The Man from London

Hungary's legendary Sindbad

2012-02-10T06:38:00.007Z

I don't feel yesterday's post works, on Austrian-Hungarian literature available in English translation, alongside the tragic ends of the authors. I was inspired by New York Review Books' edition of Hungarian writer Gyula Krúdy's short story collection The Adventures of Sindbad.

In his excellent historical introduction, George Szirtes suggests the book might have served 'a young Hungarian man of the 1920s... as a working manual of sexual relations.' Within a couple of chapters, Krúdy's semi-autobiographical hero is dead, but Sindbad's pursuit of women continues nonetheless.

'He liked lies, illusions, fictions and imagination - he would love to have swung from the high trapeze in a rose-pink vest or been an organist at a princely residence, or a confessor in a Jesuit church! A sought-after gynaecologist in Pest or a young tutor in a girls' school!'

I love his description of an elderly passerby's attention to a former paramour: 'The old gentleman's eyes rolled over her like a beer barrel across a yard.' Sindbad's thoughts infuse Ginsberg with melancholy: 'Frivolous, holy, holy and wearisome life! How nice it would be to start again!' A feeling underlined in the next story: 'A pity I am too old to begin my life anew.'

In its Classics series, NYRB could be accused of assembling a nice bunch of misogynists, including Georges Simenon and Alberto Moravia (Boredom). With them Kruda offers a prayer: 'Lord... give me untroubled dreams and a quiet night. Stop my ears against words poured into it by women. Help me forget the scent of their hair, the strange lightning of their eyes, the taste of their hands and the moist kisses of their mouths.

'Lord, you who are wise, advise when they are lying, which is always. Remind me that the truth is something they never tell. That they never do love. Lord, up there, far beyond the tower, think occasionally of me, a poor foolish man, an admirer of women, who believes in their smiles, their kisses, their tickling and their blessed lies... Lord protect me, never let me fall into the hands of women.'

The empire strikes back

2012-02-09T09:20:00.009Z

250th post: Ill health, suicide; ill health, suicide

Literature of the Austro-Hungarian empire has gained an increasing hold in English, kickstarted almost a generation ago by poet Michael Hofmann (latterly behind a revival of interest in Hans Fallada). German-language voices have been bolstered by such Hungarians as Sandor Márai and Gyula Krúdy.

Hofmann's translations of Joseph Roth are vital reading, notably his portrait of the collapse of the Habsburgs, The Radetzky March (1932). In 1933, Roth settled in Paris, where he died in 1939. Roth's final years were marked by the alcoholism he outlined in final novel The Legend of the Holy Drinker ('his last detail,' according to Hofmann), which was filmed by Ermanno Olmi. Rutger Hauer was the perhaps unlikely star of this miraculous homeless drama, which closes with the unforgettable: 'May God grant us all, all of us drinkers, such a good and easy death!'

Hofmann takes up the tale of Roth's death: 'In 1938, he went to Horváth's funeral, and told friends that the next obituary they would write would be his own. It was the news of another friend's death, the suicide of the playwright Ernst Toller, that precipitated his own collapse...' He died aged 44.

Through his descent into poverty, Roth was supported by compatriot Stefan Zweig who has caught imaginations for his novel Beware of Pity (1939). There is, too, The Post Office Girl, which was found among the author's manuscripts after his death and has been republished by Sort of Books (with a quote from Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant on the cover).

The author of short fiction The Royal Game and Letter from an Unknown Woman (filmed by Max Ophüls) left Austria in 1935 and became a nationalised Briton. He travelled to the US and onto Brazil where, on 22 February 1942 - an anniversary that occurs soon - he and his wife committed suicide.

For more short stories I especially recommend a collection by a Hungarian writer of the period: Life is a Dream (1931) is published in Penguin's Central European Classics series. Author Gyula Krúdy is also served by New York Review Books, which publishes a couple of his works, including The Adventures of Sindbad. The rogueish author is another who ended his life in poverty, inspiring compatriot Sándor Márai to lead a reappraisal with his own Sindbad Comes Home (1940).

Márai was also rediscovered posthumously thanks to the German publication of his Embers (Die Glut) in 1999 (it was later adapted by Christopher Hampton for a London stage production starring Jeremy Irons), followed by Conversations in Bolzano (alternately Casanova in Bolzano) and The Rebels. Márai's publishers made much play of the author's unhappy end: having survived the Nazis and Communists, he fled to the US where, in 1989, he too killed himself - just before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the return of democracy to central Europe, is the line.

ROA in Brussels

2012-02-06T06:27:00.004Z

Some work by the Belgian graffiti artist, in his home country. Click here for more of his animals on the loose in London.

A Pet Shop Boys iconography

2012-02-01T06:11:00.015Z

On Monday 6 February, Pet Shop Boys release their second collection of non-album tracks, Format, covering 1996-2009. I've written elsewhere about the synth duo's best b-sides so I thought I'd look at some of my favourite PSB sleeves, which are tackled exhaustively in Philip Hoare and Chris Heath's five-year-old Catalogue (Thames & Hudson) - quoted below.

1. Graphic

For many, the covers for the group's first two albums - 1986's Please and the following year's Actually - represent iconic moments, but my favourite is this graphic interpretation for their third, dance-y outing. In the same manner they played with Cindy Palmano's photograph for the Actually sleeve for greatest hits Discography - with Neil Tennant arching his eyebrow instead of yawning - so this could be said to be the starting point for the colourful tick that heralded their last album, Yes (2009). The band's regular designer Mark Farrow found the image looking through a professional book of colour combinations. Tennant says, 'It's our least favourite sleeve.'

2. Portrait

Photographer Eric Watson has shot many Pet Shop Boys' covers and this is one of my favourites, in great part due to my anticipation at the time for what is my favourite PSB single. He also shot the four photos that make up the centrepiece of accompanying album, Behaviour (1990), although second single Being Boring features some great, separate shots of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe by the Douglas Brothers. So Hard's 12" sleeve featured large lettering and numbers, a device developed on...

3. Typographic

The fourth and final single from the Actually album, Heart (1988), was written for Madonna but the Boys' decided to keep it for themselves. As with so many of Watson's pictures of Tennant and Lowe, this featured the duo in some new clothes they were keen to show off. Different formats give an indication of Farrow's predilection for playing with fonts and words: on the 12", he replaced the title with the word 'Remix'. As early as 1986's Suburbia single, the designer had given up on lettering altogether, deciding a picture of Lowe in denim cap, Issey Miyake shades and a stripey T-shirt was enough to represent them. 'It's everything about Pet Shop Boys summed up to me in a photo,' Farrow says. 'That's something I've never backed away from - I've always thought that if the photograph is strong enough to do the work on its own then I don't really need to do anything. In my mind at that time... the way Chris looked was the logo of the Pet Shop Boys.'

4. Arty

I don't know about you, I find the covers for Disco 3, London, I get along... pretty unexciting, so I went for this lo-fi number instead. The first of the band's remix albums, the cover image for Disco (1986) was taken from a video Tennant and Lowe filmed in Milan themselves for song Paninaro. The inner sleeve features Tennant in a cowboy hat from the same shoot, which is pretty cool. The album's title was intended as deliberate provocation at the time - notably in the US - while the image, to me, represents a surprisingly home-made approach, despite the neon colours and pixellation. It's not for nothing their 2003 compilation is called Pop Art.

5. Offbeat

In 1993, Pet Shop Boys reached the peak of their pop sensibility with album Very, and matched it with a revolutionary CD box that went up for all sorts of awards and features in design exhibitions to this day. After that, well, things went a bit odd - I haven't even uploaded 1999's Nightlife to my iPod, and only half of Release (2002). Nevertheless, I have a soft spot for album Bilingual (1996), which featured another attempt to rework the CD box, and further off-guard snaps of the Boys. This image, for single A red letter day, was shot by Pennie Smith in Notting Hill and seems surprisingly informal but perhaps a little unnerving, too; Smith is best known for photographing rock stars like the Rolling Stones. This isn't how we expect to see the band. In typically extravagant manner, the outer sleeves were entirely red - a reversal of Behaviour's inner, red lining.

A rare theatre post

2012-01-26T15:26:00.006Z

While the Palace Theatre was (relatively) dark recently, passersby in central London could see the building's exterior unhindered by gaudy advertising (above). Before the current primary-coloured umbrellas had gone up, there was also the chance to see backstage as new show Singin' in the Rain, which opens on 4 February, was installed:

Stitches in time: the tailor in fiction

2012-01-18T06:25:00.001Z

It's with creeping inevitably that I pick up from last week's post and the reference to Louis Garrel's short The Little Tailor to search out further tailors in fiction, starting with The Tailor of Panama. John le Carré's 1996 novel, inspired by Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, was filmed in 2001, providing a star turn - and a break from Bond - for Pierce Brosnan.

Brosnan's character has been discarded by MI6 in Panama, where he leans on Geoffrey Rush's tailor to find a way to secure his return to the fold. This tailor is typical of what we come to expect in screen depictions of the type: grasping, out-of-his-depth, a little bit sleazy.

The archetype is, of course, described by Georges Simenon in Les Fiançailles de Monsieur Hire (1933), filmed by Patrice Leconte in one of my favourite adaptations of the Belgian author's work. Michel Blanc stars as the eponymous M Hire, who spies on his beautiful neighbour, played by Sandrine Bonnaire, and is incriminated in the killing of another young woman nearby. In Anna Moschovakis' translation (for the 2007 NYRB edition), '... one sensed in him neither flesh nor bone, nothing but soft, flaccid matter, so soft and so flaccid that his movements were hard to make out.'

Like Simenon's tailor, Garrel's is Jewish and, as the young director noted, anachronistic. (I like, too, Garrel's admission that he tried to make a longer, feature, film but he cut and cut, and was left with 45 minutes.) For timeless tailors who have given us a byword for cutting down pretension we look to Hans Christian Andersen's swindlers, who pose as weavers in The Emperor's New Clothes (1837).

But my favourite fictional tailors come in Rohinton Mistry's wondrous A Fine Balance (1995), starting with unfortunate young widow Dina Shroff, who is encouraged to set up her own tailoring business to maintain her independence. She hires villagers Ishvar and his nephew Om and makes a quilt from the workers' scraps.

Later on it evokes memories of their time together '... that's the rule to remember, the whole quilt is much more important than any single square.' And there is a gap, yet to be completed: 'Before you can name that corner,' continues Ishvar, 'our future must become past.'

It is also a book of the city, Mumbai, which I don't think is ever named. After another adventure the tailors return to their favoured haunt, the Vishram restaurant:

'You fellows are amazing,' the sweaty cook roared over the stoves. 'Everything happens to you only. Each time you come here, you have a new adventure story to entertain us.'

'It's not us, it's the city,' said Om. 'A story factory, that's what it is, a spinning mill.'

Free French films online

2012-01-11T10:55:00.007Z

From tomorrow, French-film fans will be able to watch a host of shorts and full-length features online for free and vote for their favourites. The My French Film Festival offering features a couple of highly acclaimed movies that had big-screen releases in the UK last year, including Love Like Poison and Living On Love Alone, a highly watchable look at the plight of a young woman looking for work - and self-esteem.

The star of the latter, Anaïs Demoustier, features alongside another name that dominates the programme - Léa Seydoux (recently of Midnight in Paris, Mysteries of Lisbon and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol) - in Rebecca Zlotowski's Dear Prudence, a sort of 1950s cautionary tale seen through a '70s filter. Seydoux is also the lead in Louis Garrel's self-penned, sophomore directorial outing, The Little Tailor (pictured), that feels happily out of time.

The actor concedes that his 45-minute movie, which received a cinematic release in France, is indebted to the films of his hero, François Truffaut, notably La peau douce (1964) and short Antoine et Colette (1962). Garrel is open about The Little Tailor's shortcomings, including a poorly sketched role for Seydoux, but it's great fun nonetheless, and definitely worth a watch - and your vote.

New year at Ciné lumière

2012-01-04T10:32:00.003Z

For a single-screen rep cinema, Ciné lumière can boast much imaginative programming, such as a season of Spirituality in Cinema to accompany the release of Xavier Beauvois' Of Gods and Men (2010) and Palme d'Or winner Uncle Boonmee Can Recall His Past Lives. Perhaps inspired by The Iron Lady, which opens there this Friday, the South Ken institute launches a series of films about government.

The Corridors of Power season kicks off on Sunday with lengthy De Gaulle biopic, Le Grand Charles, from 2005. Current fare includes The Conquest, again starring Denis Podalydès - this time about Sarkozy's rise to the French presidency - L'exercice de l'etat, with Michel Blanc, and Alain Cavalier's Pater, starring Cavalier and Vincent Lindon.

Two classics of the last decade also feature: The Last Mitterand (2004) - which won Blanc won a César for his portrayal of François Miterrrand - and 1974: une partie de campagne (2001), Raymond Depardon's Giscard d'Estaing doc. There's no place for powerful Georges Simenon adaptation The President (1961), starring Jean Gabin and Bernard Blier, presumably because a subtitled print isn't available. Simenon fans will, however, be tempted separately by Maigret's Mistake (1994), a feature-length episode of the French TV series starring Bruno Cremer.

The highlight of this month's programme focuses on TV: Totally Serialized, a celebration of French and British small-screen offerings on the big screen, runs 19-22 January. Alongside an all-night Misfits marathon (on Saturday 21 January), there's a free screening of an episode of Elite Squad the next morning, a script-writing workshop attended by Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files) and Eric de Barahir (Spiral) among others, plus the first episode of This is England '88 followed by a Q&A with the cast. I'd also pick out a screening of the opening episode of gritty cop series Braquo (22 January) attended by director Olivier Marchal and star Jean Hugues Anglade (Betty Blue, Subway).

Carry On Christmas

2011-12-21T12:23:00.001Z

Film4 has recently been screening the early Carry On films. In all, some 30 films were made in the innuendo-laden series, which is a staple of the TV schedules. A core cast of Kenneth Williams, Charlie Hawtry, Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Connor was immediately in place for opener Carry On Sergeant (1958), and director Gerald Thomas was at the helm all the way through to a misguided revival in 1992 for Carry On Columbus, starring Julian Clary.

Sophomore outing Carry On Nurse (1959) saw the introduction of Leslie Phillips, who returned for Columbus after a run in the first films, and Joan Sim, while hospitals remained a popular setting for the series - think Barbara Windsor in her pasties. Given the films' appropriation of seaside postcard humour and the aspirational times, the vacation seam was mined to its full in Carry On Cruising (1962),Carry On Camping (1962) and Carry On Abroad (1972).

Shirley Eaton - of Goldfinger fame - was another early regular and the movies also afforded roles to Bob Monkhouse (... Sergeant) and Richard O'Sullivan, in Carry On Teacher (1959). The theme of these early ventures was routinely of a hapless group - conscripts or other initiates - pulling together and overcoming their own shortfalls to support authority.

Sid James joined in 1960 for Carry On Constable and it's his introduction that arguably cemented the reputation for single entendres and hopeless mugging that would characterise the series, which reached its pinnacle in 1968's Carry On... Up the Kyber, with Roy Castle in the role of the young male ingenue.

The films are no better than the St Trinian's movies (resurrected even more recently with Gemma Arterton, Lena Heady, Rupert Everett, Russell Brand and Colin Firth), but it's warming to see Williams, in particular, displaying finesse in the early, black-and-white outings. This charming portrait of the actor, taken just before the series began in 1957, is currently on show at London's National Portrait Gallery.

Merry Christmas and all the very best for 2012!

Silents are golden

2011-12-14T14:34:00.012Z

Following wonderful presentations of Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (attended by Rowan Atkinson) and Le grand amour, with director Pierre Etaix, the team from Fondation Groupama Gan was back at London's Ciné lumière this week with A Trip to the Moon (1902, pictured). Georges Méliès's classic - just think of that image of the rocket embedded in the moon's eye - has been restored to its original colour, with a soundtrack by Air.

The French pop duo, who previously scored The Virgin Suicides (1999), had only a month to create the soundtrack and say they left the mix deliberately raw to match the filmmaker's methods. It channels their own fascination with the moon and psychedelia, though the use of sound effects - including farmyard animal noises - doesn't do it for me.

Pop is increasingly used to soundtrack old silent films, most notably Pet Shop Boys' work on Battleship Potemkin (1925). At the time of their Trafalgar Square concert screening, Neil Tennant spoke of director Sergei Eisenstein's wish that the film be rescored every decade. Pioneering music producer Giorgio Moroder famously pursued clips of Metropolis (1924) to every corner of the planet before releasing a colourised version of Fritz Lang's sci-fi classic in 1984 with a soundtrack including Pat Benatar and Freddie Mercury (on Love Kills, covered by Little Boots).

A Trip to the Moon's 14,000 frames were originally hand-tinted by 200 artists and it's a rediscovered print of this version that formed the basis for this restoration. Air also had the luxury of not having to compete with any existing soundtrack but, like Moroder's labour of love, it's hoped the soundtrack will attract a new audience to a classic that was well-known if little seen.

Scissor Sisters' John Garden (son of Graeme!) plays live accompaniment to a series of Méliès films at Ciné lumière tonight (NB Wednesday 14 December). Highlights of Air's Q&A following the screening of A Trip to the Moon will appear here

What would Father Ted do?

2011-12-08T10:36:00.011Z

The BBC website today has an article about the prevalence of slogan 'What would Jesus do?', most noticeably at St Paul's Occupy protest. The Archbishop of Canterbury tackled that question this week, but its growing prominence reminded me of Chris Marker's film The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chats perchés, 2004), which charts the presence of a piece of graffiti art at demonstrations around the world almost a decade ago.

The iconography of the image of a Cheshire-like cat seems way more interesting than the rhetorical, rather glib use of WWJD by many who may not believe in Christ. Jesus is global but the grinning cat lends itself to greater interpretation, and can be co-opted more easily by the broad spectrum of issues demonstrators now regularly join under together, though in the period Marker charts it largely appeared at marches against war in Iraq.

In his film, Marker first tracks the cats in Paris in a period following 9/11 and they can still be spotted there above the rooftops - and elsewhere, pictured. I would love it if the cat's rise continued unabated perhaps alongside the best slogan of all, which author Graham Linehan still spots at various very British protests: 'Down with this sort of thing', coupled with its partner from TV series Father Ted, 'Careful now'.

Pop music in novels

2011-12-05T06:06:00.010Z

Pop music is a staple in contemporary cinema. It's used as a marketing tool by mainstream moviemakers and emotional signposting by filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino (cf Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, starring Ryan Gosling and College's A Real Hero track). But it's less commonly found in novels, particularly compared to classical or opera.

Other than novels directly about bands and music-making, such as Toby Litt's I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay (2008), pop is rarely referenced in literary fiction. There are notable exceptions, however: Douglas Coupland has written novels called Girlfriend in a Coma (1998) and Eleanor Rigby (2004); the record shop-owner who narrates Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (1995) regularly makes mix tapes and has Top Fives to cover most of the important things in his life.

Amid the misogynistic horror, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991) has some very funny chapters on 1980s music including Whitney Houston, Huey Lewis and the News, and Genesis ('I've been a big Genesis fan ever since the release of their 1980 album, Duke. Before that I didn't really understand any of their work...').

The eponymous heroine of Alan Warner's Morvern Callar (1995) soundtracks her life to her Walkman while the music of Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) ranges from Otis Redding to 'the tuneless: King Crimson, Soft Machine, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and Wild Man Fisher.' Character Shahid has the bootleg CD - bought from Camden market - of The Black Album in his Prince collection in the book of that name, and Prince is back for Arthur Phillips' pop-stalker novel The Song Is You (2009), which cunningly namechecks any number of particularly UK-centric pop sources.

We're back hunting for CDs in Camden and the West End in Malvern Hills, one of five stories in Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes (2009). The narrator goes to stay with his sister and help out in her café, where he meets a Swiss couple - 'We perform many hits. Beatles, the Carpenters... we do some Abba. Dancing Queen. That one always goes down well.'

Robin, one of the characters in Alan Hollinghurst's 1998 novel, The Spell, has 'old vinyls, in bumped, coffee-ringed sleeves... The Beatles and the Stones, the Doors, the Incredible String Band' though he has 'the small accidental CD collection of someone uninterested in music.' Through Robin's son, staid civil servant Alex is turned onto dance; 'Alex switched on the radio, and it was one of Haydn's opus 76 string quartets that he had sometimes listened to with Hugh. It held him for a moment... but he couldn't resist a feeling that it would always be there, and found himself reaching into the glove-box for his latest purchase from Harlot Records, Monster House Party Five, a three-CD compilation of 40 pounding dance tracks mixed by DJs Sparkx, Joe Puma and Queen Marie.'

Set in a parallel 1984, Japanese author Haruki Murakami's latest, 1Q84, could feature any amount of trendy 1980s tunes but instead anachronistically references It's Only a Paper Moon by EY Harburg and Harold Arlen ('It's a Barnum and Bailey world/ Just as phony as it can be'), alongside Janácek's Sinfonietta. While classical music may seem less gauche on the page, there are some great pop references in one of my favourite novels: F Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon (1940).

Driving with Wylie, the alcoholic writer who is in love with her, Celia dreams instead of the producer Stahr. 'I turned the dial and got either Gone or Lost - there were good songs that year... [but they] were the wrong mood, so I turned again and got, Lovely to Look At, which was my kind of poetry... "They asked me how I knew,' sang the radio, "- my true love was true." My heart was fire, and smoke was in my eyes and everything...'

Please do add your favourite pop moments in novels in the comments field below - thank you!

Raise high the roof beam, Salinger

2011-12-02T06:17:00.003Z

In a contemporary review of JD Salinger's Franny and Zooey, John Updike almost finds a forebear for David Foster Wallace in the famously reclusive author. Updike confesses to being a fan, conceding that the 'Glass saga, as he has sketched it out, potentially contains great fiction' though he is troubled by 'the extravagant self-consciousness of Salinger's later prose, wherein most of the objections one might raise are already raised.'

Updike quotes a particularly telling phrase of Salinger's from the book's jacket flap in which the creator of Holden Caulfield seems to presage the silence that was to ensue: '... there is a real-enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I'll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, I'm very hopeful.'

Salinger's final books - Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction - were published in the early 1960s from pieces that had appeared in The New Yorker in the late 1950s. His last published work, Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in The New Yorker in June 1965. JD Salinger died in 2010, aged 91, without publishing another word.

Killing time again - Forbrydelsen II

2011-12-01T06:36:00.022Z

In much the way author Howard Norman revisited the same story in three books from 1994 to 2002, the writer of The Killing, Søren Sveistrup, has been tipping his hat to familiar themes in the second series of the Danish crime drama. The original series (Forbrydelsen in Danish) stood out in part because of its focus on the family and friends of various central characters, especially those related to murder victim Nanna Birk Larsen.

Four episodes into the noticeably tighter Forbrydelsen II, the action is less immediately personal, though there are hints we may learn a little more about enigmatic heroine, detective inspector Sarah Lund. Her son has settled permanently with his grandmother, whose impending wedding gives Lund another family occasion to muck up or miss altogether, to put alongside her attempt to move in with Swedish ex-boyfriend Bengt.

Sofie Gråbøl is as outstanding as ever as Lund, whose powers of detection continue to outweigh the character's ability to play things by the book, coupled with an innate talent to be in the right place at the wrong time. As Gråbøl told me of her character in a recent interview for Time Out, 'She makes connections, that's her talent, her gift. Of course she has a strong gut feeling but there's nothing supernatural [about her intuition].'

Lund is one of only two recurring characters in the series - the other being her boss, Lennart Brix (Morten Suurballe). The political background is played out at a national level on this occasion, albeit with the state's civil servants still proving obstructive. Senior figures throughout seem to know more about the deaths of several people attached to a military unit in Afghanistan than they're letting on.

There are echoes of the excellent Danish film Armadillo (2010), which BBC4 would do well to screen during The Killing II's current run; the character Søgaard is notably familiar from Janus Metz Pedersen's Afghan documentary. Lund's case also has political as well as personal repercussions, not least for the women who are forced out of their jobs after having affairs. (There's even a replacement for luscious Rie Skovgaard in Ruth Hedeby.) Nor has the Danish weather improved.

There is, too, the initial frisson with Lund's new colleague, the brilliantly named Ulrik Strange (Mikael Birkkjaer), who has already succeeded where her previous (romantic) partner failed - by taking her to Sweden, as if that's some sort of strange Danish euphemism. Birkkjaer and Gråbøl previously appeared together in a film about a couple dealing with their daughter's death, Aftermath (2004). It's out on DVD on Monday.

Søren Sveistrup has injected warmth and dark humour in their relationship, worthy of the Swedish TV version of Wallander. (Gråbøl told The Guardian that Lund would beat Wallander in a fight - 'no contest'.) The writer is also playing with viewers' knowledge of what happened to Lund's previous police partner, and has just placed Strange in jeopardy. We'll have to tune in on Saturday to find out how that goes.

In the swim - pools in movies, part three

2011-11-30T06:11:00.007Z

Murder

A swimming pool is the centre of confusion for Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot in Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1955) but pools are so central to two intertwined French films that they are named after the bathing spots - the setting for murders in both, by different means. In La Piscine (1969), which is out now on DVD and Blu-ray, and Swimming Pool (2003), the camera lingers longingly on the pneumatic bodies of respective stars Romy Schneider and Ludivine Sagnier (pictured).

In the former film, Schneider is paired with her ex-lover Alain Delon, not looking bad nearly a decade after Plein Soleil, here distracted by Lolita-esque Jane Birkin. In François Ozon's Swimming Pool, libidinous Sagnier disrupts writer Charlotte Rampling's dreams of a peaceful holiday.

Decay

In Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También (2001), bored teenager Gael García Bernal is seen wanking into a pool with his friend, played by Diego Luna. When the randy duo embark on a road trip with Maribel Verdú, they stop at a dilapidated, out-of-season motel, where the pool is cloaked in fallen leaves. Christina Ricci meets boyfriend Elijah Wood in an equally leaf-strewn scene in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997), but this time the pool is empty, and they are in their winter coats.

The passing of a way of life, and a country, is marked in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's A Screaming Man (2010) as a proud lifeguard must give way to his son, and then must try and rescue his offspring when the civil war reaches them. Youssouf 'Champion' Djaoro's cross-country journey is leant a surreal air by the swimming goggles he sports to keep the sand from his eyes.

Death

This journey is marked nowhere better than the 1968 film adaptation of John Cheever's beautiful short story The Swimmer, starring Burt Lancaster, later reworked as a Levi's jeans ad (set to Dinah Washington's Mad About the Boy). In it character Ned Merrill decides to swim across an endless stream of home pools - as he does so, the season changes from summer to autumn, accompanied by his fortunes.

And then there's Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), which opens on scriptwriter William Holden's body floating in a pool, two shots in the back and one in the stomach, we're told. 'The poor dope, he always wanted a pool.'

In the swim - pools in movies, part two

2011-11-29T06:13:00.005Z

Terror

The sense of danger increases in The Page Turner (2009), which stars Déborah François as a vengeful young woman who infiltrates a happy family. The fear is multiplied for Jacques Tourneur's classic 1942 chiller Cat People as Simone Simon stalks terrified Jane Randolph in a pool (pictured).

Jonathan Glazer satirises the classic poolside beauty with Sexy Beast's (2000) opening sequence of a sweaty, overweight Ray Winstone - in Speedos - but menace lurks beneath this Costa pool (there's a swimming pool-set robbery thrown in for good measure, too). For downright horror, however, look no further than 2008's Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson's remarkable take on John Ajvide Lindqvist's script from his own novel.

Lust

Any number of stars have risen seductively from pools - from Esther Williams (Bathing Beauty, 1944), through Phoebe Cates in 1980s teen fantasy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) to Gael García Bernal in Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education (2004).

Then there are Denise Richards and Neve Campbell's lesbian antics in Wild Things (1998), intended to seduce police detective Kevin Bacon. This can be placed alongside the frolics of Just Jaeckin's classic soft-porn film, Emmanuelle (1974), which throws in an underwater show.

Part three - murder, death and decay - is here

In the swim - pools in movies, part one

2011-11-28T06:26:00.023Z

'Where's the swimming pool? You must have a swimming pool.'

So says Veronica Lake to Joel McCrea in Preston Sturges' Hollywood satire, Sullivan's Travels (1941), inspiration for the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? Swimming pools appear in a variety of movies: private pools denote glamour, if not decadence - witness Billy Crudup perched on a rooftop above a pool in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous (2000). 'I am a golden god!' he shouts to his fans before they urge him to jump. 'My last words... I'm on drugs!'

It doesn't take much to reduce that ultimate status symbol, the hidden swimming pool, however - a flick of the switch pitching James Stewart and Donna Reed into the water in It's a WonderfulLife (1946), while Peter Sellers floods the festivities in foam at The Party (1968). In the 1980s, swimming pools were also life-giving - to aliens in Cocoon (1985) and to gremlins in, erm, Gremlins (1984).

To mark the release of Jacques Deray's La Piscine (pictured) today on DVD and Blu-ray, over the next three days I'm going to examine more themes familiar to swimming pool films, starting with seduction and humiliation - dive in!

Seduction

In George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story (1940), the swimming pool is the setting for Katharine Hepburn's night-time swim - in the musical version of Philip Barry's play, High Society (1956), Grace Kelly is the bathing beauty. The character, Tracy Lord, remembers the yacht she shared with her ex husband as 'yar' - an execrable word in both women's mouths.

Humiliation

For Juliette Binoche in Philip Kaufman's Kundera adaptation, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), public baths are a place of humiliation - much as they are for the young teenage heroine in French director Céline Sciamma's 2007 feature debut, Water Lilies, an unforgettable portrayal of the tensions within a team of pubescent swimmers.

In the same way Binoche rarely seems to escape Paris's Métro, so she is often shown in swimming pools; it's a place of isolation for her widowed character in Three Colours: Blue (1993), set to Zbigniew Preisner's magnificent score. Michael Haneke, however, makes it a setting for, by turns, menace and threat in Code Unknown (pictured, 2000) and Hidden (2005)...

Part two, featuring lust and terror, follows here

Outdoor art 2012

2011-11-23T06:29:00.005Z

Theatre and music names garnered the headlines at the recent launch of the London 2012 Festival, which will loosely coincide with next year's Olympic and Paralympic Games. The Games will be rung in with a new piece from Martin Creed, Work No.1197: All the Bells in a Country Rung as Quickly and as Loudly as Possible for Three Minutes.

Participatory art makes up a large part of the programme and some outdoor events across the UK have already caught my imagination, starting with Forest Pitch. Craig Coulthard intends to create a full-size football pitch in the middle of a Scottish forest - goalposts and shelters will be made from the cleared trees. Two matches will then be played on the site (the artist slightly overeggs his project by choosing his teams from amateurs who have taken on British citizenship), before the spot is left to return to nature, rather like the scenes in my favourite Asterix book, The Mansions of the Gods.

Another artist interacting with nature and the elements is German Hans Peter Kuhn, who intends to pitch a series of Flags - red on one side, yellow the other - along the Giant's Causeway coastline in Northern Ireland. According to the pitch: 'Depending on the strength and direction of the wind the viewer will see a flickering pattern of red and yellow against the backdrop of this spectacular landscape, generating a strange form of binary code transmitting nature's message.'

More genteel is The English Flower Garden, 'a series of six installations with a total of 15,000 individually hand-thrown ceramic blooms mounted on metal rods'. I'm increasingly interested in ceramics and can't wait for Paul Cumming's beautiful-sounding event, part of which blossoms at London's South Bank early September 2012.

If you want to catch a preview of what's to come, check out Alex Hartley's show, which opened last night at Victoria Miro (where he will live in an outdoor installation, pictured, for the duration). Next summer, the artist will float his Arctic island nation around south-west England but, until 21 January at the gallery, you can visit his adapted photographs, many of which feature architectural additions reminiscent of James Bond baddies' lairs.

Mysterious killings

2011-11-21T05:49:00.004Z

In the last week, Germany has been gripped by the revelation that a group of neo-Nazis responsible for killing at least 10 people, a string of bank robberies and two nail-bomb attacks was able to act with apparent impunity for 13 years. Among the most striking details to emerge is that a member of the country's own intelligence service was present when two members of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) shot dead a 21-year-old Turkish man in an internet café.

The story has uncomfortable echoes of a mysterious series of fatal crimes committed in Belgium in the early 1980s. Between 1982 and 1985, 28 people were killed in at least 16 armed robberies on supermarkets, restaurants and, in one case, a jeweller's; the perpetrators rarely stole all the money available to them and only in an attack on an arms dealer seem to have focused on the outcome of their acts. No one has ever been convicted of the crimes.

Any number of theories exist to explain this bizarre outbreak of violence, including Mafia gun-running and neo-Nazi terror cells. Many argue that the gang - variously named the Nijvel or Brabant killers, after the area in which most of the offences took place - intended to destabilise the Belgian government, while others have suggested they were a 'stay behind' Gladio-style operation intended to act against the rise of communism in western Europe. Given Belgium's notorious recent history of underage-sex crime, still others link the killings to paedophile gangs.

As with the NSU in Germany, the fact that nobody has been tried for the offences has lead many to speculate on high-ranking government, military or police connivance. The Nijvel gang's final act was also their most violent: on 9 November 1985 they killed eight people and injured several others in a raid on a supermarket. They were never heard of again.

Haruki Murakami and 1Q84, part three - 'detective spelunking'

2011-11-16T06:01:00.030Z

Haruki Murakami's new book features a character, Tengo, who wants to be a writer and reviewers have naturally picked up on this aspect of 1Q84. Some of the novel's thoughts on writing, editing and publishing replicate the author's views on translation, expressed in a piece by Murakami called 'To Translate and to be Translated' (2006) collected in a book to commemorate a symposium held by the Japan Foundation five years ago.

The three-part celebration - in Tokyo, Kobe and Hokkaido - was primarily aimed at international translators of Murakami's work and called A Wild Haruki Chase: How the World is Reading and Translating Murakami. Kobe, of course, is where the Japanese author grew up, while Hokkaido is one of the settings in the first of his books to appear in Britain, A Wild Sheep Chase (1990).

'If a translation can be read smoothly and effortlessly, and thus enjoyably,' Murakami writes, 'then it does its job as a translation perfectly well - that is my basic stance as the original author. For that is what the stories that I conjure and lay out are really about.'

Elsewhere, one of the leading lights behind the symposium, Professor Inuhiko Yomota, claims: 'The international "Haruki boom" gained momentum in the 1990s, around the same time as anime (Japanese animation) and Japanese-made computer games pushed into global markets. Unlike the works of his Japanese predecessors, such as Jun'ichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata, Murakami's works are not being translated and consumed overseas as those of an author who represents Japanese culture.'

Though Murakami may not represent Japanese culture I disagree with Yomota's idea that international readers do not think of the author and his work as Japanese. The chief protagonist of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Toru Okada, may cook spaghetti and listen to Rossini, for instance, but his outlook and experiences are distinctly 'other'. While readers' 'political disillusionment, romantic impulses, loneliness and emptiness' may be assuaged by Murakami's texts, as Yomota has it, it is the books' alien setting that allows many non-Japanese readers to accept their unusual goings-on. To contradict Yomota's thesis, we 'fully realise that the author was born in Japan and that the books are actually translations.'

More compelling is the writer Richard Powers on how Murakami's work anticipated developments in neuroscience in the 1990s, specifically Italian researcher Giacomo Rizzolatti's discovery of mirror neurons. Working with monkeys in the lab, his team unexpectedly found that a macaque signalled from a part of its prefrontal cortex not only when moving its own arm but in reaction to the experimenters' movements. 'Now, in the looping, shared circuitry of mirror neurons, science has hit upon an even richer description of our communal, subterranean truths,' says Powers, 'the truths that Murakami's mirrorscape of symbols brings into existence with him.'

Kafka on the Shore (2005) and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991, pictured top) are just two examples of novels containing such parallel narrative worlds. According to Powers: 'Murakami's characters, set loose between these intersecting worlds, are forced to embark on detective spelunking. They venture downwards into walled enclaves, climb into deep wells, or drop below the surface of seismically shaken cities, searching for the rules that connect the banal and the fantastic, the material and the mental.'

The formula is repeated in 1Q84 where an unrequited couple - Tengo and old schoolmate Aomame - find themselves in a parallel 1984. Much of the narrative is naturalistic: perhaps back in 1984 the same two characters are moving between the same points in their lives (rewriting a book, hiding out in an apartment, visiting a dying parent) without being aware of the supernatural elements that link these events in the world of 1Q84, with its two moons. Politically disillusioned, lonely, romantic and empty we may be but somewhere, Murakami insists, something magical and mysterious is happening if only in our minds.

The book's 1984/1Q84 nonetheless feels close to our own time; despite lacking mobile phones and the internet, Murakami is not interested in piling on the period detail so loved by others. And what does his hero, Tengo, eat this time out? Grilled dried mackerel with daikon radish, a miso soup with littlenecks and green onions to have with tofu, cucumber slices and wakame seaweed doused with vinegar, plus rice and nappa pickles; elsewhere he makes stir-fried shrimp and vegetables with boiled edamame in a procedure Murakami itemises like a recipe - you could follow this and make it at home.

'Tengo chopped a lot of ginger to a fine consistency. Then he sliced some celery and mushrooms into nice-sized pieces. The Chinese parsley, too, he chopped up finely... Next he warmed a large frying pan and dribbled in some sesame oil... When the vegetables were just beginning to cook, he tossed the drained shrimp into the pan... After adding another dose of salt and pepper to the whole thing, he poured in a small glass of sake. Then a dash of soy sauce and finally a scattering of Chinese parsley.'

Haruki Murakami and 1Q84, part two - cuts

2011-11-15T06:23:00.014Z

I'm rather jealous of the stylish US edition of Haruki Murakami's new work, 1Q84, not least because all three Japanese books are published in one, 900-page volume. In order to speed the novel's release in English, Murakami's regular translators Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel split the work between them. Rubin took on the first two books while Gabriel tackled the last, although some particularly pernickety reviewers have complained about variances of tone between the sections.

Timing is important to Murakami: in his critical biography, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (2002), Rubin explains how Murakami asked him to begin translating book one of what is probably the Japanese author's chef d'oeuvre, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, while it was being serialised. 'Of course, as a scholar, it would have made sense for me to have waited to see how the book turned out...' Rubin concedes.

Like 1Q84, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was originally published in Japan in three parts: the first two books were released simultaneously in April 1994 with book three following almost a year later in August 1995, a time lag roughly replicated by the third part of Murakami's latest. Where the books differ is that a decision was made to edit Wind-Up Bird - that task was given to the book's translator, Rubin.

'The cuts occur primarily at the end of book two and the beginning of book three,' Rubin writes. But his work went beyond that: 'I did a lot of rearranging at the beginning of book three because I found several chronological inconsistencies which were not deliberately placed there by the author... To further complicate the textual picture, Murakami contributed many minor cuts that have since been incorporated into the Japanese paperback edition of the novel (mostly in book one).'

According to Rubin: 'There are many versions of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: the serialised version of book one; the published hardback editions of books one, two and three; my unpublished complete translation of that edition (with likely inconsistencies since I may have missed something in revising the version based on the serialised chapters); the American version; the British version from Harvill; and finally the paperback (bunkoben) version in Japanese, which incorporates some - but not all - of the cuts recommended for the American translation and possibly others decided upon afterwards.'

The decision to abridge the work in the first place was justified by Murakami's US editor, Gary Fisketjon, on publisher Knopf's website in 1997: 'My reaction was that it couldn't be published successfully at such length, which indeed would do harm to Haruki's cause in this country.' In nearly 15 years, things have moved on enough for 1Q84 to be published unexpurgated but it seems unlikely we will see a special edition of Rubin's complete version.

In his introduction to collection A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World (2008) - more of which in my next post - the translator writes: 'I have occasionally suggested to Knopf that the time might be ripe for an uncut edition, but they have shown no interest in the idea.' I wonder, too, if we'll see Portrait in Jazz, which Murakami's Russian translator Ivan Sergeevich Logatchov describes as a 'masterpiece' and sounds like it might be a counterpiece to Geoff Dyer's brilliant jazz book But Beautiful (1991).

Crafty!

2011-11-14T06:18:00.005Z

London's V&A celebrates craftsmanship in an exhibition that runs until 2 January 2012. Power of Making is great fun and includes a cake in the shape of a baby, a shark sculpture made from recycled tyres and a 'crochetdermy' bear.

Produced with the Crafts Council, the show highlights the skills of gunsmiths or the beauty of ceramics, often creating contrasts by updating traditional vocations. For example, when the market for ecclesiastical wear began to dry up, Poland's Koniakow Cooperative turned its talents instead to making lingerie, including the handmade lace G-string on display (pictured).

There's a strand where these developments achieve the absurd: take Dave Bradbury's Bill Bailey book, which is carved from stone. Australian artist Patricia Piccinini imagines safety wear for genetically engineered creatures - her double-headed 'hornet' crash helmet could be a wholly impractical device for an adult and child to cram into together, for instance.

Jeremy Hutchison took this approach to everyday objects to its extreme in the recent Saatchi New Sensations exhibition. The artist contacted factories around the world and asked them to provide him with an example of their work that was altered in such a way as to make it unusable. (It's important to state he was not after a product rejected because it was faulty.)

As part of the project, he presents the pieces with the correspondence built up over the process (pictured), which shows many factories were understandably puzzled by his intentions - endearingly, some were unwilling to compromise their hard-won reputations by making something that didn't work. (An example of this approach in the news around the same time as the show is the story of the man who ordered two differently sized slippers but, when they arrived, one was a size 1,450 rather than 14.5, though this may have been a PR stunt.) Other responses reference the joy people experienced at giving their creative input while being relieved of routine constraints.

One of my favourite pieces is a pair of sunglasses with multiple bridges, making it unwearable; elsewhere pencils lack lead or a hat is sealed so it cannot be worn. The results are suitably surrealistic - there is a solid pipe, after Magritte, which cannot be smoked. The master of the found object is referenced, too: Duchamp's snow shovel became art by being displayed in a gallery but could still function in the manner for which it was designed; Hutchison, or his craftsmen, render it unusable by inverting the shovel on the handle.

Related: the art of Mark I'Anson

Hidden London: The Poppy Factory

2011-11-10T05:50:00.006Z

Amid the continuing hooha over wearing poppies you might be surprised to learn that the British Legion's annual symbol of remembrance is made in London. The Poppy Factory (pictured below) on the Thames in Richmond makes up to 45 million poppies every year and 100,000 wreaths, as well as organising the Field of Remembrance at Westminster Abbey.

Poppies were first sold to raise money to help support ex-servicemen and women in the early 1920s and the Richmond site was established in 1925. The factory employs more than 40 disabled staff with links to the services, as well as supporting others who work from home or in other companies.

They run daily tours where you can see the work and memorabilia associated with the factory, including a 1922 letter from Major George Howson in which he describes his feelings about the project. 'I have been given a cheque for £2,000 to make poppies with. It is a large responsibility and will be very difficult... I consider the attempt ought to be made if only to give the disabled their chance.'

The first Oyster card

2011-11-09T06:28:00.008Z

Renovation work at Richmond station has revealed a handful of posters dating from the mid-1980s (see date top right, above), including one explaining how to use train-door buttons (bottom).

One-track mind

2011-11-08T06:17:00.001Z

'I dreamt I married Micke Larsson. He plays guitar and sings in Black Devils. It was so nice.'

The highlight of Swedish director Roy Andersson's 2007 film You, the Living must be a dream sequence, in which lonely fan Anna dreams of marrying Micke. The musician - played by Eric Bäckmann, who was found through a famous Stockholm music store - serenades her as their marital home moves off through the countryside, before pulling into a station (pictured). In the film's only cut, the camera joins a crowd wishing the couple well. According to Andersson it is a happy scene, full of the generosity missing from modern life.

'This was an old idea I'd had for many, many years,' he reminisces in the DVD extras. 'Originally the idea was to have a house move on a motorway, rolling from Skåne to Stockholm, on logs. My inspiration was from childhood when they built Skarvik, the refinery, in Gothenburg.

'They wanted the best harbour, and this was found in Skarvik, but there were a hundred houses there. It was so important they had this place they moved the houses, on logs. I saw this as a child and found it fascinating that they were so well-built they could move a couple of miles. I like doing scenes like this, that are complicated but turn out so well... It's a great feeling seeing this train move out.'

It reminds me of one of my favourite sequences in all cinema, when 'young buck' Moraldo finally decides to leave his spoilt, spineless friends in I Vitelloni (1953, pictured). Fellini narrated his partly autobiographical film, saying: 'I've always talked of leaving but only one of us, one morning, without saying a word to anyone, really did leave.'

At an empty station, reminiscent of that in Cinema Paradiso, Moraldo is asked by a boy, Guido, where is he going and what will he do? 'I have to leave, get away,' he replies. The response - 'Don't you like it here?' - goes unanswered. As the train pulls away, the camera passes through the bedrooms - the sleeping lives - of the group he's left behind.

I've written elsewhere about great train films, and recently Nile Rodgers posted about train songs on his wonderful blog. There are any number, of course, but I would like to add a couple of tracks (sorry!) by The Divine Comedy to his list. On the band's most recent album, Bang Goes the Knighthood, Neil Hannon returned to a theme he explored on album Liberation (1993), in Europe by Train (echoing Rodgers' fascination with Kraftwerk's Trans Europe Express). The form of building, looped samples is the same on new song Beside the Railway Tracks, the effect 17 years on even more poignant.

Sofie Gråbøl and the fear of being found out

2011-11-07T06:23:00.002Z

I had some great feedback for my post in which The Killing star Sofie Gråbøl speaks about her admiration for the series' writer, Søren Sveistrup, so here are her thoughts about acting. She fell into acting while working in a Copenhagen hotel aged 17 and feels, for a time, it was something she pursued despite never having made a conscious decision to become an actor. She obviously did well but it was only when she freed herself from other people's expectations that she could call herself an actor...

'It wasn’t something I had felt or wished for and then tried to achieve, I just hopped on a train that passed me. Everyone said to me you should go to theatre school, you should be an actor shouldn’t you, and then suddenly I started feeling this pressure somehow. I lost myself in that and I got this great fear of applying for theatre school because what if I didn’t get in, then it was all bluff.

'I think a lot of artists have this feeling of bluffing - [that] somebody is going to come and reveal us and say, you’re not allowed to be here, you’re not good enough. Finally I applied for the school and I didn’t get in, and it was somehow a big relief. It was like people's expectations -what I had dreaded the most - happened, and I felt so relieved I was able to feel my own needs and wishes, and I really wanted to be an actor. I just worked, I started doing theatre as well.'

After a considerable wait, The Killing II begins on BBC4 Saturday 19 November.

Haruki Murakami and 1Q84, part one - entering a parallel world

2011-11-02T06:37:00.009Z

Haruki Murakami's new novel, 1Q84, has its problems but it's such a pleasure to enter his fictional universe and distract yourself, especially when commuting. A couple of things seem pertinent from when I interviewed the hugely popular Japanese author several years ago, prior to the publication of another of his big books, Kafka on the Shore (2005).

'I'm interested in ordinary people,' Murakami told me of his main protagonist, Kafka Tamura. 'I guess the people he's going to meet aren't ordinary in most cases, they're kind of weird, unrealistic characters. He himself is kind of ordinary and that is very important to me because I sympathise with those kind of people, I like to see the world through the eyes of ordinary people.

'The protagonists in my stories are basically alone but kind of positive. He's not pessimistic or negative, he's positive to life or to the world, and he's looking for the clue to solve the problem and for somebody he can communicate with. His attitude is important to me and I suppose readers will feel the same way - positiveness.'

After the massive success of Norwegian Wood ('It was war'), which has since been turned into a film, Murakami wanted to settle for more modest expectations, though the global furore over 1Q84 may have unsettled his ambition. 'I publish a novel every three years or so and my readers are waiting. That is good. They are very loyal to me, or addicted, so they are waiting for the publication of my next one. It's a very idealistic cycle: I write a book and they are waiting.' Here's to the next one!

Deserted villages

2011-11-01T06:25:00.008Z

On one of the hottest days Turkey had experienced in 60 years, I visited one of the country's literally deserted places. Kaya Köyü is reached via the Mediterranean resort town of Fethiye and is described in my Rough Guide book as 'the largest late-medieval ghost town in Asia Minor'.

In 1923, following three years of war, Kaya Köyü's Greek Christian residents were exiled and the village has been uninhabited ever since. The Muslims who were supposed to replace them apparently found the land far inferior to what they were used to and refused to move in.

The roofs of the village's 400 homes have long caved in, exposing the interiors to the elements. Kaya Köyü's three churches are in a similar state: the Panayia Pyrgiotissa basilica dates from 1888 and is notable for its mosaic floor, as well as a charnel house full of human bones (the departing Greeks are said to have taken the skulls with them).

While other villages have been turned into holiday homes and short-let accommodation - this is a particularly beautiful part of the coast, boasting one of the world's most stunning beaches nearby - Kaya Köyü has been left untouched. There was hardly anyone else in sight and, with the sun beating down, it made a particularly desolate scene.

In France, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane has been left as a monument ever since 10 June 1944 when the SS killed more than 640 residents and refugees either as a form of reprisal or warning. The men were separated into five groups and killed with machine-gun fire, while women and children were corralled in the church, which was set ablaze.

In 1994, Geoff Dyer visited the site for an article in Esquire, collected in Anglo-English Attitudes (1999). 'The sign at the gate admonishes SOUVIENS-TOI: REMEMBER. Beyond the gate you see the ruined walls of a few houses,' he writes. 'Propped against one of these, a large sign admonishes SILENCE... One kind of time stopped here on an afternoon in 1944 but a different, slower kind - that sculpts hills and silts rivers - has taken over.'

You can create deserted villages, too, as Anselm Kiefer did in Barjac, southern France, where, for more than 15 years, he established a studio and outdoor exhibition space for his work, a sort of city of art. Director Sophie Fiennes captured the climax of his project, before the German artist struck camp and moved to Paris. The title of her 2010 film came from the Book of Isaiah, echoing Dyer: Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow.

George Sanders: a proposal for a film season

2011-10-27T06:06:00.006+01:00

April 2012 is the 40th anniversary of the death of George Sanders. The actor featured in more than 100 movies and would make the ideal subject of a commemorative season, I think.

He's famous for his caddish attitude and acerbic tongue - he won a best supporting actor Oscar for his role as theatre critic Addison DeWitt opposite Bette Davis in All About Eve (1950). He had further supporting roles in Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent and Rebecca (both 1940), and joined Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney for The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947).

Sanders starred in Douglas Sirk's A Scandal in Paris (1946); Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), with Edward G Robinson; a 1945 adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, as well as a couple of other favourites to which I hope to return. He took the Gauguin-inspired lead in The Moon and Sixpence (1942), from the novel by Somerset Maugham, and featured in a few films directed by Fritz Lang: Man Hunt (1941), Moonfleet (1955) and While the City Sleeps (1956).

Any tribute would have something for children: in an age when actors were cast in cartoons for their characterful voices, his insouciant drawl is inextricably linked with the tiger Shere Khan in Disney's musical version of The Jungle Book (1967). He also played Simon Templar in a couple of films in 1939 based on Leslie Charteris's character, the Saint, as well as three films as the Falcon (he was replaced in the role by his brother, Tom Conway).

Born in St Petersburg in 1906, Sanders was dismissive of the acting world and as caddish in real life as in many of his roles - he was married four times, including to Zsa Zsa Gabor and one of her sisters, Magda. He married the woman who was apparently the love of his life, actress Benita Hume, soon after the death of her first husband, Ronald Colman.

Sanders is famously said to have told David Niven that he intended to kill himself, supposedly at the age of 65. Sure enough, in 1972, he checked into a hotel near Barcelona and took an overdose of sleeping pills. He left behind a note: 'Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.'

Related: Anton Walbrook's grave

Tintin on the deathbed

2011-10-24T06:09:00.008+01:00

BELGIUM MONTH FINALE

It’s stupid. I was at the launch of the National Maritime Museum’s Tintin at Sea exhibition when there he was, in front of me: Tintin. Of course, it was a man dressed as the redoubtable boy reporter, suitably bequiffed in regulation plus-fours, clutching a fluffy toy Snowy dog under his arm. And I was nervous, as in the presence of one of my heroes. For a moment I cursed myself that I hadn’t thought to bring a book for him to sign. Which makes no sense on any level - this was a man dressed as a cartoon character.

Even though I have some trepidation about Steven Spielberg's adaptation, The Adventures of Tintin - particularly in terms of the 'dead eyes' - I feel a similar excitement about the film (pictured). The last week has seen a glut of online reviews, many of which reference the author Hergé's respect for Spielberg - as did an interview I did for October's Gulf Life magazine with expert Raphaël Taylor.

Spielberg first proposed to film Tintin in 1982, when the director was riding high on the success of Jaws and E.T. Hergé was keen for the project to move ahead but when, at the last moment, a clause was inserted in the deal whereby someone other than Spielberg could direct the movie, Hergé demurred. Nevertheless, Spielberg continued to renew an option on the material for the next two decades.

According to Pierre Assouline's biography of the writer (out now in paperback from OUP), Hergé was preoccupied with the matter on his deathbed: 'He said that he had been ready to give [Spielberg] the freedom to create even if he what created was no longer recognisably Tintin. He considered Spielberg a genius.'

Previews of The Adventures of Tintin begin today.

Autumn's done come

2011-10-20T06:26:00.002+01:00

'Autumn had arrived, that lovely cool time of year when everything changes colour and dies.' It would be an opening line to rival Camus' 'Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.' But Knut Hamsun is so good he can save it for the second page of his groundbreaking debut novel, Hunger.

The ramblings of a starving Norwegian writer, Hunger was written in 1890. Canongate's latest print - part of the Scottish publisher's series, The Canons (pictured) - features an introduction by dreary Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø, with an afterword (from 1970) by Paul Auster.

According to Auster, who wrote of his own early struggles as a writer in a book called Hand to Mouth (like this translation, from 1996), Hamsun manages to accommodate the mess (pace Beckett) of the twentieth century in Hunger. 'But it is in Kafka's story, A Hunger Artist, that the aesthetics of hunger receives its most meticulous elaboration... In Kafka's story, the hunger artist dies, but only because he forsakes his art, abandoning the restrictions that had been imposed on him by his manager. The hunger artist goes too far.'

Having written elsewhere in this blog about London on the page, Hunger's opening line marks this as a book about a city, too: 'It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him...' It is a point underlined by the novel's translator, Sverre Lyngstad, who takes issue with an earlier translation: 'Hunger is an urban novel, whose action takes place within a distinctive setting of streets, squares and residential areas familiar to Kristiania (now Oslo) residents.'

And, of course, it is about the changing season: 'At this moment my mind was lucid: I was going to die. It was autumn now and everything had gone to sleep. I had tried every way out, made the most of every resource I knew of. I indulged myself sentimentally with this thought, and every time I still cherished hopes of a possible rescue I whispered dismissively, "You fool. you've started to die already!"'

For whom Anthea Bell toils

2011-10-19T06:32:00.005+01:00

The Adventures of Tintin comes to the cinema next week, so I thought I'd write about the cartoon character people who don't like Tintin are said to prefer: Asterix. The series' co-creator, Albert Uderzo, announced last month he was retiring from the comic-book frame, 52 years after the plucky Gaulish hero's debut, alongside special chum Obelix, pet Dogmatix and chief Vitalstatistix.

Recently I had the chance to hear the books' English translator, Anthea Bell, talk as part of the Institut français' excellent, inaugural BD & Comics Passion festival. The translator of several works by Stefan Zweig and WG Sebald's Austerlitz, Bell was especially concerned with the problems of conveying the puns and cultural references that populate the Asterix books thanks to wordsmith René Goscinny, who died in 1977 - since when Uderzo worked alone.

Bell sees the books as a comic version of Odysseus - with its journey, quest and homecoming - and was keen to play up the historic accuracy of Uderzo's artwork, something Tintinologists tend to emphasise in the work of the boy reporter's creator, Hergé. One slip, however, was drawing the villagers' houses with chimneys, as they would have only had smoke holes.

There is controversy, too: in the same way Hergé is pilloried for his depiction (visually, dramatically and linguistically) of any number of non-European characters, the Asterix albums have a black pirate who speaks a sort of patois, something Bell would have no truck with in the English editions.

She pondered Asterix's lack of success in the USA. Accepting these were huge generalisations, Bell suggested that irony doesn't work on the other side of the Atlantic, and that Americans don't have enough history to be anachronistic about. The translator transposed the Gauls for William the Conquerer (our comedy equivalent being 1066 and All That), Byron for Victor Hugo, and Hamlet for Cyrano de Bergerac...

Bell claimed to have been accused of corrupting youth in her naming of the druid Getafix, though she justified this as druids 'get a fix' on the stars. Observing that people often say 'asterix' instead of asterisk, and the same for 'obelix' she said, 'I think I've done violence to to the English language.' As to the future of Asterix, following Uderzo's announcement: 'What is going to happen to the series now, one doesn't quite know.'

Tintin fans may be interested in a lecture, 'Tintin - Ace Reporter', by Michael Farr at the Wigmore Hall this Saturday afternoon, click here for details.

Three great Flemish writers

2011-10-17T06:43:00.006+01:00

BELGIUM MONTH

I tend to concentrate on French-language writer Georges Simenon (this blog is named after one of his books) so for this post I thought I'd look at three Belgian authors who write in Dutch. The titles mentioned are all available in English and dates are for original, Belgian publication.

Hugo Claus was a larger-than-life figure, a poet, playwright, novelist, director and artist. Known for his earthy language, he received a suspended sentence for offending public morals in the late 1960s, had a long relationship with Emmanuelle star Sylvia Kristel - who was 23 years younger than him - and opted for euthanasia in 2008 after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

His large, largely biographical work, The Sorrow of Belgium (1983), was canonised in Penguin's Twentieth-Century Classics series some 20 years ago (with a cover by another famous Belgian, James Ensor). Its tale of a family who collaborate through various activities in World War II is comparable to Louis Malle's film Lacombe, Lucien (1974), primarily in its viewpoint of a younger protagonist, and stirred similar controversy.

Nearly 10 years ago Granta made the perhaps foolhardy decision to publish a couple of books by Willem Ellschot, the pseudonym of Alfons de Ridder, who ran an advertising agency in his hometown Antwerp in the 1930s. His debut, Villa des Roses (1913), is the unremitting portrait of the inhabitants of a boarding house in Paris but Ellschot is celebrated for a tragi-comic masterpiece, Cheese (1933).

Cheese is one of a succession of books to feature Ellschot's 'little man' character Frans Laarmans, who finds himself lumbered with 20 tonnes of cheese much as the author is said to have been surrounded by unsold copies of Soft Soap (1923), the first of his novels to feature Laarmans. There were two more, including a final plea for tolerance in Will-o'-the-Wisp (1946), which couples Laarmans with a trio of Afghan sailors on the prowl for a prostitute named Maria in Antwerp.

Around the same time Harvill, that excellent publisher of translated fiction, put out a couple of contemporary works by journalist Erwin Mortier (the flyleaf adds intriguingly: 'He works in Ghent at the Museum of the History of Psychiatry'). The books - Marcel (1999) and My Fellow Skin (2000) - can't have been an easy task to convey in English as they're particularly impressionistic views of childhood but are highly recommended, especially the former.

The London Fiction Series

2011-10-12T06:24:00.003+01:00

Ten years ago, publisher Harvill launched the London Fiction Series of 'lost' classic novels set in the city. The first four books included Henry Green's Caught and Capital by Maureen Duffy but sales were disappointing and I don't think any other titles were added.

Each of the books featured a wonderful new introduction - I particularly recommend writer Iain Sinclair's excellent opener to The Lowlife (1963) by Alexander Baron, even if you are weary of Sinclair's Hackney shtick. (Baron's elderly widow was at the series launch, held in Brick Lane's then derelict Old Truman Brewery.) The book is great on the East End: 'Hackney isn't the East End - that's the mark of the outsider, when you hear someone call Hackney the East End. The East End starts two miles down the road, across the border of Bethnal Green.'

The lowlife is Baron's narrator, gambler Harryboy Boas, whose apparently guilt-free lifestyle hides a central secret. Harry is also notable for his literary tastes: early on, he treats himself to a set of the translated works of Emile Zola in Charing Cross Road ('This Zola is a terrific writer. He can be tougher than Mickey Spillane, and when he gets on to sex he's red hot').

At the library one afternoon, Harry goes 'in to look for some thrillers. I like these books, the way they scratch on the nerves as I lie in bed. Chandler and Hammett are my favourites. You don't get writing like theirs nowadays.' In the end: 'I picked up a couple of Simenons.' Good man.

The other Jewish writer in the series was Gerald Kersh, whose large family lived on Teddington High Street. The writer's profile states: 'At seven he wrote his first novel and published it privately bound in his father's brocade waistcoat.' His first novel proper, Jews without Jehovah (1934), was inspired by his family and had to be withdrawn on the day of publication when he was sued by four uncles and a cousin.

In the introduction to the London Fiction Series' 2001 reprint of Fowlers End (originally 1957), Michael Moorcock writes: 'Twickenham was never the hottest crucible of the city. But Kersh did what all suburban young men of spirit and lust did. He got the bus into Soho.' Moorcock continues: 'As a later Fleet Street prodigy drinking in Soho, I staggered in and out of the same pubs and clubs and... discovered the pleasures of Old Compton Street, Dean Street and Meard Street.' He concludes: 'Nobody has told more or better Soho tales or described the place and its people so well.'

Kersh was hugely prolific as a journalist and novelist - he's best known for Night and the City (1938), which was filmed with Richard Widmark (pictured). Lately there has been something of a market for London-based novels, old and new. (Peter Watts writes about Baron's reissued 1969 novel King Dido here and here.) Some 30 years after the deaths of Kersh and Green, the writers in the London Fiction Series managed to be ahead of the times.

Six degrees of current Belgian cinema

2011-10-10T06:28:00.003+01:00

BELGIUM MONTH

Benoît Poelvoorde, star of last year's Nothing to Declare (pictured left, with Dany Boon) and Romantics Anonymous, featured alongside another Belgian actor, Yolande Moreau (Séraphine, 2008), in Mammuth (also 2010) and Louise-Michel (2008). He emerged as the serial-killer lead and co-director of 1992's Man Bites Dog;

Another of Man Bites Dog's directors was Rémy Belvaux, brother of the extraordinarily talented Lucas, writer-director of Trilogy: One, Two and Three (2002) and Rapt (2009), who played sidekick Danglard in a 2007 adaptation of Fred Vargas's Have Mercy on Us All;

All three were born in Namur, as was Cécile De France who is currently one of the biggest stars of French cinema, having appeared in the two Mesrine films (2008), Orchestra Seats (2006), Clint Eastwood's Hereafter (2010), with Matt Damon, and The Kid with a Bike (2011), which receives a Gala screening as part of the London Film Festival on 21 October;

The Kid with a Bike is directed by brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who gave screen debuts to Emilie Dequenne (in Rosetta, 1999), Jérémie Renier (La Promesse, 1996) and Déborah François (The Child, 2005), and feature Olivier Gourmet in all their major films, including The Son (2002);

Gourmet's first film role was a bit part in The Eighth Day (1996), the second film of Jaco Van Dormael, who has included Belgian actor Pascal Duquenne in all three of his feature films, the other two being Mr Nobody (2009) and Toto the Hero (1991);

Gourmet also featured in the Mesrine films (with Cécile De France) and French hit Nothing to Declare, with Benoît Poelvoorde...

Hidden London: gone for a Burton

2011-10-05T06:13:00.003+01:00

This mausoleum designed to look like an Arab tent (pictured above) at St Mary Magdalene, Mortlake, is the burial place of traveller and linguist Sir Richard Burton (1821-90) and his wife Isabel. Sir Richard translated the One Thousand and One Nights into English, and commissioned translations of the Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden; on his death, Isabel burned other documents she deemed unfit for publication, presumably because they were a bit rude.

She commissioned this final resting place, and a stained-glass window in his memory in the church. Another stained-glass window at the back of the mausoleum has been destroyed by vandals - a ladder now leads to a glass window in the carefully restored tomb's roof. The picture below shows Isabel's mahogany coffin on the left (she died in 1895), while Sir Richard's steel coffin is just visible to the right.

Fans of 19th-century Orientalism may also be interested in the Kilmorey Mausoleum, which is hidden behind a wall on St Margaret's Road, Isleworth. The monument was built by Francis Jack Needham, Second Earl of Kilmorey, for his mistress Priscilla, who was around 36 years his junior and had become his ward at the age of five. When she died in 1854, Lord Kilmorey had architect Henry Kendall create an Egyptian-style memorial, which was originally built in Brompton Cemetary.

The tomb, which was moved twice and also contains Kilmorey's remains (though not those of his two wives), was carved from pink Scottish granite to resemble Egyptian stone from Aswan. There is a theory that Kilmorey hoped to be able to communicate with Priscilla after her death; the Earl is said to have dressed in white and had his servants push him in his coffin through an underground tunnel to the tomb 'for practice', according to Egyptologist Dr Jasmine Day. The tunnel was rediscovered in 1966 .

By the by, if you go to St Mary Magdalene, do visit the very welcoming St Mary the Virgin nearby. This lovely church may hold the final resting place of Elizabethan necromancer Dr John Dee, who lived for some 30 years in Mortlake.

Simenon through the eyes of others

2011-10-04T06:04:00.015+01:00

BELGIUM MONTH

I've written before about film adaptations of Georges Simenon's books, the Belgian author's photographs and the Paris of his most famous character, Maigret. Simenon's oeuvre was hugely admired by André Gide and François Mauriac among others, and for this post I thought I'd round up the thoughts of some other writers from different generations and backgrounds on his prolific talent.

Julian Barnes's essay on Simenon, The Pouncer, included in the British novelist's Francophile collection Something to Declare, starts predictably enough, with a numerical rundown: 'The 400-plus books he wrote; the 55 cinema and 279 television films made from them; the 500 million copies sold in 55 languages...' - intriguing Barnes contemplates the adaptations ahead of sales and the translations - and, of course, Simenon's 'famous estimate of having bedded 10,000 women.'

This is a critique of Patrick Marnham's biography of Simenon for the Literary Review and only in passing do we get a sense of what Barnes admires in the subject: 'One of the distinctions of the fiction, especially of the romans durs, is to show sympathetic understanding for driven, obsessed, morally affectless characters who inflict and sustain often terrible damage. The refusal to moralize makes them less distant, less safely other.'

For sheer enthusiasm, we turn to Simenon's contemporary, Anais Nin, who writes in the summer of 1955: 'I study the style of Simenon because he is a master in the physical world... Simenon has always selected the characters who submitted to destiny, a destiny formed by their character...' She is great at summing up his work in The Journals of Anais Nin, Volume Five 1947-1955: 'The tone is always fatalistic, joyless, and the characters are victims of their own suicidal destructiveness. He has described all possible variations on destruction and self-destruction.'

In the winter of 1948, Nin writes: 'Simenon. The pattern is the same in every book. It is the fall of man. Simenon is aware that this fall is caused by the fatality of an impulse of self-destruction more often than by external fatality.'

If this all sounds depressing, a few months later she states: 'He is my favourite storyteller. He has a good story to tell, and he works subtly at charaterisation. His characters are beautifully wrought, his details significant... People do not appreciate his novels as they should because he made his reputation writing detective novels.'

Writer John Raymond tackles this last point in his critical biography from 1968, Simenon in Court: 'If [the study] helps to serve public notice of an achievement far greater than Simenon's average readers have realised or perhaps supposed even, it will have achieved its purpose...' Its clunky title notwithstanding, the book falters on Raymond's judgement of the works. (I'm thinking particularly of his contradictory dismissal of Inquest on Bouvet, towards which I've always been partial.)

Raymond is at his most poetic on the criminal protagonist of 1941's Justice (Cours d'Assises), Petit-Louis: 'Of all Simenon's unfortunates, he is perhaps the most human because he is the weakest and most alone.' I'll leave the final tribute to Nin, however: 'He is perhaps our best psychologist in the novel.'

Georges Simenon is the subject of the inaugural exhibition at Brussels' new Museum of Letters and Manuscripts, until 24 February 2012.

Men, women, war - and books

2011-10-03T06:17:00.010+01:00

Two very different books from the middle of the last century with similar concerns. German author Hans Fallada's Little Man, What Now? (1932) presages the rise of the Nazis in much the same way as Michael Haneke's film The White Ribbon (2009) posthumously chronicled their coming: indirectly. Fallada's grimly comic tale of an impoverished, none-too-bright everyman was made into a popular film in 1934, which in part sealed the author's fate with the incoming fascists.

Cinema plays a central role in Fallada's book, too, when the little man Pinneberg and his wife, Lämmchen, go out to enjoy a movie, which is described in some detail. The main actor, so sympathetic on screen, brings about Pinneberg's downfall. As the character struggles to cope with unemployment, the one-time communist Fallada finds hope in his heroine, much as he did in his own wife: 'Lämmchen is my answer, I know no better one.'

Just over a decade later, Alexander Baron pitches the British soldiers of There's No Home (1950; cover detail, pictured) into a form of leave in Catania, Sicily, following the island's bloody invasion. The men retreat into domesticity around the street where they're billeted, many of them moving in with local (married) women. (This is the Via dei Martiri; in Baron's 1963 book The Lowlife, the central player finds pre-war domestic bliss in Paris on the Rue des Martyrs.)

Baron was inspired by his own experience in the Eighth Army as a scene, again in a cinema, attests: 'Once, in some back-street hall, I sat squeezed on a bench among an audience of women who were all weeping loudly. The cause of their grief was the film we were watching, Wuthering Heights. They rocked in sympathy with Cathy Earnshaw. From all parts of the hall they cried, "Ah, la poverina, la poverina!"' It plays pretty much identically in the book.

In his afterword, John L Williams examines the roles of the different sexes in the book: 'The men… feel the imperative of narrative, the need to move forwards. The women, on the other hand, want life to stand still. They have all lost men to the war: husbands and lovers, fathers, brothers and sons.'

Exclude, excise, erase: the paintings of Mark I'Anson

2011-10-02T09:29:00.002+01:00

I think Kensington's Thackeray Gallery is hosting a couple of paintings by Mark I'Anson for the next two weeks, between exhibitions. The Scottish artist is probably best known for the distinctive paintings of ships central to his 2006 exhibition Drifter, which was supported by the Scottish Fisheries Museum and the Highland Council.

In acrylic on pencil he concentrates on the boats, to the literal exclusion of all else. The harbourside in a painting of a ship in port is ignored to create a sharp excision through the hull (Drifter XVI); elsewhere, Drifter XV sits on the bottom of the frame. I'Anson doesn't paint the thrashing waves in a picture of a storm-tossed boat at sea (Drifter XVII), so it looks as if the ship has been torn out of page or a giant rubber has deleted all else: a violent erasure.

These are big paintings, too - some are 2m by 1m - so the images are as much about the fine detail as the enormous silent space that makes up the rest. For an exhibition at the Thackeray Gallery three years later, Dividing Lines, the artist included smaller portraits, using the same techniques. North Berwick's Greens and Blues has a nice little gallery of some recent work, including a beautiful portrait inspired by the character in a book (Wee heid).

I was reminded of I'Anson's work by the Vintage book cover to Vasily Grossman's seemingly ubiquitous Life and Fate (detail, pictured). The image is by Dmitri Baltermants and is strikingly similar to the Russian photographer's classic Attack (1941), though I can't work out if has been manipulated somehow or is another from the same sequence. Snow in another picture from the same year, Behind Enemy Lines, First Guards Cavalry Corps creates a similar effect as in I'Anson's paintings, as if the horsemen emerge from the print - unsettling and beautiful.

Last chance to see...

2011-09-29T19:48:00.006+01:00

Three highly recommended art exhibitions come to an end this weekend (or nearly) - do catch them if you can:

1. Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century, is at the Royal Academy until Sunday - I wrote about it here.

2. Also closing Sunday is Richard Dadd at Orleans House Gallery (pictured), Twickenham, a fascinating little show of the patricidal Victorian artist's work from the Bethlem Royal Hospital Collection.

3. Due to end 2 October but extended for one more week is another small exhibition: Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera at Chichester's Pallant House Gallery. It features a few of her most iconic self-portraits and some beautiful colour photographs of Kahlo by Hungarian Nickolas Muray.

Three literary sisters

2011-09-28T06:20:00.002+01:00

As an antidote to Carsten Jensen's very male We, the Drowned, I recently embarked on three books new to paperback by women authors. Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad won this year's Pulitzer Prize and is great fun, a series of interlinked tales equal to the best, early Douglas Coupland novels. It's extremely readable, though finally there's a suspicion Egan doesn't have much to say beneath the literary fireworks.

Siri Hustved never struggles for something to say, but the manner in which she does so may prove trying for readers of her dated feminist tract, The Summer without Men. On retreat to the country following a breakdown inspired by the break-up of her marriage, the book's narrator, Mia Fredricksen, teaches young women poetry and joins a book club with older women.

Fredricksen opines: 'Lots of women read fiction. Men don't. Women read fiction by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel, he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow.' (Elsewhere, there is reference to Hustved's husband, the 'prominent American novelist' Paul Auster.)

Like Fredricksen, the narrator of the first section of Great House, Nadia, is a poet, though she's found success as a novelist. And like Egan and Hustved, author Nicole Krauss plays with form and voices in her Orange-shortlisted novel. Following author Polly Courtney's branding dust-up with publishers HarperCollins, it's worth noting none of these books could be categorised as chick lit.

While Krauss's novel seems to be very determinedly pitched at the literary market by publisher Penguin, the same can't be said entirely for the other two - the paperback edition of The Summer without Men has one of the worst covers I've ever seen (I wish I had bought the original imprint). It gives the lie to Fredricksen's admission: 'You will notice that the written word hides the body of the one who writes. For all you know, I might be a MAN in disguise. Unlikely, you say, with all this feminist prattle flying out here and there and everywhere, but can you be sure?'

Premier league Belgium

2011-09-26T06:53:00.008+01:00

BELGIUM MONTH

It's a month to go until the release of The Adventures of Tintin, Steven Spielberg's adaptation of three books by Belgian author Hergé. I'll post on Tintin soon but I thought I'd celebrate the film hitting cinemas with weekly posts on Belgium, starting with football.

The national side boasts a number of players we see week in, week out in England, many of them in the Premiership: goalkeeper Simon Mignolet (Sunderland), defenders Vincent Kompany (Man City) and Thomas Vermaelen (Arsenal), midfielder Marrouane Fellaini (Everton), Moussa Dembélé (Fulham), and Chelsea's 18-year-old striker Romelu Lukaku. Other internationals include Bolton's Dedryck Boyata (Bolton) and Ritchie de Laet, on loan from Man United to Norwich, while Eden Hazard and Kevin de Bruyne are regularly linked to Premier League clubs.

With such a wealth of familiar talent available you'd be forgiven for thinking the national team might rival 1986's World Cup semi-finalists. However, drawn in the same group as Germany for the Euro 2012 qualifiers, Belgium's chances on making next summer's tournament always depended on making the second-place play-offs. A tight defeat followed by a draw to Turkey have left Belgium rueing what may prove to be a fatal draw away to Azerbaijan recently. Even if Turkey lose to Germany on 7 October, a win for Belgium the same night against group whipping-boys Kazakhstan may not be enough as the Turks' final game is against Azerbaijan.

Nor do Belgium's chances of qualifying for World Cup 2014 look more positive, unfortunately, drawn in the same group against Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia and - home fans - Scotland and Wales. Their youthful team, however, did fare better at 2008's Olympics. A run of good results would lift the Red Devil's world ranking and put them in a stronger position qualifying for future competitions.

UPDATE In the event, Belgium did lose their final game away to Germany 3-1 (the single goal from Fellaini), while Turkey scraped a 1-0 home victory against Azerbaijan to go through to the Euro 2012 play-offs.

Five great pop b-sides

2011-09-22T06:16:00.003+01:00

1. Pet Shop Boys - After the event (/Did you see me coming?, 2009)

I've written about this track before: it's one of the best things Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have ever recorded. One of many great moments for a group rightly lauded for their b-sides.

2. New Order - 1963 (/True Faith, 1987)

To a lovely the tune, the lyrics are said to posit a scenario in which John F Kennedy arranges for a hitman to kill his wife Jackie so he can continue his affair with Marilyn Monroe. The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, famously takes out the wrong target, provoking a further spiral of violence. Splendid, if bonkers.

3. Erasure - La La La (/Love to Hate You, 1991)

The peak of the British synth duo's art came with two consecutive albums in 1989 and 1991: Wild! and Chorus respectively. This song captures all the joy of the former with the analogue sounds of the latter - huge fun, it opens with a sample of what sounds like Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares.

4. Depeche Mode - Dangerous (/Personal Jesus, 1989)

The first single from the Basildon's foursome's best album had a suitably slinky companion - you can hear why it didn't fit into Violator's running order but it's great stuff nonetheless. Other b-sides from the album's singles veered towards the apocalyptic with portentous instrumentals Memphisto (/Enjoy the Silence) and Kaleid (/Policy of Truth).

5. The Divine Comedy - My Lovely Horse (/Gin Soaked Boy, 1999)

Neil Hannon had always given the impression this spoof Eurovision track written for Channel 4's hit comedy series Father Ted - to which The Divine Comedy contributed the theme tune - would never be released but, presumably when things got a bit desperate career-wise, out it came. Try delivering these lines with a straight face: 'My lovely horse, you're a pony no more/ Running around with a man on your back, like a train in the night'. Do also check out the band's splendid Michael Nyman covers on the back of singles Generation Sex and The Certainty of Chance (both 1998).

Related: the five best electropop albums ever

Gabin and Simenon - partners in crime

2011-09-21T06:19:00.012+01:00

Below is a version of a piece I did to accompany French film channel Cinémoi's Jean Gabin season that I've rewritten to include more of the actor's roles in films based upon novels by Georges Simenon.

Jean Gabin was born in Paris in 1904, the son of cabaret performers; he made his way in music hall before cementing his big-screen reputation in the 1930s. He appeared alongside Josephine Baker in Zouzou (1934), was on the run in Algier’s Casbah in Pépé le Moko (1937) and then appeared in a remarkable trio of films in only two years: Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes (1938), Jean Renoir’s visceral Zola adaptation La Bête humaine (same date), and Le jour se lève (1939), again with Carné.

During the war he went to the United States, where he pursued an affair with Marlene Dietrich – when Gabin insisted she be given a role in a film in which he was starring, he was sacked and joined the Free French. He was later decorated for his wartime service fighting in North Africa, and was part of the forces that entered Paris on liberation.

His 1950s citations include Jacques Becker’s classic gangster flick Touchez-pas au grisbi (1954) and the recently re-released French Cancan (Renoir, 1955). Like a more recent giant of French cinema, Gérard Depardieu, Gabin’s physical presence is unmissable but while Depardieu’s increasing girth seems to have encouraged softness in his performances, you can never exclude Gabin as a threat. His performance as a music hall impresario in French Cancan is possessed with powerful watchfulness.

It is this characteristic that made Georges Simenon’s Chief Inspector Maigret such an ideal part in a series of three films directed by Jules Delannoy and Gilles Grangier from 1958 to 1963. Gabin and Simenon were great friends but the author was especially thrilled the actor would take on the role, believing Gabin was the screen incarnation of his character (pictured).

By this time Gabin had starred in a number of films based on Simenon novels, including La Marie du port (1950), once more under Carné, La verité sur Bébé Donge (1952), with Danielle Darieux, and Le sang à la tête (1956, from the novel Le fils Cardinaud), alongside Annie Girardot.

Gabin also starred opposite Brigitte Bardot in En cas de malheur (1958), the Simenon book remade in 1998 as En plein coeur (In All Innocence) with Virginie Ledoyen and Gérard Lanvin. In 1961, Gabin was the lead in Henri Verneuil’s adaptation of Simenon’s controversial politician-in-exile novel, Le président (1961). The list gives some sense of Simenon’s cachet in the period, as well as that of Gabin.

In another Simenon adaptation, Le chat (1971), the actor stars as one half of an ageing couple whose hatred for each other is brought into the open when Gabin’s character becomes convinced his cat has been killed by his partner, played by Simone Signoret. He won Berlin’s Silver Bear award for best actor for what would turn out to be one of his last roles. Gabin died in 1976; Simenon, his elder by nearly one year, died in 1989.

Three career-reviving pop collaborations

2011-09-19T06:02:00.010+01:00

1. Tina Turner and British Electric Foundation

The one-time Anna Mae Bullock had already recorded on her own before she left abusive husband Ike in the mid-1970s, but it was an electro cover of The Temptations' Ball of Confusion produced by Heaven 17 offshoot BEF that confirmed her solo career. The track appeared on 1982 album Music of Quality and Distinction - Volume One, and BEF's Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh were drafted in to produce a soulful cover of Al Green's Let's Stay Together, which heralded Turner's reinvention as a rock diva. (The BEF album also includes a great version of Suspicious Minds with Gary Glitter, but don't expect any miracles.)

2. Tom Jones and the Art of Noise

When success deserted the Welsh star through the late '70s and early '80s, salvation came from an unlikely source: Dadaist synth supergroup the Art of Noise. By 1987, the group's mainstays - producer Trevor Horn and co-conspirator Paul Morley - had left, and the remaining bandmembers, programmer JJ Jeczalik and arranger Anne Dudley, were making their way covering the Peter Gunn and Dragnet themes. Taking the guitar and horn breaks from those tracks, the band collaborated with Jones on a cover of Prince's Kiss, which remains a highlight of the performer's live show.

3. Dusty Springfield and Pet Shop Boys

Another '60s star, the British soul icon had a quiet 1980s until Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, recently successful with singles West End Girls, Love Comes Quickly and Opportunities, asked Springfield to duet on track What Have I Done to Deserve This?, written with American Allee Willis (who also wrote the theme to Friends). Pet Shop Boys went on to write and record tracks In Private and Nothing Has Been Proved (from the film Scandal) for Springfield's 1990 album Reputation, which the duo have hinted they had more to do with than the credits allow. Pet Shop Boys recorded a great album, Results, with another gay icon, Liza Minnelli, and have also written for Tina Turner, Shirley Bassey, Kylie Minogue and Girls Aloud.

and some that didn't work out, for Gary Numan and...

When the hits fell away for the synth-pop pioneer in the early 1980s, he joined forces with his former backing band to record Love Needs No Disguise as Dramatis. He made a more dramatic decision to team up with Bill Sharpe (pictured) of jazz-funkers Shakatak but singles Change Your Mind and No More Lies had little more effect on the charts. More bizarre was a desperate pairing with Hugh Nicholson for the nonetheless tuneful singles Radio Heart and London Times, plus the woeful Like a Refugee (I Won't Cry). This year, Numan appeared on Battles track My Machines and seems happy working with Ade Fenton, who's produced Numan's new album, Dead Son Rising.

Related: three essential '80s albums

Failing to score

2011-09-15T06:39:00.002+01:00

Though I've mentioned film soundtracks in passing on this blog, I'm surprised I haven't posted directly on the subject. This may be because the quality of musicianship in cinema seems to have tailed off markedly in recent years.

There are any number of reasons for this: I suspect the main is budgetary; there is continued reliance on found, usually pop, songs; a lot of the work is formulaic; some - art-house - films often don't have any score at all, or I may not be going to the right movies. For instance, though I'm a fan of composer Max Richter, I haven't seen the last film to which he contributed a soundtrack, Sarah's Key, despite his faintly terrifying contribution to Waltz with Bashir (2008).

It can't be coincidence that one of the greatest of all directors, Alfred Hitchcock, worked with some of the greatest composers in the genre: Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, Miklos Rosza, Bernard Herrmann... One soundtrack I would highlight in the last few years is that for Tom Ford's Christopher Isherwood adaptation A Single Man (2009), which not only includes vintage hits but also mixes work by two composers: Shigeru Umebayashi and Abel Korzeniowski (plus a touch of Herrmann).

Composer Michael Nyman, notable for his work on such Peter Greenaway films as Drowning by Numbers (1988; pictured) and The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), as well as Jane Campion's The Piano (1993), is especially scathing on the state of scoring in cinema, citing derivative work and general condescension. At the root of his argument seems to be a lack of respect for the art of a composer to which, I would add in what seems to have become an increasingly (visually) stylised medium, the role of a great soundtrack.

For the record, one of Nyman's favourite bits of his own work occurs, perhaps surprisingly, in Michael Winterbottom's determinedly contemporary London movie, Wonderland (1999). He told a Time Out screening earlier this year, of the scene in which Gina McKee takes the N171 home late at night, with all that entails: 'The bus sequence is the best combination of music and image I've ever been involved in.'

UPDATE The same day I posted this, the wonderful Letters of Note site featured a letter from Audrey Hepburn, thanking Henry Mancini for his score for Breakfast at Tiffany's. It includes this succinct appraisal of a good film soundtrack: 'A movie without music is a little bit like an aeroplane without fuel. However beautifully the job is done, we are still on the ground and in a world of reality. Your music has lifted us all up and sent us soaring.'

Hidden London: stuffed, pickled, embalmed

2011-09-14T06:38:00.004+01:00

When considering the form of your final peace, you may wish to heed the indignities suffered by these mammals in our rationalist capital:

Stuffed

Forest Hill's Horniman Museum is famous for its overstuffed walrus - filled by a taxidermist in the 1870s unfamiliar with the beast's multiple folds.

Pickled

It's not the first thing you expect to see on entering a museum: a jar full of pickled moles, reminiscent of a competition to guess the number of sweets. UCL's Grant Museum boasts all sorts of zoological curiosities but don't, as I did, go immediately after lunch. (Thank you, though, to the enthusiastic woman who encouraged me to smell inside the cabinets!)

Embalmed

UCL has an even stranger corpse on its premises, however. Jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham instructed that his body be preserved upon his death in 1832 and there he is, perched in a glass cabinet. The head is made of wax - the real appendage having suffered all forms of humiliation - but his dressed body remains, at the end of the south cloisters in the university's main building.

'You have to be Hungarian'

2011-09-12T06:39:00.002+01:00

I've always had a certain fascination for the exposed insides of demolished buildings (pictured below). This is due to the revelation of secret spaces, as well as the abstract patterns they create (above). It took a photograph by André Kertész, however, to show me how to capture these sites properly. In Landing Pigeon (New York, 1960), which features in Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the Twentieth Century, he sets off the angles of vanished stairways with a bird in flight.

The Royal Academy's show concentrates on five big names: Brassaï, Robert Capa, Kertész, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy and Martin Munkácsi. You sense the curators have tried their damnedest to draw themes from the displayed work, though they struggle to explain Capa's joshing maxim, 'It's not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.' This is especially so when for much of the period under review, photography was severely restricted in Hungary, leading most of the names here to practise their art abroad - how to separate Brassaï from his views of Paris or vice versa?

Opening with a folkloric vision, notably espoused by Rudolf Balogh, the exhibition comes full circle in Miklós Rév's Straight Road (Inota, c1955), which pitches a rural idyll against industrial reality. (Tibor Schoen's Ravens - Az Erdekes Ujság, 1915 - is another picture of two halves: a dead soldier in a Christmas card scene.) There's a predictable cavil: the most recent work here is from 1992 - a shame the Royal Academy didn't throw open one of its free rooms to bring the story up to date.

Eyewitness runs until 2 October and the bumper catalogue is now only £14.95.

Five things I'm looking forward to this autumn

2011-09-10T09:03:00.023+01:00

ART

Tate Modern's Gerhard Richter: Panorama promises to be a major retrospective of the 80-year-old German artist, to rival MoMA's 40-year survey in New York one decade ago. From 6 Oct 2011-8 Jan 2012.

Look out also for Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, at the Royal Academy 17 Sept-11 Dec, the V&A's latest blockbuster, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, which opens 24 Sept to 25 Jan, plus Tacita Dean takes over Tate Modern's Turbine Hall from 11 Oct.

BOOKS
Haruki Murakami's last big novel, Kafka on the Shore, disappointed despite its heft. Seven years on, the cult author's latest, 1Q84, was so well-received in Japan, he added a third volume to the work's original two parts. They're released here in two books on 18 & 25 Oct respectively.

FILM
Swedish director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) tackles John Le Carré's classic novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with a rattling cast, which includes John Hurt, Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch, headed up by Gary Oldman (released 16 Sept).

Hurt also stars in the latest from Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, Melancholia, alongside Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Rampling, in cinemas from 30 Sept. Other stand-outs this month include Nicolas Winding Refn's James Sallis adaptation, Drive (23 Sept), and Mademoiselle Chambon (same date), with Sandrine Kimberlain and Vincent Lindon as a couple suddenly drawn to each other. Lynne Ramsay's take on the Lionel Shriver novel We Need to Talk About Kevin opens 21 Oct, boasting a stand-out performance from Tilda Swinton.

MUSIC
I haven't been excited about a new album by Björk for some time, but Biophilia sees the Icelandic pop pixie embracing nature, and technology. Out 10 Oct.

One year after Dust Lane, it looks as if Yann Tiersen is back with a new album, Skyline (pictured), out second half of October. Then there's Erasure entering Tomorrow's World, from 3 Oct.

TV
Danish crime drama The Killing was the cult hit of the winter, and I can't wait for the arrival of follow-up The Killing II on BBC4. Star Sofie Gråbøl promises the 10-episode series is even darker than the first.

A voyage around my bedroom

2011-09-07T06:34:00.006+01:00

At the start of the summer I moved my desk (dining table) into my bedroom. A friend remembered that an ex used to warn never to do this as it affects your sleep but my bedroom is at the front of the flat, which gets sunshine most of the day - when it's sunny - and gives me a sense of the bustle on the street when working.

This set-up does mean your bed is soon covered with reference books, scraps of paper and magazines - it's like being a student again. But at least it's not like Proust; in his book How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997; pictured), Alain de Botton quotes a friend of the writer, Marie Nordlinger: 'The apparent discomfort in which he worked was quite incredible; the bed was littered with books and papers, his pillows were all over the place, a bamboo table on his left was piled high, and more often than not, there was no support for whatever he was writing on (no wonder he wrote illegibly), with a cheap wooden penholder or two lying where it had fallen on the floor.' Thank goodness for my laptop.

Five years later, de Botton touched once more upon writing in bedrooms, in his book The Art of Travel. He recounts the tale of 27-year-old author Xavier de Maistre who, in 1790, undertook a Journey Around My Bedroom. Eight years later the Frenchman ventured a little further, to the windowsill, at night, in Nocturnal Expedition Around My Bedroom. It is a genre de Botton dubs 'room-travel'. De Maistre, de Botton writes, 'particularly recommended room-travel to the poor and to those afraid of storms, robberies and high cliffs.'

I've been fortunate to venture a little further this summer but then I did have to pack more than de Maistre, who needed only 'a pair of pink and blue cotton pyjamas'. I do, however, possess such a pair of stripey pyjama bottoms, so perhaps I'm not as ill-equipped for this lifestyle as I feared.

Britain's oldest purpose-built mosque

2011-09-05T06:23:00.003+01:00

In the week of the anniversary of 9/11, and amid continuing controversy over the siting of a mosque near New York's Ground Zero, I find myself reading about France's oldest mosque in a beautiful book, Paris Between the Wars (Thames & Hudson). Author Vincent Bouvet writes about the Paris Mosque, construction of which began in 1926: 'The building was intended as a symbol of friendship between France and the Islamic world and as a homage to the Muslims who died fighting for France in the Great War. The city provided the land and the architects drew their inspiration from the mosques in the city of Fez, designing a structure in reinforced concrete decorated with traditional materials from the Maghreb.'

Britain's oldest purpose-built mosque was constructed nearly 40 years earlier, in 1889, by the Hungarian-born Orientalist Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner. The Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking was commissioned by Shah Jahan, the Nawab Begum of Bhopal, alongside the Oriental Institute Leitner had established six years earlier. Leitner's parents were Jewish; when his father died his mother moved to Istanbul where she married a Jewish convert to Christianity. Leitner studied in a madrassa in the city and is said to have spoken eight languages fluently by the age of 15; he was made a professor at King's College London six years later and, aged 24, was appointed head of the Government College, Lahore. His mosque is Grade II-listed and still in use.

Sofie Gråbøl on the writer of The Killing

2011-09-01T06:05:00.010+01:00

200th POST

In July I was lucky enough to interview Danish actress Sofie Gråbøl in Copenhagen for an article in this month's Voyager. The conversation revolved around the hit series in which she stars, The Killing, including some lovely jumper philosophy. When we met, shooting was about to start on a third series in Denmark; The Killing II (pictured) is set to screen on BBC4 after the current repeated run of the first series.

After the rigours of the original, 20-episode season she said she'd mainly been tempted to revisit her character, detective inspector Sarah Lund, by the collaboration with writer Søren Sveistrup. Gråbøl was great company; here's what she said about working with Sveistrup, with whom she'd also previously worked on an Emmy award-winning romantic comedy called Nikolaj and Julie:

'I enjoy acting and the basic work but I also enjoy the whole skeleton of the character. Those meetings we have - the collaboration I have with the writer - are really interesting, they’re just as interesting as the actual acting. I like the construction of the character and the script, building the whole skeleton of emotions and he allows me to be involved in that.

'It works in the way that he writes a script that's almost finished and then we gather and we read it and the actors have meetings with him afterwards and you can say whatever you want, you can comment on whatever you want. It allows him to be in a constant dialogue with the project and to me that's extremely fulfilling.

'To me it's a sign of great self-confidence that you are so confident in yourself that you allow other people to influence [you]. You pick the good ideas. People who aren't confident, if you're insecure, it's very easy to say no. To say yes, to be open is frightening at times - also in my work, to throw yourself into a direction you’re not sure of. To me he's very good at that.'

UPDATE The Killing II screens on BBC4 from 19 November 2011.

Related: tracking down Danish band Gangway (100th post)

Danish duo

2011-08-29T17:27:00.011+01:00

In keeping with a fondness for reading fiction from places I've visited, I recently embarked on a couple of books by Danish authors. Carsten Jensen's We, the Drowned (cover detail pictured) could do worse than having a quote from Henning Mankell on the front (and back) and features Newfoundland - another predilection of mine - but unfortunately pales alongside Michael Crummey's Galore, my stand-out read of the year so far. Both novels focus on seafaring towns, and Jensen's work has the broader historical sweep, but the magical realist elements (a feature of both books) are gradually swept away. I don't read many books by women, but We, the Drowned - with its theme of the feminisation of a town and its way of life - is particularly male, and suffers for it.

Mercy, the first novel to be translated into English by Jussi Adler-Olsen, shares with Pedro Almodóvar's latest film, The Skin I Live In (from a novel by Thierry Jonquet), the theme of punishment and illegal incarceration. Given its Danish origins, it's tempting to point out the political machinations in the book's background, which are reminiscent of those in TV series The Killing. Out now in Penguin paperback, Mercy starts poorly but soon gets going, and signals a new line of investigation for fans of Scandinavian crime in the 'Department Q' series.

Masters of melodrama: Max Ophüls and Douglas Sirk

2011-08-22T06:36:00.007+01:00

There's a telling moment in his introduction to the DVD of Max Ophüls' The Reckless Moment, when Todd Haynes calls the German-born director 'Sirk'. Ophüls' camera, of course, flies gracefully through such dramas set in turn-of-the-century Europe as La Ronde, starring Anton Walbrook (1950), Madame De… (1953) - which features another ronde, this time following a pair of earrings - and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), adapted from a novel by Stefan Zweig. The director was no less adept at the seamier side of twentieth-century life in the US: The Reckless Moment (1949; pictured) was based on a story in Lady's Home Journal and stars James Mason as a blackmailer who starts to sympathise with his housewife victim, Joan Bennett.

Ophüls made only one film in colour (Lola Montès, I think), but his oeuvre is as rich and sumptuous as anything by Sirk, another German, five years his elder. Born Hans Detlef Sierck, the central tragedy of Sirk's life occurred in 1937, when he quit Germany with his second - Jewish - wife, leaving behind the son from his first marriage. Claus Detlef Sierck became the blue-eyed boy star of Nazi cinema but died on the Russian front in 1944. Sirk reimagined the last weeks of his son's life in the film A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958).

Both Ophüls and Sirk had worked in theatre and were masters of spectacle, with a special interest in women's rights and inequalities. Many of Sirk's films star strong female leads: Written on the Wind (1956) is an oil-dynasty intrigue with stunning Lauren Bacall and Dorothy Malone, who at one point clutches a model of priapic rig to her chest; Jane Wyman falls for her gardener - Rock Hudson, Sirk's leading man of choice - in All that Heaven Allows (1955; remade by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as Fear Eats the Soul in 1973, this time featuring a Moroccan guest worker in Germany, and again by Todd Haynes for Far from Heaven, 2002); the valedictory Imitation of Life (1959) has Lana Turner and Juanita Moore caught in a typically bleak look at the post-WWII dream.

After leaving Hollywood, the director's last films were short projects for his university students in Munich in the 1970s; each year's intake voted on which of their favourite scripts they would produce - Sirk made the one that came bottom.

Alfred Hitchcock's 10 best cameos

2011-08-18T21:31:00.002+01:00

The Lodger (1927)

The director starts modestly enough for his first British film, glimpsed at his desk in a newsroom, and later in the crowd watching an arrest.

Blackmail (1929)

This superb early thriller features a climactic chase in the British Museum and onto the roof of the Reading Room, but before we get there Hitch is glimpsed being attacked by a child in a tube carriage.

Lifeboat (1944)

Another trademark turn, this time in 'before' and 'after' photos in a newspaper ad for slimming product Reducto Obesity Slayer.

Spellbound (1945)

He comes out of a lift at the Empire Hotel, smoking a cigarette and carrying a violin case - one of several appearances with a musical theme.

Strangers on a Train (1951)

The director is once more weighed down with a musical instrument - this time it's a double bass he's trying to manoeuvre onto a train as Farley Granger disembarks.

Rear Window (1954)

Hitch is seen winding up a clock in the songwriter's flat approximately 30 minutes in.

North by Northwest (1959)

He misses a bus in the opening sequence.

Psycho (1960)

When Janet Leigh returns to her office at the start, Hitchcock is standing outside the window, wearing a cowboy hat.

The Birds (1963)

As Tippi Hedren enters Davidson's pet shop, Hitch comes out leading two white terriers.

Topaz (1969)

The director is being pushed in a wheelchair in the airport when he stands up, shakes hands with a man, and walks off.

Five Euro crime writers

2011-08-17T06:34:00.015+01:00

FRANCE

First published in the UK in 2004, Have Mercy on Us All marked the arrival of a ferocious crime-writing talent. Fred Vargas is an archaeologist whose books are often inspired by a historical event, such as the plague, delivered with dark humour(s). Commissaire Adamsberg is the central figure, the work having taken a bit of a hit, for me, with a diversion for The Three Evangelists (2006). Vargas's latest - and Adamsberg's sixth - An Uncertain Place, kicks off in London's Highgate Cemetery.

GERMANY

The work of Andrea Maria Schenkel fits alongside the best of the recent wave of Scandinavian crime writers - I'm thinking particularly of Karin Fossum. Novels The Murder Farm (2008) and Ice Cold (2009) have thrown new light on wartime guilt while her most recent, Bunker, is a terrifying psychological thriller. All three are published by the exemplary Quercus and translated by luminary Anthea Bell.

GREECE

As if to emphasise the split in Eurozone countries, Petros Markaris's Costas Haritas novels are notably more popular in southern Europe. The Late-Night News (2004) was a suitably depressing introduction to the internal workings of Athens CID as Haritas investigates first the deaths of an Albanian couple, then a woman reporter's murder. Hard-boiled, and not conducive to tourism.

ITALY

For the Anglophone reader, it's hard to look anywhere other than Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen mysteries for an insight into Italian politics and corruption although Carlo Lucarelli stands out among a host of native crime writers. His UK debut Almost Blue (2004), a creepy tale of a blind radio buff who hears the voice of a serial killer, emerged some time after it had been made into a film in Italy. Lucarelli is one of many who's turned his hand to historical crime, in this case a trilogy of Commissario De Luca novels set in fascist wartime Italy.

SPAIN

Arturo Pérez-Reverte is currently best known for his Captain Alatriste books and though the author may not be the latest cutting-edge Spanish crime writer, he's been at the forefront of publishers' fascination with historical crime fiction since mystery The Flanders Panel was picked up by Harvill in 1994. (Harvill was also behind Vargas here, among others.) Follow-up The Club Dumas became a film, The Ninth Gate (1999), under Roman Polanski, starring Johnny Depp, while Viggo Mortensen has since become Alatriste (alongside Elena Anaya).

Welcome to Iceland

2011-08-15T06:05:00.014+01:00

I've got a piece in Voyager this month on Scandinavian crime novelists, written with the magazine's splendid editor, Andrew. Due to the focus on Denmark, Norway and Sweden, there was no space for Iceland, home of one of the best Nordic crime writers of the last decade, Arnaldur Indridason. (I haven't tried his compatriot Yrsa Sigurdardottir, any good?)

Indridason emerged in the UK in 2004 with Jar City, a terrific exploration of this remote country's landscape and heritage in the form of a murder-mystery. (The book was reissued with the unbelievably dull title Tainted Blood but seems to have reverted to form, thank goodness.) There are now seven Inspector Erlendur investigations - branded Reykjavík Murder Mysteries by the publishers - as well as a historical thriller (Operation Napoleon), though the work has slightly flagged for me since 2006's Voices. (All dates are for UK translations.)

In 2008, a film version of Jar City hit our screens and I interviewed director Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavík, 2000) about the difficulty of casting the much-loved lead role (the part went to Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson, pictured). I was especially taken with Kormákur's views on his country and what drew him to the book initially - 'We never believed we could make thrillers due to the lack of crimes,' the director noted of his first encounter with Indridason's work.

For Kormákur, detective Erlendur is a 'true Icelandic character, the type of man who has moved from the countryside and never really found ground in the city. That's why I emphasised the mountains: when he's out smoking, I pulled the mountains in. This man took the mountains with him to the city. There's a lot of those people, they bring horses to the city and they have a country life in the city but it doesn't fit. I liked that part of having him drive through the lava field and being alone in this humungous country - it's very big with very few people - and also emphasising not the beauty spots but the spots that are more real to me.'

Since then Kormákur has worked largely in the US - including on a thriller scripted by Indridason called Contraband, which stars Mark Wahlberg and is due out in Britain next March - although you can't blame him returning home to what sounds like an idyllic life. 'My ground is in Iceland but it's hard with an audience of 300,000 people, I've been lucky to get some experience abroad. If I haven't totally fucked it up I'll do some more movies but I'll always come back to Iceland, I'll never leave the country. I have five children, I live on a farm breeding horses - I just think life won't get much better than that.'

Let it rain

2011-08-12T08:57:00.009+01:00

Among those who have looked for reasons for the (temporary?) cessation of riots in England, some commentators have pointed to the ever-reliable British weather: it rained. Downpours herald the end to the violence in Colin MacInnes's 1959 novel, Absolute Beginners; as his hero waits for an escape flight to Oslo, down comes the rain: 'I held up my arms in it, and opened my mouth and cried, "More! More! More! That'll stop it… That'll do what the ruling orders can't do! That's the only thing to keep the whites and blacks and yellows and blues… indoors!"'

Reaction to the riots is all too familiar: 'in the leader sections… they were still on about unrestricted immigration… They said Welfare was an urgent consideration, and what was needed was a lot more experienced welfare officers to iron out awkward misunderstandings… the magistrate had advised people to stay indoors at night… Best news of all - really heartening - was that the cabinet minister in charge of home security had received reports of all these happenings at his country house, and was studying them closely, and said the utmost strictness will be observed in the impartial enforcement of the law.'

Ultimately, though, 'so far as the government and top cats who control things were concerned, these riots might just not have happened at all, or have been in some other country.' In MacInnes's west London there are Teds, Hoorays, the new immigrants and even newer teenagers (the 'absolute beginners' of the title): 'And what a time it's been in England, what a period of fun and hope and foolishness and sad stupidity!'

A friend also highlighted this lovely extract from Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage.

The 12 best novels about filmmaking, Part 2

2011-08-10T06:03:00.015+01:00

6. Blue Movie, Terry Southern (1970)

Award-winning director Boris Adrian 'a film-maker - in the tradition of Chaplin, Bergman, Fellini' decides to make a stag film 'that's really good', in this Hollywood satire from the co-author of Candy (1958). 'I've got to find out… how far you can take the aesthetically erotic… suppose the film were made under studio conditions - feature-length, colour, beautiful actors, great lighting, strong plot… how would it look then?' Flown to Liechtenstein by his producer, Adrian gets his chance to fulfill an urge that's overtaken directors from Stanley Kubrick (Southern worked on the script for Dr Strangelove) to Lars von Trier.

5. The Day of the Locust, Nathaniel West (1939)

'West's Hollywood is made up of degeneracy and brothels, of failure and sexual desire, of cock-fighting and third-rate boarding houses,' says Alan Ross in his introduction to Picador's collection of the one-time screenwriter and contemporary of Scott Fitzgerald's work. Locust follows aspiring actress Faye Greener and the men who flock around her: set painter Tod Hackett, a cock-fighting Mexican and his cowboy extra friend, and a hapless clerk - Homer Simpson. It may have served as inspiration for AM Homes's This Book Will Save Your Life (2006).

4. The Last Tycoon, F Scott Fitzgerald (1941)

Hollywood loves films about filmmaking, so it was never going to forego the chance to shoot a script based on a work by one of America's greatest writers, even if Fitzgerald's novel was unfinished on his death in 1940. Robert De Niro and Theresa Russell were among the stars for Elia Kazan's 1976 movie set in Hollywood's golden age of the 1930s, inspired by MGM mogul Irving Thalberg. Fitzgerald had also worked in Hollywood, and previously mined the territory in his Pat Hobby stories.

3. The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster (2002)

American author Auster is rightly celebrated for his early novels, notably the New York Trilogy, but hopefully not at the expense of this powerful, more recent work. Grief-stricken professor David Zimmer receives an invitation to visit the elderly subject of Zimmer's film studies monograph, The Silent World of Hector Mann. For the last 50 years, Mann has been making films in secret on his New Mexico ranch, all of which are due to be incinerated within 24 hours of Mann's death. In an imaginative tour de force, Auster - who's made films himself - creates a shimmering back catalogue for his and Zimmer's mutual subject.

2. Remainder, Tom McCarthy (2005)

What happens when movie fiction becomes more real to us than our own experience, the brilliant Tom McCarthy asks in his debut novel (cf news events that are described as being like a film). Following a freak accident, Remainder's narrator lands an enormous amount of money, which he uses to create ever more elaborate sets and scenarios to bolster his sense of authenticity; 'Even before the accident, if I'd been walking down the street just like De Niro, smoking a cigarette like him… I'd still be thinking: Here I am walking down the street, smoking a cigarette, like someone in a film.'

1. Flicker, Theodore Roszak (1991)

History professor Roszak's book is tremendous: a student investigating the films of German B-movie director Max Castle uncovers a plot involving Orson Welles, Cathar knights and subliminal messages planted in films, which are portrayed as encapsulating the perpetual battle between good and evil (black and white/light). An unsurpassable mix of fanboy thrills and the sort of playful erudition espoused by Umberto Eco, it has long been rumoured to be a project for director Darren Aronofsky.

Part one is here

The 12 best novels about filmmaking, Part 1

2011-08-08T06:20:00.032+01:00

12. The Director's Cut, Nicholas Royle (2000)

I forgot to include one of Nick's books that would have been appropriate for a previous post, so am making sure not to repeat my mistake here. The majority of the books in this list are about Hollywood, so let's start with the exceptions. Framed within a murder mystery, Royle's work has a very strong sense of place, including the view of central London's Hanway Street he would have had himself from the eighth floor of Time Out's offices on Tottenham Court Road.

11. Show Business, Shashi Tharoor (1992)

Seriously injured on the set of his latest movie, Bollywood star Ashok Banjara reflects on his life in India's film industry and as a disgraced politician while hundreds of fans stage a vigil outside the hospital where he is being treated. Author Tharoor is a fascinating figure: he ran for the position of UN secretary general in 2007, supported by India, where he is now an MP; this book is due to be reissued by a US publisher in September.

10. LA Confidential, James Ellroy (1990)

Crime writer Ellroy's connection to the Black Dahlia killing is well-documented - not least by the author himself; his LA Quartet inescapably features Hollywood at its heart and great fun is to be had here in the character of Jack Vincennes (played by Kevin Spacey in Curtis Hanson's 1997 big-screen adaptation), the police sergeant compromisingly attracted to the showbiz world.

9. The Player, Michael Tolkin (1988)

It's easy to forget that The Player was originally a novel, such is the reputation of Robert Altman's 1992 film, starring Tim Robbins as a film studio boss targeted by a rejected writer. Tolkin creates a freewheeling thriller about creative power and ambition; a host of stars appeared as themselves in the movie version, much as they did in 2003's Elmore Leonard adaptation, Be Cool.

8. & 7. Karoo, Steve Tesich (1998) & Playland, John Gregory Dunne (1994)

Two books by scriptwriters about scriptwriters: Tesich adapted The World According to Garp (1982) and apparently died four days after completing this book (one of many here that features celluloid on the cover), about script doctor Saul Karoo, alcohol and nicotine addict. From Ellroy's 1950s to the 1940s, Dunne's screenwriter delves into the past to uncover what happened to Baby Blue Tyler, one-time child star, now trailer park resident with 11 marriages behind her.

Part two - numbers six to one - is here. If you'd like to add any suggestions below, please do!

Three bands too eclectic for their own good

2011-08-03T06:33:00.019+01:00

1. Mickey 3D

In addition to the handicap of singing in French in the Anglophile pop world, Mickey 3D also suffer from failing to fit into a simple category; in music, it pays to be immediately identifiable. On probably their best album, Tu vas pas mourir de rire (2002), this very good band from the Loire region in the centre of France jump from hip-hop (Les enfants) through rock (Amen) and North African influences (Yalil) to synth pop (La peur) and chanson (Chanson de rien du tout).

2. It's Immaterial

Best known for singles Driving Away from Home (Jim's Tune) and Ed's Funky Diner, included on any number of 1980s pop compilations (and ads), It's Immaterial are typically characterised as synth pop although the Liverpudlian duo were mining the new wave with a particularly British blues we would probably label folk. Album Life's Hard and Then You Die (1986) showcased the band's offbeat lyrics, while follow-up Song (1990) was produced by The Blue Nile's producer Calum Malcolm, who made them sound a bit like The Blue Nile.

3. Satellite

I have no idea where one-man band Jonny Green came from, nor where he went after 2002's splendid Fear of Gravity album. He's writer, guitarist, drummer, programmer, vocalist and producer on this sneaky, fun album of looped samples, strings and more. It's pop with a dark edge: 'You took my clothes/ So that I couldn't go out/ That's how I got arrested' (from the title track); Baby it's You rocks out ('I don't know what a psychopath like you wants from me') while instrumental October is the Art of Noise revisited, of all things. And then... nothing?

Ten or 11 things I know about Godard

2011-08-01T06:43:00.019+01:00

1. A Bout de Souffle (1959) was written by François Truffaut, who was also supposed to oversee erstwhile Cahiers critic Jean-Luc Godard's filmmaking debut, which stars Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

2. Godard had wanted to cast Danish model Anna Karina in a small role in A Bout de Souffle but she refused to do nudity. When he pointed out he had seen her in a TV ad for Palmolive soap she replied she’d been wearing a bathing suit beneath the suds - 'It was in your mind I was naked.'

3. Karina and Godard married in 1961, the year he cast her as the lead in Le Petit Soldat. The release of his second film was delayed for two years due to its portrayal of the war in Algeria; in the meantime Karina starred in comédie musicale Une Femme est une Femme (pictured top, 1961) as a woman whose husband doesn't want her to have a baby, so she turns instead to his best friend, played by Belmondo.

4. Belmondo and Karina teamed up again for Pierrot le Fou (1965), part-gangster flick, part-road-movie, part-musical comedy portrait of the end of the the marriage of Godard and his star.

5. By the time of sci-fi flick Alphaville (1965), starring Eddie Constantine, Godard's love for Paris had dimmed and he used locations around the city as the setting for his dystopian vision of the future.

6. Godard has a bit of a thing for using prostitution as metaphor: for the acting industry in Vivre Sa Vie (1962), featuring a stand-out performance from his muse, Karina, and for living in Paris (Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d’Elle, 1966).

7. Deux ou Trois Choses… was made simultaneously with political movie Made in USA (1966), shooting one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Karina is the girl with a gun in the latter, a multi-coloured noir film.

8. Godard makes an unexpected cameo in children's film Shéhérazade (dir. Pierre Gaspard-Huit, 1963), which stars Karina: 'The beggar walking on his hands is Jean-Luc Godard, in disguise of course, and without his glasses,' she says.

9. La Chinoise (pictured above, 1967) presaged the following year's student uprising although a year before JLG had been skeptical of consumerist apathy among 'the children of Marx and Coca-Cola'; Jean-Pierre Léaud is a winning lead amid the sloganeering of Masculin Féminin (1966) as if Truffaut's Antoine Doinel - name-checked here at one point - has had a lycée education.

10. In Passion (1982), starring Isabelle Huppert, narrative, sound and image are fragmented; other themes and appearances that can be traced across the films include, crucially, a preoccupation with pinball machines (notably also in Vivre Sa Vie).

11. Léaud, Nathalie Baye and Johnny Halliday are among the stars scurrying about in 1985's Détective, a Feydeau-esque policier where the hotel setting seems to serve as a potted version of contemporary France, much as the cruise ship takes on global connotations in his latest, Film Socialisme.

All the films cited here are available in the DVD boxsets Jean-Luc Godard - Vols 1 & 2 and Jean-Luc Godard: '60s Collection except Film Socialisme, which is in (some) cinemas now

The 10 best Americans-abroad films

2011-07-27T06:40:00.004+01:00

1. The Third Man (1949)

For this exercise, I'm ignoring war or spy movies* - it's amazing how much of that stuff Americans are involved in all over the world - but Carol Reed's post-WWII classic based on a script by Graham Green gleefully wades in at number one. Writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) visits Vienna on the invitation of old friend Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, and finds himself in a whole mess of trouble. Welles later acknowledged that the cuckoo clocks in his inimitable speech atop the ferris wheel were traditionally German, not Swiss. (*or archaeology - sorry Indy!)

2. Last Tango in Paris (1972)

Another heavyweight performance, this time from Marlon Brando as a widower in an affair with a young Parisian played by Maria Schneider. They meet flat-hunting in the posh 16th arrondissement, with its views of the double-decker Pont de Bir-Hakeim. Director Bernardo Bertolucci captures desperation and fury, all within sight of a copy of the Statue of Liberty.

3. Barcelona (1994)

Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson visited in Vicky Cristina Barcelona but the hugely underappreciated Whit Stillman beat Woody Allen to the Catalan capital by some 14 years. Stillman married his Spanish wife in the city in 1980 and the American cousins at the centre of his film are smitten by the local women - 'that's one of the great things about getting involved with someone from another country, you can't take it personally,' opines one.

4. Before Sunrise (1995)

In the mid-90s, director Richard Linklater had actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet interrailing and spend the night together. Nine years later they were at it again, this time in Paris, where Hawke's character is on a book tour in Before Sunset. Lovely, and rather warming to a certain generation.

5. The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)

Perhaps a closet homosexual with definite fantastical and possibly psychopathic leanings, Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) falls under the spell of spoilt, rich Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) and, crucially, Greenleaf's playboy lifestyle. Italy's beaches and cities have rarely looked more inviting than in Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's psychological thriller.

6. Roman Holiday (1953)

A generation before, Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn were injecting some star charisma into William Wyler's otherwise underpowered comedy romance. The couple pack in all of Rome's sights - who can forget the scene at the Bocca della Verità?

7. Frantic (1988)

Gene Kelly's Technicolor experience as An American in Paris (1951) could hardly have been more different from that of poor Harrison Ford, who finds himself thrown into the French capital's darkest spots when his wife goes missing. Roman Polanski controls the tension superbly, adding Emmanuelle Seigner as an accomplice for good measure.

8. 9 Songs (2004)

While many of these films pit Americans as fish out of water, here young student Margo Stilley wraps her legs round geologist Kieran O'Brien in a musical and sexual journey through a nine-month relationship in London. More here.

9. The Portrait of a Lady (1996)

This post was inspired by a Guardian article about literary Americans abroad that left out Arthur Phillips' Prague, which cheesed me off, but I could hardly omit Henry James, could I? Hal Hartley regular Martin Donovan joins a stellar cast, including John Malkovich and Nicole Kidman at her best as American heiress Isabel Archer touring Europe.

10. Lost in Translation (2003)

I was stuck between this and Paul Bowles adaptation The Sheltering Sky (1990) for the final spot, but we've already got Bertolucci so in come odd couple Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray. Director Sofia Coppola overdid the alienation in her last, Somewhere, but here Tokyo steals the limelight, full as it is of crazy Japanese-speaking Japanese doing crazy Japanese things.

Foxy Elena

2011-07-25T06:48:00.004+01:00

In a month's time Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In opens in the UK, starring Elena Anaya opposite Antonio Banderas (pictured). Anaya's first major role came alongside Paz Vega and Najwa Nimri in Julio Medem's Sex and Lucía in 2001. Anaya plays the naughty nanny, Belén, who lends writer Lorenzo porn films starring her mother; the film's central tragedy is wrought when Belén and Lorenzo get together.

Unlike her equally beautiful co-star Vega, Anaya has largely avoided such cod-English comedy films as Spanglish, opting instead for French cinema. She is the heavily pregnant hostage in thriller Point Blank (2010), and appeared across both Mesrine movies (2008).

She's worked before with Almodóvar, in Talk to Her (2002), and returned to Medem for lesbian chamber piece Room in Rome (2010). Here's hoping her latest outing will uncover some grit beneath the wide-eyed features.

Dinner for none?

2011-07-20T17:30:00.012+01:00

The way countries view each other can often be a mystery, especially when the reference point is not recognised in one nation. Much of Europe associates Brits with a TV play called Dinner for One (1963). It's an integral part of New Year in Germany and Denmark, but is unknown here. The skit stars May Warden as a rich old lady whose butler, Freddie Frinton, has to stand in for her dead friends at her 90th birthday dinner.

Despite featuring British character actors, it's a German TV production, which may explain its lack of celebrity this side of the Channel. The piece was discovered playing Blackpool in 1962 and presumably appealed because it is near silent - the butler is a tottering drunk by the end as he tries to fulfill his role. Nearly 50 years on, New Year - and Britain - without it would be unthinkable for many Europeans.

Pioneer sleuths

2011-07-18T06:43:00.002+01:00

From contemporary women detectives in books and on TV, I've stepped back into the world of their fictional forebears. The first female sleuths didn't exist in real life but on the page, conjured by men and women writers as a means to allow them into a world males may not have gained entry, or simply because the characters remained unnoticed and beyond suspicion.

The heroines featured in Michael Sims' excellent anthology The Penguin Book of Victorian in Crime - out now - are feminist antecedents and many of their concerns resonate today: the case of The Mysterious Countess (by WS Hayward, 1864?) is suddenly accelerated when a policeman sells information to a newspaper, while the narrator of The Unknown Weapon (Andrew Forrester, 1864), Mrs G, notes, 'the detective force, many of whom, though very clever, are equally simple, and accept a plain and straightforward statement with extreme willingness'.

Three great European artist's museums

2011-07-13T06:29:00.007+01:00

1. Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris

Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) converted this space - pictured - to show off his fantastic work, an example of which was used recently on the cover of Roberto Bolaño's gargantuan novel 2666. The artist's apartment and Grand Tour souvenirs are preserved as he wanted, while paintings fold out of wall-mounted holders.

14 rue de la Rochefoucauld, 9th; closed Tuesdays. €5.

2. Sir John Soane Museum, London

On a grander yet not less intimate scale, architect Soane (1753-1837) modelled this incredible venue to house his collection of books, sculpture and drawings for 'amateurs and students'. An act of parliament preserved the space after his death as close as possible to his intentions.

13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, WC2; open Tuesday-Saturday. Free.

3. Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen

The name Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844) may not ring any bells but his grand sculptures can be found in many of Europe's major cities. Denmark's oldest gallery, above, was specifically designed to house the oeuvre he bequeathed to the state - the sculptor's grave is in the central courtyard.

2 Bertel Thordvaldsens Plads, Slotsholmen; closed Mondays. 40kr.

If you happen to read this and can recommend other great artist's museums around the world in the comments below, please do!

Louisiana, Denmark

2011-07-11T19:52:00.008+01:00

Apologies for the relative silence here, I went to Denmark where I visited this beautiful, coastal gallery (among other things, which I'll come back to). A 40-minute train ride from Copenhagen, Louisiana's collection includes work by Frank Auerbach, Per Kirkeby and Peter Doig, with a special emphasis on Alberto Giacometti. Outdoors sculpture is from Alexander Calder (pictured above), Jean Arp, Max Ernst and Henry Moore (below), and there are temporary exhibitions, too: architecture show Living and David Hockney's iPad drawings run until autumn.

Film find: Roy Andersson's debut

2011-07-01T06:13:00.003+01:00

Artificial Eye seems to have slipped out a DVD release for Roy Andersson's debut feature film from 1970 but it's well worth picking up, for fans of the quirky Swedish director and non-initiates alike. A Swedish Love Story (pictured) is an ostensibly simple first romance, with strains of adult disappointment, and class and culture clashes. Five years later, Andersson's second, Giliap, was less successful and he didn't make another full-length movie for 25 years.

Andersson aficionados will be looking for deadpan elements familiar from his second coming - Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You, the Living (2007), funded by his ad work - for instance, a sketch involving the installation of a pair of saloon-style swing doors. A Swedish Love Story is notable, too, for its sound design, from the very opening scenes, involving a motorbike on the open road, and a family gathering interrupted by a barking dog and insistent recorder practice.

Some viewers may be surprised by the great performances Andersson elicits, notably from his young cast. Inspired by the Czech New Wave, Andersson's own influence can most recently be seen in such films as Ruben Östlund's Involuntary and O'Horten by Bent Hamer, and here the debt Lucas Moodysson owes is obvious. The top image also reminds me of the Dardennes' L'enfant (below):

Hidden London: Richmond's Chilean revolutionary

2011-06-27T05:45:00.003+01:00

Late last summer, as part of celebrations to mark 200 years of Chilean independence, a group of dignitaries gathered beside Richmond Bridge to commemorate the man who contributed to the country's liberation from Spain. Bernardo O'Higgins was the illegitimate son of a Spanish officer himself born in Ireland, Ambrosio O'Higgins, and Chilean Isabel Riquelme. The couple never married and Bernardo had little to do with his father.

From the age of 16 to 18, Bernardo was sent to school at Clarence House, The Vineyard, in Richmond (pictured above). In London he is said to have become instilled with a sense of national pride and, in 1810, he became one of those who supported independence in his country. At last year's ceremony at the site of this bust in O'Higgins Square (top), the Chilean chargé d'affaires, Rodrigo Espinosa, said: 'Our country is celebrating her 200 years of independence and one could say that, to a certain extent, the whole story could have started here, in leafy Richmond.'

Related: revolutionary watering holes in wartime London

Hidden London: Anton Walbrook's grave

2011-06-21T06:38:00.009+01:00

Emigré Austrian actor Anton Walbrook featured as the master of ceremonies in Max Ophüls' La ronde (1950) and was a particular favourite of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, starring in 49th Parallel (1941), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and, most memorably, as the impresario Boris Lermontov in The Red Shoes (1948), alongside Moira Shearer. He manages to be sad and dashing, which is probably why I like him.

Walbrook's final resting place (pictured top) is in the extension of St-John-at-Hampstead, NW3, tucked neatly beside the grave of George du Maurier (above). Both can be seen easily from Church Row, while nearby lie the graves of actors Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Kay Kendall; the main churchyard is home to the tombs of two Johns, Constable and Harrison (below, click for larger version), inventor of the marine chronometer.

Related: Jean Cocteau murals off Leicester Square

The films of Pierre Etaix, Part Two

2011-06-15T07:10:00.003+01:00

For his second feature, Yoyo (1965, 92 mins), French filmmaker Pierre Etaix entered his favoured world of the circus. (In 1973 he set up a circus school in France with wife Annie Fratellini, who was from a famous circus family.) Following the 1929 economic crash - and at the introduction of sound - a bored industrialist (Etaix) runs off with the mother of his son to form their own mini circus; the son grows up to become a famous clown, Yoyo, who dreams of restoring the old family château.

Etaix demonstrates his sound ear and balanced eye, though Yoyo's not quite as visually rich as Le soupirant, with its lovely scenes of Paris; typically, the director never quite allows himself a full-on happy ending. There are daring tributes to Groucho Marx and Charlie Chaplin and a tiny animation that would no doubt thrill avowed fan Terry Gilliam. Another fan, François Truffaut, wrote to Etaix after seeing Yoyo: 'It's a beautiful film in which I loved every shot and every idea, and which taught me many things about movies.' That's not bad, is it?

Etaix's first colour movie, and the best full-length introduction to his magical sensibility, Le grand amour (The Great Love; 1969, 85 mins), was followed by an assemblage of four sketches, Tant qu'on a la santé (As Long As You're Healthy; 1966/'71, 65 mins), in black-and-white and colour. It has some nice touches but rises to its peak in the last segment, Nous n'irons plus aux bois, which lays bare in sepia tones city folks' countryside idyll.

Etaix spent seven months assembling 4km of footage of the French on holiday alongside interviews on subjects as various as sexuality, advertising and the director himself, for his final conventional movie, Pays de Cocagne (Land of Milk and Honey; 1971, 80 mins). The result proved to be at odds with France's self-image post May 1968 - his camera seems more jaded than usual - and it proved to be his final conventional movie, a foray into the Omnimax format with old partner Jean-Claude Carrière in 1989 notwithstanding.

The films of Pierre Etaix, Part One

2011-06-14T07:05:00.017+01:00

Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki was unfortunate not to be officially recognised among a remarkably strong line-up at Cannes this year. His was one of many welcome returns, not least because his new movie, Le Havre, features remarkable French director Pierre Etaix (pictured above, left). Etaix was fêted at Cannes last year when his masterpiece Le grand amour (The Great Love, 1969) was screened by way of highlighting the restoration of his tremendous back catalogue of five features, long lost amid contractual constrictions and to the effects of time on film stock.

Trained as an artist, Etaix served a form of apprenticeship on Jacques Tati's Mon oncle (1958). Etaix illustrated a novelisation of Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot by Jean-Claude Carrière (also 1958) and the duo continued to collaborate on all of Etaix's best work, starting with perfect short, Rupture (1961); a second, Heureux anniversaire (Happy Anniversary), won the Oscar for best short film in 1963. (Carrière has gone on to work with Luis Buñuel, Milos Forman, Jonathan Glazer, Michael Haneke, Philip Kaufman, Louis Malle and Volker Schlöndorff, among many others.)

Rupture introduced Etaix's perennial character - the writer-director starred in his first four features - the dapper, slightly dreamy office worker. It was a role he developed for his first full-length film, Le soupirant (The Suitor; 1963, 83 mins). Le soupirant shares many themes with Etaix's best film, Le grand amour: the bourgeois lead lives at home with his parents; in the pursuit of love a series of misunderstandings occurs. The film features a notably discordant soundtrack and is at its most exuberant when Etaix gives rein to his clown's instincts. Elsewhere are the familiar sleight of hand and moments of inspired fantasy featuring automated objects.

Part two follows tomorrow…

Hidden London: Jean Cocteau in the West End

2011-06-13T06:32:00.007+01:00

I was once lucky enough to visit the sixteenth-century Saint-Pierre chapel in the south of France, famous for its murals, painted in the mid-1950s by Jean Cocteau. The French writer, artist and filmmaker was inspired, I seem to remember, by the connection between the fishing town (the chapel had been used as storage for fish until its restoration) and Christ's disciple as a fisher of men and fisherman himself, plus Django Reinhardt. There are some great pictures of it here.

If you can't travel that far don't worry, for there's another Cocteau mural just off Leicester Square, next door to the Prince Charles cinema. Cocteau completed a few of these works towards the end of his life and, in 1959, he tackled a side chapel in the Church of Notre Dame de France, newly rebuilt after it had been destroyed by bombing in World War II. There are all sorts of conspiracy theories surrounding the artist's imagery but look out for his self-portrait, turning away from the cross. There's a stream of photos here.

Related: literary lives behind Charing Cross Station

A new Lund

2011-06-07T06:25:00.010+01:00

Those suffering withdrawal since the end of triumphant Danish TV series The Killing, may be tempted to check out Swedish detective Irene Huss, based on writer Helene Tursten's character. An introduction for English-language thriller fans comes in publisher Soho Crime's Detective Inspector Huss. The cover to the 2003 edition brands it 'Sweden's Prime Suspect', though no doubt the dabs of Scandinavia's finest, Sarah Lund, would be all over the book if it were published now.

Forty-year-old Irene Huss is admittedly less of a mess than lovely Lund - Huss is a judo-practising, happily married mother of teen twin girls. The crime is different, too: a wealthy businessman falls to his death from his apartment block, although there is the ever-present interference from superiors on such a sensitive case.

The bleak Göteborg atmosphere compares with the Copenhagen of The Killing, then there is Huss's dress sense: 'black jeans, down-filled poplin jacket, and […] red wool sweater'. There is a Lund here, Huss's colleague Håkan, who brims with initiative.

A procedural in the style of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck series (also set in Sweden), there's the occasional nice change of perspective: 'Since the major renovation a few years ago, Göteborg's Central Station is quite a beautiful place to visit. The dark, polished woodwork of the walls, benches, and pillars creates a turn-of-the-twentieth-century atmosphere. But the crowded flow of travelers, the stoned junkies, and the the winos asleep on the benches are the same as always. The ticket line is the same too, even if nowadays it's computerized with little paper numbers and digital displays above each ticket window.'

A (Swedish) TV series of Detective Inspector Huss mysteries kicked off in 2007 - the slightly grim trailer for the first instalment is here - starring Angela Kovács (pictured), who was also a regular in the Krister Henriksson Wallander series, currently rescreening on BBC4. Six new 90-minute episodes of Irene Huss are due to air in Sweden this autumn - worth picking up, anyone?

Hidden London: human fat for sale

2011-06-06T06:13:00.004+01:00

Reporting plans by Sir David Attenborough - 'the most trusted person in Britain ' - to develop the abandoned pub next door to his home in Richmond, Surrey, the Daily Mail fails to mention the property's grisly link to a notorious crime. The 'Barnes mystery' attracted attention when human body parts were found in a box in the Thames - eventually the trail led to a disaffected, alcoholic maid, Kate Webster, who was hanged for killing her mistress.

Webster went to work for Julia Thomas at 2 Vine Cottages, Park Road, Richmond, in January 1897. Webster had been in and out of prison over the years and though she and Mrs Thomas initially got on well, their relationship soon deteriorated. In a row after drinking, Webster is said to have attacked her employer and strangled her; the maid then chopped up Mrs Thomas's body and boiled many of the parts.

She disposed of some in a box from Hammersmith Bridge - a coal man who found it the next morning reported his discovery at Barnes police station, hence the crime's popular nickname. In an even more grim development, Webster is said to have sold the human body fat at the Hole in the Wall pub on Park Road for use as dripping.

The ensuing trial was complicated by the lack of Mrs Thomas's head but a recent news story reveals a human skull was found during work to redevelop the Hole in the Wall as part of David Attenborough's home. Unfortunately, I can't find confirmation that this was the missing piece of the widow's body, though Attenborough has received permission to turn the former pub's beer garden into a 'wildlife haven'.

UPDATE On 5 July it was confirmed that the skull belonged to Julia Thomas.

Related: naked ladies in Twickenham

Cannes' biggest winners

2011-06-03T06:11:00.004+01:00

Here's a slightly longer version of a piece I did for French film channel Cinémoi's free Cannes app (which features exclusive pictures, video content and more):

Belgians Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are among a handful of directors – including Francis Ford Coppola, Emir Kusturica and Shohei Imamura – to have twice won the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. Following Rosetta (1999) and L’enfant (The Child, 2005), it could have been third time lucky this year but The Kid with a Bike received Cannes’ second prize, the Grand Prix.

Danish provocateur Lars von Trier was banned this year following an ill-advised Nazi rant, but he has won the festival’s top three prizes: the Palme d’Or for Dancer in the Dark (2000), the Grand Prix for Breaking the Waves (1996) and the jury prize for Europa back in 1991.

Both directors serve their actors well, too: Émilie Dequenne and Olivier Gourmet have been rewarded for their roles in the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta (pictured) and Le fils (The son, 2002), respectively, while Björk (Dancer…), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Antichrist, 2009) and Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia, this year) have scooped the best actress award for their roles in von Trier movies.

Another director who serves his women stars well is Pedro Almodóvar, also back this year with The Skin I Live In, starring Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya. Almodóvar's female ensemble for Volver, including Penélope Cruz and Carmen Maura, won the best actress award in 2006. But the festival’s biggest winners came in 1955 when the entire cast of Russian drama Bolshoya Semya (A Big Family) shared the - male and female - best acting prizes.

Hidden London: Craven Street, WC1

2011-06-02T06:16:00.000+01:00

You're likely lost, or looking for the College of Optometrists, to stumble upon this unprepossessing street, hemmed in as it is by Charing Cross station, the Strand and Embankment. But a few plaques commemorate the literary minds that have passed through.

For nearly 20 years from 1757, Benjamin Franklin lived at No 36, during which time he wrote extensively (including starting his autobiography in 1771), attempted to mediate between Britain and America, was postmaster for the colonies, and pursued scientific and medical discoveries, including charting the Gulf Stream. Franklin returned to America in 1775 in time for revolution, and his Georgian home is now a museum (above). Bones found during the conservation and thought to belong to an anatomy school on the site are on show in the basement.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Herman Melville toured Europe to negotiate publishing contracts, when he stayed in a boarding house at No 25 (above). In spring 1827, 29-year-old German poet Heinrich Heine (his date of birth appears to be wrong on this plaque, below) stayed at another hostel at No 32 when he travelled to England to escape controversy following the publication of a second volume of his popular travel journals, Reisebilder. (The year had also seen the publication of his Buch der Lieder, one of the most successful poetry books ever published in Germany.)

Heine had a mixed experience of the capital, reflected by visitors to this day no doubt: 'It is snowing outside, and there is no fire in my chimney... I am very peevish and ill to boot,' he wrote to a friend. 'London has surpassed all my expectations as to its magnificence, but I have lost myself. Living is terribly dear, so far I have spent more than a guinea a day... It is so fearfully damp and uncomfortable here, and no one understands me, and no one understands German.'

Tintin in retirement

2011-06-01T05:40:00.019+01:00

Plenty has been written about the central place in Hergé's life and oeuvre of Tintin in Tibet (1960) - a biography due out in October promises a special focus on the story. The perfect Tintin album, however, must be Tibet's immediate successor: The Castafiore Emerald (1963).

Tintin in Tibet came at a time when Hergé suffered from eczema and insomnia - his dreams were dominated by eerie white spaces he transferred into the book. Hergé's marriage was collapsing and a Jungian psychologist advised him to stop drawing his hero - instead he created one of his most powerful books, revisiting one of Tintin's (and Hergé's) oldest friends, Tchang.

Penned 32 years after the boy reporter's first appearance, The Castafiore Emerald (pictured) is no less personal: Hergé wanted to stay home with his new, second, wife, and restricted his hero to Marlinspike Hall - there was to be no running around the world for this adventure. But the author's cartoon alter ego Captain Haddock has no peace: he is confined to a wheelchair after tripping on a broken step, has to tolerate a visit from the formidable Bianca Castafiore and still the stair is not fixed (by a character named in the French after a real builder with whom Hergé had problems, M Boullu).

Hergé's line is the purest of any of the books, as Tintin and co attempt to recover one of the diva's missing jewels amid a stream of red herrings. In his book Tintin: Hergé and his Creation, Harry Thompson quotes the writer saying: 'My ambition was to try and tell a tale in which absolutely nothing happened, simply to see whether I was capable of keeping the reader's attention to the end.'

In the final two (completed) books - Flight 714 (1968) and Tintin and the Picaros (1976) - Hergé reintroduces several old characters, including General Alcazar, Colonel Sponz, Rastapopoulos, Captain Allan and Piotr Skut, but all the favourites are reunited for The Castafiore Emerald: Professor Calculus, the Thompsons and Castafiore herself. The premature idyll heaps further irritations on Captain Haddock, however - pursued by paparazzi, bitten by a parrot (twice) and stung by a bee. Though Hergé took his time to produce the final albums, it was time for Tintin to travel once more.

Related: Tintin in Arabia

Hidden London: naked ladies in Twickenham

2011-05-31T06:24:00.002+01:00

When Mohamed al-Fayed unveiled his kitsch tribute to Michael Jackson at Craven Cottage, Peter Watts posted on London's worst statues. I forgot to suggest this extraordinary collection installed in York House Gardens, Twickenham, by the building's last private owner, Parsee prince Sir Ratan Tata, who paid £600 for them in 1909. The statuary is said to have been brought to Britain from Italy by financier Whitaker Wright, who killed himself using cyanide - in court - on being found guilty of fraud in 1904.

Following Tata's death, the main building was acquired in 1924 by the London Borough of Richmond and Twickenham for its council offices but the statues were left to fend for themselves, covered with obscene graffiti and apparently painted over in the Second World War so German bombers couldn't use moonlight reflected off the white Carrara marble to guide them up the Thames. The figures were restored in the late 1980s - this lady seems unperturbed by the plight of her friend:

Ha!

2011-05-30T10:06:00.007+01:00

Jonas Milk has given way on this blog - I've been inadvertently outed by this poster for a tremendous new film, see top left (click for larger image). It's not even my quote.

Street art week: Part2ism

2011-05-27T06:39:00.001+01:00

Soundtrack imaginaire

2011-05-27T01:49:00.004+01:00

Xavier Dolan's unrequited ménage à trois film Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires), starring Monia Chokri, Niels Schneider and Dolan himself (pictured right to left), opens today. Artfully shot, if empty and irritating, it boasts probably the best (non-original) soundtrack I've ever heard, including Swedish band The Knife's steel drum electro runaround Pass This On, sibling offshoot Fever Ray's Keep the Streets Empty for Me and Bach's Cello Suite No 1 in G Major, BWV 1007. Highlights are outings for 3ième sexe by cult French '80s band Indochine, Isabelle Pierre's Le temps est bon and Dalida's Italian-language cover of Bang Bang, though unfortunately the last aren't available on iTunes in the UK.

Street art week: Stik stuff

2011-05-26T06:24:00.015+01:00

Stik is at LAVA Gallery in central London from today until 4 June. Here's a piece of his I particularly like on Brick Lane, and here's the man himself at work.

Street art week: found paintings

2011-05-25T06:01:00.004+01:00

Street art should be left where people see it but occasionally works are left out deliberately with the intention that they be collected. A friend dismissed some pieces by Adam Neate only to discover she could have picked up something of value for nothing - he was giving them away.

I was lucky enough to see this picture by MisterMN (above), with the following note on the back: 'Act 27, London 2009 - This Item is part of the London Street Art Collection and must be reported as soon as it has been found.' I contacted the email listed and received an extremely gracious reply confirming the piece was mine to enjoy. I'm a big fan of his work and have always been rather chuffed with my find.

Street art week: mighty ROA

2011-05-24T06:52:00.006+01:00

Street art week: wall memorials

2011-05-23T16:15:00.007+01:00

As graffiti around Shoreditch inevitably gives way to pristine walls, the latest trend is to memorialise significant sites with framed reproductions of the popular images that had adorned the spot (above). And, as with the best street art, there are those who try and remove these latest decorations however determinedly afixed:

Here is Boot Street in its heyday:

Dark Times in Hackney

2011-05-20T04:42:00.008+01:00

Daniel Kramb gave a reading of his first novel, Dark Times, at the lovely Sutton House Book Brunchers yesterday. Set against the backdrop of the financial crisis, the book is steeped in Hackney's streets, bars and clubs. Here's an interview we did earlier this year:

What was the inspiration for the book? When I started writing Dark Times, back in 2007, I set out to tell a story about four East Londoners. Getting into these people was a way for me to make sense of my own confusion, my place in the world. Then, in 2008, “the crisis” hit. Suddenly, everything seemed to collapse but at the same time there was, I thought, a great chance in front of our eyes. I wanted to capture that particular moment in time, and I wanted to tell the whole thing in a very intense, distinct style, which I had played around with for some time.

Dark Times has a very specific sense of place - how important is that to you? Very important. The book has four characters but the most important one might well be its fifth, and that’s East London, or Hackney, more specifically. It’s the one aspect of the book that was never in question, I wanted to write a love letter to this part of the city.

At one point in the book, you say, 'If you walked a street often enough, it became part of you'. How are your characters formed by their environment? That’s Sarah, the journalist in the book, and at that point she has started to walk up and down Stoke Newington High Street, something I used to do a lot. Whether we consciously feel it or not, I think we are formed - or at least greatly influenced - by our surroundings. It’s definitely true for the book’s characters: the idealistic Max, who is also a keen walker, is fed, if you like, by Clapton street life, and the park benches of Hackney Downs reinforce his constant state of waiting; Jonathan simply couldn’t function without the bars of Shoreditch and Dalston; for the struggling artist Lizzie, Ridley Road Market is both a source of great inspiration, and a constant reminder of her unstable, precarious life. But I think this is always a two-way process, a dialogue, between people and place.

You wrote a first draft of Dark Times when you lived in Hackney and then rewrote it when living abroad, in Amsterdam. How did that affect what you wrote? I think it helped: being taken out of your usual surroundings is always a kick-start for fresh thinking, so that was good for the rewriting process. More importantly, I started being terribly homesick for Hackney - it wasn’t about Amsterdam, I liked being there - but I had all these flashes of streets, sounds and smells hitting me out of nowhere. So I found myself sitting in a tiny attic overlooking the river Amstel, early in the morning, conjuring up the dirt of Dalston Lane, the coffee smell inside Café Oto, or the busy Shacklewell Lane junction seen from behind a late-night Turkish soup at Somine.

Dark Times is available on Amazon and at various bookstores (details in the first link on this post).

London on film: five great musicals

2011-05-18T06:16:00.009+01:00

1. The Young Ones (1961)

Freewheeling fun as Cliff Richard's Nicky and chums, including Melvyn Hayes and The Shadows, use pirate radio to promote a fundraising concert to save their youth club. The catch? The evil property developer threatening their venue is Nicky's dad (played by Robert Morley). It spawned further big-screen outings for Cliff and The Shadows in quick succession: Summer Holiday (1963), Wonderful Life (1964) and Finders Keepers (1966). Key location: Paddington

2. My Fair Lady (1964)

Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion premiered on Broadway in 1956. Original star Rex Harrison reprised his role as confirmed bachelor 'enry 'iggins for the film version, which also stars Audrey Hepburn, whose singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon. Key location: Covent Garden, pictured

3. Absolute Beginners (1986)

Pop video director and documentarist Julien Temple created a colourful 1950s London for this adaptation of the first book in Colin MacInnes's great trilogy. Musicians David Bowie, Ray Davies, Smiley Culture, Tenpole Tudor and Sade star and contribute to the soundtrack, among others. Leads Patsy Kensit and Eddie O'Connell are disappointing in a likeable, if mistimed, gamble. Key location: Soho

4. Mary Poppins (1964)

Never mind Dick Van Dyke's defining accent or Juile Andrews' terrifying mumsiness, this is all about David Tomlinson's lovely turn as the put-upon banker who doesn't dare turn his back on the corporate world. Includes songs Chim-Chim-Cheree, A Spoonful of Sugar and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Key location: the Bank of England

5. Oliver! (1968)

Lionel Bart's adaptation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist took to the London stage in 1960, before being revived more recently in the West End with famous names in the controversial Fagin role. Star Mark Lester can be spotted as a schoolboy in François Truffaut's Ray Bradbury adaptation Fahrenheit 451 (1966). Key location: The Thames

Wartorn London (and elsewhere) on film

2011-05-17T06:19:00.004+01:00

While writing about empty London, I realised I have a fascination for movies shot in post-war wastelands. In that post's Seven Days to Noon (1950), the central character hides among bomb-damaged buildings in the City. On another occasion I wrote about Jacques Tourneur's Berlin Express (1948), much of which was filmed amid the devastation wrought by the allied bombing of Berlin and Frankfurt.

One year later, Orson Welles used real Viennese locations for The Third Man, including the Riesenrad, where Harry Lime famously damns 500 years of Swiss brotherly love. Roman Polanski used CGI to create one of cinema's most dramatic visions of war damage in The Pianist (2002), when the camera lifts to reveal the alien landscape of an annihilated Warsaw.

Back in London in 1949, a bombed site in Lambeth became the setting for Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico, although the war-damaged buildings featured in the film are sets. Stanley Kubrick stretched this MO further when he filmed the battle scenes for his Vietnam war movie Full Metal Jacket (1987) - in the Isle of Dogs and the Royal Docks (pictured).

Schlock city: The Curious Dr Humpp (1969)

2011-05-16T05:38:00.006+01:00

Inspired by H Writer, Haggered's And Now The Screening Starts posts, I had planned to write about The Curious Dr Humpp (La venganza del sexo) on Friday the 13th but unfortunately Blogger was down. The next Friday the 13th isn't till January, so I hope you'll forgive the indulgence in posting now about this awful Argentinian sexploitation movie, which opens with a canoodling couple being chloroformed before we jump to a lesbian couple getting it on. A drunk man leaving a club, a masturbating woman, a stripper in a jazz club and four dope-smokers are the next to be kidnapped by a bizarrely masked automaton in silver platform boots.

These 'latent nymphomaniacs' are subjects in a bizarre experiment conducted by the impassive Dr Humpp to uncover the key to human sexual experience, in part to preserve his own life. 'Can they stand another extraction?' the mad scientist asks his libidinous assistant (pictured). 'The girl can, she's still strong enough,' is the reply, 'that poor man's got nothing left now.'

The police and a journalist are soon on the doctor's trail but not before we're exposed to more titillating goings on, including a bizarre scene with the monster serenading the drugged test subjects in the laboratory's grounds. Weirder yet, Dr Humpp is revealed to be in thrall to another: a talking brain in a jar (director Emilio Vieyra is especially taken with bubbling lab ephemera, strategically placed to obscure the bumping and grinding).

Johnnysugar on IMDb comments that many of the slightly more explicit sex scenes were added by the film's US distributor, which goes some way to explaining the dubbed, English-language print's non-uniform feel, though many of the original's outdoor scenes look as if they were recorded on different, faded, stock. Utter rubbish, although the militaristic elements are intriguingly authentic and it does deliver all manner of remarkable dialogue, including the zinger: 'Sex dominates the world, and now I dominate sex!'

London on film: the blank canvas

2011-05-12T06:55:00.001+01:00

The most famous images of London on the big screen are fragmentary, illusory even: the blue door of Notting Hill (1999), Newman Passage at the beginning of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), the Bank of England in Mary Poppins (1964), or the rooftop sets from the same film. This may be because we have very little interaction with the capital's best-known icons in our day-to-day life, unlike the Disney-fied characters in the live-action version of 101 Dalmations (1996), say. The capital's streets don't always offer the best views of landmarks - unlike Paris - and, as amateur photographers know, it's difficult to capture the bustle of crowds on camera.

My favourite depiction of London's streets and buildings comes in the Boulting brothers' Seven Days to Noon (1950), when the city has to be evacuated after a scientist threatens to detonate a bomb if the government doesn't halt nuclear research. It may well have served as inspiration for the deserted scenes in Danny Boyle's zombie thriller 28 Days Later... 52 years later: compare the shot from 28 Days, top, with the - very small, sorry - image from Seven Days, below.

While these two films show off London's landmarks to best effect they also capture Londoners' psyche: in such metropolitan Hollywood disaster movies as Independence Day (1996) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004) people are shown coming together in the face of apocalypse. We, on the other hand, want nothing less than the city to ourselves.

Related: London Underground on film

Killing jokes

2011-05-10T06:27:00.009+01:00

A friend happily recommended Albert Cossery's short 1964 novel The Jokers, a very funny satire on a dictatorial Arab governor. Cairo-born Cossery died in Paris a few years ago aged 94, having lived most of his life on the fourth floor of the same St Germain hotel - La Louisiane. He produced less than one book for each decade of his life.

The cover (pictured) for the NYRB's translation (from French), by Iranian photographer Abbas, is presumably an image of Syrian ruler Hafez al-Assad and underlines the book's continued relevance. An obvious parallel is Milan Kundera's The Joke (1967), which also takes for its starting point authoritarian states' fear of mockery.

Cossery's philosophy is closer to that of the pleasure-seeking Tomas in Kundera's most famous work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), though The Jokers' mordant denouement shows there's nothing more serious than humour. I'll definitely be looking up more work by Cossery, thanks for the tip, Andrew!

Related: Tintin in Arabia