surrealism
Laura de Lisle
I have a confession to make: I don’t like Alice in Wonderland. I know, I know, a lot of people disagree. I do appreciate its place in the cultural pantheon – I just find all the caterpillars and tea parties and pointless riddles really, really dull. So it’s hard to be sure if it was the subject matter of Alice, A Virtual Theme Park that left me a little chilly, or its form. Creation Theatre’s Zoom adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s stories is over-ambitious at times, but it works well when it’s reminding us of life’s fundamental absurdity – and how leaning into that can bring us together Read more ...
Gaby Frost
Deft and funny prose, in a feather-light translation by Ted Goossen, is the signature of Hiromi Kawakami's latest collection People From My Neighbourhood, a series of surreal and playful short stories offering a glimpse at the most curious and intriguing of all beings: neighbours.It’s like a dream woven from the fragments of a world seen from a window. Each story is just three or four pages long. Sometimes the chapter titles only make sense in the final line of the story, and even then, we ask: why that detail? There are themes which link individual stories: gambling brings together the Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Missing the office? Or dreading the day you have to return? What’s your relationship to the people you work with and for, and how does it intersect with your personal life? Do your paymasters know you? Do they care about you? Are there days when the routine and the hierarchy of it all just feels like a spirit-crushing game?All of those notions, and many others, drifted through the imagination when you entered the unsettling world of the Institute. This hour-long film for the BBC was created and directed by Amit Lahav, founder of the much-admired physical theatre company Gecko, and adapted Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Salvador Dalí’s house at Portlligat on the Costa Brava is straight out of the pages of a lifestyle magazine, its sunbaked white walls dazzling in the sunshine, and light pouring in from every angle. It was a fisherman’s hut when Dalí moved there in 1930, extending it over 40 years like “a true biological structure” to make a home and a place to work for himself and his wife Gala, with every window letting in a view of the sea.The house is one point of the Dalí Triangle: another is the Gala Dalí Castle at Púbol, not far from Girona (pictured below right). Dalí moved here after the death of his Read more ...
Sarah Collins
“Truth was further from safety than two islands at opposite ends of the earth,” proclaims the narrator of ‘Lake Like A Mirror’, the titular short story in Ho Sok Fong’s intoxicating new collection. When a young Chinese Malaysian literature tutor inadvertently falls foul of the university committee after a recital of an ee cummings poem is uploaded online, she begins to feel bored with herself, and bored of “drawing the line” that determines appropriate and inappropriate, fatigued with self-censorship in the pursuit of safety. Ho’s startling prose viscerally conveys the quiet, stifling fear Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Visceral, gaudy, alien, otherworldly to the point of being almost improbably imaginative, the nudibranch serves as an appropriate figure for Nigerian-British writer Irenosen Okojie’s muscularly surrealist prose. Look up a picture of one if you haven’t before: the nudibranch is an exuberant, kaleidoscopic variety of sea slug. In the story that gives her newest collection of short stories its title, Okojie provides a short definition of the creature, which serves as a kind of epigraph: "Soft-bodied, marine gastropod molluscs which lose their shells after their larval stage. They are noted Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's five years since Steven Ellison aka Flying Lotus released an album, and it's not entirely clear how far he's moved creatively. To be fair he's been busy branching out in other directions, producing for superstar rapper Kendrick Lamar, making short films, and helping members of his Brainfeeder stable like Thundercat and Kamasi Washington along to greater fame. But with this album he seems to have taken up precisely where 2014's “Your Dead” left off. The same preoccupations are here: exquisite musicianship mashed together with deliberate decay and destruction, high falutin spiritual Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Modern’s retrospective of Dorothea Tanning is a revelation. Here the American artist is known as a latter day Surrealist, but as the show demonstrates, this is only part of the story. Tanning’s career spanned an impressive 70 years – she died in 2012 aged 101 – but as so often happens, she was eclipsed by her famous husband, German Surrealist Max Ernst. They met in New York; he was scouting for artists to include in an exhibition staged by his then wife, Peggy Guggenheim. On the easel in Tanning's studio was Birthday, 1942 (pictured below right) a newly finished self portrait. The Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
If we think of Robert De Niro and Brian De Palma, we likely think of The Untouchables from 1987 with the great actor in his career pomp, chewing up the scenery in a memorable cameo as Al Capone. However, the pair had history. They made three films together in the 1960s – Greetings, The Wedding Party and Hi, Mom! – which are now gathered together in 2K restorations from the original negatives. The short of it is that two of them are now little more than historical curios for archivists, but the other is revelatory on a number of counts and well worth exploring.The Wedding Party began Read more ...
graham.rickson
Věra Chytilová’s 1966 film Daisies almost defies description, though what initially seems like 75 minutes of plot-free silliness does coalesce into something bordering on the coherent. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, to quote Seinfeld. Daisies is what it is, and approaching it with open eyes is a whole lot of fun. Opening with aerial footage of World War Two bombing raids, we soon cut to Chytilová’s young protagonists, played by Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová. Both called Marie, they recline in swimming costumes and make nonsensical conversation. “Nobody understands anything,” Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A whiff of chlorine hits you as you open the door of the Whitechapel Gallery. Its the smell of public baths, and inside is a derelict swimming pool with nothing in it but dead leaves and piles of brick dust. Damp walls, peeling paint and cracked tiles make this a sorry sight. The door to the changing rooms has been sealed shut and some joker has sawn through the wall bars. Where has the pool come from, though? A wall notice explains. This was the Whitechapel Pool, opened in 1901 as an amenity for east enders. It was renovated in 1953, but in 1988, it was closed after losing its funding Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Slovak director Štefan Uher is often acclaimed as the figure who initiated the movement that came to be known as the Czech New Wave with his 1962 work, The Sun in a Net. While that film certainly had a style, both visual and narrative, that was original for its time, Uher would continue to stretch other boundaries over the few years in which the New Wave lasted, not least in his 1966 The Miraculous Virgin (Panna zázra nica).For, as well as pushing the social boundaries of what was acceptable in cinema for which it would become better known, the new political circumstances also ushered in Read more ...