Ladyfest London Films - what an ace programme. Don’t Need You looks particularly superb. Argh, you never get to see movies like that normally. Revolution girl style and indie cinema style now is what we need.
(although I’m away that weekend for my Dad’s 60th, so mmmm, I’ll be revolting in absentia)
Went to the Imperial War Museum on Sunday. I’d wanted to go there for a long time, ever since I developed a fascination with the 40s as a time of simultaneous personal misery and communal togetherness (the ideal state to be in). I didn’t want to see the guns, I just wanted to explore the Home Front, and I wasn’t disappointed.
I should point out the short-term catalyst for this visit was a new haircut. The less eagle-eyed amongst you (or those who don’t know me in the real world) may think I’m still sporting the indie fringe of yesteryear, but no, I now have codebreaking hair, with a sharp side-parting that allows me to crack codes, look stylish and fight a war on both domestic and international fronts. It’s really very exciting.
I learnt a very lot at the IWM. There was a wonderful drive to recycle and make-do-and-mend, driven along by strange little characters and wonderful posters. Everyone seemed to love homemade food and people genuinely helped each other for a greater cause - and I don’t mean the nation, I mean each other. Look at this amazing image.
Abram Games - a great utopian designer.
This day trip felt very important - my new hair might be a fancy, and of course there is no poetry in poverty and war, but there remains a sophistication in the forties which I find fascination, a defiance and an ignorance of the disgusting political atmosphere. A real time of public liberation, and of self-sufficient independence. The War gets all the headlines for its strong leaders and its big bombs, but what really wins my heart is every single story in the streets, and that crystallises in the making something out of nothing that rations made essential.
I’d always marveled at how my favourite documentary-maker, lovely wide-eyed Humphrey Jennings, had brought surrealism to the darkest political times, and it had always made total sense to me, but here at the IWM were scenes after scenes of domestic surrealism, making hats from leaflets, making toys from bins, making communication through wires and string. It was a revelation. This is the message that’s so strange and beautiful about ecology - not that we can save our climate (or not just that) but that we can fashion isolated objects into something new and meaningful, making beauty from scraps.
Cos this was a time of total and utter ambiguity and impermanence, so you just made it marvelous. I know I feel entirely detached and repulsed by the ‘big’ things on the evening news, so I feel similar - building tiny moments of wonder literally from the ground up - a revolution in miniature. A revolt through a side parting, and more more more.
Went to see the show about him at the Serpentine. What brilliant art - feels revolutionary and new today, like nothing else you ever see. Why didn’t people all follow his example and do something totally new? It’s a tribute to him that a lot of it still feels shocking.
I liked his montages the best - under the pressure of soviet bureaucrats., I felt like his photos got sedate and sad, although still beautiful. But I like him being rough, not beautiful.
I made a few good montages when I first started university - I made one using this picture and some silly headlines. I spent years regretting it, because the person I gave it to hated it, but actually, I now think it was interesting. Shame I’ll never see it again.
I didn’t really know computers then - it’d be so easy to photoshop a bad version now, that would be really sad.
I’m building up a stack of National Rail compensation vouchers - I’ve made two big complaints in the last 6 months and got well-rewarded for doing so. If you don’t answer back, you don’t get anything. That is my moral.
They’re good stories too…but they’ll have to wait for another time.
I saw All White in Barking last night - the new film by Marc Isaacs, who’s a really intriguing filmmaker. I pretty much knew in advance I’d like it a lot, being fascinated by both the white working-class and counties just outside London like Essex.
I do realise that’s one of the most patronising sentences you’ll ever read, but I mean it in total honesty - I’ve been following Leeds United since I was 8, and for an experience of white working-class hope, frustration, glory and loss, you can’t better it as a masterclass. Plus I love Cheshunt for walking - it claims it’s in Hertfordshire but it’s so obviously in Essex. And it has the Lee Valley Park, one of the most beautiful secret places for animals wet and dry in the South.
Anyhow, the film was great, but for me, it wasn’t just about Essex worker whites, it was also about Jewish Essexites - like Monty the Holocaust survivor and his buddies and a man called Roger who wasn’t openly outed as Jewish but so obviously was. Their confusion about race and friendliness was very typical of our bredren, and the doc made one of its most poignant jabs when a dinner of Holocaust survivors featured a man stating that Jews must marry Jews because it was simply the right thing to do. It’s not knowing racism, but it is putting up barriers that, especially to outsiders, seemimplausible and cruel. The cycle of exclusion and prejudice, however benignly intended, carries on.
These are really important issues. In a more poetic moment, on the 243 home, I got happy because the doc really celebrated outsiders and non-conformists, albeit a bit unpalatable at time, which is very good indeed. People who say what they think and want the goodness of others to be proven to them rather than assume it. I mean, actually, that rarely works, because if you start suspicious, you’ll probably remain so, but I see nothing wrong with seeing every new person as a potential friend to woo and impress.
Anyhow in other news, my current film obsession is Frownland, about…well, it’s about so much, but the central character is a stuttering troll of a man who lives in a perpetual netherworld of crisis and disgust, in a city that seems to seep hatred. It’s funny, it’s scary and it’s also very very sad for anyone who identifies that yep, big cities are just like that - horrible, dirty and unfriendly. So, Frownland isn’t just one of the best, most unique, films of recent years, it’s also probably my favourite film title ever.
I wish I could show you a scan of the Jewish Telegraph front page this week - a picture of Stefan Ruzowitzky, who made the so-so film “The Counterfeiters”, with the tagline “Oscar win for Nazi’s Grandson”
It’s a film about Nazis, yes. And about Jews. But just because he’s the grandson of a Nazi doesn’t make him “Nazi’s Grandson”. I’m a “Jew’s Grandson” but I’d rather not be referred to that way. What a typically awful bit of press from an awful navel-gazing newspaper, maintaining that status quo that Jewish readers could only be interested in the Oscars for their Jewish content - by which of course I mean usually their Holocaust content, because that’s still the only acceptable story in town.
We’re a group of people most international and worldly-wise, most intellectually sharp. But now, it’s terrible - I wish Jewish people weren’t so easily led in paranoid insularity, a secret gang of death-related nods and winks.
By the way, a nod to my boys and girls if you haven’t already seen it…