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OUT NOW in Blu-ray and DVD editions: Yûzô Kawashima’s 1957 classic, <a href=“http://www.eurekavideo.co.uk/moc/catalogue/bakumatsu-taiyo-den/“><b>Bakumatsu taiyô-den</b></a> [A Sun-Tribe Myth from the Bakumatsu Era]. This is the debut of Kawashima on disc in the West — and what a debut it is. Bakumatsu taiyô-den has consistently been heralded one of the greatest Japanese films of all-time, garnering the #5 spot in the influential Kinema junpô’s 1999 best-of-Japanese-cinema poll. This is a particularly exciting release for us, as the film has long been requested for a DVD or Blu-ray release — and we are proud to help expand, even in a modest way, exposure to the canon of Japanese masters. When the great studio Nikkatsu (a long-time MoC collaborator) celebrated their 100th anniversary in 2011, it was this new restoration of Kawashima’s raucous brothel comedy, Bakumatsu taiyô-den, that opened the festivities.

In addition to the new HD restoration of the film (in 1080p on the Blu-ray) in its original aspect ratio, and newly translated optional English subtitles, our edition includes a 36-PAGE BOOKLET featuring a new and exclusive essay by critic and Japanese cinema scholar Frederick Veith, a testimonial of Kawashima by his protégé and collaborator Shôhei Imamura, and rare and archival imagery. This release is a can’t-miss.

Coming in May: Clouzot’s debut L’Assassin habite au 21 and The Complete (Existing) Films of Sadao Yamanaka.

In the first partnership of its kind, Audible and Granta magazine are collaborating on the unabridged audiobook production of Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4, which was released via audible.co.uk and audible.com on 16 April. The wider aims of the partnership are to broaden the audience for literary fiction through a new, accessible format and to encourage writers to engage with spoken word from the start of their careers. In this short film deputy editor of Granta, Ellah Allfrey, offers a glimpse of how the list was created, and writers from the issue discuss why reading aloud enhances their work and what it was like to get the call saying they had been selected.

Nadifa Mohamed

Granta Best of Young British Novelist 4: Nadifa Mohamed from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

In the second of three specially commissioned short films celebrating Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 4, we introduce you to Nadifa Mohamed, who was born in Somalia and raised in South London. Mohamed’s first novel Black Mamba Boy (which was shortlisted for numerous prizes and won the Betty Trask Award) was inspired by the life of her father who was forced to leave Somalia and set out on an odyssey that brought him to the UK. Here we join her as she explores Shepherd’s Bush Market, where there is a large Somali community, hear about her next novel (excerpted in the issue) and learn why she wants to be the griot, or storyteller, of the London she grew up in.

You can also watch the first in this series of short films, on Adam Foulds.

Commissioned in collaboration with the British Council.

Directed and produced by The Film Atelier.

 

Erschütterlich ist der Mann, den Pierre Etaix spielt - irgendwo zwischen Tati und Mr. Bean -, und erschüttert wird er. Einer, der sich seiner eigenen Fantasie ebenso ausgeliefert fühlt wie der Dingwelt. Erstere malt sich Vampirfantasien lebensecht aus; letztere tickt (Episode 1) und rüttelt (Episode 3), kommt in die Quere (immerzu, als Drahtzaun zum Beispiel, Episode 4), zerfällt unter den Händen, entzieht sich und kehrt als noch nicht mal Verdrängtes zurück. Vielmehr ist das Alltägliche immerzu fremd oder wird es. Eine zerrüttelte Welt, von der Kamera, die gerne völlig unbewegt bleibt, nüchtern notiert; ja, eigentlich muss man sagen, dass unter diesem Blick auch die Menschen zur Dingwelt gehören, weil sie Eigenleben haben, ohne Subjekte zu sein. Sie rennen, trampeln, essen, gehen ins Kino, machen einen Ausflug ins Grüne: wie du und ich. Was sie aber antreibt, was sie empfinden, was sie anderes sind oder wären als Ess- und Renn- und Trampelmaschinen - das ist, und zwar ohne die Nostalgie von Tati, die Frage im Innern der Komik von Pierre Etaix. (80cp)

IMDB - Stills

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From the Chicago Reader (August 10, 2001). — J.R. There’s certainly a lot more footage — 53 minutes, to be precise — which makes this better in certain ways than the original Apocalypse Now, though the flaws are also magnified. (Kurtz’s Cambodian savages slaughtering a caribou — actually, it’s a Filipino ceremony — and kneeling before [...]

News.

• The lineup for the 52nd Semaine de la Critique as well as the 2013 Selection for Quinzane des Réalisateurs in Cannes have been announced. Also from Cannes: Kim Novak is set to be a guest of honour to mark a screening of the recently restored Vertigo.

• Above: The omniscient Twitter has revealed the first image behind the scenes of Abel Ferrara's new film featuring Gérard Depardieu as Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

• David Cronenberg has begun casting his next project, Maps to the Stars. The first names involved? Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Robert Pattinson and Sarah Gadon.

• Two of MUBI's very own are in different (early) stages of realizing film projects. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky has started shooting Ellie Lumme (production pictured above), having partly funded it via GoFundMe. Also head over to Vishnevetsky's blog for updates. Meanwhile, Kurt Walker (co-director of programming for MUBI Canada, Australia & New Zealand) is crowd-funding over at Indiegogo for Hit2Pass, a film that he's directing along with Tyson Storozinski—check the pitch video and the campaign here.

Finds.

• Above: the trailer for Asghar Farhadi's The Past, which is set to debut in competition at Cannes next month.

• Marcel Hanoun's filmography is online for free on Vimeo.

• Above: from a stunning spread of photos from an issue of LIFE titled Teenage Wasteland: Japanese Youth in Revolt, 1964 comes this photograph by Michael Rougier. The original caption reads: "Kako, languid from sleeping pills she takes, is lost in a world of her own in a jazz shop in Tokyo." The series holds in vivid still life a generation brought to the big screen in films of the era by Yoshishige Yoshida, Yasuzo Masumura, Imamura, Oshima, Kō Nakahira and others.
   
• Featureshoot has discovered a new project by photographer Reiner Riedler. Titled The Unseen Seen, it is "a series of macro shots of original filmrolls" sourced from The Deutsche Kinemathek. Below you can see a roll for Christian Petzold's Ghosts (2005):

• Over at Cinema Scope Online, Michael Sicinski has a report on Toronto's Images Festival:

"Unlike most other showcases of experimental film and video, Images has been integrating gallery and museum work into its presentations pretty much since it began back in 1988. In this respect, Images has quietly blazed the trail that festivals such as Rotterdam, Berlin, and even Sundance have chosen to follow, encompassing not just screenwork destined for theatrical presentation but also media installation, projection-based performance, as well as single-screen environmental works that demand in-gallery monitor looping, the better to highlight their inherent non-linearity and remove the cognitive cues of “start” and “finish” implicit in a seated screening.

Images, doing its level best to avoid all but the most basic boundaries of genre, divides itself into two programmes only: “On Screen” and “Off Screen.” The festival has been ahead of the curve in combining these modes within a single institutional aegis. Moving through the various spaces Images encompasses, one can certainly sense that Executive Director Scott Miller Berry’s overall vision is expansive and artist-driven, following “screen culture” as it’s currently evolving."

Above: the Polish poster by Maurycy Stryjecki for Pierre Etaix's The Suitor.

• Criterion Collection's Current blog is thoughtfully hosting a piece by Notebook columnist David Cairns on The Return of Etaix. Regular readers of Cairns will remember that he did some preliminary exploration of Pierre Etaix's wonderful comedies in his column The Forgotten. (Adrian Curry has likewise highlighted the director's posters, one of which you can see above.)

From the archives.

• Above: because it had somehow evaded me until last week, here's an amazing video shot by Jonas Mekas of Harmony Korine tap-dancing.

Photo storage and organization service Trovebox announced today that they added support for storing your photos at archive.org.  Or as they put it:

 

 

Check out their announcement.  We’re excited to host their patrons’ photos and keep them safe.

...in der ein Bauer seinen Spaten nicht an die Kooperative abgeben will; zunächst meint er zum Kooperativenvertreter, bald müsse er dann wohl auch seine Kleider abgeben und auch seine Schuhe, er würde dann schließlich nackt enden. "Wie ein Hund" fügt er hinzu und im gleichen Moment läuft hinter ihm tatsächlich ein Hund durchs Bild, seelenruhig. Und es ist nicht ganz klar (zumindest nicht nach einmaligem Sehen), ob der Hund der Anlass für diesen Zusatz war, oder ob er als eine Art "Beweis" zufällig im Bild anwesend ist, wie durch höhere Gewalt herbeigerufen. Ob der echte Hund dem Wort "Hund" vorgängig ist, oder auf es folgt.

Die Super-Illu, schreibt sie wenigstens, hat ihre Leser auf „SUPERillu.de“ gefragt: „Jobcenter sollen kranke Hartz-IV-Empfänger stärker kontrollieren. Wer blau macht, muss mit Leistungskürzungen von bis zu 30 Prozent rechnen. Ist das gerecht?“

„Ja“ sagen, wenigstens auf SUPERillu.de und auf den Seiten dieser, so die Eigendarstellung, „meistgelesenen Zeitschrift für Ostdeutschland“:

76 %

Jaja, wir sind schon wirklich ein Volk.

* 

Auf ihren Seiten „heiter bis glücklich“ stellt das ZEIT Magazin gewöhnlich Dinge vor, die der besserverdienende Mensch gewiss nicht braucht, aber doch kaufen soll, damit es wenigstens dem Premium-Sektor des verarbeitenden Gewerbes besser gehe. Und hier sieht man die Alternative zur billigen Kühlbox aus dem Baumarkt:

„Kühlboxen sind normalerweise aus Plastik und hässlich. Dieses Modell aus Metall gibt es in verschiedenen hübschen Pastelltönen bei outofdoors.co.uk.“

Und der pastellene Blauton, der da vorgestellt wird, ist so hässlich, dass ich mich nicht einmal dagegen zu pinkeln wagen würde.

*

Und bei meiner nimmermüden Suche nach der zen-buddhistischen, super-dada, fundamentaldebilistischen Null-Story lässt mich die F.A.Z. selten im Stich. Heute erfahre ich: „Nadya Suleman, nach der Geburt von Achtlingen in Amerika auch als Octomom bekannt, ist wegen Mietschulden heimlich umgezogen“. Sauber! Doch der schönste Satz dieser immerhin 32 Zeilen langen Geschichte kommt zum Schluss. „Auch Sulemans Versuche, das Einkommen der Familie als Stripperin aufzubessern, stießen auf Unverständnis“.

Ganz große Literatur, das! Franzl Kafka wäre vor Neid erblasst, wenn er nicht eh schon so blass gewesen wäre: “Auch Sulemans Versuche, das Einkommen der Familie als Stripperin aufzubessern, stießen auf Unverständnis“.

Auf das Verständnis von F.A.Z.-Lesern darf indes diese Überschrift im Wirtschaftsteil rechnen: „Die Weltbank will extreme Armut bis 2030 ausradieren“.

*

Doch nun noch einmal zurück in den meistgelesenen Osten. Unter „Aktuelles und Wirtschaft“ heißt es in der SuperIllu unter der Rubrik „Aufwärts“: „Halle. Das Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung Halle (IWH) bekommt eine Präsidentin. Die Volkswirtin und Wirtschaftsweise Claudia Buch aus Tübingen wird zum 1.6. das vakante Amt übernehmen. Sie folgt auf Ulrich Blum, der nach massiver Kritik an der Forschungsleistung des Instituts ausgeschieden war“.

Aufwärts geht es also, wenn ein Mann, der Kritik übt, rausgeschmissen wird, und eine Frau an seine Stelle tritt, um den Mangel an Forschungsleistungen zu verwalten? Kim Jong-un, hier können Sie was lernen.

Na ja, dafür gibt’s bei ADLER ja auch „Traumfigur für 39,99“.

Es sind dies Hosen ohne menschlichen Inhalt. Echte Traumfiguren eben. Früher hätte man vielleicht noch „Gespenster“ gesagt.

*

Und irgendwas muss man immer lernen in dieser Kolumne. Also aufgemerkt, liebe Leserin und lieber Leser. Laut einer Stellenanzeige in der ZEIT wird an der Universität zu Köln eine „Juniorprofessur (W1) ohne tenure track für Medienästhetik (Schwerpunkt Musik)“ ausgeschrieben.

Was W1 ist, weiß man ja so ungefähr. Oder doch genau: Grundgehalt 3.926,84 € und „nicht ruhegehaltfähige Zulage nach positiver Evaluation“: 260 €.

Hey, so ein bisschen Medienästhtik mit Schwerpunk Musik kann doch nicht so schwer sein, oder? (Ich habe mal als Einmannband eine Pflastermalerin begleitet.)

Aber was zum Teufel ist ein tenure track?

Wikipedia weiß es: „Tenure-Track bedeutet die Chance, nach einer befristeten Bewährungszeit eine Lebenszeitprofessur (bzw. Stelle auf Lebenszeit) zu erhalten. In der Regel ist damit ein Aufstieg innerhalb des Professorenkollegiums verbunden (typischerweise Assistant – Associate – Full Professor)“.

Okay, verstehe. Es heißt, dass ich wahrscheinlich nach einer Zeit mit 3.926,84 und vielleicht noch 260€, wenn da vernünftig herumevaluiert wird, wieder zurückkehren muss, zur Einmannband und zur Pflastermalerei. Nun, war ohnehin das schönere Leben. (Aber bei 3.926,84 ist vielleicht eine neue Gitarre drin, oder?)

Ted Hodgkinson, Evie Wyld

Continuing a series of podcasts on our Best of Young British Novelists 4, today we bring you an interview with Evie Wyld. Wyld’s first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, which follows the lives of two men, Frank and Leon, who live decades apart but on the same wild coastline in Queensland, Australia, and was shortlisted for numerous awards and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Betty Trask Award. Her second novel All the Birds, Singing, is excerpted in the issue. Here Wyld talks to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about why living in Peckham makes it easier to write about rural Australia, how memory informs her stories and why she can’t write a novel without at least one shark in it.

Author image by Roeloff Bakker.

Booklist Advanced Review

Issue: May 1, 2013

I Hear the Sirens in the Street * (starred review)

McKinty, Adrian (Author)

May 2013. 318 p. Prometheus/Seventh Street, paperback, $15.95. (9781616147877). Prometheus/Seventh Street, e-book, (9781616147884).

A headless torso found in a suitcase presents just the kind of case Detective Inspector Sean Duffy of the Royal Ulster Constabulary wants to pursue, even after he’s ordered to let it go. When the victim is identified as an American poisoned with a rare plant, and the suitcase is found to have belonged to Martin McAlpine—an army reservist and brother of a baronet killed months earlier, presumably by the IRA—the case becomes even more interesting. Especially after the detective who did a perfunctory investigation of McAlpine’s murder reopens that case and is himself murdered.

It’s 1982, when violence in Northern Ireland threatens to escalate after Britain’s invasion of the Falkland Islands pulls away troops that support the RUC. In this pitch-perfect sequel to The Cold Cold Ground (2012), the second in the author’s Troubles Trilogy, Duffy is nearly overwhelmed by politics. This is crime fiction at its best: a police procedural with dialogue that’s crisp and occasionally lighthearted; blistering action that’s often lethal; McKinty’s mordant Belfastian wit; and a protagonist readers won’t want to leave behind when the trilogy ends. 

— Michele Lebe

Elsewhere on Kafila, we have published a 7000 word long response by Madhu Kishwar to Zahir Janmohamad’s open letter to her which appeared on 15 January, followed by Zahir Janmohamad’s response. Perhaps a few things need to be stated here clearly with respect to her ‘response’. It seems to me to violate every tenet of [...]

Kishore Jha is a development professional and is working in the field of children’s rights for the last two decades. This piece was originally published on the NSI blog. सन २०११ में भ्रष्टाचार के खिलाफ अन्ना आन्दोलन में उमड़े हजारों लोगों की तस्वीरें आज भी ज़ेहन में ताज़ा है। उन तस्वीरों को टी वी और [...]

Benjamin Markovits

The first real job I ever had was playing basketball for a minor league team in southern Germany. I was fresh out of college. I knew I wanted to write and I didn’t know how to pay for it. The club was based in Landshut, a small town about an hour from Munich, very pretty, with a famous old church, a river running through it, cobbled streets and crooked houses and biergartensn – all of that – and everybody from the ages of seventeen to forty had gotten the hell out. At least, that’s how it seemed to me.

There was one disco, or maybe two, but the players hung out at a place called the Riverside, where a pizza van used to pull up on Saturday nights, and sell pretty good slices. I went maybe once. My father warned me before I set off about the rough types, real men, I might encounter on the job. These are not the kids you grew up with, he said. Don’t get into any gambling situations. Watch out. And in fact I lost five marks to one of them on a long coach ride, playing Connect 4 to pass the time, with an engineering student from Munich – a six foot nine skinny power forward, who rode the pine for us while finishing his degree.

On fellowship or visa applications, when I have to fill in details of my employment history, I run into the problem of what the job title was. Swing man or three spot or small forward – there are different ways of writing it. But the truth is, I didn’t last long. I wasn’t good enough to have fun. In Landshut I got my ass kicked by guys who were older, tougher, better and for the most part smarter, at least in the relevant ways. Pretty much as soon as I got to Landshut I wanted to quit. A few months before I had been writing essays about The Tempest and the Putney Debates, falling in love with a grad student, throwing Frisbees in the quad, and going out for late-night pastrami sandwiches. In Landshut I got my ass kicked by guys who were older, tougher, better and for the most part smarter, at least in the relevant ways. They wanted it more, as the sports writers say. And every day I had to go to work and face this fact.

There was something depressing about the whole set-up. I made 1800 marks a month, the club gave me an apartment to live in, and we got our meals paid for on the road. This seemed terrific to me – I was a kid. But there were thirty-year-old guys on our team, making not much more money, and living in the same crummy flats. The trouble with being an athlete is that some of the time you have to work so unbelievably hard that the rest of the time you’re not good for much. So my teammates watched videos or played video games all day, sat around, took naps, warmed frozen pretzels in the microwave, and then at night went to work, and sweated their guts out.

I was intensely lonely. I had a lot of free time – between the morning practice, which ended at noon, and the evening practice, which started at eight. But the only people I knew were people I saw too much of already, and so I spent the afternoons on my bike, cruising around the mildly pretty countryside, buying chickens from local farms and putting together roasts, reading all the English-language books they had in the local library. Writing poems, that kind of thing. Sweet melancholy days. And then in the evening I’d get my ass kicked again.

All of this makes sense if you’re winning basketball games, but we weren’t. The reason we had to practice so late and so early is that the coach cost a lot of money, and bought cheap players (like me), and had to bring us up to scratch himself. Also, we shared gym time with a lot of local activities: yoga classes, kids’ ballet, Jazzercise, etc. Often we had to pull their exercise mats off the court before warming up. If you come home sweating at ten each night, then you can’t get to sleep right away. But we also had to wake up early to force down food, otherwise we’d end up puking our breakfasts on court during the morning session. What I mean is, those four hours of work took up the whole day and some of the night.

Boy was I glad to get out of there. A year passed before I could pick up a ball again with pleasure. The short experience left deep scars. Not just the sense of failure. Or the feeling of giving up on what I thought I loved – a game I spent my childhood playing – of giving up on childhood. But the memory of the guys I played with, who really were very good at what they did, talented and dedicated and physically freakishly blessed – toiling away their short working lives, for not much money, in small towns across Europe, where nobody really cares about basketball anyway. ■

Image by acidpix.

Showreel of Ben Markovits in his playing days:

Am letzten Montag in der „Denkerei“ am Oranienplatz in Berlin unter der Überschrift „Asketen des Luxus“ konnte man sich unwillig oder amüsiert von Bazon Brock belehren lassen: etwa über die Abschaffung des Limbo 2007 oder die Herkunft der phrygischen Mütze, sich von der Künstlerin Stephanie Senge von ihren Ideen zur Ermutigung des Konsumenten und ihrer eigenwilligen Version des Ikebana bezaubern lassen oder sich am neuen Buch von Wolfgang Ullrich erfreuen, das von ihm vorgestellt wurde:
Alles nur Konsum. Kritik der warenästhetischen Erziehung, Wagenbach, 2013,
Ullrichs Untersuchungen vieler abergläubischer Praktiken des Konsums, die immer auch mit Ironie betrieben werden, verlieren nicht das aus den Augen, was dieser Praxis ein Ende setzt und die Dinge wieder freigibt. So endet das Buch mit einem Zitat von F. T. Vischer von 1879:
„Es ist auch deswegen in Ordnung, dass der Mensch endlich stirbt, er soll sich schon deswegen gern darein fügen, weil sich mit der Zeit gar zu viel Sach um ihn ansammelt…“

"...most likely he's younger and less experienced than you...""...if that's possible."
(Rawhide, S01E07 "Incident at Barker Springs" R: Charles Marquis Warren)

In this clip, I discuss F. W. Murnau’s seminal silent film “The Last Laugh,” a crucial inspiration for last week’s film, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “A Screaming Man.” The thematic connection is apparent: Both films feature a hotel employee who loses his position due to his advancing age, and whose identity and moral fibre are thereby shattered. Both films face bitter ironies of class and privilege, both reflect sharply on the societies where they’re set—Weimar Germany and Chad, respectively—and both involve the fate of children. In Haroun’s film, when civil war arises the moral stakes suddenly ramp up, becoming mortally high. Murnau was filming in a democracy, albeit a fledgling one, and his vision of inequality and cavalier authority—of the vast contrast between the individual, with his vast dreams and fragile dignity, and the overwhelming, impersonal, implacable force of a society burdened with unquestioned traditions and ruthless habits—virtually shrieks with warnings of impending disaster.

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The most cinematically fruitful schism is the one between the Catholic Church and Protestant denominations. It gave rise to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s epochal blend of the highly inflected and the austerely natural in his 1928 “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” to Jean-Luc Godard’s combination of cinematic passion and suspicion, idolatry and iconoclasm—and, now, it’s the philosophical spark of Terrence Malick’s new film, “To the Wonder,” in which Catholic iconography and Protestant ideals tangle in the American heartland.

I wrote here last week about Malick’s rapturous sense of beauty, rooted in painting and dance, as well as of the rare depths of emotional experience he sounds by replacing character and psychology with archetype and mood. But the director’s intentions are far from the “oceanic” or vaguely spiritual; his metaphysical ideas aren’t cosmic but terrestrial and rich in human implications, and his vision isn’t one of the beyond but of life. “To the Wonder” brings a deeply considered and coherent worldview to the screen, and it’s worth considering the specific substance of Malick’s philosophical, religious, and aesthetic sensibility.

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Adam Foulds

Granta Best of Young British Novelists 4: Adam Foulds from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

In the first of three specially commissioned short films, we take you inside the writing study of one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 4, Adam Foulds. The winner of the Costa Book Award for The Broken Word and shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel The Quickening Maze, here Foulds tells us how he would take long investigative walks of Epping Forest as a young boy who wanted to be a scientist, why he started to write and what attracts him in his work to moments of ‘existential reckoning’.

Commissioned in collaboration with the British Council.

Directed and produced by The Film Atelier.

Christophe Jaffrelot gives us perspective on why Gujarat’s development numbers don’t look as impressive as Gujarat’s economic growth – it’s about Modi’s neglect of the rural: Modi’s policy, over the last 10 years, has benefited the urban middle class more than anybody else. If Gujarat ranks only 11th out of 23 states in terms of [...]