Inglourious Basterds

I went to see this film spontaneously last Thursday evening, not knowing a thing about it but rather just tagging along on a cinema trip with my flatmates. I don't often go to films that I haven't read up about first, and it was actually quite a nice experience not to have any expectations of enjoyment or knowledge of the storyline.

Inglourious Basterds is the latest work of Quentin Tarantino, and tells the story of Lieutenant Aldo Raine and his mini army of Jewish soldiers, the Basterds, in Nazi Germany, 1944. According to Empire, Tarantino has been talking about his WW2 action movie for nearly a decade; it has finally hit our screens with Brad Pitt taking the role of Aldo Raine, and the film providing for us a violent fairytale in which the ending of WW2 is completely reimagined by Tarantino so that cinema itself plays the principal role in bringing down the Nazis.

In true QT style the film is very dramatic in all aspects: use of close-up 'peering-through-one's-fingers' violence, striking music, the way it is shot and especially here the ostentatious use of language, carried off in a markedly expert manner by the character Col. Hans Landa aka "The Jew Hunter" (Christoph Waltz), who speaks a total of 4 different languages with comfortable ease throughout the picture.

My favourite scene takes place in a restaurant, where Landa comes into contact with Shosanna - a girl from the Jewish family he suspects of hiding in a French house under the floorboards at the start of the film, 3 years ago. He succeeded in killing the rest of her family, but she managed to escape and fled to Paris where she now owns the cinema that is to go on and destroy the Third Reich. In the restaurant we are not sure whether Landa recognises Shosanna, which causes a huge amount of tension that continues to build up throughout the scene with help from the fast, sharp, close up shots and flashbacks that are used. At the end of the scene, Landa looks at Shosanna and says to her, leaning close with a very uneasy sense of knowing, 'You know, there is one more thing I meant to ask you... but I just can't remember what it was.' And with that the camera zooms straight in to where he stubs his cigarette out on his apple strudel (which is a Jewish dessert), and which for me strongly symbolises Landa's horrific killing of Shosanna's family in the first scene.

I won't ruin the rest of the story for those that haven't yet seen the film (!) but I can certainly say that it is worth its full 3 hours of your time. It is a long film, but with so much to keep the audience entertained you will not be fidgeting in your seats checking to see how much time there is left! Inglourious Basterds is currently showing at cinemas now and you can view the trailer here.

The Impossible Project - Saved Polaroid

This post proves that signing up to high-street shop email updates does not always cause a waste of inbox space! I received an urban outfitters newsletter email today that featured an advert for a project they are working on: Saved Polaroid. They have teamed up with The Impossible Project 'in a worldwide effort to restart and reinvent instant photography.' I'm sure most of us are familiar with polaroids, if not from when we were kids then more recently due to the popularity of retro trends. Let's face it though, they were pretty cool. Before the ease and convenience of the modern day digital camera, the polaroid was the key to a photograph you could look at pretty much as soon as you'd taken it - the birth of instant photography. But as soon as digital cameras came onto the market with better quality pictures, memory cards allowing many more photos to be taken and no need for film, plus their much smaller size and lightness, polaroids were quickly ditched for their newer, shinier, modern opponents. But now, it seems, we want them back! Production of analog instant film stopped in 2008, closing the factories in Mexico and the Netherlands. Impossible b.v. has been founded with the concrete aim to re-invent and re-start production of analog INTEGRAL FILM for vintage Polaroid cameras (www.the-impossible-project.com). The Impossible Project clearly states that their aim is not to rebuild Polaroid Integral Film however, but to re-invent it under a name brand name, developing a new product with new characteristics and optimised components. For all us arty types, this is something to look forward to! And in the meantime appreciate some of the really interesting polaroid artists around, including Jennifer Rumbach, and a whole range of artists found at Polanoir.

Freshwest

I came across 'Freshwest' this morning whilst reading an edition of the Telegraph magazine from earlier this year. Freshwest is the furniture design company of the design duo Marcus Beck and Simon Macro and 'embraces both experimental and functional design and is driven by (their) desire to realise ideas'. What caught my attention was the simplicity of furnitures' appearance, versus the obvious complexity of the physics behind some of the works, resulting in pieces that have the feel of half school-boy experiment, half modern art.

One of my favourite pieces by Freshwest is the recent 'Brave New World Lamp' (left), as all the wood pieces look to me like scaffolding, holding up the lamp, where in actual fact the wooden pieces are constructed in a way that they are themselves the lamp's form. The lamp was launched with the Dutch company 'Moooi' in April, and made an appearance at the Milan Design festival, quoted by many as one of the highlights of the festival.

The 'Lazy Chair' was also exhibited at the Milan Design Festival; in actual fact it was present at the entrance to the festival to grab people's attention as they walked by. The Lazy Chair is constructed of wood and strings, and the piece contains movement sensors so that when people walk past, the chair collapses. It reminds me of those little children's toys of say, a giraffe on a little wooden stand, that will collapse and reform when the button underneath is pressed and released.

St Ives Tate

In order to find inspiration for this blog, I , as well as many other students I'm sure, have been paying trips to various museums and art galleries, so that I might have something interesting to say about particular pieces of work, artists or just something that has inspired me from visiting these places. Last week I was on holiday with my family in Cornwall, and one day we explored the picturesque postcard-town that is St. Ives. Whilst there I thought that taking a trip to the St. Ives Tate would be a valuable addition to the inspiration I have been trying to gain for this blog.

However, I always seem to encounter the same problem with 80% of the modern art I come into contact with. I just don't get it. I'm sure I'm not the only one, in fact I'm sure I'm one of many; I try to find meaning, explanation or even just some kind of sense in some of the works that are displayed in these galleries, framed so perfectly and even seeming to demand respect, but for that 80% of modern art, I just can't appreciate what I see. There was one piece I came across by Katy Moran: an abstract oil on canvas painting comprised of mostly beiges, dark browns and blacks, and the little plaque next to the piece read "Muffin Power". Why? Where was the muffin? Maybe if there was something explaining why she'd named it that I could feel more open towards the piece, but as it stood, trying to find 'muffin power' in the harsh strokes brushed angrily across the canvas seemed like a hopeless mission, and all I felt inclined to do was move to the next piece.

The 'What is art?' debate has been going on for years, and will continue to do so as long as art is being produced. I do not deny that pieces such as 'Muffin Power' are not art; I believe that art is a form of self expression, and clearly pieces like these are. Maybe it's just that I like to know what's going on in a piece of art.

Despite finding many pieces in the St. Ives Tate that I did not connect with, what I did love about my visit there was the building itself. The white stone conjured a complete sense of calm, and combined with the building's curves made it a very aesthetically pleasing place to visit. At the front of the building was a very tall roofed sort of amphitheatre, that even had the feel of some sort of temple, as if to worship the work that the Tate houses. As one walks round the museum at the top, there is a balcony and rectangular window spaces in the wall that look through the amphitheatre onto the view of the beach and surrounding bay. It is as if these windows turn the views into pieces of art themselves, framing them simply and drawing one's attention to the vistas before them. It seemed to me a perfect building to house art, not only fulfilling its purpose, but creating ever-changing art at the same time, by the different views one can see from the rectangular spaces each day.