It’s been a hectic seven months since I last wrote but things are calming down now, and I am enjoying the peace and quiet of the Easter holidays at present. I have a large backlog of material that I want to share, starting with a few of the press releases that I wrote during my three month internship in Southbank Centre’s Press Office. So keep reading!

‘Death obsessed her, as the one act that could take her the necessary step beyond her vision. Death would carry her and her sagacity clean through the riddle. She deferred all her questions to death’s solution.’ Discuss these statements made by Ted Hughes about the poetry of Emily Dickinson, illustrating your answer with reference to at least three relevant poems.

Emily Dickinson lived from 1830 to 1886 and is now regarded as ‘one of America’s most distinctive and eminent poets’, according to M.H. Abrams. As Ted Hughes has pointed out, death is a prominent subject in Dickinson’s work. She writes about death in different ways at different times. For instance she writes about death as a consolation in poems for loved ones when a dear person has just passed away; she writes about death in her elegies to her favourite poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning in ‘I died for Beauty – but was scarce’. She also writes about death as a way of renouncing her Calvinist upbringing and expressing her anger at a God who creates suffering and the ultimate separation: death. In the later years of her life, she puzzles over what death might bring and muses upon the afterlife. In this sense, Hughes is justified in writing ‘death obsessed her.’
However, if death obsessed her, then it was only as the dual side of life. More often than not, the subject of Dickinson’s poems is life and the vivacity of experience within human life as well as the evanescent quality of life and emotions. In this essay, I present the argument that if Dickinson does write a lot about death it is merely as an expression of the evanescent nature of life; the way in which nothing lasts for very long, and everything will eventually come to an end.
Read the rest of this entry »

Discuss the specific cinematic strategies that Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet have deployed to give historical authority to their biography of the later life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (1967)

Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet’s Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach is a film that has provoked much debate. Some critics have described Chronik as not really a film at all but merely a presentation of musical performances on film . Others have described the film as a biography of the later life of the great German composer Johann Sebastian Bach or as a love story that recalls the married life of Anna and Sebastian. This was surely the way in which Godard interpreted the film when he said that the film ‘did not have enough relevance to contemporary problems’ . Richard Roud and Barton Byg, among others, have written that Chronik is a film that is concerned with politics . In this essay, I argue that Chronik cannot be reduced to any one definition but is a work that can be interpreted in numerous ways. I will demonstrate that whilst Straub and Huillet do employ various cinematic strategies which give historical authority to their film, Chronik is much more than a biography of the later life of Bach and is in fact a highly political film that is as concerned with encouraging its viewers to actively participate in a reconstruction or a remembrance of the German past as it is with creating a historically authentic work.
Read the rest of this entry »

Discuss how, and to what purpose, Maurizio Nichetti has incorporated classical Italian Neorealist material taken directly from Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica in his postmodernist film Ladri di saponette (1989)

Ian Aitken has described postmodernist cinema as one that ‘erases distinctions between high and low art, mixes styles and genres together in defiance of existing (authoritarian) rules of taste, and employs irony, pastiche and historical indeterminacy in place of directive conceptual analysis’ . Maurizio Nichetti’s Ladri di saponette (Icicle Thief) is an exemplary postmodernist film: it erases distinctions between high and low art through its blurring of the boundaries between film and television, and presents us with a medley of genres such as the film-within-a-film that is a pastiche of neorealist films and is presented within the context of a television studio, footage of which is filmed in a documentary style. This essay will focus on the use of Italian neorealism in the film-within-a-film that is presented in Ladri di saponette (Icicle Thief). In order to distinguish between the film-within-a-film and the film as a whole, I will, for the purpose of this essay, refer to the film-within-a-film as Ladri di saponette and to the film as a whole as Icicle Thief.
Read the rest of this entry »

Discuss the ways in which nostalgia and anticipation are deployed by Wolfgang Becker in his film Good Bye Lenin!

In Europe, film is as an important source of national identity. Wendy Everett writes, ‘film images … are essential to the expression of national identity’ . More than this, film is a significant medium through which the past can be explored in order to help society to move forward. As Everett has noted, film has the ‘capacity for penetrating beyond the veils drawn by time’ and therefore is the ‘ideal medium’ for exploring the past and helping countries to come to terms with the past and create for themselves an identity that is firmly rooted in the past . However, German cinema has a history of evading the past; for decades the memory of the Nazi period was repressed in both the cinema and wider society . It was not until the late 1970s and 80s that German filmmakers really began to examine the past in films like Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) .

Given the importance that both Everett and Sorlin have placed on the power of film to help a country to come to terms with its past and to express its own identity, it is implicit that one of the roles of contemporary German cinema should be to deal with the realities of life in the German Democratic Republic as it really was rather than portray it as an idealized period. Good Bye Lenin!, a film which spans from ten years before the fall of the Berlin wall and closes shortly after the official reunification of Germany in October 1990, has come under strong criticism for providing a nostalgic picture of life in the GDR and making light of the totalitarianism of the Communist regime. However it is my opinion that whilst Becker may provide us with examples of nostalgia in his film, he does so in ‘ambivalent’ ways . One of the ways in which Becker complicates his portrayal of life in East Germany is through his use of anticipation; yet this essay will show that Becker also deploys anticipation in less than straightforward ways. In this essay I discuss the various ways in which Becker deploys nostalgia and anticipation in his film, ultimately concluding that Good Bye Lenin! is a film that is less concerned with the past and more concerned with the state of German identity in current times.
Read the rest of this entry »

How does Les Quatre Cents Coups represent a new dimension in French cinema and how did its reception help to establish the New Wave filmmakers as a group?

The New Wave or ‘La Nouvelle Vague’ was a term first used by the French media to describe the flood of debut films released by new French filmmakers from January 1959 to the end of 1962. The term was applied to a group of young filmmakers who were united by a passion for film, a knowledge of film history and a desire to create a new film culture in France. Their output was diverse but overall their films marked a significant shift in contemporary cinema.

Francois Truffaut’s first feature film Les Quatre Cents Coups won a prize at the Cannes film festival in May 1959 and went on to receive immense popular success when it was released at the box office a month later. Whilst Truffaut is generally regarded as one of the least experimental of the New Wave filmmakers and whilst Les Quatre Cents Coups is not regarded as his most innovative or groundbreaking film, this essay will show that Truffaut’s debut film did break with the traditions of contemporary French cinema in significant ways and, as one of the earliest films to represent a new approach to cinema and achieve popular success, Les Quatre Cents Coups was instrumental in establishing the New Wave.

Read the rest of this entry »

How have Sam Selvon and Penelope Fitzgerald imagined marginal figures and their place in the twentieth century city in the novels The Lonely Londoners and Offshore?

The Oxford English Dictionary offers several definitions for the adjective ‘marginal’, three of which are particularly helpful when trying to define what a ‘marginal figure’ might be. The first is: ‘relating to or situated at the margin’, the second: ‘having a small majority’ (in politics), and the third: ‘of secondary or minor importance’. These definitions suggest that a ‘marginal figure’ is a person who is situated at the edge of society geographically and politically, who exerts little political power in mainstream society because they are part of a minority group, and who are perceived as less important than the majority of society. Marginal figures are therefore people who occupy a subaltern position in society.

Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore are novels that deal with two types of marginal figures in twentieth-century London; the West Indian migrant in the 1950s, and the houseboat owners and dwellers who lived on the Thames river in the 1960s. As the novels show, these people were not outcasts but neither were they members of mainstream society; instead they occupied a liminal position in twentieth-century London society. However, by making these marginal figures the main characters of their novels, Selvon and Fitzgerald are involved in a creative act of reversal that has political implications. This essay discusses the ways in which Selvon and Fitzgerald imagine marginal figures and their place in twentieth-century London, and explores their representations as both documentaries of a real location and as fictional constructions.
Read the rest of this entry »

Hi there!

It’s been a little while since I last posted. I’ve been busy holidaying in the South of France, and when I got back I was occupied with starting and getting settled into my internship at the Southbank Centre. I’m very much enjoying it so far as the staff are uber friendly and it is incredibly exciting working at such a large and prestigious arts organisation and finding out how it all works! Plus it’s just such a vibrant, energetic, creative place to work!

Seeing all those artists ‘doing their thang’ reminded me that I need to get on and put out some work of my own. I am currently working on about three art reviews (one book, one film and one visual art exhibition), and hopefully I will be putting those up soon, so look out for that. Right now, however, I’m going to put up some of the essays on literature and film that I completed over the last three years during the course of my English Literature with Creative Writing degree at Goldsmiths University. My highest marks were in my second year module entitled ‘European Film’ and my third year module called ‘Literary London’, so I think I’ll start by putting up those.

Enjoy …