Crossfire Hurricane

Art, Film & Hopper

Austrian director Gustav Deutsch has recreated 13 of Edward Hopper's paintings into a film From Shirley - Visions Of Reality. The plot expands on the story of Shirley, a recurrent figure in Hopper's paintings.

From Shirley – Visions of Reality (2013). Photograph by Jerzy Palacz.

Office at Night (1940) by Edward Hopper

From Shirley – Visions of Reality (2013). Photograph by Jerzy Palacz.

Morning Sun (1952) by Edward Hopper

From Shirley – Visions of Reality (2013). Photograph by Jerzy Palacz.

Room in New York (1932) by Edward Hopper

more @ Phaidon

RZA

Woodkid

I've posted Woodkid tunes here before but didn't realise then that Yoann Lemoine was also the music video director responsible for 

Lana Del Rey's Born to Die -

And the gorgeously French New Wavey 

Dreaming of Another World for Mystery Jets -

That he used to roll with Luc Besson's crew and also directed a series of roughs for Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.

Nor even that he collaborated with Agyness Deyn 

on his own stunning music video for Iron.  

The very same song that Dior Homme's 2013 Fall collection "A Soldier on My Own" was inspired by.

Wow woodkid. Wow.

Scout

Discovering New York City gems through the eyes of movie location scout Nick Carr.

 

The 'Abandoned' McKittrick Hotel on West 27th Street.

Notable films à clef

8½, Federico Fellini's "director's block".

Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst.

 Annie Hall,
denied by Woody Allen to reflect his relationship with Diane Keaton. 

Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola and ex-husband, Spike Jonze.

 Adaptation, based on The Orchid Thief &

 Charlie Kaufman's difficulty in adapting the book into a screenplay.

Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson dealing with his father's death.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

Shame

Art can't fix anything. It can just observe and portray. What's important is that it becomes an object, a thing you can see and talk about and refer to. A film is an object around which you can have a debate, more so than the incident itself. It's someone's view of an incident, an advanced starting point.

- Steve McQueen

Kontrol

After crashing the Melbourne Festival opening party last night (literally - apologies to the bartender at the mercy of my wayward elbow), and being mesmerised firstly by Rineke Dijkstra's  I see a Woman Crying (Weeping Woman) at the ACCA opening

then by Santiago Sierra's burning K



- the dancing flames licking the cold Melbourne air, purple violently clashing against vibrant yellow, igniting the sweet smell of fire so foreign in the city.  Accompanied by a satisfying stunned hipster silence, (most blissfuly oblivious to the symbolism of this spectacle - the grand finale in the world wide destruction of letters calling a death knell to 'kapitalism')...

This evening was a sublime medley of dinner, wine and dessert at the wonderful Journal Canteen. 

A fantastic prelude preparing us for the beginning of the festival proper in the best cinema seats in Melbourne - ACMI.  We had come to appreciate the hectic and complex inner workings of the intriguing Anton Corbijn in his most recent biography Inside Out.

In love with his music video clips



and photography

and having already enjoyed the previous film documenting his (dare I say it) more fascinating earlier years in Shadow Play: The Making of Anton Corbijn.  Filmmaker Klaartje Quirijns’s Anton Corbijn: Inside Out delves into the psyche of this intensely driven Dutch artist.  One senses it's a keep-moving-lest-drop-into-the-abyss kind of momentum that propels the incredible commercial success of this dark photographer.   This film reveals the present day story behind the only man who could so honestly capture the romance of Ian Curtis in the phenomenal 2007 biopic Control.

All this and the festival's only been going for 24 hours...

Nihilists

Gutterballs - The Big Lebowski

The Beautiful and The Damned

No church in the wild.