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Tuesday, 2 August 2011

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Films that have never been shown



The Fall of Phaeton

The Quiet American

The Queen of the Night at
the British Museum

D-Tox

Graham Greene’s classic, The Quiet American was filmed back in 2000, starring Michael Caine and Brandan Fraser. The film was well-received at the Toronto Film Festival but it was axed after September 11, being considered too controversial for release.

Numerous films featuring some of the biggest stars are now gathering dust in Hollywood’s closet. They cannot be released because it is thought they are ‘bad’ or ‘unmarketable.’ Also, many Hollywood executives hold back films when they may be termed ‘offensive’ although so many pirated copies come in, even to Sri Lanka.

In 1999, D-Tox an action-packed thriller starring Sylvester Stallone was filmed. It cost Universal Pictures 60 million pounds and has been lingering up to date with no prospect of it ever being shown.

There is a World War II drama that featured the child star Haley Joel Osment, who played the role of a Jewish boy who disguised himself as a Gentile during the Nazi invasion of Poland. It is still awaiting release.

‘Phone Booth’ was a film of a deranged sniper who traps and kills his victims in a Manhattan phone booth. That has been indefinitely delayed. At least there was an explained. America already has its plate full of snipers. Who wants more and especially when so many use phone booths to call friends when they are out of doors?

The problem is that the cost of producing new films has risen so sharply that studios are now cutting their losses by keeping that they think won’t market in the closet.

PS - Why not pack them all off to India, that seems to thrive on anything and everything in the theatres? 

At the British Museum: Goddess or whore?

Don’t pass by the British Museum and miss seeing a new terracotta relief that the Museum spent 1.5 million pounds for. It is a Mesopotamian antique, The Queen of the Night identified by the Japanese art-lover who sold it, as being from the reign of the Babylonian King Hammurabi. It could be a representation of a naked goddess or a sign for a Babylonian brothel.

Even the Museum will tell you it knows little about it except that it was well worth the money and ‘exceptionally sexy.’ 

Rubens, who broke European rules of art

To look at any work by Rubens is a revelation. He was the courtier who knew how to satisfy and delight his patrons - Charles I of Britain and Philip IV of Spain among others.

Rubens had his beginnings in Italy in the early 1600s after an initial training in Antwerp. But he was also independent enough to be a daring and tireless innovator. He broke all the rules of European Art and injected his work with a startling vitality that gave an immense freshness as well as a sense of attack.

He became known, even adored, for his religious commissions - work for royal and aristocratic patrons - as well as for a special room where he hung his drawings and tapestries. Wherever his work hung, dynamism seemed to leap off the walls. In Italy, he executed, The Fall of Phaeton when he was just 28 years-old and even at so young an age, his paintings had an arresting vivacity and an almost theatrical flamboyancy.

This same theatricality gleamed through his huge altarpieces of ‘Christ’s Descent from the Cross’ where the dead Christ, ghastly in pallor, spreads across the whole width of the canvas.

Rubens was a masterly Baroque stylist - a style never designed for subtlety - and all his works an unrestrained and heartfelt celebration of humanity with a delicacy that was beguiling.

Stirring up racist hatred

The Zulu playwright, Mbangeni Ngema, has stirred up a lot of racist hatred in South Africa by releasing a song calling on the blacks to fight the Indian minority community:

My fellow countrymen!

We need men to take on the Indians.

They arrive in Durban everyday

And are packed at the airport....

The song is titled ‘AmaNdiya’ - meaning Indiana. 

There are 500,000 South Africans of Indian descent in the country. Even Mandela demanded that Ngema apologise, but it seems to obvious that people are never satisfied anywhere until they have caused trouble.

I said ‘anywhere’. Isn’t that our country too? 

Remembering Balthus

Balthus, born Balthasar Klossowski in 1908, died aged 92 in 2001. He was one of the 20th century’s most controversial artists, both mischievous and manipulative and horrified the establishment with his series of paintings of adolescent girls in suggestive poses.

In America he was accused of encouraging child abuse and when a wine company used one of his paintings as a label, the company was forced to withdraw the wine from the US market.

Balthus cultivated the image of a recluse and when once asked to give his biographical information for a 1968 exhibition, he wrote ‘Balthus is a painter about whom nothing is known. Now look at my pictures.’

He grew up in Paris and an album of his first drawings was published by his mother’s lover when he was just 12. The lover, German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, advised him to use the nickname ‘Balthus.’

In 1933, Balthus provided the illustrations for an edition of ‘Wuthering Heights’ and his images of Heathcliff and Cathy were met with some disgust. He then sealed his reputation with the painting La Lecan de Guitare’ which depicted a Lesbian seduction. He admitted that he had deliberately set out to shock.

‘Balthus is a giant,’ wrote one critic, ‘but to most people he’s the fellow who paints little girls showing their panties.” Balthus remained indifferent. ‘Everybody sees what he wants to see,’ he said.

He was hugely admired by some of his contemporaries. Even Picasso described him as a ‘real painter who is doing so much more than all these young artists who do nothing but copy me.’

Balthus’ paintings sold for millions of dollars and on his 92nd birthday, there was quite a surreal mix of celebrities including Tony Curtis, Bono and David Bowie. 

Tate gallery call it a work of art!

It is in a tin - one tin - of Italian artist, Piero Manzoni’s faeces and it was bought by the Tate Gallery for 22,300 pounds! One tin of shit!

Manzoni made an ‘Edition’ of 90 tins, selling each 30-gram tin for the same price as gold. His motive for canning his excrement was to expose the gullibility of the art-buying public. He said: ‘If collectors really want something intimate and truly personal to the artist, there’s the artist’s own shit.’

At least 45 of the 90 cans have exploded, but Manzoni has sent his shit to museums across the world, aware of the fact that the tins were malodorous time-bombs that would burst some day and spatter the museums.

The Tate Gallery who paid so much, say that so far their tin has remained intact, but they are keeping an eye on any signs of faecal upheaval!

 

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