The Rest Is Noise Festival - My weekend in the 1960s

This post will give you a general overview on the talks I've attended during the past weekend, I have many notes to go through and I unfortunately got ill, so the posts on each event will be a little bit delayed, but I promise I'll try to write them as soon as I can!
This said here are the fantastic events I attended, (desctriptions taken from the event's booklet).

Saturday 26

Richard Weight - The Sixties, For Now

Richard Weight discusses the social liberalism of Britain in the 1960s, the country's relations with the USA and Europe and the founding of the modern, largely secular country we live in today. This is followed by a discussion with Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of Southbank Centre, before questions are taken from the audience. Richard is the author of Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 and Modern British History: The Essential A-Z Guide. Richard also taught history at UCL, King's College London and Boston University.

Psychiatry and the 1960s

The writing and teaching of R D Laing caused a dramatic shift in attitudes towards mental health in the 1960s. Heavily influenced by existential philosophy, Laing tore up the rule book and became a huge influence on successive generations of psychiatrists, writers, and philosophers. In this event, his son Adrian Laing, a lawyer and writer, discusses his influence with chair Anthony David.

Double Bill: John Cage & Roland Kirk's Sound & What the Future Sounded Like

Dick Fontaine's experimental 1966 film Sound brings together two very different musical iconoclasts - Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Cage - who shared a similar vision of the boundless possibilities of music. In What the Future Sounded Like, the fascinating story of British electronic music is revealed.

The Noise of Third Cinema: 1968 and Film

Bev Zalcock, filmmaker and teacher, and Helen de Witt from the BFI explore the relationship between radical film practices and politics, including the emerging influence of feminism. Taking Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's revolutionary film, The Hour of the Furnaces, and their manifesto, 'Towards a Third Cinema', as the starting point, this discussion, which included extracts, will look at the films of the anti-Vietnam War protests, the May '68 uprisings, the Black Panther Party and other activist movements.

Sunday 27

The Beat Generation

Iain Sinclair has long been recognized as a great writer of the marginal and the esoteric, and his latest book American Smoke is a journey in the footsteps of the Beat writers and the landscapes rhey inhabited. He discusses the lasting impact of figures such as Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac and William Borroughs with chair Garth Cartwright, author of More Miles Than Money: Journeys Through American Music.

Zappa on Zappa

Gail Zappa, Frank Zappa's widow, in conversation about her life, the 1960s in the US and the UK, and being a rock and roll wife. 

Noise Bites

A whistle-stop tour of the key artists, movements and political breakthroughs of the era. With 15 minutes per topic, the need-to-know subjects include the cult film Performance, The New Hollywood, Computers and Artistic Experiment, and Feminist Performance Art.

Roger McGough & Brian Patten

The cultural melting pot of 1960s Liverpool gave rise to the most significant poetry movement of the era, when Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten fused pop sensibility and a zest for performance to create The Mersey Sound. At this very special event, McGough and Patten read poems and discuss Liverpool during that heady decade, before taking questions from the audience.

Angela Davis

Angela Davis is an iconic figure of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. She emerged as a nationally prominent activist and radical in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party USA and had close relations with the Black Panther Party. At this event, Angela Davis looks back at the enormous social gains made during a decade of revolution, and their resonance for the present day. Chaired by Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of Southbank Centre.

The Rest is Noise Festival - Southbank Centre

"I wanted to tell the story of the 20th century through  it music." 

Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise

As mentioned in my previous post I want to talk about The Rest Is Noise Festival inspired by Alex Ross' book and hosted by the Southbank Centre.

The Festival has been going on since January 2013 and here is a little recap of the past events:

"The first half of 2013 has seen us take a fascinating journey through the music of the 20th century. We started at 1900, when the world was on the brink of imploding into the First World War, and travelled through the end of the Second World War, just as America's star was on the rise and the Iron Curtain drew an impenetrable barrier across a shattered Europe.

During this time we provided a map for audiences that included talks, films, debates and concerts to help explain the relationship between classical music and the social and political changes of the last century. This approach, inspired by Alex Ross' book The Rest Is Noise, has allowed us to see the music of that period 'in the round' - bringing in the history of science, technology, philosophical and political movements."

Jude Kelly, Artistic Director, Southbank Centre

On the last weekend of this October the time will go back to 1960s and for only £15 for the day pass or £25 for the weekend pass, these are all the things you can see:

Saturday 26 

Film Screenings: Heimat 2 and much more besides

Tariq Ali. In this keynote talk the author and activist discusses a radical decade and key figures such as Henry Kissinger and Malcolm X

Stephen Montague. Listen to This Get to know the music of the 1960s

Pop Art. An overview of the transatlantic movement which dominated the 1960s art world

Marina Frolova Walker. Director of Studies in Music, Cambridge, discusses Shostakovich in the 1960s

May '68. The students protests that turned into one of the most powerful moments of the 1960s

Sunday 27

The Beat Generation. Explore the words and music of the 1960s underground

Zappa on Zappa. Gail Zappa speaks about her husband Frank

The Beatles. Discussion on the early years of the legendary band, based on new biographical material

Joe Boyd. The producer and writer in conversation about the 1960s

Roger McGough & Brian Patten. The legendary Mersey poets read poems and celebrate Liverpool in the 1960s

Angela Davis. Legendary civil rights activist looks back on a decade of revolution

Yellow Submarine

These are only some of the exciting activities going on during that weekend, and among the November ones I will just mention a couple such as: 

Hanif Kureishi about tensions in Thatcherite Britain

Layla Alexander-Garrat, Tarkovsky's on-set-translator, speaks about the legendary film director

Film Music of the 1970s: the great film scores from John Williams to Bernard Herrman

"What do two world wars, votes for women and a moon landing sound like?

Here comes the 20th century."

My BFI May Calendar

'Lonesome Cowboy' Pierre Lauret on The Searchers
Mon 20 May 18:20 NFT3

"In the latest in our series exploring film through a philosophical lens, Pierre Lauret (Professor of Philosophy at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris) presents a screening of The Searchers, and then considers the troubling absence of 'home' in John Ford's Western masterpiece through an insightful talk. Lauret identifies a void at the heart of this tale of a Civil War veteran doggedly hunting the Comanches who have kidnapped his niece: where will he return with her upon victory? The Comanches have burnt her home out, and have killed the rest of the family. The hero who protects the family and the community, has no family and no community, just like his charge. He must, in the end, return to the desert, as Ulysses returns to the land of the dead."

BAFTA Masterclass: Film Make-up with Lois Burwell 

Thu 23 May 18:10 NFT3

"Having recently wowed audiences by transforming  in Daniel Day-Lewis Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln, Lois Burwell received her third BAFTA nomination, following those of Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan. Her expertise in her craft has seen her as head of the make-up department on the Fifth Element, Almost Famous, Mission: Impossible, Catch Me If You Can and The Green Mile, to name just a few of her illustrious credits. This will be a rare opportunity for an audience to hear first-hand how some of these iconic looks have been created."

The King of Marvin Gardens

Fri 24 May 

"Nicholson plays David Staebler, a retiring type getting by in Philly by relating wry confessional stories over the radio, until he's suddenly summoned to Atlantic City by his younger brother Jason (Bruce Dern, all gloriously ratty panache). It's not just that Jason needs to get out of jail; he wants a partner for his get-rich-quick scheme in Hawaii. So David lingers on, with Jason, his ragdoll lover (Ellen Burstyn) and her spaced-out stepdaughter, in the fading, maybe dangerous grandeur of a resort whose streets once inspired the Monopoly board... Rafelson's witty, compassionate study of a sibling relationship awkwardly rooted in childhood dreams and adult rivalries is as rich, resonant and unpredictable as a good novel; from its superb opening soliloquy to a quietly affecting coda, the film grips like a vice. Lent terrific support by Julia Anne Robinson, Scatman Crothers and John Ryan, the three leads are magnificent, while Làszlò Kovàcs' camerawork is marvellously evocative of life on, above and under the boardwalk. A killer movie."

Missing Believed Wiped Special: An Evening with John Henshall

Tue 28 May 18:30 NFT1

 

" To celebrate 20 years of the BFI's Missing Believed Wiped initiative we are mounting a series of MissingBelieved Wiped specials throughout 2013, highlighting the most recent finds and revisiting some old favourites. One of the great finds of the last few years has been the sensational footage of David Bowie performing "The Jean Genie" from a 1973 edition of Top of the Pops. The footage was recovered from the collection of John Henshall, a television cameraman and director of photography who had made the special lens used for the Bowie performance. John has had a long career in the TV industry and was found to have hundreds of tapes of rare and missing bits of television within his collection and these are being catalogued by our colleagues at Kaleidoscope, the classic television organisation. Tonight John will join us on stage to share some of those gems with us and regale us with the fascinating - often hilarious - stories behind the productions. Expect more magical moments of missing music, segments of lost dramas, rare pop video footage and other unmissable examples of the flotsam and jetsam of British television."

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell

Wed 29 May 18:30 NFT1

"When Dr Simon Helder is committed to an asylum after being caught experimentating on stolen cadavers, he finds himself in the company of fellow re-animator Baron Frankenstein, who is physician there. The two join forces to continue their research but Helder gradually realises that a fine line separates the inmates from those apparently in charge. This was Terence Fisher's last film and the final instalment in Hammer's exploration of the Frankenstein story. Here, Peter Cushing's Baron raches his most degenerate, his gaunt yet distinguished appearance giving little inkling of the menace just beneath the surface. To mark the centenary of Cushing's birth, we are showing Hammer's new high-definition restoration of his final portrayal of the character that brought him international fame: Baron Frankenstein." 

The screening will be additionally introduced by Madeline Smith, the film's co-star, and Joyce Broughton, Cushing's secretary for 35 years.     

 

 

 

Seven months of BFI Southbank

Since I live at at five-minute walk from the Southbank, I could spend seven months in the cultural heart of
London. In this second semester, unfortunately, I couldn't go to many events, because of essays, readings and tests which took all my time.
However, I still have all my tickets from the events I attended between September and January. Here's a brief summary of them together with films' and readings' suggestions.

What's a MacGuffin? This was the very first event I attended. Since one of my biggest  interest is screenwriting, I wanted to learn more about writing thriller films. The lecture consisted in a nice pastiche of Hitchcock's clips to analyse how the suspense is built through film form and characters. That suspense that Hitch defined as an exquisite torture for the audience. The MacGuffin object is essentially this: a plot device on which to hang the tension in a film, but that in itself could be anything and nothing. Some of the most famous ones in Hitchcock's filmography are: the lighter in Strangers on a Train, the ring and the newspaper in Shadows of a Doubt, the government secrets in North by Northwest, the first Mrs. De Winter in Rebecca, the uranium in Notorius, the suspected murder in Rear Window, the necklace in Vertigo, the $40.000 cash in an envelope and Arbogast's phone booth call in Psycho, the colour red in Marnie, the reason the birds attack in The Birds. As guest star in the last part of the meeting we had the pleasure to meet David Freeman Hitchcock's last screenwriter,who worked with him on Family Plot (1976), he also wrote a book about this collaboration called: The last days of Alfred Hitchcock.


Creative Collaborations: Edith Head and Alfred Hitchcock, see my old post about it here:
http://artbookscinema.blogspot.it/2013/02/characters-come-first.html

Caesar Must Die:
It's always good to feel proud of your own country, this was my feeling when I saw that both Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's film (also winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2012) and Marco Bellocchio's
The Sleeping Beauty (La Bella Addormentata) were being presented at the London Film Festival. The film is a splendid homage to Shakespeare, to the richness of the Italian language, and, above all, to humanity.


 
The Art of Frankenweenie:
Tim Burton's Frankenweenie opened the London Film Festival last year, and the director left the stop - motion characters with all their clothes and settings used on the film plus pictures taken during the creation of them to the BFI for one-month free exhibition. It was fantastic, and the young people working there were all Disney Studios' employers who worked on the film and were ready to explain every single step of the creation of a stop-motion feature-length film. The work behind it is unbelievable, to all those who say Tim Burton is "only" a mainstream director etc., please believe me, he is an artist, with his visionary point of view on the world, and he takes care of every moment of his films until everything meets his taste. Read Burton on Burton if you still have doubts.


Im Kwon-Taek in Conversation - Run Far, Fly High:
The South-Korean director is the winner of the Honorary Golden Berlin Bear (2005) and nominated twice for the Golden Bear with Gilsoddeum (1986), and The Taebaek Mountains (1995) at the Berlin International Film Festival. Moreover, he won as Best Director at Cannes Film Festival with Chihwaseon (2002). He is a key figure to learn about the meaning of working in the film industry during a regime in which most of the topics were taboo. His films reflect on Korean society, on Buddhism, culture, Japanese colonial power. One of the reasons of his success is that he improved throughout his career by always trying something new. Extremely interesting to learn about the battle against censorship from a voice that saw and portrayed history in the moving pictures for 50 years. Suggested viewings: Mandala (1981), The Surrogate Woman (1986), Come, Come, Come Upward (1989), General's Son (1990), and Seopyeonje (1993).Here's the conversation: http://www.bfi.org.uk/live/video/1013

BAFTA Screenwriters' Lecture Brian Helgeland: always connected to my interest in screenwriting I wanted to attend this event which is part of a collaboration between the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and the BFI. 2012 was the third year in which those two institutions celebrate the artistic role of screenwriters in films. My lecture was with Brian Helgeland. Celebrated Oscar-winner for his script of L.A. Confidential. He talked about his career, obstacles and success, and about his personal style. For example, he is not concerned with the camera movements in his scripts, but he focuses on the psychology of the characters. He also talked about adaptations and said that you have to admire a book to do it, it's useless to rewrite something you don't even like. One of the most interesting things he said was that he fell out of love with movies after seeing how they are made, and, at that point, he fell in love with making movies. You can find his biography here:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/brian_helgeland/biography.php
If you're interested in the topic you can watch some other screenwriting's lectures here: http://www.bfi.org.uk/live/video/872


Horror Europa with Mark Gatiss: preview for BFI Members of this BBC 4 programme with Mark Gatiss (author of the series A History of Horror, 2010):
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFJXeVtHrkE
The screening consisted of his trip around Europe to research the roots of the horror genre in the 20th century: from the castle of Nosferatu and the German Expressionism, to the Italian giallo followed by the Belgian lesbian vampires and the ghosts of the Spanish Civil War to the 70s Italian horrors with De Palma, Dario Argento and Emilio Bava. Full of content and very rich with directors' interviews done for the occasion, visits on film's locations, and a proper narrative behind it exploring less-known films, totally worth watching. To conclude the meeting had a Q&A with Gatiss.

Screen Epiphanies: John Landis introduces 2001: A Space Odissey.
The director of The Blues Brothers and Animal House, films which shaped my childhood and that I rewatch whenever I can plus one my favorite director's masterpieces. Each month the BFI presents the Screen Epiphanies in which a big film director, producer, actor, etc. introduces the film that made them love cinema, and took them into that world. Here is the director's introduction:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/live/video/1016

Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures.
I have always wanted to see this documentary, and I had a very special chance. Introducing it and sitting among us there was nonetheless than Jan Harlan, Kubrick's friend and producer throughout his career. Every time I meet someone who played such a big role in the films I love the most, I feel very honoured, because it motivates me to keep on loving my subject, and hoping for the future. The documentary presents a very personal and well-rounded portrait of Stanley Kubrick, it was directed by Harlan, after the director's death (1999) and released in 2001. It narrates and celebrates his career, his attitude during the films' creation, and his actors talking about him along with his wife, Christiane Kubrick, his daugther, Vivian Kubrick and Jan Harlan (it was such a weird feeling to watch him on the screen and then turn my head and see him sitting there.) Here is the link to the complete documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR-loS9MHww

 
The Shining: nothing more to add, I love Kubrick, I love Jack Nicholson, and I love love love The Shining, I went to see the director's cut which was released by the BFI for the first time. Just amazing. And, actually, a few days ago, thanks to a classmate's presentation on Swedish cinema, I found out that the sequence of Jack breaking the door with an axe is inspired by a silent horror film: The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjostrom, 1921). You can find it on Youtube, I watched it and it's awesome, I highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg7hAwUGQmo

Amour : certainly not a film for everyone, you have to enter the cinema being aware that you are about to watch something psychologically very strong and disturbing. I started crying just at the beginning, because I couldn't think of a better title to express what we see rather than AMOUR. Watch it if you feel ready, but bare in mind that it is not an easy experience, but one that is definitely worth the effort. Absolutely deserved Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar plus other four Oscar nominations. Thanks Michael Haneke.

The Lumineers: 14/03/2013

Thanks to my dear friend Emily I had the chance to see The Lumineers performing at the Hard Rock Cafè on Thursday night. The gig was awesome, in a small and intimate space in which you feel very close to the performers and get carried away by the music.
I've always loved live performances because they represent the moment in which you get to see the artists, and in which you feel their music even more.


I really appreciated when Wesley Schultz asked everyone to put their phones down and live the performance instead of watching it on a screen.
I had never thought about that before, but in this era everyone is so used to technology (me included, of course) that we actually forget that it's not an Youtube video, but someone passing his/her art and passion to you.

I recorded a couple of songs, the sound is not the best ever, but hope you enjoy them!