the flicker club film recommendation:
Having two small kids I am overdosing on animated movies. Don't get me wrong, I love a good cartoon, it’s just that I crave a little flesh and blood occasionally. Witness how Disney’s beautiful, but oh so sentimental, 1996 version of the Victor Hugo classic ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ has sent me on a desperate quest to find a copy of the infinitely superior 1939 RKO version.
Directed by William Dieterle, it has often been promoted as Hollywood’s finest hour. The film is luscious, epic and faithful to the source material.
The cast is to die for, with Maureen O’Hara, one of the greatest screen beauty’s ever, a stunning Esmeralda, Sir Cedric Hardwick playing the most insidious and chilling villain in cinema history and last, but certainly not least, the great Charles Laughton transforming himself utterly into the heartbreakingly noble, but physically confounded, Quasimodo.
Every line Laughton delivers stays with you forever:
‘She gave me water, and a little pity’
‘I am as shapeless as the man in the moon’
The bells! The bells!’
‘Sanctuary! Sanctuary!’
It is the kind of towering performance that invites mimicry or subsequent cliché but here it is unique, original and indelible.
Although entirely filmed on the Hollywood backlot, you will not once feel that you are anywhere other than 15th Century France and those thousands of people you see surrounding the Cathedral? All flesh and blood. There’s not a drop of cold, calculated CGI in a 1939 movie.
So, if it's Gargoyles that you're after that sing and dance for a bit of light releif please go over there to 1996, but if you want to be moved to tears as Quasimodo laments to an inanimate effigy, 'Why was I not of stone like thee?', then come with me to 1939.
Clive for the flicker club
the flicker club art exhibition recommendation:
Muybridge was the man who famously proved a horse can fly. Adapting the very latest technology to his ends, he proved his theory by getting a galloping horse to trigger the shutters of a bank of cameras. This experiment proved indisputably for the first time what no eye had previously seen – that a horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at one point in the action of running. Seeking a means of sharing his ground-breaking work, he invented the zoopraxiscope, a method of projecting animated versions of his photographs as short moving sequences, which anticipated subsequent developments in the history of cinema.
the flicker club quotation of the week:
Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind
Dr Seuss
the flicker club reviews:
DAVID BAILEY SCULPTURE +
“Who d’you think you are, David Bailey?” was a line from a classic camera advert. With fame like that as a photographer, Bailey, 72, has now diversified his visual artistry to 3D with some interesting sculptures currently on show at Pangolin London in Kings Cross, next to the new Guardian newspaper. One of London’s few galleries dedicated to exhibiting sculpture. As Bailey himself says: “ I’m not saying I’m a sculptor, I just make images. I don’t take photographs, I make them. And now I’m making something else.”
And make them he does. From miniature skulls in silver to a giant five foot bronze. Some reminiscent of Eduardo Paolozzi, slightly scary, tongues wagging and surreal with an oil can on legs, tribal influences and references to Warhol. Large photographic prints also hung on the gallery walls. Unlike Bailey’s fashion work, comprised of skulls rather than flesh.
Art world bigwigs rubbed shoulders and sipped fizz at the private view. As well as Bailey himself, dressed in his leather jacket, I noticed editor Dylan Jones and Jamie Wood enjoying the event.
This exhibition runs until October 16th 2010 at The Pangolin London
Joel Chant for the flicker club
THE SURREAL HOUSE @ THE BARBICAN
I stood staring at two huge balls, and a staircase leading nowhere and suddenly remembered where I was… The Surreal House exhibition hosted by the Barbican.
The premise of the exhibition looks at Freud’s idea of the house as a symbol of our bodies, and thus our deepest desires, and our own more overt need to see our houses as extensions of our social selves…blimey…but it’s a surrealist exhibition, so what’s it really about…who knows?
Turn a corner as you first enter the space and on display behind bullet proof glass is Sigmund Freud’s office desk chair, a piece of architectural furniture so beautiful and evocative that it only took a moment to think about reaching for the camera to get a slice of it ...
Wait a minute is that a little gallery man really telling me to put my camera back in my bag or is he just a construct . No he really is telling me off. Surely Breton would have told him where to go. I want some pictures, he wants trouble. I tried to warn Daisy and Juliette, to take pictures more surreptitiously due to the heavy security. But neither of them would listen. Juliette was too busy taking a light reading and Daisy was having trouble with her tripod.
Rather abruptly a piano which we’d noticed suspended from the ceiling, suddenly exploded and the keys spilled out with such force that Juliette leapt in the air. This is a weird place.
Daisy leans in to say something and I realise her eyes are made of glue and she’s wearing a lobster for a hat. As I turned to take a further look at the installations I tripped on some otters attached to my feet and glimpsed at myself in the reflection of a Le Corbusier drawing. I was now wearing a moustache fashioned from a fox’s tail and my face appeared to be melting as it slid from its foundations like frogspawn.
The little man who’d first held me to account over photography now noticed I had two accomplices and radioed ahead for back up. From nowhere another little gallery man, slightly more out of shape than the last, appeared. Now the fight was on. As we tried to get photographs of the art they fannied round us desperate to catch us in the act.
Exhausted by the chase we decided to hide out in exhibitions own cinema, while heat abated. We got some front row action and settled down to watched Jacque Tati’s Mon Oncle. I fell asleep and woke up writing this..
Dave Holland for the flicker club
LUCY IN DISGUISE PRESS LAUNCH
As we arrived at Selfridges for Fashions Night Out and a sneak preview of Lily Allen and Sarah Owen's 'Lucy in Disguise', we were handed a cupcake with a masked lady on and a champagne cocktail... Who could ask for anything more!?!
The sequins were ubiquitous. Fathers spilled out of every rail. And the fabric was food for the fingers. But this was just an aperitif of what’s to come... A store in Covent Garden where you can go with friends, buy or high desirable pieces, be given your own party dressing room, a private stylist and sip grey goose cocktails.
For the finishing touches these fashion Goddesses have even thought of a blow dry salon where your tresses will be teased and your make-up applied... You shall go to the ball...
Daisy for the flicker club
LIZA CAMPBELL: DARK BOXES
Imagine the scene – a roomful of art to peruse and enjoy, a sit down roast chicken supper and some bloke giving away chocolate. (Quality stuff too, none of your Dairy Milk) Heaven? Close…W2.
Great Western Studios to be exact and the opening night of the new exhibition from the First Lady of Papered Over Neuroses and Heiress to the Family Misfortune, our very own Liza Campbell.
There are eighty wall-mounted boxes within which various scenes are played out… A crowd of rampaging, wild-eyed Vikings storm through a forest screaming, ‘Death To All Fanatics”. A teletubby hangs by his neck from a light fitting beneath the caption, ‘When The Work Dried Up’. There is also a rather magnificent ‘delinquent doll’s house’ and some beautiful cushions, which it really would be a shame to sit on.
Liza has sliced open the seedy underbelly of life, pulled on her (no doubt fuchsia) marigolds and had a good old rummage around. Just thank God it’s not you that has to get their hands dirty.
This was all followed by a delicious supper whipped up by the flickers own Stephen Williams, in his other guise as caterer to the starving artists of the Great Western Studios... (Pretty much the same as normal...just wearing a pinny).
All in all a delightful evening, good company, excellent food and a roomful of boxes without Noel Edmonds. Come on, for a Tuesday night, what more could you possibly want?
Pete Scott for the flicker club
OUT OF TOWN OPENING
Thursday night. What's the haps? How's about the launch of one of the most anticipated shop openings this side of Christendom. Is that a place or a time? Anyroads, there we all were down Clerkenwell at the opening shindig of lil' John Cooke's new venture 'Out of Town' (shop, bar, cafe, whatever).
There's a vintage Belstaff in the window that has got my name literally running through every single stitch of its waxed fibre. It's unlikely that you're ever going to have to consult a Wedding List for me. In the meantime you can donate funds direct to my account if you feel I should own this jacket. Man up Men, this is the item that will turn me into the kind of guy you all know I can be, (once kitted out in the appropriate apparel, obviously). On top of that we're all popping down for breakfast next Saturday, How Very. That should probably be a lower case V.
No-one needs an excuse to have a few drinks in The Slaughtered Lamb (eeuugh). So lets just drop in for a swift one for the after.....opening? Really, I can't keep up. Butler, Hassey, Gibb, Weatherall, Lindsay and our newest recruit Mr. M. Pergl, (he's so media right now).
My Christmas shopping problems are now wrapped up. What's more Messers Cooke and (his beautiful wife) Rowlands have agreed to produce our next flickbook and poster. Loving their work. Itching to see their new Barbican pad.
Stephen for the flicker club
DUNGENESS according to Clive..
Have you ever been to Dungeness? My God it's bleak. There's a bloody great Nuclear Power Station looming over the barren, windswept wasteland. There's also a couple of Lighthouses, a scattershot collection of ramshackle shacks bordered by a beach of pebbles as large as goose eggs. The whole place has an imposing, oppressive, almost gloomy, all pervading atmosphere.
This place is utterly unapologetic and unique. It sears itself into your soul. It makes you feel as if you're at the start of an adventure just parking the car, which we did adjacent to Derek Jarman's delicious garden. I don't know how to describe the garden other than it gives the impression of being a natural formation, the composition styled by the elements and not the clumsy hand of man. The garden is as raw, bleak and barren as its surroundings and spills out and merges with the landscape with no beginning or end. We loved this haunting place.
There again, let us not forget that Doctor Who, in the form of dear old Jon Pertwee, trammelled these parts when he defeated the threat of The Claws of Axos beneath the very shadow of the Power Station afore mentioned.
If you've never been do take a trip. It will make a lasting impression for good or ill.
DUNGENESS according to Stephen..
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah we’ve all been to Dungeness……
Behold here is my favourite photo of our back to school week on the coast. It might seem to you that it’s just a snap of my friends looking bored but I like to think of it as the promo shot for my new band which I have now christened Jenny and the Wild Wolves.
For future reference if anyone tells you you have to go to The Pilot when in Dungeness, you don’t. It’s a hole, (with apparently what can only be described as a certain naïve charm). Loving my work.
thank you to our special guest bloggers, Mr. Dave Holland, Mr. Pete Scott and Mr. Joel Chant.
lots of love,
