Features
Tom Birchenough
Photographer Rena Effendi’s current exhibition, "Zones of Silence", at London's Mosaic Rooms includes work from four of her recent series, and it’s hard not to see a link between them – displacement. As the exhibition notes explain: these are lives lived in areas of the world that have become invisible.The first room shows work from Azerbaijan-born Effendi’s long study (2006-2012) of life around her native Baku, “Liquid Land”, where refugees from the now distant Nagorno-Karabakh conflict still live improvised lives in the oilfields that surround the city. It arouses strange impressions: there Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You read the book, you saw the play, and in January you can see the BBC's new six-part dramatisation of Wolf Hall. Cunningly adapted by screenwriter Peter Straughan and directed by Peter Kosminsky, the series promises to be both a faithful translation of Hilary Mantel's novel and an absorbingly fresh approach to the telly-isation of history."They're such huge books [ie Wolf Hall and companion piece Bring Up the Bodies] and so layered and epic, the first challenge was to find a kind of through-line for the drama," said Peter Straughan at a screening of the first episode. "I decided it was Read more ...
David Nice
Not so much a national hero, more a national disgrace. That seems to be the current consensus on Peer Gynt as Norway moves forward from having canonized the wild-card wanderer of Ibsen's early epic. It’s now 200 years since Norway gained a constitution, and 114 since Peer first shone in the country's National Theatre, that elegant emblem of the Norwegian language. Where does this uniquely prosperous country stand today, spiritually speaking, and can Ibsen’s myth, creating as potent a figure as Oedipus, Hamlet, Don Juan or Faust, offer any answers?Alexander Mørk-Eidem took the question as the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The news that keyboard player Ian McLagan had died of a stroke at 2:39pm today at a hospital in his adopted home of Austin, Texas is tremendously sad. McLagan outlived his former Small Faces bandmates Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott, and it seemed as though he would be around forever. Drummer Kenney Jones is the only Small Faces member left with us.Despite having defined a vital aspect of the Sixties with Small Faces and going on to global stardom with The Faces, McLagan was approachable and led a low-key life in Austin. Seen behind his keyboard at the city’s bars and always open for a chat Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1971, the British rock group UFO released their second album. Titled One Hour Space Rock, its cover bore the subtitle Flying and, yes, images of UFOs in the form of flying saucers and a bald, naked and pink humanoid with claw-like fingernails. Musically, although the album had its freaky sections and sported the lengthy tracks "Star Storm" and "Flying", what was on offer was mostly day-to-day blues-rock.Nonetheless, this was an overt acknowledgment that rock music was on a more-than-nodding acquaintance with the concerns of science fiction. One Hour Space Rock wasn’t a bestseller and UFO Read more ...
fisun.guner
A sci-fi special would be incomplete without the profoundly influential figure of JG Ballard, a writer who, when he began his career in the late Fifties, fully subscribed to the notion that “sci-fi is the literature of the 20th century.” Unlike the “Hampstead novel,” he once said, “the sci-fi novel plays back the century to itself.”But as much as he had embraced it, no one genre could really contain him. He was sui generis, and something of a visionary with it, acutely alive to the evolving hyper-real present and its dystopian possibilities. Environmental catastrophe, mass media, the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
No Gravity or Interstellar has challenged the might and influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey: its re-release this week is one of the movie events of the year. Those who haven’t previously seen it – but who take CGI for granted – should be prepared to be awestruck, if not necessarily moved, by the classical music-enhanced images of planets, spacecraft, and astronauts created with animation, matting, models, back projection, and Douglas Trumbull’s special photographic effects. If that sounds prosaic, it’s because Stanley Kubrick’s film is more about surface than substance.Culturally as well as Read more ...
graham.rickson
Classical composers have always enjoyed depicting the implausible. Operas based on mythological subjects abound, creating near-impossible staging demands. Musical works based on science fiction are far rarer. Haydn's plodding opera Life on the Moon isn't one of his most scintillating works. More engaging is the first act of Janacek's comedy The Excursions of Mr Brouček, its pickled hero dreaming himself onto the surface of a moon inhabited by a colony of fey artists and intellectuals. The most tantalising of sci-fi operas never got beyond initial discussions: Stravinsky was so enchanted by Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The lightning speed of the past, Raymond Carver once wrote. There’s no epic distance of space larger than that between the imagined futures of decades past and the way things are now. It’s the Jet-Pack conundrum: it should be here but what have we got? Drones and jogging apps.Of course, sci-fi isn’t a literal space – or wasn’t, before CGI. It was, rather, the last trumpet of allegorical art in a world obsessed by surface images. Outside of sci-fi, we barely experience allegory in our imaginative lives. Gaming, however wacky the graphics, is about literalism and WYSIWYG shoot-ups, while most Read more ...
Matt Wolf
He was at home with screen newcomers like Dustin Hoffman and Cher and knew how to handle such old pros as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, while his stage work gave a leg up to then-unknowns Robert Redford and Whoopi Goldberg and he collaborated time and again with Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. Mike Nichols was comfortable within the knockabout world of Monty Python, winning one of his nine Tony Awards for directing the musical Spamalot, a decade after he forsook the glitz of Broadway and Hollywood to make a rare acting appearance in the National Theatre premiere of the Wallace Shawn Read more ...
fisun.guner
Baudelaire called him a “pictorial Balzac” and said he was the most important man “in the whole of modern art”, while Degas was only a little less effusive, claiming him as one of the three greatest draughtsman of the 19th century, alongside Ingres and Delacroix.Honoré Daumier has always been held in the highest esteem by fellow artists, both in his own time and today, with contemporary artists such as Peter Doig and Paula Rego keen admirers. But beside his technical skills, Daumier was also among the most socially alert and politically engaged artists of the 19th century. A socialist and Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
We’ve grown accustomed to cinemas asking punters to pocket their cell phones, or prohibiting food and drink inside the auditorium. But an unassuming sign on the doors of the Gartenbaukino in Vienna has a different plea: Bitte nicht laufen. Please don’t run.This request is posted during the Vienna Film Festival, or Viennale, for the über-enthusiastic local audiences who make a dash for the best seats in the 700-plus-seater cinema. I witnessed one such surge, for the jazz and mind games American drama Whiplash; as a female colleague was swept along by a wave of excited film buffs, her backwards Read more ...