Hipster Cinema

Last night, record hipster densities at Warsaw's MoMA for the opening of film festival Kinomuzeum (remember Larry Clark last year?) and a special showing of Matt Wolf's Teenage.

The film was an astonishingly apt reflection of the audience: a good-looking, humorous and slightly repetitive collage of youth sub-culture (between 1905 and 1945). It also highlighted the truism that whatever their name and purpose, teenage movements are rebellions frequently hijacked by convention and corporatism.

But there are antidotes to cultural cynicism - like the month of free independent cinema ahead of us. And once you've seen Grace Ndiritu's shamanic video performances and Maria Callas as Passolini's Medea, it will almost be Spring. 

New Openings

Museums used to be hermetic, both in space and in mind. Little light came in through the columns and curtains, and little came out. But things are changing.

Last week I finally made it to the Museum aan de Stroom (MAS) in Antwerp. Housed in a surreal stack of brick and curved glass panels, it combines the previous collections of the maritime, ethnography and folklore museums. Once you enter it is hard to decide what is more spectacular: viewing the inside or viewing the outside. And why shouldn't museums compete with the outside world?

Speaking of which - the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Although set just in front of the memorial where chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees in 1970 in recognition of Germany's responsibility for the war, it refuses to be another Holocaust museum. Instead, it traces the entire history of Jews in Poland, from a millenium ago until today.

The building - seemingly simple from outside yet curved and complex on the inside - reflects this openess. What could be better for the new museums than visual and intellectual osmosis? Let the sunshine in.

Architectural Nudism

Maybe it's because it's winter and everyone is covered up that all my recent contributions involve nudity. Or maybe it's just a coincidence that the only artist that truly kept my attention at Warsaw's Zachęta exhibition on contemporary Brazilian art was Fabiano Rodrigues.

Rodrigues takes photos of himself skating through beautiful buildings, sometimes naked. I like that. It may seem gratuitous, but it highlights both his vulnerability and the buildings' allure. What's not to like?

Check out his tumblr too. More variety soon (maybe). 

A Case for Delay

Susan Sontag's "On Photography" contains such poignantly accurate observations, that when I read the collection of essays some years ago they may or may not have caused me to have my digital camera stolen.

"Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution...Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it." (1977) How prophetic is that?

I switched to manual photography. Isn't removing instant gratification a way to limit abuse?

Abuse maybe, but not the lure of glorification. Like these September shots from Sicily I only just received. Looking at them now, when the snow is piling up in Warsaw's streets, they are charged with the pathos of time. They have become relics, heightening melancholy and idealising a moment long gone.

As Sontag put it 35 years before Facebook: "Essentially, the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own."

Well, sometimes that can be nice too. 

Figuratively Naked

What a surprise these photos are!

Yes - Jean-Michel Basquiat as a reclining nude. If these days it is no longer unusual to see an artist naked (think Marina Abramovich or even Ai Wei Wei), it is probablt because they use their bodies for their art like so many (other) entertainers. Which is why these shots are different. Taken by a former girlfriend of Basquiat and forgotten for over 30 years, they show the painter both literally and figuratively naked. The nudity here is not a costume or a means to an end. It simply reveals intimacy and carries with it a reflection of Basquiat's short life: After turning away to light a cigarette and smiling into the camera with a mix of glee and discomfort, all that remains is an inward look and a few scattered drawings. 

Łódź

Łódź is Poland's third-biggest city, and it is filled with ghosts. The ghosts of textile workers who lived in cramped tenement houses facing the factories, the ghosts of magnates who dined in rococo palaces, and the ghosts of Jews rounded up and deported.

David Lynch, Untitled, (Łódź), 2000

They are there, the ghosts, floating around side by side with the living. The tenement houses are still inhabited, with the same staircases and the same railings, covered by a thousand layers of fingerprints. The rococo palaces are art museums that hardly anyone visits, or restaurants that stay empty on a Friday night. And the ghetto, untouched by the war, has stayed so since: With windowless staircases, crumbling façades, and no paint left to peel. Descendants of those who moved in seven decades ago live in monuments to something they don't care to recall. 

David Lynch, Untitled, (Łódź), 2000

So why visit? Because everywhere else, the traces of the past have been made to look pretty. Everywhere else, the ghosts have been chased away and reconstructed behind glass. Not in Łódź. 

Killing Clichés

Although it is Behind the Candelabra which dominated the headlines this year, winning eleven Emmies and showing Michael Douglas as the camp and closeted (& Polish) Władziu Liberace, 2013 was actually a great year for boxing down queer stereotypes on film (especially in Poland).

Here my favourite features of last year that starred gay characters and refused to be 'gay films'.


1. Tom At the Farm

Xavier Dolan's fourth feature film lies somewhere between tragedy, comedy and psychological thriller. Sexual tension sizzles between characters dead and alive, and repression becomes a sign of madness. There is so much more to come from this 24-year-old, I cannot wait.

Tom at the Farm (2013), trailer

2. Floating Skyscrapers

"The most courageous film of the year" said the poster for this film, and it might be right: You don't see full-frontal gay sex in arch-catholic Poland every day. And yet the film isn't set on  provocation per se, but on exploring the fear to become oneself. Which ends up being much more shocking than naked bodies.

Płynące wieżowce (Floating Skyscrapers), 2013, official trailer

Floating Skyscrapers - English teaser

3. In The Name Of...

For being incredibly shot and shedding light on a Church taboo. Szumowska's film is not about paedophilia, nor about abuse, but about a priest who happens to be a homo. Powerful, beautiful, and necessary.

In the Name Of (2013), English trailer

4. My Brother the Devil

Alright, not strictly 2013, but I only discovered this gem a couple of weeks ago. Take an East London housing estate, second-generation immigrants, drugs, violence, and forbidden attractions: the right ingredients to fall into a cliché trap. And yet this film manages to dodge them all and create something entirely new and surprisingly empowering. A must-watch.

My Brother the Devil, 2012, trailer