Today the 18th Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film, one of the largest animated film festivals in the world, will be opening its gates. And so for six days animation in all its glory will again be the order of the day with controversial issues, colourful worlds and well-known figures. The very best animated films from all over the world are competing against one another in the competitions and expected guests include famous animated artists such as Oscar-winners Andrew Ruhemann and Thomas Stellmach, Donald Duck's voice actor Peter Krause and animation legend Bill Plympton. Popular actors, Alexandra Neldel, Christoph Maria Herbst and Boris Aljinovic have also announced their participation.

Just two of the films competing in the AniMovie competition for animated feature films are the colourful 3D-CGI spectacle "Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror" by Shinsuke Sato and "Chico y Rita" a touching love story set in Cuba in the 1940's. Unfortunately the film "O Apostolo" by Fernando Cortizo could not be completed in time for the Festival. Instead we are delighted to be able to present Michel Ocelot‘s most recent film, "Les Contes de la Nuit" (Tales of the Night). This poetic fairy tale film by doyen Ocelot combines classic silhouette film techniques with current 3D technology to create unique worlds of colour and space which emphasise the magical character of the stories.

The Festival also focuses on the alpine country of Switzerland, where in recent years a flourishing animated industry has developed which is held in high esteem by the international community. On Friday, the programme Revolutionary Films from the Middle East and Maghreb offers an exciting insight into the current political situation in North Africa and the Arab region as seen by filmmakers there. There is also no shortage of film history: the Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film in co-operation with the German Institute for Animated film is paying tribute to Kurt Weiler in celebration of his 90th. birthday. Weiler is one of the most important protagonists of East German animated film. And there are other things to celebrate: on Saturday the black-humoured series "South Park" will be celebrating its 15th anniversary with a cult night which will include previously unreleased and uncensored episodes.

Expected guests include animated artists and actors such as director Andrew Ruhemann, whose film "The Lost Thing" won the Oscar 2011 in the category "Best Animated Short Film", the well-known African filmmaker Moustapha Alassane, Thomas Stellmach and a number of international filmmakers and animation experts. Anthony Shafer from Disney, Saschka Unseld from Pixar and Pierre Coffin, director of "Despicable me", will be presenting their studio's most recent productions. Famous filmmakers such as Bill Plympton, Andreas Hykade, whose most recent episodes of "Tom and the slice of bread with strawberry jam and honey"  are now showing on TV, sound designer Andrea Martignoni and other international animation experts will also be passing on their experience in various workshops.

The best animated films in the world will be selected in the presence of the winners at the grand Award Ceremony Gala, this Sunday at 8.00 pm in the Gloria 1 cinema. German actors Alexandra Neldel, Christoph Maria Herbst and Boris Aljinovic nominated for the award for the best voice actor or voice actress in an animated film have also announced their participation.

Impatient waiting will end at the Festival

Ingenious directors are heading for Flying Broom again this year to halt the impatient waiting of the festival followers.  Doris Dörrie, Margarethe von Trotta, Iciar Bollain, Tahmineh Milani, Dorota Kędzierzawska and Marta Meszaros
will meet film lovers with the best examples of their own cinemas on
5-12 May at 14th Flying Broom International Women's Film Festival.

Flying
Broom will present to its followers a week full of the latest films of
these ingenious directors that they will bring from Germany, Iran, Poland, Hungary, and Spain to Ankara.

Spanish director, Iciar Bollain who
is the favorite of not only festivals but also women's activities with
her award-winning film called 'Take My Eyes' that depicts domestic
violence is coming with a film about colonialism this time: Even the Rain (2010).African
natives are struggling for water, their right to live; however the
rulers who use force to dominate nature are turning even the rain into
bank notes. So what will the African natives do to struggle against
these rulers? This film, which makes difference with its unique scenes
and script that is clearly a work of a master, was awarded at Palm
Springs International Film Festival.

One of the most prolific directors of German cinema, Doris Dörrie addresses body politics this time with her latest film 'The Hairdresser (2010)' even
though the far east atmosphere which she skillfully created in her film
called 'Cherry Blossoms' has not lose its effect yet. The Hairdresser,
which wants us to question the power over women’s body, tells the story
of an obese hairdresser, Kathi, who is having a hard time finding a job
because she doesn't meet the patterns of the beauty sector.

Tahmineh Milani,
who makes women's problems visible with her films in her country, Iran,
and adapts lives that remained hidden into the screen with a rebellious
language, is a bold director responding to inequalities and injustice
with the language of cinema. Milani keeps decoding sex-based problems
and opposing masculine dominance again in her film called 'Payback (2010)' which tells the story of four women who meet in a prison and start a gang to take revenge from men.

Polish director, Dorota Kedzierzawska,
who is counted among unforgettable directors by film lovers with her
film called 'Crows', tells a story about childhood in her new film 'Tomorrow Will Be Better (2010)'.
This film, which mirrors three children’s struggle to find their own
ways in life, brings Kędzierzawska up to the level of masters once
again.

Hungarian cinema also has a special place in the world cinema history. Márta Mészáros
who keeps adapting sexist politics and extremities of government
pressure into cinema is the most popular woman director in Hungary.
Mészáros takes us back to the 1970s with her film called 'The Last Report on Anna (2009)'.
This film focuses on Anna Kéthly who was once a minister of Imre Nagy
government, which was banished after The Hungarian Revolution. 'The Last
Report on Anna' is the first film that deals with informants since the
political changes in Hungary.

And another ingenious director of German cinema, Margarethe von Trotta… Von Trotta is coming to the festival with 'Vision (2009)'
which portrays the life of Hildegard of Bingen, the first composer to
write about her life and the first woman to write about female
sexuality. Von Trotta is making a significant note in the history of
women's cinema with Hildegard who is the most foreseeing and inspiring
woman of Middle Age.

You can watch the films at Kızılırmak Movie Theatre and Goethe Institut in Ankara.

For more information: 0312 427 00 20

The Green Hornet; Chico & Rita; Confessions; In Our Name

There are few things more depressing than watching a genuinely inventive director being overpowered by the machinery of a franchise blockbuster. Take The Green Hornet (2010, Sony, 12), the long-gestating big-screen spin-off from the 30s radio serial and 60s TV show which is technically "Un Film de Michel Gondry" although frankly you wouldn't know it from watching the movie. In fact, the real driving force here is writer-and-star Seth Rogen playing slobbish Britt Reid, whose campaigning news mogul father (Tom Wilkinson) dies suddenly after a suspicious insect bite. Initially uninterested in his grand paternal legacy, Britt is stung into action by the inventive fighting skills of coffee-maker-cum-handyman Kato (likable Taiwanese pop sensation Jay Chou) and embarks upon a knockabout reign of clumsy crime-fighting vigilance, kept alive only by his super-agile sidekick.

The Green Hornet had been knocking around for a long time before the arrival of Gondry, whose previous love of "in camera" effects had created some wonderfully old-fashioned cinema magic; from the head-spinning antics of his "Lucas with the Lid Off" music promo, which is all shot in one gravity-defying take, to the cardboard dream sequences of The Science of Sleep and the comedic home video process of "sweding" featured in Be Kind Rewind. "Of course, there are sequences that have my specific signature," says Gondry of The Green Hornet, worryingly acknowledging how little of his own stamp he was able to place on the rest of this multi-million dollar romp. Predictably, the result – clunkily retro-fitted into obligatory 3D for cinemas – owes less to Gondry's home-made aesthetic than to Ang Lee's ill-fated Hulk, another franchised failure which ate its auteur director for breakfast. Much of the blame for the movie's lumpen dreariness must lie with Rogen, who has neither the anarchic loser charm of Aaron Johnson's dorky Kick-Ass (to which The Green Hornet owes a huge debt) nor the quick-fire wit of Robert Downey's Iron Man, settling instead for mere ho-hum bozo boorishness.

Meanwhile Christoph Waltz simply dusts off his quiet-but-scary turn from Inglourious Basterds as the Hornet's fiendish nemesis, while Cameron Diaz fights a losing battle against her woefully perfunctory love-interest casting. Plentiful DVD extras include commentary, featurettes, deleted scenes, gag reels etc, but sadly not a cheerfully cheap "sweded" version of the bloated feature which would have been infinitely preferable.

While Toy Story 3 was a worthy and much-loved Oscar winner, my own favourite animated feature of last year was Chico & Rita (2010, Icon, 15), a ravishingly old-fashioned romance set in 40s Havana and 50s New York, and played out against the birth of bebop. Designed by Javier Mariscal and co-directed by Fernando Trueba (whose wildly diverse CV includes the Oscar-winning charmer Belle Epoque and the brilliant but little seen psychodrama The Mad Monkey), this wonderfully seductive musical odyssey oozes tactile pleasure, its "hand-drawn" 2D visuals boasting more depth and heart than any 3D CG offering. Having teamed up briefly with sultry singer Rita, Cuban pianist Chico crosses continents in search of the lost chord struck by the love of his life. With Bebo Valdés at the helm of the soundtrack, and animated cameo appearances from the likes of Charlie Parker and Chano Pozo, this provides a snappy crash course in the backstory of modern blues, affectionately documenting the moment when African rhythms put a backbeat into free-form jazz. More importantly, it presents a spine-tingling melancholic romance which both breaks and gladdens the heart while putting a spring in one's step. An accompanying CD and graphic novel are also available for those who wish to take this affair to remember a little further.

Last month Tetsuya Nakashima's Confessions (2010, Third Window, 15) picked up the award for best Asian film at the Asian Film Awards in Hong Kong, having already won statuettes for best film, director, screenplay and editing at the 34th Awards of the Japanese Academy, and been put forward as the country's official entry for Oscar's reliably shambolic foreign language film category. Based on Kanae Minato's bestselling novel, Nakashima's almost impenetrably cool film spins umpteen interweaving stories which variously revolve around themes of schoolyard bullying, poisonous deceit, maternal anguish and ice-cold revenge. Stylistically the movie is a marvel, with every shot designed to within an inch of its life and accompanied by the super-hip sounds of Radiohead, Boris, and the xx. The problem is that the glistening surface sheen and self-aware plot contrivances ultimately militate against emotional involvement, meaning that Confessions impresses without ever quite engaging. But perhaps that's the point – after all, shouldn't a film about alienation put a distance between itself and its audience? A lengthy accompanying featurette offers some answers but subsequent viewings are clearly needed to crack the film's chilly veneer.

There were awards, too, for Joanne Froggatt who picked up the gong for most promising newcomer at this year's increasingly important British Independent Film Awards for her role in In Our Name (2010, Artificial Eye, 18). She plays a British soldier returning from Iraq who struggles to readjust to civilian life after witnessing (and feeling increasingly responsible for) the random horrors of war. There's real conviction in Froggatt's understated performance, particularly in her fractious relationship with her husband (whose response to active service is altogether different) and to the daughter about whose safety she becomes more and more paranoid. Owing both a thematic and tonal debt to the work of Ken Loach, Brian Welsh's intelligent, thoughtful drama enjoyed a simultaneous on-demand release to complement its limited theatrical run, a smart strategy which looks increasingly like a viable model for independent film distribution in the UK.

Kelly Reichardt's new frontier story Meek's Cutoff tilts decisively toward socially-minded existentialism

THURS/21

Beginners (Mike Mills, U.S., 2010) There is nothing conventional about Beginners, a film that starts off with the funeral arrangements for one of its central characters. That man is Hal (Christopher Plummer), who came out to his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) at the ripe age of 75. Through flashbacks, we see the relationship play out — Oliver's inability to commit tempered by his father's tremendous late-stage passion for life. Hal himself is a rare character: an elderly gay man, secure in his sexuality and, by his own admission, horny. He even has a much younger boyfriend, played by the handsome Goran Visnjic. While the father-son bond is the heart of Beginners, we also see the charming development of a relationship between Oliver and French actor Anna (Melanie Laurent). It all comes together beautifully in a film that is bittersweet but ultimately satisfying. Beginners deserves praise not only for telling a story too often left untold, but for doing so with grace and a refreshing sense of whimsy. Thurs/21, 7 p.m., Castro. (Louis Peitzman)

FRI/22

The Good Life (Eva Mulvad, Denmark, 2010) Portraits of the formerly wealthy are often guilty of peddling secondhand nostalgia for some ancien regime while simultaneously stoking schadenfreude toward the now-deposed (just ask Vanity Fair). Eva Mulvad's melancholy character study of 50-something Annemette Beckmann and her aged mother, Mette, avoids both traps even as her subjects — formerly wealthy Danish expats living on the dole in a cramped apartment in a coastal Portuguese town — offer few inroads for sympathy. Narcissistic and petulant, Annemette blames the loss of her family's wealth on the 1974 nationalization of Portugal's then-Communist government, and claims that her cosseted upbringing has made it hard to find a job ("Work doesn't become me," she gratingly protests at one point). Mette, who is more likeable, is a resigned realist whose sole comfort, aside from the pet dog, seems to be her knowledge that she is not long for this world. Comparisons to Grey Gardens (1975) are inevitable here, but the Beckmanns simply aren't as interesting or possessed by as idiosyncratic a joie de vivre as the Beales, making The Good Life a tough slog. Fri/22, 3:45 p.m.; April 28, 6:45 p.m.; and May 1, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Matt Sussman)

Hahaha (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2010) Do you remember a time you behaved badly (not horribly, but bad enough that you felt ashamed) but you didn't really think about it until long after the fact, say, when getting drinks with an old friend? If you can't, than the latest from South Korean director Hong Sang-soo will probably jog your memory. As with many of Hong's films, Hahaha's premise is similar to the above scenario: two 30-something buds get together and reminisce about their recent trips to the same seaside town. Shown in episodic flashbacks, we start to realize that the incidents and players in their separate accounts overlap into one story filled with terrible poetry, domineering mothers, stalker-ish behavior, and poorly made choices. Hong's films are primers in how not to treat your fellow human beings (straight dudes are usually the culprits), so take notes. Fri/22, 9:15 p.m.; Mon/25, 9 p.m.; and Tues/26, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Sussman)

I'm Glad My Mother is Alive (Claude Miller and Nathan Miller, France, 2009) Codirected with his son Nathan, this latest by veteran French director Claude Miller is an about-face from his acclaimed 2007 period epic A Secret. Viscerally up-to-the-moment in content and handheld-camera style, it's a small story that builds toward an enormous punch. Thomas (played by Maxime Renard as a child, then Vincent Rottiers) is a lifelong malcontent whose troubles are rooted in his abandonment at age five by an irresponsible mother (Sophie Cattani). Neither the attentions of well-meaning adoptive parents or the influence of his better-adjusted younger brother can quell Thomas' mix of furious resentment and curiosity toward his mere, whom he finally develops a relationship with as a young adult. As usual, Miller doesn't "explain" his characters or let them explain themselves, yet everything feels emotionally true — right up to a narrative destination both that feels both shocking and inevitable. Fri/22, 6:45 p.m., and Mon/25, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Dennis Harvey)

Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, U.S., 2010) After three broke down road movies (1994's River of Grass, 2006's Old Joy, 2008's Wendy and Lucy), Kelly Reichardt's new frontier story tilts decisively toward socially-minded existentialism. It's 1845 on the choked plains of Oregon, miles from the fertile valley where a wagon train of three families is headed. They've hired the rogue guide Meek to show them the way, but he's got them lost and low on water. When the group captures a Cayeuse Indian, Solomon proposes they keep him on as a compass; Meek thinks it better to hang him and be done with it. The periodic shots of the men deliberating are filmed from a distance — the earshot range of the three women (Michelle Williams, Zoe Kazan, and Shirley Henderson) who set up camp each night. It's through subtle moves like these that Meek's Cutoff gives a vivid taste of being subject to fate and, worse still, the likes of Meek. Reichardt winnows away the close-ups, small talk, and music that provided the simple gifts of her earlier work, and the overall effect is suitably austere. Fri/22, 9 p.m., and Mon/25, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Max Goldberg)

Stake Land (Jim Mickle, U.S., 2010) Not gonna lie — the reason I wanted to review this one was because of the film still in the SFIFF catalog. Rotten-faced vampire with a stake through its neck? Yes, please! But while Jim Mickle's apocalyptic road movie does offer plenty of gore, it's more introspective than one might expect, following an orphaned teenage boy, Martin (Connor Paolo, Serena's little bro on Gossip Girl), and his gruff mentor, Mister (Snake Plissken-ish Nick Damici), on their travels through a ravaged America. As books, films, and comics have taught us, whenever a big chunk of the human race is wiped out (thanks to zombies, vampires, an unknown cataclysm, etc.), the remaining population will either be good (heroic, like Mister and Martin, or helpless, like the stragglers they rescue, including a nun played by Kelly McGillis), or evil — cannibals, rapists, religious nuts, militant survivalists, etc. Stake Land doesn't throw many curveballs into its end-times narrative, but it's beautifully shot and doesn't hold back on the brutality. Larry Fessenden (director of 2006's The Last Winter) produced and has a brief cameo as a helpful bartender. Fri/22, 11:30 p.m., and Mon/25, 9:45 p.m., Kabuki. (Cheryl Eddy)

SAT/23

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica, Romania, 2010) Andrei Ujica's three-hour documentary uses decades of propagandic footage to let the late Romanian dictator — who was overthrown by popular revolt and executed in 1989 — hang himself with his own grandiose image-making. While the populace suffered (off-screen, you might want to bone up on the facts before seeing this ironical, commentary-free portrait), the "great leader" and his wife Elena were constantly seen holding state dances, playing volleyball, hunting bear, and vacationing hither and yon. (We even see them on the Universal Studios tour.) There's no surprise in seeing them greeted with enormous pageantry in China; but it's a little shocking to see this tyrant welcome Nixon (in the first-ever U.S. presidential visit to a Communist nation), lauded by Jimmy Cartner, and hobnobbing with Queen Elizabeth. This grotesque parade of self-glorifying public moments has a happy ending, however. Sat/23, 12:45 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/24, 5:15 p.m., New People; May 1, 1:30 p.m., PFA. (Harvey)

Life, Above All (Oliver Schmitz, South Africa/Germany, 2010) It's tough enough to simply grow up, let alone care for a parent with AIDS and deal with the suspicions and fears of the no-nothing adults all around you. Rising above easy preaching and hand-wringing didacticism, Life, Above All takes as its blueprint the 2004 best-seller by Allan Stratton, Chandra's Secrets, and makes compelling work of the story of 12-year-old Chandra (Khomotso Manyaka) and her unfortunate family, unable to get effective help amid the thicket of ignorance regarding AIDS in Africa. After her newborn sister dies, Chandra finds her loyalty torn between her bright-eyed best friend Esther (Keaobaka Makanyane), who's rumored to hooking among the truck drivers in their dusty, sun-scorched rural South African hometown, and her mother (Lerato Mvelase), who listens far too closely to her bourgie friend Mrs. Tafa (an OTT Harriet Manamela), for her own good. Cape Town native director Oliver Schmitz sticks close to the action playing across his actors' faces, and he's rewarded, particularly by the graceful Manyaka, in this life-affirmer about little girls forced to shoulder heart-breaking responsibility far too soon. Sat/23, 4 p.m., and April 28, 6 p.m., Kabuki. (Kimberly Chun)

The Mill and the Cross (Lech Majewski, Poland/Sweden, 2010) One of the clichés often told about art is that it is supposed to speak to us. Polish director Lech Majewski's gorgeous experiment in bringing Flemish Renaissance painter Peter Bruegel's sprawling 1564 canvas The Procession to Calvary to life attempts to do just that. Majeswki both re-stages Bruegel's painting — which draws parallels between its depiction of Christ en route to his crucifixion and the persecution of Flemish citizens by the Spanish inquisition's militia — in stunning tableaux vivant that combine bluescreen technology and stage backdrops, and gives back stories to a dozen or so of its 500 figures. Periodically, Bruegel himself (Rutger Hauer) addresses the camera mid-sketch to dolefully explain the allegorical nature of his work, but these pedantic asides speak less forcefully than Majeswki's beautifully lighted vignettes of the small joys and many hardships that comprised everyday life in the 16th century. Beguiling yet wholly absorbing, this portrait of a portrait is like nothing else at the festival. Sat/23, 12:30 p.m., SFMOMA, and April 27, 9 p.m., Kabuki. (Sussman) Mind the Gap Experimental film fans: come for the big names, but don't miss out on the newcomers. Locals Jay Rosenblatt (melancholy found-footage bio The D Train), Kerry Laitala (psychedelic 3-D brain-dazzler Chromatastic), and Skye Thorstenson (mannequin-horror music video freak out Tourist Trap, featuring the acting and singing stylings of the Guardian's Johnny Ray Huston) offer strong entries in an overall excellent program. International bigwigs Peter Tscherkassky (the 25-minute Coming Attractions, a layered study of airplanes, Hollywood, and Hollywood airplanes — not for the crash-phobic) and Jonathan Caouette ("Lynchian" has been used to describe the Chloë Sevigny-starring All Flowers In Time, though it contains a scary-faces contest that'd spook even Frank Booth) are also notable. New names for me were Zachary Drucker, whose Lost Lake introduces a transsexual, pervert-huntin' vigilante for the ages, and my top pick: Kelly Sears' Once it started it could not end otherwise, a deliciously sinister hidden-history lesson imagined via 1970s high-school yearbooks. Sat/23, 4:45 p.m., and May 1, 9:45 p.m., Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Troll Hunter (André Ovredal, Norway, 2010) Yes, The Troll Hunter riffs off The Blair Witch Project (1999) with both whimsy and, um, rabidity. Yes, you may gawk at its humongoid, anatomically correct, three-headed trolls, never to be mistaken for grotesquely cute rubber dolls, Orcs, or garden gnomes again. Yes, you may not believe, but you will find this lampoon of reality TV-style journalism, and an affectionate jab at Norway's favorite mythical creature, very entertaining. Told that a series of strange attacks could be chalked up to marauding bears, three college students (Glenn Erland Tosterud, Tomas Alf Larsen, and Johanna Morck) strap on their gumshoes and choose instead to pursue a mysterious poacher Hans (Otto Jespersen) who repeatedly rebuffs their interview attempts. Little did the young folk realize that their late-night excursions following the hunter into the woods would lead at least one of them to rue his or her christening day. Ornamenting his yarn with beauty shots of majestic mountains, fjords, and waterfalls, Norwegian director-writer André Ovredal takes the viewer beyond horror-fantasy — handheld camera at the ready — and into a semi-goofy wilderness of dark comedy, populated by rock-eating, fart-blowing trolls and overshadowed by a Scandinavian government cover-up sorta-worthy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009). Sat/23, 11:30 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/25, 6:15 p.m., New People. (Chun)

World on a Wire (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Germany, 1973) The words "Rainer Werner Fassbinder" and "science fiction film" are enough to get certain film buffs salivating, but the Euro-trashy interior décor is almost reason enough to see this restored print of the New German Cinema master's cyber thriller. Originally a two-part TV miniseries, World on a Wire is set in an alternate present (then 1973) in which everything seems to be made of concrete, mirror, Lucite, or orange plastic. When the inventor of a supercomputer responsible for generating an artificial world mysteriously disappears, his handsome predecessor must fight against his corporate bosses to find out what really happened, and in the process, stumbles upon a far more shattering secret about the nature of reality itself. Riffing off the understated cool of Godard's Alphaville (1965) while beating 1999's The Matrix to the punch by some 25 years, World on a Wire is a stylistically singular entry in Fassbinder's prolific filmography. Sat/23, 8:45 p.m., Kabuki, and April 30, 2 p.m., PFA. (Sussman) SUN/24

A Cat in Paris (Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli, France/Belgium/Netherlands/Switzerland, 2010) Save your pocket poodles, please: Paris, as cities go, is most decidedly feline. From 1917's silent serial Les Vampires to its uber-cool 1990s update Irma Vep, cat burglars and the Parisian skyline have gone together like café and au lait. Add actual cats and jazz to the mix for good measure (even Disney saw fit to set its jazzy 1970 Aristocats in the City of Light). At just over an hour long, the animated A Cat in Paris is an enjoyable little amuse-bouche that employs all the standards of the cats-in-Paris meme: Billie Holiday warbling on the soundtrack, a dashingly heroic antihero who scales the rooftops as if he studied parkour under Spider-Man, and the titular untamable black cat who serves as his partner in crime. Complete with a climatic Hitchcockian set piece on the rooftops of Notre Dame Cathedral, A Cat in Paris has a refreshingly angular and graphic, almost cubist, feel. Directors Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli's work certainly doesn't rank among that of countryman Sylvain Chomet (2010's The Illusionist), but this family film is worth checking out if kitties up to no good in Purr-ree simply make you want to le squee. Sun/24, 12:30 p.m., Kabuki, and May 1, 12:30 p.m., New People. (Michelle Devereaux)

MON/25

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, U.S., 2010) The latest documentary from Werner Herzog once again goes where no filmmaker — or many human beings, for that matter — has gone before: the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, a heavily-guarded cavern in Southern France containing the oldest prehistoric artwork on record. Access is highly restricted, but Herzog's 3D study is surely the next best thing to an in-person visit. The eerie beauty of the works leads to a typically Herzog-ian quest to learn more about the primitive culture that produced the paintings; as usual, Herzog's experts have their own quirks (like a circus performer-turned-scientist), and the director's own wry narration is peppered with random pop culture references and existential ponderings. It's all interwoven with footage of crude yet beautiful renderings of horses and rhinos, calcified cave-bear skulls, and other time-capsule peeks at life tens of thousands of years ago. The end result is awe-inspiring. Mon/25, 7 p.m., and Tues/26, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Eddy)

TUES/26

Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán, France/Chile/Germany, 2010) Chile's Atacama Desert, the setting for Patricio Guzmán's lyrically haunting and meditative documentary, is supposedly the driest place on earth. As a result, it's also the most ideal place to study the stars. Here, in this most Mars-like of earthly landscapes, astronomers look to the heavens in an attempt to decode the origins of the universe. Guzmán superimposes images from the world's most powerful telescopes — effluent, gaseous nebulas, clusters of constellations rendered in 3-D brilliance — over the night sky of Atacama for an even more otherworldly effect, but it's the film's terrestrial preoccupations that resonate most. For decades, a small, ever dwindling group of women have scoured the cracked clay of Atacama searching for loved ones who disappeared early in Augusto Pinochet's regime. They take their tiny, toy-like spades and sift through the dirt, finding a partial jawbone here, an entire mummified corpse there. Guzmán's attempt through voice-over to make these "architects of memory," both astronomers and excavators alike, a metaphor for Chile's reluctance to deal with its past atrocities is only marginally successful. Here, it's the images that do all the talking — if "memory has a gravitational force," their emotional weight is as inescapable as a black hole. Tues/26, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki, and April 28, 6:15 p.m., PFA. (Devereaux)

The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Breillat, France, 2010) Fairytales are endemically Freudian; perhaps it has something to with their use of subconscious fantasy to mourn — and breathlessly anticipate — the looming loss of childhood. French provocateuse Catherine Breillat's feminist re-imagining of The Sleeping Beauty carries her hyper-sexualized signature, but now she also has free reign to throw in bizarre and beastly metaphors for feminine and masculine desire in the form of boil-covered, dungeon-dwelling ogres, albino teenage princes, and icy-beautiful snow queens. The story follows Anastasia, a poor little aristocrat, who longs to be a boy (she calls herself "Sir Vladimir"). When her hand is pricked with a yew spindle (more of a phallic impalement, really), Anastasia falls into a 100-year adventurous slumber, eventually awakening as a sexually ripe 16-year-old. It all plays like an anchorless, Brothers Grimm version of Sally Potter's 1992 Orlando. And while it's definitely not for the kiddies, it's hard to believe that many adults would find its overt symbolism and plodding narrative any more than a sporadically entertaining exercise in preciousness. Your own dreams will undoubtedly be more interesting — perhaps you can catch a few zzz's in a theater screening this movie. Tues/26, 6:15 p.m., and April 27, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Devereaux)

THE 54TH ANNUAL SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL runs April 21–May 5. Venues are the Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Castro, 429 Castro, SF; New People, 1746 Post, SF; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third, SF; and Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, SF. For tickets (most shows $13) and complete schedule visit www.sffs.org>.

The poor must be protected in African cities, where millions are denied adequate housing and face the threat of eviction

It is a human rights violation of such proportions that it could be easily equated to that of a humanitarian emergency. Yet, despite its impact, the denial of the right of adequate housing is rarely internationally condemned or discussed.

In big cities around the world, particularly in Africa, hundreds of thousands of people have no other choice but to live in ramshackle housing, cramped conditions or inadequate structures. In the worst cases, people have nowhere to live at all.

Slums and forced evictions are the two main culprits for these living conditions, affecting millions of the urban poor. Across Africa, shanty towns – or slums – are dotted across the outskirts of most large cities, where people have migrated from rural communities in search of work.

Living conditions in slums are far from adequate: many people frequently have no access to essential services such as sanitation, clean water and healthcare, while their children cannot access primary education. Women, men and children are regularly exposed to abuses, and the state provides little security.

As well as this, the inhabitants of such settlements live with the daily threat of being forced from their homes. These evictions often take place in the middle of the night, with police, heavy-handed security contractors and bulldozers, leaving the residents little or no time to collect their belongings.

Hundreds of thousands of residents in Port Harcourt, capital of Rivers state in Nigeria, are all too familiar with this threat. Largescale redevelopment plans have left more than 200,000 people at risk of being made homeless. Already thousands were forced from their homes to make way for an eight-screen cinema complex in August 2009.

Meanwhile in Zimbabwe, six years after Operation Murambatsvina – the mass forced evictions programme carried out in June and July 2005, in which more than 700,000 people lost their homes or their livelihoods or both – thousands of men, women and children are still living in far from adequate conditions.

Many pregnant women and young babies surviving in makeshift accommodation at Zimbabwe's Hopley settlement are at serious risk of ill-health or death, because of the dreadful living conditions. There is no maternal or newborn healthcare available in the community, putting these vulnerable groups at great danger.

In Ghana, thousands of people who live close to railway tracks in Accra are being forced to make way for the redevelopment of the railway system. Many of those facing eviction have nowhere else to go, so risk being left homeless. And as is often the case, there are no plans for resettlement or compensation for these people.

The situation is just as bleak in Kenya – home to Kibera, one of the world's largest slums. Here, Amnesty International is concerned at the high level of risk of fire to homes in these settlements. The poor quality of materials used for the homes and their poor construction, combined with overcrowded conditions and haphazard electricity connections, present a deadly risk to slum residents. In March, a fire broke out in one informal settlement, Deep Sea, leaving up to 90% of the housing structures destroyed and about 10,000 people homeless.

There is no excuse for people to live in such appalling conditions. The right to adequate housing is just as essential as the right to be free from torture, or the right of freedom of expression. Safe and adequate homes are essential to any person's wellbeing, and this is not out of the reach of any of these governments.

As representatives at the UN have been meeting to discuss issues of sustainable urban development this week, Amnesty International is calling on African governments to redouble their efforts in providing adequate housing and security for those who risk having this basic right to adequate housing denied.

Every effort has to be made to ensure people living in slum dwellings have access to water, sanitation, healthcare and education in line with international law and standards.

Forced evictions are never acceptable. Governments can no longer carry on with this practice. Instead, every effort has to be made to protect the rights of the poorest across Africa's cities, including by providing peace of mind that they can live in their homes with basic facilities and in the knowledge that they are free from the threat of being evicted from their homes at a moment's notice.

• Kate Allen is Amnesty International's UK director

New Cartographies: Algeria-France-UK, Manchester

As protest continues to alter the political climate of north Africa, this show of reflections on cultural relations between Algeria, France and the UK could hardly be more timely. The estimated 1 million people killed in the 1962 fight for Algerian independence from 130 years of French colonial rule still haunts the subject but most contributors here approach the dramas with subtlety. Yves Jeanmougin's photographs summon the life of the mysteriously murdered poet Jean Sénac, ex-friend of French Algerian existentialist Albert Camus. Meanwhile, Sophie Elbaz's L'lle Fantastique is a photographic triptych of a simply stunning Algerian rock face.

Cornerhouse, to 5 Jun

Robert Clark

Eve Sussman And The Rufus Corporation, London

US artist Eve Sussman and her gang The Rufus Corporation are known for brainy, high-gloss films that deconstruct art history and cinema. Sussman first made a splash in 2004, with her recreation of Velázquez's Las Meninas, turning its perfect symmetries into a moving sequence of human relations. Her London debut goes in the opposite direction historically, with a dystopian sci-fi production, partly inspired by a trip to Soviet cosmonaut base Star City, and using software that edits the story of a man controlled by a metropolis, in ever-changing permutations. Two further videos turn a train journey through Asia into a meditation on time, and reflect on film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky's expedition into memory and Russian history, Mirror.

Haunch of Venison, W1, to 14 May

Skye Sherwin

Wael Shawky & Huang Yong Ping, Nottingham

Two artists take on daunting political and religious subjects in an intrepid spirit of ironic playfulness. The Egyptian Wael Shawky tackles Islamophobia and the Israel Palestine conflict through animation. One would think the endlessly contested Jerusalem monument of the Dome of the Rock might be artistically untouchable. Shawky takes an absurdist slant, animating the Dome as a fairground merry-go-round. The Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping's playfulness is more weightily sculptural but its lightness of spirit is no less incongruous. A lifesize elephant sleeps in front of a Asian market stall while seven Buddhas are hooked on a fishing line in front of a giant biblical sea monster.

Nottingham Contemporary, to 26 Jun

RC

Paul Graham, London

Paul Graham has spent the last 30 years making the case for documentary photography as a serious, complex art form and this show covers all the photographer's major projects. Dickensian in their social reach, series such as Beyond Caring from the mid-80s depict the underclass of Thatcher's Britain, while his more recent American Night depicts the country's racial inequality, offsetting images of African Americans as tiny figures wandering vast stretches of open asphalt with hyper-real colour-saturated shots of affluent homes.

Whitechapel Gallery, E1, Wed to 19 Jun

SS

Norman Adams, Newcastle upon Tyne

During the latter half of the 20th century the east London-born painter Norman Adams set himself up at the end of a line of English visionary eccentrics from William Blake to Stanley Spencer. Only obliquely influenced by the formal innovations of European modernism, Adams's inspiration came from a singular strain of Christianity. While it was broadly taken for granted by then that Christ's story had been well and truly painted out of the art world picture, Adams dared to tackle the Stations Of The Cross head on. Here we see just how close he got to convincing. Charming watercolour studies of his beloved Umbria, Provence and Skye, meanwhile, embody a less strained and overtly mystical visual poetry.

Northumbria University Gallery, to 3 Jun

RC

Turner Contemporary, Margate

Margate's Turner Contemporary is the latest initiative to bring some cultural oomph to parts of the British coast that have seen better days. Opening its doors this weekend, the mammoth David Chipperfield-designed gallery complex has been built to reflect the famed light that so captivated JMW Turner and the Victorians who flocked to this halcyon seaside getaway. (A more recent scion, Tracey Emin, recently expressed her love for the place in neon.) There's an innovative mix of names in the debut show, Revealed, which takes its cue from Turner's painting The Eruption Of The Souffrier Mountains In The Island Of St Vincent. The six artists responding to this lesser-known masterpiece, include French conceptualist Daniel Buren, famed for his stripe paintings; master of the macabre Douglas Gordon; and young Brit Conrad Shawcross, whose outsize machine-like kinetic sculptures fuse art and science.

Turner Contemporary, to 4 Sep

SS

The Lives Of Great Photographers, Bradford

This fascinating show aims to tell the life stories of some of the most renowned photographers of all time, from 19th-century pioneers Jacques Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot onwards. So we see the faces behind the cameras, as well as equipment they might have used, alongside selections of their work. The Romantic Victorian artist Julia Margaret Cameron is presented as a proto-celebrity photographer with her charismatic sepia images of poets and beauties. In utter contrast, Arthur Fellig, otherwise known as Weegee, is evoked as he stalked New York in the 1930s and 40s, seeking out the dead and dying victims of accidents and crimes. He acquired the nickname from the occultist Ouija board, due to his uncanny ability to arrive almost immediately at the scene.

National Media Museum, to 4 Sep

RC

Alice Anderson, London

If Alice Anderson hadn't existed, the Freud Museum's art curator would surely have been tempted to make her up. Her work is a perfect match for the iconic shrink's former family home. Delving into childhood fears, her spooky videos, installations and sculpture explore classic Freudian terrain, playing out compulsive rituals with doppelganger dolls and fairytale motifs. Rapunzel-like red hair is Anderson's signature. For her latest work she's used the motif on a grand scale, entwining the museum in ropes of dolls' hair. Indoors, wax dolls, looms and hairy fetish objects further explore the maternal bond, and challenge Freud's ideas about so-called female "genital deficiency".

Freud Museum, NW3, to 5 Jun

• MEETINGS ON THE BRIDGE START Meetings on the Bridge, the sixth of which will take place this year, aims to create a platform for the cinema industry to meet. It brings together producers, directors, scriptwriters, and industry representatives from both Europe and Turkey, giving filmmakers a chance to do their projects’ first international presentation and creating a common ground for co-productions. The first meeting will take place at 9.30 in the French Palace. The meeting for Turkish-French co-productions, will last until 18.00.

• CLAIRE DENIS FILM MUSICS 1996-2009 TINDERSTICKS CONCERT In its 30th year, Istanbul Film Festival hosts an unequaled project that brings together two names from the music and cinema worlds. Claire Denis, one of the “auteur” directors of the French cinema, and the British rock group Tindersticks, with whom she collaborates frequently in her films, meet in Istanbul under Istanbul Film Festival’s 30th Year Special Event. The concert will take place at 21.00 in Fulya Sanat.

• THE SON COMES TO THE FESTIVAL FOR THE FIRST TIME Directed by Atilla Cengiz, The Son, which stars Rıza Akın in the leading role, will be screened at 11.00 in Atlas. Atilla Cengiz will attend the screening, which will be holding its premiere in the Festival.
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• WHITE MATERIAL WITH DENIS Acknowledged director Claire Denis, who is also the president of this year’s Festival jury, will attend the screening of her latest film White Material. Following a fragmented story-telling particular to Denis, the film follows Maria, a strong-headed white woman, who owns coffee plantations in an unnamed African country torn by a violent rebellion. Leading actress Isabelle Huppert is charming as always. It can be seen at 11.00 in Fitaş 4.

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• THE CONSEQUENCES OF CHILD ABUSE The traumatic consequences of childhood sexual abuse is delicately and sensitively tackled in Elisa K, the first collaboration between Catalan directors Judith Colell and Jordi Cadena. Director Judith Colell will attend the screening at 13.30 in Atlas.

• IF FOOTBAALL GETS TANGLED IN THE CRIME WORLD The documentary that examines the intersection of sports, crime, and politics via two Colombians that are a world apart personality-wise, The Two Escobars can be seen at 13.30 in Fitaş 1. Michael Zimbalist, one of the film’s directors, will attend the screening.
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• A NEW FEMALE DIRECTOR Hatice Yakar’s first feature film Furious Madness Somber Suffering takes place in Çukurova in the 1960s. Yakar will attend the film’s first screening at 13.30 in Beyoğlu.

• A HEARTWARMING FILM In The Plane Tree, a heartwarming family film, which appeals to everyone, Handan İpekçi, one of the leading female directors of Turkish cinema, balances the elements of drama and comedy. The film’s screening will take place at 16.00 in Atlas, with the participation of İpekçi.

• TRAN ANH HUNG IS IN ISTANBUL The much-anticipated film by Tran Anh Hung, who had directed The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo, Norwegian Wood can be seen at 16.00 Fitaş 4. Adapted from Haruki Murakami’s 1987 novel by the same name, the film revolves around the themes of love, death, the loss of innocence, heartbreak and awakening sexuality. Director Tran Anh Hung will attend the screening.

• ÖZGENTÜRK’S LAST FILM Ali Özgentürk’s last film Unseen will make its premiere during the Festival. The film takes as its basis the journal entries written by the director’s grandfather fifty years ago and narrates the hard journey taken by Hungarian Béla Bartók, one of the brightest classical music composers of the era, to Anatolia in order to discover Turkish music in the 30s, and its reflections on the present day. Özgentürk will answer questions by the audience following the screening at 19.00 in Atlas.

• YOUR SON, ERDAL One of the most discussed documentaries of this year, Your Son, Erdal will be screened at 19.00 in Beyoğlu. Through the short stories of Sinan Suner, Zekeriya Önge, Erdal Eren, and Ercan Koca, Your Son, Erdal attempts to remind us of the dark period in Turkey between 1977 and 1984 and to deliver that period from a cold perception of history, making it more humane. Director Tunç Erenkuş will attend the screening.

• AN EXTRAORDINARY AUTOBIOGRAPHY Considered as one of the pioneers of New Queer Cinema, in his debut Massillon, American video artist William E. Jones recounts his own story without using any actors, but by combining his own voice with images. Exhibited in many contemporary art institutions, this extraordinary autobiography can be seen at 19.00 in Pera. Jones will answer questions after the screening.

• FOR JULIEN TEMPLE FANS Considered to be documentary and music video director Julien Temple’s best film to date, Oil City Confidential can be seen at 21.30 in Fitaş 1. Temple’s trilogy on British music ends with a prequel to his landmark films about punk figureheads the Sex Pistols in The Filth & The Fury and Joe Strummer in The Future Is Unwritten. A talk with ackonowledged director Temple will follow the screening.

IFF PRESS RELEASE

In turning down ready IPL cash to play first-class cricket with Essex, Ravi Bopara has shown real class

WORTH MORE THAN MONEY

In the Spin's mind the words "Ravi Bopara" have tended to conjure up a distinct mental flipchart. The images are familiar: the creamy cover drive; the impishly self-satisfied 30 minutes of gorgeous, rhythmical Total Batting undercut at all times by the certainty of an imminent soft nick to the keeper or lazy-sweep lbw. The exhilarating hold-the-pose lofted six. The scuttling golden-arm bowling, righteously feasted on by Chris Gayle at last year's IPL. And the self-regarding smile of a man who appears to feel at all times just a little too pleased about how good his car stereo is.

To all of this can now be added something rather unexpected. Specifically, a set of personal priorities that stand as an example to ambitious young sportsmen everywhere - and as a stinging riposte to all who bewail the cynicism and greed of the gilded modern sportsman.

This week Bopara turned down £100,000 to play for the Delhi Daredevils in the IPL as a late replacement for the injured Paul Collingwood. This is a great gig by anyone's standards: a sack of cash for four weeks' work plus a slew of high-end after-hours hobnobbing. But Bopara turned it down because he wants to play Test cricket even more - which is on balance more likely if he scores runs for Essex in Division Two of the County Championship. This is such a breathtakingly bold decision it is hard to comprehend why it hasn't been reported, or celebrated, more widely.

Indeed it took the Spin some time to get its small and rather fevered brain around the full ramifications, which are, quite simply: England now have to pick Bopara for the first Test against Sri Lanka in June. The decision on who replaces Collingwood in the Test team is, let's face it, something of a toss-up in any case. But not to pick Bopara now would be self-destructive and dispiriting, both for the fertility of the ECB-county cricket nexus, and for the primacy of Test cricket among young England players generally. Forget how many runs he scores in the next six weeks. Bopara has made a stand. He must be supported.

If this seems a little overheated there is sound reasoning behind it, of a sporting rather than jingoistic nature. Teams require a kind of internal libido to function. Everybody has to want them to work, to want desperately to be there. Bopara clearly has this with England. This is about more than money for him - more even than a lot of money. As an institution that feeds on such desire, the England team should look favourably on him for this. If it's neck and neck for a spot, Bopara should have an edge.

He is essentially in a two-way shoot-out with Eoin Morgan to bat at No6 in Test matches. Morgan also knows this. Unlike Bopara he is at the IPL with the Kolkata Knight Riders. Of the two, however, Morgan seems the most likely to benefit from more first-class cricket. Nobody really knows if he has it as a high-class long-form batsman. Runs now, and some technical refinement, might be invaluable. His decision, and it is entirely his to make, is to instead play lucrative short-form cricket despite the fact that the urge to qualify for England was apparently based on the high-falutin principle that there was no other way for him to play Test cricket. It is unfair, but there are those who would describe Morgan and his fellow late-comers to Englishness as cricketing mercenaries. This kind of thing doesn't help.

In a sense Bopara leaves the selectors little choice. What kind of message would it send out now to prefer Morgan? Bopara scored an excruciating 16-ball duck in his first innings since deciding to force the selectors' hand with sheer weight of runs in county cricket, but in effect we know enough about him already. He may or may not be good enough, just as Morgan may or may not be. But it would be sound self-promotion if Bopara's stance - Test cricket over gold - were to be rewarded.

Never mind the counterargument that wanting to play for England is also a commercial decision, as ECB central contracts are equally juicy. We're talking about turning down cash in hand, plus the chance of life-changing enrichment (score an IPL hundred and you're in clover) in return for no more than a heightened chance of preferment. Bopara - classy batsman, and apparently classy guy too - really, really wants it. The Spin can only hope England give him a summer to show more of the substance behind his style.

A JOBBING INTERNATIONAL CIRCUS?

The Spin spent last Friday at The Oval watching two matches simultaneously: the swashbuckling, disco-cricket of Chennai Super Kings v Kolkata Knight Riders via satellite TV; and the swash-knitting tea-dance cricket of Surrey v Northants in the opening round of County Championship matches.

How strange it was to watch two such contrasting sets of players in action: one of them a rag-bag of overseas players, careerist big-money signings and the odd local youngster - and the other a pair of IPL franchises.

The received wisdom is that there is something bolted-on about the idea of an IPL "team". These are simply pre-fabs. But of the 22 players on show in India, six were overseas imports and 16 domestic. At The Oval the 22 players also broke down into six imported and 16 indigenous. Of those English players, 11 had previously played for at least two other counties or moved as a big-money signing. There was, in effect, nothing to choose between the two sets of teams when it came to player-sourcing. And so the Spin decided to conduct its own Domesday Book-style census of county and IPL teams, with the idea of getting to the bottom of this issue once and for all.

The results are in. And the headline stat is that there is nothing to choose between IPL and County Championship Division One when it comes to loading your team with overseas players. The only real difference - and it is a significant one, of life-changing personal commitment - is that this is institutionalised in English cricket via residency and Kolpak-finagle.

On the basis of the last round of matches (and a predicted first XI for the non-playing Warwickshire) Division One is home to 33 first-choice foreign cricketers and 66 English, where nationality is taken at the moment the player in question first took up with an English county. Division One is therefore 33.3% overseas. The 10 teams of the IPL fielded 38 overseas players and 72 Indian. It is 34.5% overseas. In Division Two the picture changes slightly: 20 foreign players feature and 79 English. Division Two is only 20% overseas.

For England's top tier and the IPL the figures are remarkably similar, as are the figures for domestic players aged 23 or under (24% in the ECC, 19% in the IPL). It is hard to say what, if anything, this means, other than English cricket fans might want to think twice before dismissing the IPL as a jobbing international circus.

Plus of course there is the bigger question of what balance of overseas and domestic produces the best cricket and the best cricketers. There is no real answer to this, but young homegrown players and hardened internationalists looks like a pretty good mix: certainly at The Oval there was not much wrong with the duel between the still-wily 38-year-old Chaminda Vaas and junior biffer Rory Hamilton-Brown.

The other really outstanding figure is the number of South Africans in both cases. The IPL has 13. It is 11.8% South African. The County Championship has 25. It is 12.6% South African. The talent and sheer determination of South Africa's peripatetic cricketers really is phenomenal. Like ant colonies, or Starbucks franchises, they just keep on popping up everywhere. It is a great achievement.

QUOTES OF THE WEEK

"I was pretty tired and didn't want to run too much. I was pretty hot and humid so I tried to limit my running" - Shane Watson reveals the secret behind his record-breaking bout of six hitting (15 in his 189 against Bangladesh): basically it was laziness.

"I'm a batsman that can turn it up and turn it down, and at this moment, it's definitely a wonderful feeling heading back to putting on the maroon colours and wearing the coconut on my chest" - the mercurial Marlon Samuels celebrates his international recall by making Three Lions on a shirt sound a little dull.

THE POWER AND THE GLORY

The Spin has this week been reading Simon Wilde's new biography of Ian Botham: The Power and the Glory. It is an unusually good Botham book, although it does have the natural advantage, uncommon in the genre, of not having been written by Botham himself. Among the meticulous research and fine detail on Botham's early days the Spin's juvenile sensibilities were drawn to the passage covering Botham's retirement, specifically his final over in first-class cricket playing for Durham against the Australians. The details are already widely known, but Wilde frames the incident with delicacy, describing Botham "unzipping his trousers and letting his 'old man' dangle free while he sent down the final delivery".

This is bizarre on so many levels. First that Botham should call time on such a distinguished career with a moment of such juvenile numptiness. Plus the Botham phallus acts as a barometer needle of changing times: it seems surreal now that nobody on the boundary noticed this happening. Imagine such a retirement today, the perimeter crowded with Sky Sports News cameras, the squadron of newspaper snappers, Botham's old man projected live around the country and casually immortalised on the Ten O'Clock News. Poor David Boon, the striking batsman, played on for several years more. But who knows what scars he bears. Wilde's book coincides with the passing of 30 years since the 1981 Ashes series and Botham's glorious summer. It isn't the only marker: a cinema documentary film, From the Ashes, comes out on 8 May. Here as a Spin world exclusive is a specially put together download preview. It's great stuff.

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Prolific film director with a reputation for exploring social and moral issues

Sidney Lumet, who has died aged 86, achieved critical and commercial success with his first film, 12 Angry Men (1957), which established his credentials as a liberal director who was sympathetic to actors, loved words and worked quickly. For the bulk of his career, he averaged a film a year, earning four Oscar nominations along the way for best director, for 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976) and The Verdict (1982).

It is arguable that, had he not been so prolific, Lumet's critical reputation would have been greater. Certainly, for every worthwhile film there was a dud, and occasionally a disaster, to match it. But Lumet loved to direct and he was greatly esteemed by the many actors – notably Al Pacino and Sean Connery – with whom he established a lasting rapport.

The majority of his films were shot not in Hollywood, but in and around New York. Lumet's book Making Movies (1995), a lucid account of all aspects of the film business, used his own works for textual analysis and included a coda, almost a lament, in which he railed against the studios' interference. He had become increasingly aware that there was little space, even in his beloved New York, for works inspired by social commitment and passion, less still for those derived from great plays and literature.

His diatribe echoed the words of the character played by Peter Finch in Lumet's Network, a black comedy written by Paddy Chayefsky. Finch, portraying a television executive, screams defiance at the banality and excesses of the medium, just as Lumet – somewhat more subtly – would express his disillusionment with the studios' obsession with infantile blockbusters that made a mockery of serious directors such as himself. He was a consummate professional, a courteous and cultured individual destined by upbringing and intelligence to enter the theatre.

He was born in Philadelphia to Eugenia Wermus and Baruch Lumet, distinguished Yiddish theatre actors, and was only a few years old when he first acted on stage and on the radio. He appeared in the film One Third of a Nation (1939) and had several roles on Broadway, including a performance as Jesus, in the play Journey to Jerusalem, staged in 1940. After attending Columbia University, Lumet was in the US army signal corps during the second world war, and served in Burma and India.

His immediate postwar career was in the theatre, as an actor and a director, until he joined the CBS network in 1950 as a trainee television director. During this golden era of live drama, working alongside directors including Delbert Mann, Robert Mulligan and John Frankenheimer and the writers Reginald Rose and Chayevsky, he amassed hundreds of credits.

It was Rose's courtroom drama 12 Angry Men – which had previously been aired on TV – that launched Lumet's cinema career, with Henry Fonda as the producer and in the lead role, as a sceptical juror in a murder trial. Lumet moved quickly to a second film with Fonda, Stage Struck (1958), but neither that unconvincing portrait of life in the theatre, nor the rather better That Kind of Woman (1959), starring Sophia Loren, substantially enhanced his career.

The Fugitive Kind (1960), written by Tennessee Williams, now seems noteworthy only for the mismatching of Marlon Brando with Anna Magnani. A Franco-Italian production, Vu du Pont (1962), adapted from Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, was controversial for the time because of its homosexual theme, but now looks impossibly dated.

However, Lumet re-established his career with another theatrical adaptation. His 1962 film of Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill starred Ralph Richardson and an Oscar-nominated Katharine Hepburn. He compounded that film's success with a nuclear-age nightmare, Fail Safe (1964), with Fonda heading a starry cast and battling, as the US president, to save the world, while American planes head, by mistake, into Soviet territory. A kind of Dr Strangelove without the black humour, Fail Safe reflected Lumet's serious nature.

Nowhere was this sombre tone more evident than in The Pawnbroker (1964), about a Jewish businessman (Rod Steiger) haunted by his memories of the holocaust, and The Hill (1965), starring Connery, which was set in a north African detention centre during the second world war. The Hill, made in black and white and with no music, was one of a handful of films Lumet shot in Britain.

He returned to New York, where he made an elegant version of Mary McCarthy's novel The Group (1966), notable for its fine ensemble playing. Back in the UK, he directed a gloomy version of John le Carré's Call for the Dead, retitled The Deadly Affair (1966), with a great performance by James Mason, lost in a foggy London and an impenetrable plot. Mason also dominated Lumet's sturdy 1968 film of Chekhov's The Seagull.

After joining Joseph L Mankiewicz to compile a documentary about Martin Luther King, he made the brilliant caper The Anderson Tapes (1971) with Connery, his favourite actor. Lumet once told me that whenever he received a screenplay, he looked to see whether there was a part for Connery. He was also cast in The Offence (1972), as a policeman who is so affected by the horrors of his work that he becomes the predator. In Lumet's film of Murder On the Orient Express (1974), probably the best screen adaptation of an Agatha Christie story, Connery was among an all-star cast including Lauren Bacall, John Gielgud, Ingrid Bergman and, as the detective Hercule Poirot, Albert Finney.

No doubt Lumet regarded that particular box-office hit as less profound than Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975). The former, based on Peter Maas's non-fiction book, starred Pacino as an undercover New York police officer who is surrounded by corruption on the force but is determined to play straight. The latter, also based on a true story and again starring Pacino, in a particularly mesmerising performance, revolved around a botched bank robbery and was shot on the streets of New York, with fierce improvised dialogue.

Lumet had another hit with Network – which was nominated for a total of 10 Oscars and won four – but then faltered with a turgid version of Peter Shaffer's play Equus (1977) and the risible The Wiz (1978), an African-American version of The Wizard of Oz, starring Diana Ross. Only Michael Jackson (as Scarecrow) and Lena Horne (as Glinda the Good) redeemed that farrago.

Horne's daughter Gail Jones was Lumet's third wife. He had previously been married to the actors Rita Gam and Gloria Vanderbilt. After he and Jones divorced, he married Mary Gimbel in 1980. The following year, he returned to his preoccupation with corruption and the police, directing and co-writing the factually based Prince of the City. This long, serious work was unjustly neglected – despite an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay – but remained a personal favourite for Lumet.

He worked with David Mamet on The Verdict (1982), an expose of legal malpractice, eliciting a driven performance from Paul Newman as an alcoholic lawyer and a masterly one from Mason as his adversary. Daniel (1983), an adaptation of an EL Doctorow novel, was another labour of love for the director yet failed to engage the public, remaining only a tribute to Lumet's tenacity and integrity.

The Morning After (1986) proved to be an unusual film for Lumet as it was made in Hollywood, rather than on location in New York. Starring Jane Fonda as a drunken actor involved in a killing, it was a moderate success, although Lumet far preferred Running On Empty (1988), in which River Phoenix played the son of political activists hotly pursued by the FBI. That film combined three of Lumet's obsessions – politics, the family and justice. These themes returned in Family Business (1989), starring Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick; Q&A; (1990), with Nick Nolte as a bigoted cop; A Stranger Among Us (1992), a quasi-documentary portrait of a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn; and Night Falls On Manhattan (1996), which had echoes of 12 Angry Men and The Verdict but suffered from lacking the spark of originality. Despite respectable notices in the US, it failed at the box office.

Lumet moved on to Critical Care (1997), which he described as a "no-budget black comedy". Life was not getting any easier for gutsy, cultured, caring directors, but a little thing like no budget did not faze him. He moved the shoot to Toronto to double for the more expensive New York – that way, he said, "you pick up 17% on the exchange rate".

His next film took him back to where he was happiest, the streets of New York, for what many considered a redundant reworking of Gloria, the 1980 movie directed by John Cassavetes and starring Gena Rowlands as the gutsy, eponymous hero, who is on the run from the mob. Lumet was blessed with a bankable star, Sharon Stone, who blended glamour with tenderness in the role. In a move to keep working, he returned to television in 2001 with the series 100 Centre Street, based around the staff of a New York City courthouse. Characteristically, it was well received for its intelligence and pace.

At the Academy Awards in 2005, Lumet was presented with an honorary Oscar by Pacino. "If you prayed to inhabit a character," said Pacino, "Sidney was the priest who listened to your prayers, helped them come true." It seemed for a while that the big screen was beyond the reach and insurability of a director – however well known for his brisk and economical approach to shooting – who was in his 80s. However, in 2007 he made a brilliant return to form with the black comedy Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. The film, which followed two hard-up brothers who decide to rob their parents' jewellery store, with catastrophic results, was superbly acted under his witty and sympathetic direction.

Lumet is survived by Mary and his stepchildren, Leslie and Bailey; his daughters Amy and Jenny, from his third marriage; nine grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

• Sidney Lumet, film director, born 25 June 1924; died 9 April 2011

Now in our 9th year, the Sacramento International Film Festival is proud to host some of the world's best filmic talent both globally and locally with over a week of films, workshops, and special events. Each year we continue our mission to cultivate filmmaking as an independent art while welcoming all levels of the film industry to our region.

For more information, visit http://www.sacramentofilmfestival.com/festivalguide2011

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Saturday, April 9th ---Crocker Art Museum | 216 O Street

(Afterwards, visit Ernesto's (1901 16th Street, at 16th & S) for our after-party/conversation!)

11AM

NORCAL ALL-STARS

 DJINN (d. Eliane Lima, 15m)
An homage to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Brazilian Philosopher Claudio Ulpiano.

THE  BULLPEN (d.  Vincent Dee Miles, 15m)
Marla, overwhelmed, goes to the bullpen.

INSIDE MY BEING (d. Robert Carlo Chiesa, 18m)
Through the course of the mother daughter journey into the depths of Alzheimer's, Jenni finds that when all else is gone, her mother's heart and soul is not and is able to keep a very special connection with her to the very end.

TYRANNY OF THE MIRROR (d. LaDonna Witmer, 8m)
The mirror image is a hard master. Most women know what it's like to find their reflection wanting. There's always something not quite right -- not tall enough, short enough, curvy enough, thin enough, old enough, young enough.

MARTHA & DEE VISIT THE 5TH DIMENSION (d. Noelle Foster, 10m)
Martha's family has all the outward trappings of suburban bliss. But in reality, her home life is a dystopia of parental egocentricity and neglect. When Martha decides to run away from home, she brings her invisible friend Dee along for an adventure.

THE LOVELY LEAVE (d. Kelly Slachman, 10m)
When Lieutenant Steve Jones 24-hour leave is unexpectedly cut short, he and his wife have very different ideas about how to spend his time at home. Set during WWII, 'The Lovely Leave' is a drama based on the short story by Dorothy Parker.

SACRAMENTO: A FAMILY FABLE (d. Michael Bodie, 19m)
An estranged son. A missing father. And a dead dog. Wouldn't YOU want to go home for the holidays?

BEFORE THE BEGINNING (d. Jason Borroel, 30m)
Winner of Sacramento International Film Festival's screenplay contest, Before the Beginning portrays an awkward meeting between a man and a woman which reveals many secrets.

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3PM
PORTRAITS OF GREATNESS: ELOY TORREZ & DAVID JOHNSON WITH SPECIAL GUEST ELOY TORREZ (free!)

POSITIVE NEGATIVES: THE ART OF DAVID JOHNSON (d. Mindy Steiner, 35m)
David Johnson, now 84 years old, was the first African American student to study photography under Ansel Adams. But unlike Ansel Adams, David Johnson found his landscape on the street where he lived, capturing mages of people living with respect and dignity in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. The amazing art, culture, and sense of place come through in Johnson's work.
ELOY TAKE TWO (d. Roberto Sierra Oregel, 30m)
A journey into the creative mind and work of Los Angeles muralist/artist and singer/song writer, Eloy Torrez. The portrait is composed by his brilliant musical and painting talents and revealing interviews.
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Sunday, April 10th ----The Artisan-1901 Del Paso Boulevard (between El Camino & Arden Way)

11:30AM

ENVIRONMENTAL VISIONS PT.II-DOUBLE FEATURE WITH SHORTS

SIBYLLINE FRACTURE (d. Susan Shaw, 6m)
As a part-time Atchafalaya Basin resident, I am very passionate about the waters of Louisiana. This is my response to the BP spill.
OUS DEENH MILSOON (WILL SEE YOU THAT DAY) (d. Farhan Maqsood, 7m)
Pakkhi Vaas (Temporary Inhabitants) are the marginalized of society, inhabiting the outskirts of the city Lahore in Pakistan, usually occupying vacant government land. Their only connection to society is doing menial jobs to support their families.
THE MUSIC OF ERIC ZANN (d. Janelle Miguel & Benjamin Morales, 1m)
WHAT DO POLAR BEARS DREAM WHILE THEY'RE DYING? (d. Arthur C. Smith III, 33m)
What if we're all the polar bear? A wildlife cinematographer moves to Alaska to discover that what's really killing polar bears is already killing people.
SCIENTISTS UNDER ATTACK (d. Bertram Verhaag, 88m)
A documentary thriller about how Agro-Chemical multinational corporations victimize international scientists to prevent them from publishing their disturbing findings.

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Monday, April 11th----The Artisan-1901 Del Paso Boulevard (between El Camino & Arden Way)

7PM

DOUBLE FEATURE: TIERRA MADRE & WOMEN SPEAK

TIERRA MADRE (d. 62m)
The true story of a woman on the Mexican border determined to raise her children with her female partner.

GET REAL! WISE WOMEN SPEAK (d. Joni Steele Kimberlin, 77m)
Wise Women Speak profiles extraordinary women who are using their time and talent in their later years to benefit the world.

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Wednesday, April 13th----The Artisan-1901 Del Paso Boulevard (between El Camino & Arden Way)

(Afterwards, visit Carol's Books-next door at 1913 Del Paso Boulevard-for our after party/conversation.)

7PM

Cine Soul-the Sacramento Int'l Black Film Festival Part I

MR. DIAL HAS SOMETHING TO SAY (d. Celia Carey, 68m)
Award winning documentary on acclaimed artist Thornton Dial.
This feature explores the visual arts sibling of jazz, the blues, and gospel.
What is art, where is it born, and who decides what is great art?

For more information, visit http://www.sacramentofilmfestival.com/schedule2011
or call Carol's Books: 916-335-9094

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Thursday, April 14th----The Artisan-1901 Del Paso Boulevard (between El Camino & Arden Way)

(Afterwards, visit Carol's Books-next door at 1913 Del Paso Boulevard-for our after party/conversation.)

7PM

Cine Soul-the Sacramento Int'l Black Film Festival Part II

ROUND ON BOTH SIDES (d. Marquette Jones, 17m)
Time is running out on both Nancy's dream of becoming a supermodel as well as her opportunity to be a good mother.
REVOLUTIONARY MICROPHONE (d. Therese Tran, 13m)
An intimate portrait that looks at the power of one individual, Gidon the Mighty Warrior, to bring social awareness to a community through poetry and music.
INFILTRATING HOLLYWOOD: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR (d. Christine Acham, Clifford Ward, 57m)
A gripping documentary on the controversial and FBI repressed 1973 black film The Spook Who Sat By the Door. Through interviews with author Sam Greenlee, Berlie Dixon, widow of director Ivan Dixon, Academy Award winning editor Michael Kahn, and Melvin Van Peebles, the film explores one of the most gripping stories of the last thirty years.

For more information, visit http://www.sacramentofilmfestival.com/schedule2011
or call Carol's Books: 916-335-9094

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Friday, April 15th----The Artisan-1901 Del Paso Boulevard (between El Camino & Arden Way)

3:30PM

SAC ANIMATION 2011

I AM SO PROUD OF YOU (d. Don Hertzfeldt, 21m)

TOOTHNAPPED (d. George Dondero, 5m)
Pull the tooth. Discover the truth.

FLESH COLOR (d. Masahiko Adachi, 4m)
It's the Japanese tattoo world on the skin.

THREADS (d. Robert Forsberg, 9m)
Threads utilizes visual storytelling to use animation as a way to show life events that cannot be seen. Set in Mongolia, Threads is about a young girl who comes to terms with her mother's death by reliving their most cherished and loving times together.

KINGS (d. Robert Forsberg, 7m)
Two old men traveling on a train together engage in an escalating conflict that they try to resolve by playing the card game WAR. They then dominate the only innocent victims they can find. Kings poses the question 'is War inevitable'?

NO ROBOTS (d. Kimberly Knoll, 6m)
In the not so distant future, a cafe owner has to run a business during a time when robots have resorted to crime as a means of survival. He discriminates against mechanical citizens by segregating himself against robotic kind.

LIFE FORMS (d. Cathy Karol-Crowther, 3m)
Hand drawn animated life forms find love and harmony.

SNEEZE ME AWAY (d. Ryan Grobins, 14m)
A boy finds a way to enter into a magical, fantastic world by sneezing with his eyes open. He must then enlist the aid of a strange ally in order to get home again.

THE BIRD UPSTAIRS (d. Christopher Jarvis, 9m)
Frustrated attempts to bear children overwhelm the lives of an aristocratic, avian couple in the early nineteenth century.

CIRCUS (d. Mackenzie Cauley, 7m)
This animated short that explores the romance and quarrels between 3 performers of an old fashioned circus.

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7PM

HARD ASS CINEMA SHORTS SHOWCASE

SPARE (d. Tomer Almagor, 9m)
When Frank's flimsy plan to whack Leo is tampered by a flat tire and Leo flees the scene, the two gangsters embark on a chase deep into the woods where they experience unforeseen intimacy.

SUNDAY MORNING COMING DOWN (d. Tara Parian, 21m)
Sunday Morning Coming Down tells the story of Q, a reticent day laborer, who can't pay his mother's medical bills and also make rent. When his landlord gives him a five-day ultimatum, he takes up a lucrative offer to murder the mistress of Daniel Roaldson.

ANDRE (d. Christopher Fernandez, 12m)
After a workplace affair, Andre has fallen in love with his boss, Lynne. When Lynne recommits herself to her husband Andre is left emotionally damaged. His attempts to win Lynne back fail and he is further hurt and alienated when she has him fired.
BREAKING OUT (d. Kevin Barile, 21m)
Breaking Out is an action/drama about a prisoner who is highly trained in the art of combat who must break out of his cell, fight the guards and rescue his best friend, Benny, from the mysterious people holding them hostage before they both suffer an inevitable demise.

FRANTIC (d. Sean Bradley & Josh Fasulo, 6m)
A once-charming girl struggles to distinguish between fantasy and the reality that corrupted her dreams.
SHADES OF GRAY (d. Frank A. Simasko, 13m)
Ellen Hayes is the victim of a brutal and traumatizing assault. On the way home from the hospital her husband, Patrick Hayes, takes matters into his own hands when she spots her assailant.
3 APARTMENTS (d. Hernan Berangan, 30m)
On one floor of an apartment building, a man crawls up to his own door - number 207 - he's been shot. The girl in 204 is having a meltdown. In 206, a skittish guy is trying to get rid of an old friend. As they unravel, their three stories intertwine.

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Saturday, April 16th ---Crocker Art Museum | 216 O Street

12noon

INTERNATIONAL SHORTS

   TRUTH      OR DIE  (d. Tom Grejs, 10m)
Two teenagers find themselves on a steep cliff overlooking the Swedish mountainside. They play a game, Truth or Lie, to determine the circumstances that brought both to the precipice. As the truth is revealed, the games changes from Truth or Lie to Truth or Die.
IRIS (d. James Niebauer, 2m)
Shot in black and white, Iris is about a photographer chasing her subject.
KIDNAP (d. Sijia Luo, 4m)
A little chicken is late to school, but her excuse is too wild to believe: getting kidnapped on the way to school. You believe not not, this chicken is a really good actress and a Kung Fu master.
PASSION, FRUIT (d. Ting Liu, 14m)
Passion, Fruit is Ting Liu'a graduation thesis film. It received high honors and the Steven J Ross prize for Best Filmed Thesis at Wesleyan University.
  STRANGERS    NO MORE  (d. Kirk Simon, 39m)
In the heart of Tel Aviv, there is an exceptional school where children from forty-eight different countries and diverse backgrounds come together to learn. Many of the students arrive at Bialik-Rogozin fleeing poverty, political adversity and even genocide. At the school they learn and heal.

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2PM

THE PRACTICE OF THE WILD
THE PRACTICE OF THE WILD (d. John J. Healey, 52m)
A conversation with Pulitzer prize winning Northern California poet Gary Snyder.

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4PM

SFF SHORTS SAMPLER
SCOTTISH BOB (d. Joe Stanley, 7m)
When the Family get together, it is a constant struggle to avoid the day ending in disaster.

ULTIMO RECURSO (d. Barney Elliott, 9m)
Without any further options, Cesar resorts to desperate measures. But when an ironic twist of fate foils his plan - in the heat of panic - Cesar must decide whether to flee or to help.

LIGHTS (d. Sabine Lamby, 15m)
The story of a small-town police officer who dreams of being a hero. As his peaceful village offers no opportunity for heroism, he decides to take matters in his own hands.

VENTO (d. Marcio Salem, 15m)
A small isolated town in Brazil is becoming windless.

FLAT LOVE (d. Andres Sanz, 15m)
A man, convinced that the world is actually flat, falls in love with a two-dimensional woman at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From the writer/director of the award-winning Bedford, Flat Love is a unique, funny tale of love and obsession narrated by acclaimed actress Isabella Rossellini.

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7PM

40TH ANNIVERSARY RETROSPECTIVE OF THE LAST PICTURE SHOW w/special guest Timothy Bottoms

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (d. Peter Bogdanovich, 118m)
A group of 50's high schoolers come of age in a bleak, isolated, atrophied West Texas town that is slowly dying, both economically and culturally. The show will also include Q&A with the film's star Timothy Bottoms, live and in person.

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Sunday, April 17th ---Crocker Art Museum | 216 O Street

11:30AM

BARBERSHOP PUNK

BARBERSHOP PUNK (d. Georgia Sugimura Archer, Kristin Armfield, 77m)
Barbershop Punk follows the personal journey of Barbershop Quartet fan Robb Topolski as he takes on a powerful internet broker. Directed by Georgia Sugimura Archer and Kristin Armfield (Co-Director), the film contemplates the future of the American Internet and the Net Neutrality debate, bearing witness to the importance of independent voice and thought.

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1:30PM

POUND OF FLESH w/Special Guest Timothy Bottoms

THE PSYCHIATRIST (short film, runtime TBA)

POUND OF FLESH (d. Tamar Simon Hoffs, 120m)
Professor Noah Melville is seemingly a model family man with a secret. When a young woman's body is found near campus, the police are led to Noah. Malcolm McDowell and Timothy Bottoms star in this gripping drama of dark intentions.

Q&A WITH ACTOR TIMOTHY BOTTOMS of Pound of Flesh

Feeling peaky? You will be after this journey through some of the more disturbing hospitals of cinematic history

There's no safer place is there? A hospital is the only place you'd want to be if something was wrong with you, surely. A gleaming white palace of holistic healthcare where the only thing on the agenda is curing the ailments inflicted by the dangerous world outside. And in among all of this altruistic intent is the jovial atmosphere on the wards; the friendly banter of healthcare professionals and the recovering patients. Such visions recur so often in British cinema and TV history that we must hold a special respect in our collective consciousness for the wards. This can be the only reason for the remorseless 25-year domestic accident-based grind through the ranks of aspiring actors that is Casualty.

The happy-go-lucky pratfalls of the Carry On films aren't the worldwide norm though. It seems hospital wards are where cinema society houses its darkest nightmares, illuminated only by occasional, brief flickers of hope. They are filled with pressured professionals with punitive powers over life and death. Throw in the odd psychological collapse and perhaps a conspiracy or two for added viewing potential. Just relax, and loosen your clothing, the doctor will see you shortly.

1) Threads sees a society completely broken down by a nuclear attack but the health service struggles on manfully, unaware that it is already dead. (@4:30)

2) Perhaps most famous for appearing in a Metallica video, Johnny Got His Gun is a distressing jaunt through a brutally isolated mind. Brief, priceless, respite is provided only through the care and attentions of one thoughtful nurse.

3) Is it catching? Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor gives a strange meaning to Travis Bickle's "real rain" speech.

4) There's something very wrong in Lars Von Trier's hospital in Riget/Kingdom and it isn't just the unsettling beige palette.

5) Strikes, tea breaks, undercover reporters, Robin Askwith, visiting royals, African dictators, evolving the human condition: Lindsay Anderson's curate's egg Britannia Hospital continues to intrigue.

Last week on Clip joint, Matt Harvey explored the moments in cinema when the penny drops ...

First off, an honourable mention should go to Shaunie2000 for suggesting the previous night's episode of that hotbed of Aristotelian drama Neighbours.

It's not really a film though, so probably ineligible.

1) DonutHingeParty suggested Bob Hoskins's brilliant performance at the end of The Long Good Friday as he realises the game is up.

2) Notwaving dug out that classic scene from The Apartment with Jack Lemmon and the broken mirror.

3) Alipan found an absolutely brilliant penny dropping scene from Toy Story where it finally dawns on Buzz Lightyear that he's only a toy. Just try watching this clip without crying just a little bit. Just try!

4) Thesubhuman nominated Fonda v Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West where Frank finally realises who Charles Bronson's character really is. Awesome scene.

5) And finally, to lighten the mood (none of these clips have been particularly cheerful, have they?) let's end with a song! StevieBee found a musical epiphany in Sweeney Todd about, er, cannibalism. Oh ...

Clip joint is changing. From May we'll be transferring commissioning (as well as writing) power to you, the readers. So please hold off on pitching any Clip joint topics until then.

Schedules are for Wed/30–Tues/5 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS' TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6. "Other Cinema:" April Fool's special with books and films about pranksters, Sat, 8:30.

BIG UMBRELLA STUDIOS 906 1/2 Divisadero, SF; www.bigumbrellastudios.com. $1. "This is No Joke: These Movies Were Really Made:" •The Room (Wiseau, 2003), and Troll 2 (Fragasso, 1990), Fri, 7.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-10. "Sing-a-long:" The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939), Wed-Thurs, 7 (also Wed, 2). •Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (Burton, 1985), Thurs, 7:30, and Edward Scissorhands (Burton, 1990), Thurs, 9:20. The African Queen (Huston, 1951), Sat-Sun, 2, 4:30, 7, 9:20.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-15. Certified Copy (Kiarostami, 2010), Wed-Thurs, call for times. Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune (Bowser, 2010) Wed-Thurs, call for times. Winter in Wartime (Koolhoven, 2009), call for dates and times. The Storm That Swept Mexico (Teles and Ragin, 2011), Thurs, 7. Trophy Wife (Ozon, 2010), April 1-7, call for times.

GOETHE-INSTITUT SAN FRANCISCO 530 Bush, SF; (415) 263-8760. $7. "From the Wild West to Outer Space: East German Films:" Hot Summer (Hasler, 1968), Thurs, 7.

HUMANIST HALL 390 27th St, Oakl; www.humanisthall.org. $5. "Re-Imagining Gaza," short films produced by Palestinian youth, Wed, 7.

MECHANICS' INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100, rsvp@milibrary.org. $10. "CinemaLit Film Series: French Twist:" Irma Vep (Assayas, 1996), Fri, 6.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. "Film 50: History of Cinema: Fantasy Films and Realms of Enchantment:" The City of Lost Children (Jeunet and Caro, 1995), Wed, 3:10. "Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area:" "Different Tongues: Film in Dialogue With Music, Literature, and Dance," Wed, 7:30; "Preserving the Avant-Garde at PFA," Sun, 3. "Behind the Scenes: The Art and Craft of Cinema: Patricia Woodbridge on Art Direction:" "Lecture by Patricia Woodbridge" followed by I Am Legend (Lawrence, 2007), Thurs, 7; Shutter Island (Scorsese, 2010), Sun, 5:30. "Under the Skin: The Films of Claire Denis:" Beau travail (Denis, 1999), Fri, 7; Trouble Every Day (Denis, 2001), Fri, 8:30; Wings of Desire (Wenders, 1988), Sat, 8:30. "Afterimage: Filmmakers and Critics in Conversation: Patricio Guzmán with Jorge Ruffinelli:" Salvador Allende (Guzmán, 2004), Sat, 6:30.

PARAMOUNT 2025 Broadway, Oakl; 1-800-745-3000, www.ticketmaster.com. $5. Pillow Talk (Gordon, 1959), Fri, 8.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994; www.redvicmoviehouse.com. $6-10. The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (Herzog, 1974), Wed, 2, 7, 9:20. Kaboom (Araki, 2010), Thurs-Sat, 7:15, 9:15 (also Sat, 2, 4). Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010), Sun-Mon, 7, 9:20 (also Sun, 2, 4:15). The Housemaid (Im, 2010), April 5-6, 7:15, 9:20 (also April 6, 2).

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us? (Siegel, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 7, 8:45. "Men and Machine Guns:" Ninja Turf (Park, 1985), Fri, 7:30; Miami Connection (Park, 1987), Fri, 9:15. Orgasm, Inc. (Canner, 2009), April 1-7, 6:45, 8:30, 10 (no 8:30 show Sun/3; also Sat-Sun, 1:30, 3:15, and 5).

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 151 Third St., SF; www.sfmoma.org. $10. "San Francisco Cinematheque:" "Radical Light: In Search of Christopher Maclaine: Man, Artist, Legend," Thurs, 7.

SAN FRANCISCO MAIN LIBRARY 100 Larkin, SF; www.sfpl.org. Free. Bicycle Bride (Zee, 2010), Sun, 2.

VORTEX ROOM 1082 Howard, SF; www.myspace.com/thevortexroom. $5 donation. "Thursday Film Cult:" •Some Girls Do (Thomas, 1969), Thurs, 9, and The President's Analyst (Flicker, 1967), Thurs, 11. YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. "Human Rights Watch Film Festival:" In the Land of the Free (Jean, 2009), Thurs, 7:30. "Iran Beyond Censorship:" Close-Up (Kiarostami), Fri-Sat, 7:30; Crimson Gold (Panahi, 2003), Sun, 2; White Meadows (Rasoulof, 2009), Sun, 4. "San Francisco Cinematheque:" "Two Together One: Stanton Kaye and Jim McBride," Fri, 7; "Two Together Two," Sat, 7. These events, $10. "Fearless: Chinese Independent Documentaries:" Karamay (Xu, 2010), Sun, 1.<\!s>*

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Think the Spanish are all about siestas and fiestas, and united in Catholicism and nationality? Read on

Geography

Spain shares the Iberian peninsula with Portugal. France sits across the Pyrenees, along with tiny Andorra. A giant rock called Gibraltar sticks out of the bottom and there, due to the perfidious nature of Britain, the Union flag flies. Far-flung outposts include the Canary Islands and two north African enclaves called Melilla and Ceuta. It is considered outlandish to suggest these should not be Spanish. The biggest mountain ranges and rivers (like the Duero) mostly run right to left (except a few that run left to right, like the Ebro). High points include the Pyrenees, Gredos, Sierra Nevada and Alpujarras. Spain is not all sunshine and geraniums. The Atlantic north-west at Galicia is rain-drenched and green, while the interior freezes in winter and the parched south-east at Almería (below) can be desert-like – think Clint Eastwood's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, which was filmed there.

Population

There are now 47 million people in Spain, 7 million more than a decade ago. This has nothing to do with big, happy Spanish families and everything to do with big, happy families from Ecuador, Romania and Morocco. About 5 million immigrants came in just eight years. Not all natives want to be called Spaniards. Some prefer to be called Catalans, Basques, Galicians or by another regional name. Most don't mind being called both Spanish and one of these things, though they disagree over which is more important. Others only want to be Spanish. This is not always a recipe for getting along, but it keeps pollsters busy asking "identity" questions.

Economy

Whizz, bang, pop! Spain's economy grew like a giant souffle in the noughties, only to implode when its massive property bubble burst and the global credit crunch hit. Now 4.3 million Spaniards are jobless – 20% of the total. About 700,000 new homes remain unsold. Spain has less debt than the UK or Germany and has not nationalised major banks, but neighbours like Greece and Portugal make debt markets nervous. Zapatero began swinging the cuts axe even before George Osborne. He also hiked retirement to 67 years. This suits Angela Merkel, who calls the shots.

Government

General Francisco Franco died in bed in 1975, restoring the monarchy and handing his dictator's baton to King Juan Carlos. The young king tossed it away and now Spain is a democracy. Juan Carlos stayed on as head of a parliamentary monarchy – the first monarch since 1931. After Franco died the Catalans, Basques and Galicians wanted some self-government. Then other regions wanted some too. Now Spain is divided between 17 regional governments who do most of the spending (excluding social security and pensions) and have much of the power. Some say Spain is federal in all but name.

Politics

National politics is a two-horse race. The Socialists and the conservative People's party (PP) take governing in turns. Right now the Socialists rule under the increasingly unpopular prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The PP leader, Mariano Rajoy, though considered dull, looks like a shoo-in in the 2012 elections. There are no Lib Dems (even if Nick Clegg, by virtue of his Spanish wife, is Spain's favourite British politician). But nationalists from Catalonia or the Basque country often hold the balance of power, just like Clegg. It is the Basques' turn now. That means more money and devolution. And it means everyone else wants more too.

Food and drink

So the French thought they were the kings of cuisine? First the Basques, then the Catalans and then the whole of Spain drowned in Michelin stars at the start of the 21st century. From funky Ferran Adrià (pictured above) to the nouvelle cuisine of Juan Mari Arzak, Spain calls the shots. A huge variety of grapes means wineries do not have to imitate the monotonous displays of pinot noir and chardonnay churned out by rivals. Instead they produce distinctive reds from La Rioja, Ribera del Duero, Priorat and a hundred less well-known regions. Sharp north-western whites, like the albariños, compete with the smoother verdejos of Rueda or the whites of Penedès[acute last e]. . Fizzy cava makes Christmas cheap and the northern Asturians and Basques like their cider.

History

Not a subject Spaniards always agree on. Try asking who caused the civil war in the 1930s, or whether the Basque country and Catalonia are historical nations. A potted history reads like this: Invaders from north Africa made Spain part of the Muslim world in the 8th century. Seven centuries of sluggish reconquest ended in 1492. Cunning royal marriages and clumsy navigating (by Columbus) gave Spain a massive empire covering bits of Europe and much of South America in the 16th century. Everything went downhill from there, ending with the loss of its last major colonies in the 1890s, a civil war in the 1930s and four decades of Franco. The turnaround came with the 1978 democratic constitution.

Entertainment

Pedro Almodóvar, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Antonio Banderas may be global names in cinema, but the industry at home is struggling. Spaniards are the download kings of Europe. Industry lobbyists claim losses of €4.2bn a year. Only 13 million spectators bought tickets to Spanish films last year – the worst figure for a decade. They provided €80.3m of income – less than the €87m from subsidies.

Love and sex

So is this where Opus Dei members mortify themselves to keep their minds off sex? Or is it one of the few countries to recognise gay marriage and transsexual rights? The answer is both. Most Spaniards occupy the wide middle ground between Almodóvaresque sexual experimentation and church-inspired chastity. The average Spaniard loses his or her virginity at 18. Spanish men are said to be the largest brothel-goers in Europe.

Character

Siestas, fiestas and holy communion? Not really. Spaniards are too busy working their strangely long hours to have a mid-day kip. Most call themselves Catholics, but they are not big church-goers. Regional stereotypes stretch from partying Andalucians, to dour Castilians, laconic Galicians, penny-pinching Catalans and industrious, chaste Basques. These are considered insulting and politically incorrect – except when people use them to describe themselves

International relations

In 2009 Spain boasted the world's ninth largest economy. Now it is 12th, overtaken by Russia, India and Canada. Spaniards are wildly enthusiastic Europeans and seem largely happy to shape their international agenda around the EU. Exceptions include Cuba, where Spain is a dove, and Morocco. The latter is a short hop from southern Spanish beaches and governments, who fear illegal migrants and terrorism, tread carefully.

Camp on the beach on the Emerald coast, take a tour of Cognac country or follow in Proust's footsteps around Normandy – our experts reveal their dream trips that won't break the bank

Brittany

It is called the Emerald coast and bears its name with panache. From Cancale, world capital for oysters, to St Briac, where Renoir loved daydreaming, this stretch of granite rocks and gold sand shelters resorts with everything discerning visitors on a budget could dream of. Among them is Dinard, between St Malo and St Lunaire. There, pitch your tent at the Camping du Port Blanc (rue du Sergent Boulanger, +33 2 9946 1074, camping-port-blanc.com) on the beach, from €13pp a night, or rent a studio at the charming La Pensée in St Lunaire (la-pensee.pagesperso-orange.fr) from €195 for a week.

Among the many things to do in and around Dinard: swim, sail, walk, eat and hunt for antiques. In Dinard and St Lunaire, Point Passion Plage (digue de L'Ecluse, Dinard, +33 2 9988 1520, pointplage.fr) provides kayak, catamaran and windsurf lessons and rentals. You can also purchase a €92 pass that will give you access to all their activities.

Your stay on the Emerald coast wouldn't be complete without a taste of the region's best galettes, such as those of Crêperie du Roy (9 boulevard Féart, Dinard, +33 2 9946 1057). Go for the galette soubise (onions cooked in muscadet) and crêpe pomme maison flambée au calvados – your palate (and wallet) will be forever grateful.

If you want to treat yourself, then veer towards the promenade au Clair de Lune. At the end stands La Gonelle (+33 2 9916 4047, lagonelle.com), a seafood and fish restaurant open from 15 April to 30 September. You can choose your fish from the aquarium; the chef will present it to you on a platter as it breathes its last.

There's no need for a car in Dinard. Public transport, such as the bus linking St Briac to St Malo (illenoo-services.fr), or the vedette (boat) taking you to St Malo every half-hour (vedettes-saint-malo.com), are reliable and cheap. You can also rent a bike for the day near Dinard's market (8 rue St Enogat, +33 2 9946 2725, breizhcycles.com) and cycle to the medieval city of Dinan (dinan-tourisme.com). You'll pedal through sunflower fields and old villages and hug the River Rance for a few miles. Dinard will leave you with wonderful and enduring souvenirs.

French-born Agnès Poirier is a political commentator and film critic based in Paris

Normandy

In order to do the Marcel Proust tour of Normandy properly, you should ideally be driven by a bisexual chauffeur you're lusting after. If you can't manage that, then hire a convertible two-seater and get your significant other to wear goggles, kinky rubber coat and close-fitting aviator's hat while you shout relevant passages from A la Recherche du Temps Perdu from the passenger seat.

Drive first to the Grand Hôtel Cabourg (les jardins du Casino, +33 2 3191 0179, accorhotels.com) on the lovely Côte Fleurie (Flower Coast). Proust checked into his fourth floor suite here feverish and exhausted in the summer 1907. He wrote: "… menaced by the enemies thronging around me, penetrated to the very bones by fever, I was alone and wanted to die". When I stayed in the Marcel Proust suite with my beloved, by contrast, I couldn't have been happier. I flung open the French windows on to the Promenade de Marcel Proust and rang for the best room service I've ever had – champagne with confite de daurade aux huîtres.

You could splash out and do the same – a double room costs from €165. Or stay at nearby La Raspelière (from €80 for a double, chambres-hotes-cabourg.fr), and then dine at Le Balbec restaurant below the Grand Hôtel, with its marvellous seasonal seafood menu (three courses from €56). First, though, have a Proust cocktail (gin, cointreau, orange and curaçao bleu) in the Belle Epoque bar while listening to Scott Joplin on the computerised pianola.

Next morning follow Proust and the love of his life, chauffeur Albert Agostinelli, on their tour of Norman architecture. They went to Bayeux, not to see the tapestry, but to pay homage to oriental figures in the romanesque part of Bayeux cathedral. They didn't, as far as I can find out, have lunch in Bayeux's restaurants (try La Rapière, off rue St Jean, +33 2 3121 0545, larapiere.net) offering Norman-style cooking. But you should.

Rejoin Proust's tour by visiting the abbeys of Jumièges, Saint-Wandrille and Saint-Georges de Bouscheville, perhaps taking tea at the Château de Balleroy (chateau-balleroy.com), where Proust savoured Boucher's tapestries.

Check into another grand hotel – the Grand Hôtel de l'Espérance at Lisieux (from €69 a night, lisieux-hotel.com) and after dinner, get your chauffeur to drive you to the cathedral of St Pierre. It was here that in 1907 Proust studied the facade's foliated tracery, illuminated by Agostinelli's headlamps.

The following morning drive towards Illiers, where adolescent Marcel stayed. On the way, you'd be idiotic not to visit Chartres cathedral (chartres-tourisme.com). Illiers itself is a scruffy backwater village transformed into Combray in the novel. Today the house where Proust's Tante Léonie lived is a little museum (marcelproust.pagesperso-orange.fr). From Illiers, you could drive to Monet's garden at Giverny (€8, giverny.org/gardens). Proust repeatedly planned to go, but never made it. A shame: given his love of botany and his hypersensitive openness to beauty, he would have adored it.

Stuart Jeffries is a feature writer and ex-Paris correspondent for the Guardian

Loire

The Loire Valley has to be France's most français region. Its people speak the purest French, and it's also at the heart of the country's history – a fascinating base for a week's touring.

The most famous chateau, and justifiably so, is Chenonceau (chenonceau.com) in Indre-et-Loire – it straddles a lake on a series of arches, and was a gift from King Henri II to his lover Diane de Poitiers, a woman so sexy that the Queen, Catherine de Medici, used to spy on the couple's lovemaking to learn a few tricks. Chenonceau is to chateaux what Monica Bellucci is to cinema. Le Relais de Chenonceaux (+33 2 4723 9811, chenonceaux.com), close to the chateau, has double rooms from €52, half-board from €92.

To the south-west, across vineyard-covered countryside stands the hilltop Château de Chinon (visit-loire.com/cities-loire/chinon). You can stand in the very room where Joan of Arc performed a "miracle" in 1429. To test her divine inspiration, Prince Charles (no, not that one) hid in disguise among his courtiers. Unerringly, Joan picked him out. Miraculous, until you realise that the knock-kneed, squinty-eyed prince was one of the most recognisable men in France.

A great-value day out is a rent-a-bike ride along the Loire riverbanks from the medieval Château de Blois (chateaudeblois.fr): Traîneurs de Loire (traineursdeloire.com) rent out bikes for €13 a day from several locations along the river.

In the evenings, the region is the perfect place for a gourmet feast. In the old centre of Saumur, Auberge Saint-Pierre (6 place Saint-Pierre, auberge-saintpierre.com) has traditional regional cuisine at reasonable prices, such as boeuf bourguignon for €11.50.

And if I taste a wine I like at dinner, I ask the restaurateur for the grower's address, then drop by next day to stock up at wholesale prices. Chinon blanc sec, for example, is a golden drink that inspires descriptions like "harmonious", "fruity" and "generous with its charms" – very much like this part of France itself.

Stephen Clarke, author of A Year in the Merde (Black Swan, £7.99). His new book, Paris Revealed, is out on 31 March

Aquitaine

The first time I travelled down to France's south-west corner, it was to investigate the region's separatist movement, Iparetarrak (IK), a more amateurish and considerably less violent version of Eta. For many years, IK was secretly applauded by those Parisians lucky enough to own houses along that pristine stretch of Atlantic coastline. Twenty years on, the revolutionaries that fed IK have retired and development along the coastline has mushroomed. New-builds have sprung up on the hills, and traffic jams along the coast's route nationale are the norm.

There is one place, however, that has not changed. Guéthary is a small fishing village nestled between the chichi seaside towns of Biarritz and Saint Jean-de-Luz. It is also one of Europe's more confidential surf spots and so it has been contaminated or preserved, depending on your point of view, by a certain alternative vibe that seems to co-exist quite nicely with the well-heeled Parisian families who have been holidaying there since the 60s.

The village is sliced in two by the route nationale, so you'll want to make sure you're staying on the right side of it. Head straight to the Hotel Madrid (+33 5 5926 5212, lemadrid.com) in the heart of the village. Here the sound of the ocean rubs out the distant rumble of traffic. Unaltered since the turn of the last century when Paul Klee stayed here and sat with Kandinsky on its windswept terrace overlooking the sea, Le Madrid is still a simple, family hotel with five pretty rooms, from €59 a night, and a good restaurant.

Guéthary is one of those magical places to which people return faithfully all their lives. My own children would play for hours on its vast fronton (court), theoretically for pelota but more often for impromptu football, or rollerskating, or teenage flirting or, at night, dances and fireworks or Basque games (shows of strength).

In the morning, you might walk down to one of Guéthary's three beaches: la Plage du Centre to mess around in the rockpools and eat chipirones (tiny squid) or gambas a la plancha (grilled shrimp) at Kostaldea, a little place right on the beach. Or there are the wilder beaches of Les Alcyons or Cenitz, where you can lie on the white sand or body-surf in the big waves. Later, while the children play outside you can be in the Bar Basque opposite the Madrid, drinking sangria and watching the sunset.

Lucy Wadham is the author of The Secret Life of France (Faber, £7.99)

Alsace

With a unique Franco-German character, Alsace offers stunning mountainous scenery, gorgeous villages, fascinating museums and wonderful wines. My ideal itinerary around the region kicks off high up in the Vosges mountains. The wonderful little eco-hotel Villa Rosa (rue Thierry Schoerem, +33 3 8949 8119, villarosa.fr) in Trois-Epis, near the town of Colmar, is the perfect place to relax. It has eight comfortable rooms costing from €63 per night, and its owner, Anne-Rose, creates wonderful meals with the vegetables, herbs and flowers from her garden (€26 for three courses).

After winding down for a day or two next to the solar-heated pool or taking walks from the hotel, I'll jump in the hire car for some thrilling drives through the mountains. The hairpin bends aren't for the faint-hearted, and the roads' steep hills are a popular challenge for cyclists. My destination is the nearby village of Turckheim. Like my other favourite villages, Eguisheim and Riquewihr, Turckheim has wonderful narrow streets rambling through colourful timber-framed houses with window boxes in full bloom. My stroll will also have me sniffing out one of Turckheim's wineries where I'll sample the local riesling and gewürztraminer.

Not far from Turckheim is the imposing Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg (haut-koenigsbourg.fr). Sitting high over the vineyard-lined valley, the castle dates from the 12th century and offers incredible views across to the Black Forest in Germany. After a poke around its battlements, I'll carry on to Colmar, a gorgeous little town in the heart of Alsace. Lunch is at the characterful restaurant Maison Rouge (9, rue des Ecoles, Colmar, +33 3 8923 5322), where I'll tuck into a salad of the local Munster cheese, or a delicious tarte flambée, before walking it off along the canal in the area known as Petite Venise (Little Venice).

Carolyn Boyd is editor of France magazine (francemag.com)

Poitou-Charentes

Beneath Tiepolo skies, it's a gentle amble through shimmering cognac vines down to the Charente river for a dip in the calm waters. Such is the idyllic nature of summer days in the Charente, second-sunniest corner of France, after the Riviera.

The riverside town of Cognac has for four centuries been the home of cognac-making, now a booming export trade, not least among the American rapper fraternity where it's known as "yak". In the courtyard restaurant of the quirkily decorated but comfortable Hotel Heritage (25, rue d'Angoulême, +33 5 4582 0126, hheritage.com, doubles €70) or in the smartly cosy Le Bistro de Claude (35 rue Grande, +33 5 4582 6032, bistro-de-claude.com) the spirit Victor Hugo dubbed "the liquor of the gods" is served in tulip glasses to stop aromas escaping.

Most cognac houses – such as Hennessy, Martell and Rémy Martin – offer visits and tastings. But Baron Otard (baronotard.com) has the advantage of being in the Château de Cognac so the tour takes in Renaissance halls designed by Leonardo da Vinci and plunges into a fungi-draped dungeon, the "paradise cellar", where cognacs from centuries past are stored.

For sustenance of the soul, the nearby thousand-year-old Abbey of Bassac (+33 5 4581 9422, abbayebassac.com) has a tangible spirituality and visitors are welcome to stroll in the near-silent gardens. Within the same tiny village there's a choice of two good restaurants, L'Essille (rue de Conde, +33 5 4581 9413, hotel-restaurant-essille.com) and L'Auberge de Condé (, doubles €35, rue Rixendis Loriches, +33 5 4583 0967, auberge-de-conde.net).

But for an insight into contemporary French culture, head to Angoulême, historic home of papermaking and capital of the comic book. On a ramble through the hilly Charente capital you'll spot some of the 20 or so giant-scale cartoon scenes painted on to the sides of buildings by top comic strip artists.

Lennox Morrison is an author and journalist based in Paris

Dordogne

The prehistoric Lascaux caves, Bergerac, and Sarlat are the famous sites of the Dordogne region of Aquitaine, but in the bit I know well I've found many surprising treasures. Make a base in the pretty village of Sainte Alvère, such as the sweet Roquebrune en Périgord (+33 5 5361 2418, roquebrune-perigord.com, €75 for two), where you will be tempted to spend a week scoffing saucisson, truffles and foie gras from the weekly market (the rotisserie chicken van is amazing). Go dancing one night with local farmers, families and dreadlocked hippies at La Guinguette de Neufonds, a fun restaurant beside a lake (where you can swim) near Vergt, that has a cheap buffet with live music ranging from Gypsy jazz to local ska-punk.

My top day trips are as follows. A wonderful chateau with an interesting backstory is Château des Milandes (milandes.com) in Castelnaud-la-Chapelle, once the home of Josephine Baker, the African American who became an exotic dancer in Paris in the 20s. She also spied for the French resistance, was a major player in the American civil rights movement and the Angelina Jolie of her day, adopting children from around the world. Look out for the gorgeous art deco bathrooms modelled on perfume bottles and her famous banana skirt. Another day drive to Limeuil, where the Dordogne and Vézère rivers meet and you can go for a high-speed float in the strong currents, or kayak. Further away, on the coast, the incredible Dune du Pyla is Europe's biggest sand dune, and if you're in the area in May, the Bergerac jazz festival (jazzpourpre.com) is excellent.

Gemma Bowes, acting travel editor of the Guardian

Provence-Alpes-Côte D'Azur

Provence and the Côte d'Azur don't take kindly to budgets, but experiencing the region on the cheap is possible. I'd head to Nîmes (just over the border in Languedoc-Roussillon), preferably between 8-13 June for the Féria (viva-la-feria.com), and either buy a ticket for the bullfighting at the Roman arena of Les Arènes (4 rue de la Violette, arenesdenimes.com) or settle for some gardiane, a bull casserole. I'd sleep at the excellent Nîmes youth hostel (€35 for a double, +33 4 6668 0320, hinimes.com).

On to Arles and the fascinating Van Gogh walking tour (+33 4 9018 4120, arlestourisme.com) then, bellyful of bull finally digested – it won't go down without a fight – I'll have pizza at Chez Néné et Bébé (12 impasses du Forum, +33 4 9093 4949, tinyurl.com/5sg57fg).

I'd like to hit Avignon for its festival from 6-26 July (+33 4 9027 6650, festival- avignon.com) and to eat at Au Tout Petit (€25 for three courses, 4 rue d'Amphoux, +33 4 9082 3886, autoutpetit.fr), which serves good value, inventive dishes.

Last stop, Aix-en-Provence, and I'd stretch the budget to stay at Le Manoir (€67 for a double room, 8 rue d'Entrecasteaux, +33 4 4226 2720, hotelmanoir.com), set in an historic house with a beautiful courtyard and 14th-century cloister.

Neil McQuillian is a travel writer for Rough Guides

Languedoc-Roussillon

It is easy to find the Languedoc. Just follow the Rhône river, and when you hit the southern French coast, instead of turning left to head to St Tropez or Provence, head right towards Spain. The region stretches over 16,000 square miles.

Your first major stop is Béziers, a city that seems almost more Spanish than French. It was a Cathar stronghold in medieval times and the site of a horrendous massacre in 1209 when crusaders besieged the city. The worst bloodshed took place in the cathedral, which you should visit, if only for the views across the city and the Orb. Then you have two choices for lunch; either the best wine-bar in the region, Le Chameau Ivre (15 place Jean Jaurès, +33 4 6780 2020, tinyurl.com/5s93d5t), or a charming restaurant called Le Petit Monmartre (+33 4 6728 5654, lepetitmontmartre.net) in the elegant Place de la Madeleine. Stay at the Hôtel des Poètes, overlooking the park (80 allées Paul Riquet, +33 4 67 76 38 66, hoteldespoetes.net).

Next stop is the Etang de Bages, just outside Narbonne. You can walk along the wooden walkways over the water, or simply along the coastal paths, admiring the nature and the pink flamingoes. If you're hungry there is no nicer place to eat than the restaurant Le Portanel (pas de Portanel, +33 4 6842 8166, leportanel.fr).

From there it is a short drive to Spain, but please don't miss Collioure (collioure.com), just before the border, a favourite haunt of the fauvist artists and famous for its anchovies.

Helena Frith Powell is the author of Love in a Warm Climate (Gibson Square, £8.99)

Cinephiles received a surprise treat when, in 2007, Charles Burnett's debut film "Killer of Sheep" was showcased in theaters and on DVD thirty years after it was created. Taking cues from Italian neo-realism, the movie examined a community of African Americans in L.A. as they lived their day-to-day lives, scraping by but always remaining optimistic. The release reached many new audiences, which...

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Black Film Critics Circle (BFCC) has voted 'The Social Network' Best Film of 2010 and has awarded Best Director to Darren Aronofsky ('Black Swan'), Best Actress to Natalie Portman ('Black Swan') and Best Actor is tied between Colin Firth ('The King's Speech') and James Franco ('127 Hours').

Best Picture: The Social Network

Best Director: Darren Aronofsky - Black Swan

Best Actor: Colin Firth - The King's Speech (tie) James Franco - 127 Hours

Best Actress: Natalie Portman - Black Swan

Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale - The Fighter

Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo - The Fighter

Best Independent Film: Night Catches Us

Best Original Screenplay: Christopher Nolan - Inception

Best Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin - The Social Network

Best Documentary: Waiting For Superman

Best Foreign Film: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Best Animated Film: Toy Story 3

Best Ensemble: The Social Network

BFFC Signature Awards include:

Pioneer - Haile Gerima - As the independent producer, director, writer of "Teza", Gerima has bee recognized for sustaining African Diaspora culture and empowering disenfranchised populations through his highly artistic and provocative work. His commitment to speaking truth to power is depicted in a body of work from the seventies up to his ground-breaking film Sankofa of the nineties. Gerima is a visionary with an eye for promoting black culture in film in a positive and historical light.

Breakout Performance -Jaden Smith - Jaden is a rising star who is recognized for his excellent performance in the summer blockbuster remake "The Karate Kid." With an unmistakable charisma and charm, an acting ability beyond his years, and commitment and dedication to the role, Smith was a scene stealer. There is no doubt that Smith has a bright future ahead of him.

Special Mention -Gareth Edwards - With his SF film "Monsters", Edwards took an original and organic approach to cinema bringing the industry back to its roots of visual storytelling. Edwards' creativity defies the trend of contrived narratives and reliance on big budgets and gimmicks and instead gives the audience rich stories and memorable characters. "Monsters" is a great look at how Sci-Fi is done right (human stories, not creature-features) by a Director who understands that less is more, with good visual effects employed economically to enhance the film - not define it.

BFCC's Top Ten Picks

1. The Social Network

2. Inception

3. Black Swan

4. The Fighter

5. The Kids Are All Right, The Town (Tie)

7. Toy Story 3

8. The King's Speech

9. Winter's Bone

10. The Ghost Writer

Black Film Critics Circle is a film critics organization dedicated to honoring excellence of professionals in the film industry in U.S. and World Cinema. The organization launched in 2010 to celebrate achievements in cinema, maintain the integrity of a true critics organization and advance a collective vision of journalists of the black Diaspora. BFCC's mission is to acknowledge and honor the contributions by people of the black Diaspora in the film industry who work in front of and behind the camera while also welcoming promising new talent; Assist in the development of new talent in the field of entertainment journalism through educational opportunities, mentoring and strategic partnerships: Raise awareness of the significance of black film and black film history as a critical part of film culture and preservation

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... of Interactions by Leon Gurevitch disney.go.com/fairies and Pixie Hollow MMOG by Allison Maplesden Feminism and Cinema in the Digital Age by Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon Great Directors Mattias Frey on Michael Haneke Matt Losada on Jean Rouch Robert Farmer on Jean Epstein Festival Reports Martha P. Nochimson on New York Gianluca Pulsoni on Lucca Film Festival Celluloid Liberation Front on...

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DIFF 2010 ‘Cultural Bridge Day' on Dec. 16 promotes intercultural dialogue through cinema

The ‘Cultural Bridge Day' opened with the screening of Egyptian director Hesham Issawi's Cairo Exit, a powerful account of life in contemporary Cairo about two star-crossed lovers. The film shines the spotlight on the social and cultural taboos that riddle the city's diverse population.

Masoud Amralla Al Ali, Artistic Director, Dubai International Film Festival, said: "The Cultural Bridge Day is a significant component of the festival, highlighting our commitment to promote universal harmony through intercultural dialogue. With over 200 nationalities, Dubai is uniquely positioned to foster dialogue, and Cultural Bridge Day is a perfect fit to the ethos of the city and the festival. The new additions of the Peace Wall and Phone Booth will further drive the participation of the public, making DIFF a true community event."

The new venue of DIFF, The Walk at JBR is hosting a series of colourful events to mark the ‘Cultural Bridge Day.' Global Village is presenting some of this season's most exciting international street entertainment including South African drummers and dancers, South African music workshop with the participation of the audience, Egyptian Tanoura dancers, Kenyan acrobats, and performances by a Thai dance group and the Lebanese Dabka Dance Company. The festivities start at 2 pm and will conclude with the open air screening of ‘My Wife's Husband' a film by Niazi Mostafa and the concert of Lebanese classical Arabic singer Rima Khcheiche.

At the venue, visitors could also take part in the popular digital photo-booths set up by Fishfayce, where people can express their perceptions on cultural understanding through a written or signed pose, which will be available to download or share online through social media.

A new addition this year is the Peace Wall hosted by DIFF in partnership with The JamJar Gallery. The public could participate in the ‘Cultural Bridge Day' by sending messages of peace that will be depicted on the ‘Peace Wall.'

DIFF PRESS RELEASE 

By: Nsenga Burton

Film director Tanya Hamilton isn't a household name yet, but the craftsmanship of her new film, Night Catches Us, will certainly make her one. The film takes a complicated look at the Black Panther Party in 1976 and examines how the political organization and the black power movement affected the intimate relationships of the people involved in it. The relationship central to the narrative is between Marcus and Patricia, played brilliantly by critically acclaimed actors Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington.

Hamilton's film is based on the true story of a family friend, Carol Lawson-Green, who helped raise her. Lawson-Green went to prison for a year after she organized a protest at the White House following the Selma march and "Bloody Sunday." Hamilton was always interested in how these events shaped Lawson-Green's life, for better or worse.

The Root wanted to find out out just who this young woman is who has made such a provocative film that speaks to so many issues. We learned that she is everything such a complex work suggests she would be: cerebral, brilliant, humble, thoughtful, opinionated, complicated, clear, laser-focused, holistic, brave, afraid and courageous. Yes, we deduced all of this in less than an hour. In an industry that can be cookie-cutter, that is pretty refreshing.

The Root: How is a first-time director able to pull together a cast that includes Kerry Washington, Anthony Mackie, Jamie Hector and Wendell Pierce?

Tanya Hamilton: It was timing and having a compelling screenplay. We were looking to make this film right when the Screen Actors Guild strike was going to happen, so the timing was right for them to consider a smaller project. I also think that the politics were particularly important to Anthony and Kerry because it connected them to characters who were layered in a way that would speak to African-American actors.

TR: The Roots did the sound track. How did you decide to work with them?

TH: I knew their agent at Paradigm, and it was actually her suggestion. I always liked them a lot, but I never thought they would be a possibility for us -- you know, because they're the Roots. We all sat down and thought of how we wanted to have a three-tier approach to the music -- present, past and future -- which is important in the movie and needed to be reflected in the music. It was a collaborative process, and I can honestly say that the Roots were instrumental to this film because they are the glue that holds the sound together.

TR: What is your all-time favorite film?

TH: Nicolas Roeg's Walk About. I love his earlier movies. They're upside down, crazy, weird. I like the space in those a lot. Raoul Peck's Lumumba [and] Sometimes in April. Mean Streets. I admire subtlety -- films with much more of a '70s bent. That's the era of character, when character ruled.

TR: What are your feelings about the challenges that black female directors face?

TH: There aren't a lot of black women making movies, which I find interesting in a way. I've blindly not really thought of it. I'm race obsessed, and that has been the lens through which I walk through the world. Making the film has made me think about my gender in a way I had previously not bothered [to]. Film is a very male-dominated world, and those positions are very protected. I think it's interesting in terms of what gets defined as a woman's film as opposed to a regular film. I haven't figured it out yet. I don't have a theory -- at least not a smart one.

TR: Do you have a theory on any subject that you'd like to share?

TH: One theory I have is about what I'd like to do as a filmmaker. We as filmmakers live in extremes. You have sort of this specialty world -- the Caucasian world that is enormous. [White filmmakers] go into the Hollywood world or the independent world and have so many options. You look at that world of African-American cinema, but it doesn't really exist. I know there are a lot of people who want to see films that defy class -- films that live at the center, not at the extremes. We need to figure out how to make content for [moviegoers who want to see films that transcend class and race] and to market it so that people will come out and see it.

TR: What's next for you?

TH: I want to do this thing about these two brothers who are Native American and one of them is half black. I'm very interested in that world and worlds that are underexplored. I am very interested in what we view as an old-world society. What does it mean to be modern and Native American?

TR: Is there anything else you would like to add?

TH: Black filmmakers need to pay closer attention to how we market films. The biggest heartbreak is when you see how much work went into marketing your film and learn that so few people went to see it. No one involved in commerce wants to get involved in something that won't make money. We have to figure out a way to marry art and commerce. That is the secret to these specialty films. How do I deal with audience and marketing -- how do I shove the two things together while maintaining the integrity of the film?

Nsenga Burton, Ph.D., is editor-at-large for The Root, where she writes the Buzz section and contributes regularly. She is also a media scholar whose expertise includes race, class, gender and sexuality. Burton is an assistant professor at Goucher College and recently completed a chapter on South African soap operas for an anthology on black popular culture.

Like The Root on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

Recently, it's all been about the Wikileaks hullabaloo and cable gate keeps on getting bigger and bigger, what with..

• The US still trying to recover after it's less than nice comments about China was revealed. Documents show how exasperated America is with "muscle-flexing" and "difficult" Chinese politicians. One cable describes China as a country who is "losing friends worldwide" and that "stomp[s] around and carry a small stick."
• But on a brighter note, the US kept up the pressure to release Liu Xiaobo. Ambassador Huntsman wrote a letter requesting his release but got rudely told not to use human rights as an issue to meddle in Chinese affairs
• Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd previously urged Hilary Clinton to be forceful with China saying "prepared to deploy force if everything goes wrong."
• China blocked a UN move to sanction anti-India terrorist group JuD at Pakistan's request.
• Kenya would rather not have the US and China get along because China plays a convenient counterbalance to American and European power in the region and the competition China creates gives African countries more leverage.

So what does the man next in line to Hu like in his movies anyhow? Well, he liked Jia Zhang Ke's I Wish I Knew documentary that played at the Expo as well as The Departed. He gave two thumbs up to Saving Private Ryan and particularly enjoys Hollywood movies about World War II, which is all swell until you hear Xi's reasons for liking them. The leak has Xi saying, "Hollywood movies are grand and truthful. Americans have a clear outlook on values and clearly demarcate between good and evil. In American movies, good usually prevails."

Oh okay, because in real life, the forces of good always triumph over evil. Sounds like Xi needs to stick to watching the Disney channel. But wait, there's more.

"Americans say what they should [emphasis Shanghaiist] say...In contrast, Curse of the Golden Flower, a recently popular Chinese movie directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Gong Li (she of Miami Vice movie stardom) had been confusing to Xi. Some Chinese moviemakers neglect values they should promote."

We forgot about how the Chinese government likes to blot out all the "confusing" things in cinema for it's people. It's not everyday that you see the US acting so openly like China--busying itself with the censoring of it's state secrets--or that you see a top Chinese leader praising American film sensibilities but there you have it.

SIXTY years ago, I watched African jungle adventure film King Solomon’s Mines at the Globe cinema in Johnstone.

Urban Planner is Torontoist's guide to what's on in Toronto, published every weekday morning, and in a weekend edition Friday afternoons. If you have an event you'd like considered, email all of its details—as well as images, if you've got any—to events@torontoist.com.

Pat Stanley's paintings, on display until December 5, envision Toronto's concrete architecture as a cornerstone of its future natural landscape. Image courtesy of the artist.

Today in Toronto, we've got the return of the One of a Kind Show, an art exhibit inspired by Toronto's concrete architecture, a reading from literary superstar Derek Walcott, and the autumn edition of the Naked Frames video festival.

CRAFT: The return of the One of a Kind Christmas Show and Sale is as sure a sign as any that the holiday season has arrived. The queen of craft shows, running from today until December 5, is the perfect place to get all that pesky shopping out of the way, with over eight hundred artisans hocking their wares. From handcrafted wooden toys to unique textiles to an enormous variety of artisan foods, garnishes, and preserves to sample (seriously—don’t eat before you go), this is one holiday event that is not to be missed. Like all smart shopping venues, the endless hall of crafts is windowless and clock-free, so don’t be surprised if you emerge from its depths and find out that it’s January. Direct Energy Centre, Exhibition Place (100 Princes' Boulevard); 10 a.m.–9 p.m.; $10–$12/adults, $6.50/seniors and students, kids under twelve FREE.

ART: Concrete buildings don’t make many people’s hearts start beating faster, but look around and you’ll notice that their clean, institutional lines make up a fair chunk of Toronto’s landscape. Inspired by the book Virtual Concrete, Pat Stanley’s paintings foresee a bleak future for Toronto’s concrete architecture, fusing past and future in a vision of these buildings being taken over by the natural world. His pieces represent iconic structures such as New City Hall, Rochdale College, and the Gardiner Expressway, starkly superimposed on a canvas of natural chaos. His show runs until December 5, with an opening reception tonight. Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts (984 Queen Street West), 6–9 p.m., FREE.

WORDS: What's that whooshing sound you hear? It's the sound of book nerds and academics from across the city high-tailing it to Ryerson for an appearance by literary superstar Derek Walcott. Born in Saint Lucia, Walcott is known for poetry and plays that interweave strands of mythology, magical realism, and postcolonialism. His work, which earned him the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, echoes the syncretic nature of Caribbean culture, fusing elements of African, Asian, and European traditions. Tonight, he'll read, speak, and answer questions, but be sure to arrive early, because seating is limited. Ryerson University, Library Building, room LIB-72 (350 Victoria Street); 7–9 p.m., doors at 6:30 p.m.; FREE.

VIDEO: Quarterly video festival Naked Frames returns for its autumn edition tonight, once again paying homage to "all things cool and all types of weird." The festival was designed to honour videos and animations made with little to no budget, and tonight's edition features contributions by Neil Kingma, Mike Geiger, Diego Maclean, and more. The evening will feature live music from Gentleman Reg, and a top secret after-party/meet-'n'-greet will take place after the screenings, with the location only announced at the event. Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue); 9 p.m.; $10/regular, $8/members, $5/students.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Carlos

The life of Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal is just too big to fit into one film. That was the conclusion reached by director Olivier Assayas upon researching what would become a five-and-a-half hour epic about the man, which was first shown as a miniseries in Europe before showing as one massive film at Cannes earlier this spring. For the convenience of those with more modest attention spans, there is a more streamlined two-and-a-half-hour version of the film. But for the truly ambitious, the mammoth full cut is on a roadshow tour that hits the AFI this week.

What those not prone to numb posteriors will get is a two-decade epic look at the remarkable life story of a man who was the architect behind numerous bombings, hijackings and other assorted mayhem -- on behalf of a diverse array of organizations and causes -- from the mid-70s through the mid-90s until his eventual arrest at the hands of the French equivalent of the CIA, in concert with the Sudan. And if you've got the patience, the AFI has some nice incentives to check it out on the big screen. The screening, while the length of three features, is a mere $15 -- for that price, you get the movie, a free box of popcorn and a 40-page commemorative program.

The AFI also has a few other series getting underway now that the European Union Showcase is over, with one series covering New Spanish Cinema, as well as a month-long series of the films of Victor Fleming (The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind). And, starting Friday, the theater celebrates the 50th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho with a week long run of a brand new 35mm print of the film.

View the trailer.
Carlos opens today with one daily showing through Saturday, at 1 p.m. each day, at the AFI.

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Dancing Dreams

German choreographer Pina Bausch is a household name -- that is, if your household happens to follow modern dance. But even if that's not where your interests lie, many cinephiles have at least seen her and her work via the dance sequences in Pedro Almodóvar's masterpiece, Talk to Her. Bausch passed away last year, and this film by Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffmann is the last document of her work, as she leads a troupe of teens on a new project. The film is being shown at the Hirshhorn as a tie-in with their current exhibit of the paintings of Guillermo Kuitca, who took inspiration from Bausch in a number of his works.

View the trailer (German language, no subtitles).
Next Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Hirshhorn. Free.

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Images of the World and the Inscription of War

Last week, we covered Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's adapation of Kafka's Amerika. In accompaniment to the series of films from that pair, the National Gallery is also taking a look at the films of a protégé of theirs, the German film essayist Harun Farocki. Farocki has made dozens of essay films and experimental documentaries throughout his career, many of which turn the camera back on itself, examining the nature of reproduced images themselves. In Images of the World..., that manifests itself in a number of ways. Farocki shows images shot by British intelligence planes during World War II which demonstrates that the Allied forces were well aware of the existence of German concentration camps, but they weren't really a priority: the pictures were taken to identify bombing targets, but Auschwitz can be seen clearly. The basic themes are that images have the ability to influence both action and inaction, and that the knowledge that we're being photographed can similarly influence our behavior. Though the film is over 20 years old, and spends much of its time looking back even further into the past, it seems like a timely subject given the modern ubiquity of cameras of all kinds.

View the a clip from the film.
Saturday at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery. Free.

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Welcome to the Rileys

Kristin Stewart must really want to make sure no one thinks of typecasting her as the dull, pining, wholesome Bella, who she plays in the Twilight series. She's had two less vampire-obsessed roles this year. First up was her turn as Joan Jett in The Runaways. Now, as if deciding that dark eyeliner and punk rock wasn't pushing the envelope quite far enough, here's Welcome to the Rileys, in which Stewart plays a foul-mouthed New Orleans stripper. Who is also a prostitute on the side. And who happens to only be 16. Enter James Gandolfini, a father grieving over his dead daughter who takes an interest -- but not of the client kind -- when he meets her while in town on business. He takes up with her in New Orleans, leaving his wife back home in Indiana wondering what's happened to her husband, and going in search of him.

View the trailer.
Opens today at West End Cinema.

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Let's Visit the World of the Future

Devotees of the satirical "Church of the Subgenius" (Monkeyrotica, with that Dobbs Icon as your avatar, we're looking at you) will want to head over to the Passenger on Tuesday, as the Washington Psychotronic Film Society is having it's very own Subgenius night. On the program for the evening is Let's Visit the World of the Future, a 1973 film by Douglass Smith, better known within the church as the Reverend Ivan Stang, who -- J. R. "Bob" Dobbs mythology notwithstanding -- co-founded the church in 1979. The film itself is a blackly comic satire, depicting a future in which a bizarre race of clowns has taken control of the world -- now completely covered over in one massive apartment complex -- and a population which is distracted from this horrible dystopia by a constant holographic environment which surrounds them.

Tuesday at 8 p.m. at The Passenger. WPFS screenings are free, but a $2 donation is suggested.

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Also opening today is Love and Other Drugs, Edward Zwick's dramedy about love in the time of Viagra starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway. We'll have a full-length review a little later on; after the holiday, it's the latest from Claire Denis, White Material, starring Isabelle Huppert as the white manager of an African coffee plantation who is trying to keep her business and her family together in the midst of civil unrest. We'll have a review of that on Friday.

Bridget Riley, London

Her paintings' harlequin abstractions might thrum and bulge like an acid hallucination, but Bridget Riley has always played down op art's associations with summer of love psychedelia. The 19th-century painter Georges Seurat was her first road in to perceptual experimentation in the 1950s. Here she's chosen to pair her most recent work with three studies by the great pointillist, as well as inspirational paintings by Old Masters including Raphael's Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Mantegna's Introduction Of The Cult Of Cybele At Rome. Alongside new op configurations that range from monochrome waves to candy-coloured stripes, Riley's creating an upscale version of Arcadia, the wall painting seen in her major Paris retrospective of 2008. Created from curling leaf-shapes and strong diagonals, it's an abstract idyll in fresh blue, green and earthy brown.

National Gallery, WC2, Wed to 22 May

Skye Sherwin

Chant Avedissian, Llandudno

Chant Avedissian has created a kind of Egyptian pop art. Focusing mainly on the 1940s to 60s, Avedissian has amassed a considerable archive of magazine portraits of the great and good, the famous and infamous, of the Arab world. Through a peculiarly deadpan technique of stencilling, the portraits are rendered like hand-printed backstreet posters. These then tend to be plastered in grids across the gallery walls to accumulate a cross-section view of a society and culture that's unfamiliar to many westerners. Here, heart-throbs Farid al-Atrash and Abdel Halim Hafez, screen sirens Shadia and Hind Rostom, and celebrated singers Om Kalthoum and Asmahan are all meticulously intermixed with Egyptian scripts and universally familiar, if untranslated, advertising slogans.

Oriel Mostyn, to 19 Feb

Robert Clark

Anja Kirschner And David Panos, Southend-on-Sea

Eighteenth-century jailbreakers and pirates from a drowned future world are among Anja Kirschner and David Panos's real and imagined London subjects. Currently included in the British Art Show 7, their film The Last Days Of Jack Sheppard was a bold costume drama fit to rival those of Derek Jarman or Peter Greenaway, and great things are expected from their latest, The Empty Plan. Addressing the relationship between art and social movements, they've swapped their usual East End backdrop for the Hollywood encountered by radical playwright Bertolt Brecht, a far from easy experience as theatre gave way to cinema and the revolutionary Marxist principles that informed his work were betrayed.

Focal Point Gallery, Mon to 1 Jan

SS

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Newcastle upon Tyne

The cavernous shell of Robert Stephenson and Company's locomotive works adds historic grandeur and architectural atmosphere to this changing series of film installations presented by CIRCA Contemporary Arts Projects. These are site-specific screenings, all vaguely relating to historic subjects, and staged in conditions far from your local Odeon. In installations by Stuart Pearson Wright, Henry Coombes and Lu Chunsheng, a regal Keira Knightley is pursued through an Elizabethan maze by her fortunate courtier; the English painter Edwin Landseer is pursued through the Scottish Highlands in a delirious fit of panic; and Orson Welles's The War Of The Worlds is remade as the ominously titled The First Man Who Bought A Juicer Bought It Not For Drinking Juice.

Stephenson Works, to 9 Dec, see ccaprojects.org.uk

RC

Phillippe Parreno, London

It's about time Philippe Parreno had a big UK public gallery show. A major player in the relational aesthetics gang of the 1990s, the French artist helped shape a new kind of art that put interaction and the exhibition experience over objects. Best known for his 17-camera film portrait of footballer Zinedine Zidane, at the Serpentine he's bringing the sounds of Hyde Park inside the gallery. Elsewhere, June 8 1968 recreates the rail-side scenes of mourning as Robert F Kennedy's body was taken by train to be buried. His latest, Invisible Boy, is a further blend of documentary and fantasy, exploring the world of a Chinese child immigrant who sees monsters scratched into the film stock.

Serpentine Gallery, W2, Thu to 13 Feb

SS

Len Lye, Birmingham

From the 1930s through to the late-50s, Len Lye produced ultra low-tech and utterly animated animations in a free spirit of tireless experimentation by painting, scratching and stencilling straight on to celluloid film. Rainbow Dance shows a prancing silhouette doing a 1930s raindance to the rhythmical strains of a muffled New Orleans trumpet. Free Radicals, set to an African drum beat, is an angulated jive of insectile semi-abstract graphics. With such films and his later tangible motion sculptures – or "Tangibles" as he called them – Lye disarms with an innocent and almost daft sense of creative fun. Far less known than the likes of Moore and Hepworth, this carefree experimental spirit could well historically lift Lye above their sober-minded and relatively self-regarding modernism.

Ikon Gallery, Wed to 13 Feb

RC

Doug Fishbone, London

To call Doug Fishbone's latest work unique is an understatement. Shot in Ghana, with a cast of local stars and produced by a leading Ghanaian production company, his feature film Elmina sees the white, New York-raised, London-based artist playing it straight as the black hero in a B-movie medley of globalisation and small-town vice. The relativity of perception has long been Fishbone's quarry, skewered with strategies like politically incorrect jokes or hypnotism. Here he uses race and representation to push audience expectations to the limit. What's most remarkable about the project though is how smoothly the initially absurd figure of the white artist is absorbed into Elmina's fiction. If you can't catch the film at Tate Britain or the commercial gallery show of on-set photographs, this radical collusion of conceptual art with African cinema is also available through VCD in UK and Ghanaian street markets.

Tate Britain, SW1 to 2 Jan; Rokeby, EC1, Thu to 14 Jan

SS

Cecilia Stenbom, Gateshead

Cecilia Stenbom plays around, deliberately amateurishly, with what she sees as the sophisticated politics of fear. The facade of Stenbom's self-acted films and deceptively cack-handed drawings and paintings might seem light and shallow enough, but she appears to work from a dead serious proposition: that the powers that be might be trying to maintain control of society through the propagation of a climate of fear from ill-defined threats. In An Essential Guide To Survival, the artist delivers advice on tactics of staying alive. Sexed up bio-terrorism seems a particular subject of concern. Indeed it is the artist's contention that these days fear sells quicker than sex.

Workplace Gallery, to 23 Dec

RC

Today on the list: Cell phone companies conceal a health warning, Michelangelo’s David the way it was meant to be seen and Hollywood doesn’t care about poor people—or old people.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

The links below open in a new window. Newer ones are on top.

There’s a new side job for the aspiring actor: bedbug buster
New York’s Pest Infestation Spells Opportunity for Thespians; ‘It’s Like Hanging Out’

Spillcam, vuvuzela are top words of 2010
“Spillcam” and “vuvuzela” were the top words of 2010, reflecting the global impact of the months-long oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the noisy South African horns at the World Cup soccer tournament, according to a survey released on Sunday.

Hollywood’s Vanishing Have-Nots
NIGEL COLE, the British director of 2003’s “Calendar Girls,” was only half joking when he said, “In England we only make films about the working class or the aristocracy.”

Why flops matter to the cinema
An era’s great flops serve countless functions in pushing the art and industry of filmmaking forward. They introduce technological innovations. They help filmmakers and actors — those that manage to work again, at least — learn how to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. And for the people involved in them, flops are something more than a wake-up call: They can even rescue a career.

GREAT MOMENTS IN ACADEMIC RESEARCH
Scenario : You are applying for a job via e-mail – is it a good idea to attach a smiley? 
That depends – according to a report presented at the 25th annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology (2010).

How to cut the deficit without having to listen to Simpson and Bowles any more
The politics on the deficit commission are predictable, but they are another sign of how far removed DC style centrism is from where the American public actually is.

Cellphone companies conceal serious health warning
WARNING: Holding a cellphone against your ear may be hazardous to your health. So may stuffing it in a pocket against your body.

Mitch McConnell played both sides of Iraq war
George W. Bush got a lot wrong in his administration, but he certainly did figure out Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell.

The shadow scholar: confessions of an academic “paper-for-hire” writer
The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): “You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?”

Taibbi: the Tea Party Moron Complex
By rallying behind dingbats and morons like Palin and Michele Bachmann, the Tea Party has made anti-intellectualism its rallying cry.

Michelangelo’s David as It Was Meant to Be Seen
Standing on a pedestal high up by Florence Cathedral’s dome, a 400-kilogram (800-pound) fiberglass reproduction of Michelangelo’s David has shown today how the towering sculpture acclaimed for its depiction of male beauty would have looked in the destination first envisaged for it.

TRUE OR FALSE? Networks don’t care about old people
Pop quiz: What’s the No. 1 scripted series on television these days? If you said “NCIS,” which ropes in 20 million viewers a week – sorry, you’re staying after class.

Related Entries

• November 17, 2010 The Earmark Sideshow
• November 17, 2010 Saying Goodbye to Compassionate Conservatism

Famously defeated and laid waste by the Romans in the third century B.C., the ancient metropolis of Carthage has bequeathed its name to two notable features of modern Tunis. One is a swanky suburb where the villas of diplomats skirt the rudimentary but scenic ruins of the old imperial capital. The other is the biannual Carthage Film Festival, or Journées Cinematographiques de Carthage (Oct. 23-31, 2010), which bills itself as “the dean of all African and Arab” festivals.

Founded in 1966, it is a capacious event, with an international purview that encompasses, say, the latest from Abbas Kiarostami and Woody Allen as well as special sections devoted to the cinemas of Mexico and the former Yugoslavia. Yet the festival’s emphasis on the cinemas of the Middle East and Africa is what sets it apart, offering a valuable overview of an oft-neglected sector of world cinema. This year’s edition suggested… Read the rest

Welcome, my son, welcome to the machine.
What did you dream?
It's alright, we told you what to dream.
Pink Floyd, ‘Welcome to the Machine’

How do you tell a story? Start at the beginning and move steadily towards the end, silly – begin at ‘Once upon a time’ and keep going until you reach ‘Happily ever after’ – everyone knows that. And that’s the way stories have been told since time immemorial. Up until recently. Since the advent of cinema the public has become more and more adept at following ever-increasingly complex storylines beginning in media res, flashing forward in time, jumping back, plopping into subplots and skipping from third person narratives to first and back again. Fairy stories these are not. And The Birth Machine by Elizabeth Baines is certainly not. But it begins like one:

Once upon a time there lived a king and queen who had no children; and this they lamented very much. But one day as the queen was walking by the side of the river, a little fish lifted its head out of the water and said, "Your wish shall be fulfilled, and you shall soon have a daughter."

You might recognise it. It’s from Edgar Taylor’s 1823 translation of the Grimms’ fable ‘Dornroeschen’ which he rendered as ‘Rose-Bud’ – we know it better these days as ‘Sleeping Beauty’. You can read it in full here (jump down to #177). Personally I don’t remember the fish in fact Disney’s version is so ingrained on my head I found I remembered very little of this version.

Fairy tales of course frequently exist in a variety of forms and it’s usually the one we read (or see) first that becomes the definitive version in our heads. Even though there have been in total a whopping-great seven different versions of Blade Runner the one I remember was the one I saw in the cinema in 1982, the International Cut, although I have since seen the other two must-see versions, the 1992 Director’s Cut and the 2007 Final Cut. It’s rare for books unless they’re translations to have more than one edition but The Birth Machine has. The book was first published in 1983 by The Women’s Press. A revised version was self-published in 1996 retitled The Birth Machine - The Author's Cut and now a further revised, and – hopefully – final version, has now been published by Salt Publishing. Unusual to say the least. You can read the whole history on her blog here.

Just as directors don’t always have total control over what ends up on the cutting room floor authors don’t always have as much say as you might imagine when it comes to what their editors do with their blue pencils. To say that the edition published by The Women’s Press was butchered is probably going too far but changes were made. The most significant alteration was where the story starts. The editor decided that the book should begin with chapter four which opens with:

Earlier that morning she shivered in the hospital corridor. A new admission for induction of labour.

Considering the book is called The Birth Machine and in this latest edition there’s a gynaecological couch on the cover you might not think that such a bad decision, to cut to the chase. But is that where the story begins? This is how Disney’s version of Sleeping Beauty begins:

In a far away land long ago lived a King and his fair Queen. Many years had they longed for a child and finally their wish was granted. A daughter was born. They called her Aurora. Yes they named her after the dawn for she filled their lives with sunshine.

Aurora is the Roman goddess of the dawn by the way.

So no fish then. There was no fish in the original either. The Grimms added that bit in. An element of their writing style is how their tales invariably include magic and communication between animals and humans.

The most recent version of The Birth Machine opens with chapter one reinstated to its rightful position:

Ladies and Gentlemen: the age of the machine.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are proud to welcome to Boston Professor McGurk, who has flown in from England to lecture today on the latest developments in the use of the machine.

So are we in some kind of auditorium or lecture hall? No, we’re actually inside the Professor’s head. His wife is pouring his cornflakes while he flicks through his diary; he is a man much in demand: “you’re lucky to catch him, sometimes he’s late, sometimes he’s gone already when you get there; often he regrets he can’t be there in any case.” The Professor is a man of science and he has complete faith in it. Science though is all about doubt and the effort to resolve it. He has forgotten that in his . . . I was going to write ‘self-assuredness’ but really the word I was looking for is ‘arrogance’.

We do get to meet the woman who earlier that day had been shivering in the hospital corridor, Mrs Harris, Zelda, the wife of Dr Harris, a colleague of the Professor’s as it happens. First impressions are important. Elizabeth Baines didn’t want our first impression of Zelda to be her standing in a hospital corridor, no; she wanted us to see her through the eyes of the Professor’s students, as Elizabeth says in her Author’s Note at the end of the book, “as an object in his virtuoso demonstration.” Without her, without some body to undergo processing, there is no way to see just how wonderful the machine is:

“Good morning, Mrs Harris. Mrs Harris is about to benefit from our modern technology. Aren’t we, Mrs Harris?” He says with a wink in Mrs Harris’s direction: “Mrs Harris is a rather special patient. How are we feeling, Mrs Harris?”

He turns back to the students: “Now to connect the patient up to the machine.”

You just want to slap him, don’t you?

When I first heard of this book, a couple of years back in fact, I wondered if it might be a science fiction novel; the book Demon Seed came to mind, a book that, coincidentally, also exists in two versions. This isn’t the case but there is common ground. In both books machines are heavily relied upon to provide for the comfort and safety of humans. In reality ‘the machine’ that is going to look after Zelda and her unborn child is actually two machines but really Elizabeth is using the term ‘machine’ here in a much broader sense.

Although the book does not shy away from describing the birth of Zelda’s baby in great (although not gratuitous) detail, obstetrics is not the real issue here, simply a convenient context for examining bigger issues. She writes:

[M]y intention when I wrote The Birth Machine in 1982 was to tell a story exploring the hubris of much contemporary ‘scientific’ thinking. In particular, I was interested in the contemporary tendency to overlook, or even deny, the factor of uncertainty.

My daughter was born in 1980 and so this brought back many memories for me. I recall inquiring as to the functions of the various contraptions that crowded around the head of the bed, what the readouts indicated and what warning signs I should be on the lookout for. Also I remember how I was lightly dismissed by the staff when I advised them that the readings were drifting into the danger zone; a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

This is not the first time I’ve read a book by Elizabeth Baines. A few months back I read her novel Too Many Magpies, a book that also deals with the divide between science and magic, and you can read my review of it here. I had a difficult time getting into it and I might have had a similar problem with this earlier novel if I hadn’t anticipated a similar approach to her subject matter. There are several intertwined storylines going on here and it takes a wee while to connect them:

1. The induction of her child from Zelda’s perspective
a. While drug free
b. While medicated
2. The birth from the point of view of various members of staff
3. The events leading up to her pregnancy and admission
4. A series of events from Zelda’s childhood
5. The experiences of two medical students
6. The experience of her husband’s staff

In presenting the story in the way she has what Elizabeth has been trying to do is break her readers in gently – ‘wean’ is the word she uses – so that we start off from a safe ‘objective’ distance before being asked to submerge ourselves in Zelda’s worlds of childhood and impending motherhood. Starting with a man also seemed to her like a good way to rope in potential male readers. And I agree.

This is where I feel that Salt’s cover design lets the book down (even though it was designed by a man) because as a male I can’t imagine sitting on a bus riding along the side of the Clyde with a bunch of working men reading a book with a dirty great pink gynaecological couch on the front cover. Now if they’d used H R Giger’s Birth Machine on the cover that might have been very different (see my quick suggested cover aside) notwithstanding how much they would have been charged for permission to use the image in the first place. My wife was also “creeped out” by Salt’s cover. She said “It makes me shudder.” I never read my copy of The Yellow Wallpaper on the bus for exactly the same reason – the cover. I much prefer the cover to The Author’s Cut and I’m rather sorry now I didn’t stick it on my Amazon wish list when I first discovered it.

The Yellow Wallpaper is, of course, regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature and it would be easy to read The Birth Machine purely as a feminist novel. It is but that’s not all it is. This is how Elizabeth herself describes the book:

The Birth Machine concerns a woman about to give birth who finds herself silenced (and her subjective experience discounted) by not just the system and apparatus of the medical profession, but above all by its language and logic – which indeed to some extent she has internalised. For me above all it's a novel about language, and scientific logic and the competing power of dreams and myth and intuition. The protagonist Zelda also has a buried secret, and the novel is also about the silencing power of repression.

I asked Elizabeth if she saw any connection between the two books:

Gosh, The Yellow Wallpaper. Well, I know when I read that I was very impressed and affected – I guess I must have been influenced: wouldn't be surprising, though no one else has seen the connection, and I hadn't thought of it myself. I guess they're both about women trapped – psychologically as much as anything.

If you don’t know The Yellow Wallpaper this is what it’s about according to Wikipedia:

Told in the first-person perspective as a series of journal entries, the story details the unreliable narrator's descent into madness. The protagonist's husband, John, believes that it is in the narrator's best interest to go on a rest cure, since he only credits what is observable and scientific. He serves as his wife's physician, treating her like a powerless patient. The story hints that part of the woman's problem is that she recently gave birth to a child, insinuating she may be suffering from what would now be called postpartum psychosis.

So, in both books, males are in charge. In Zelda’s case it’s a male professor and a male husband who oppress her. There’s no doubt that each of them of them believes that they’re doing the best thing for her and especially the baby but trying to get a simple answer to a simple question proves impossible whether Zelda is talking to a male or a female and I found the experience exactly like that when my first wife was in labour: no one would give me a straight answer to a straight question.

The question Zelda wants answered is a simple enough one. Before being admitted she asks her husband to ask the Professor and when he gets home he hasn’t got his coat off before she wants to know:

“Did you speak to the Professor?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“It’s OK. There’s nothing wrong. It’s just a precaution.”

“Roland! Precaution? Against what?”

He lifted two palms. “I don’t know . . . anything. Any of the complications of late pregnancy. They’re just making absolutely sure that everything goes properly.

Control is a big issue in this novel. Women have been having babies for thousands of years. Their bodies take control and, complications notwithstanding, several hours later out pops a wee baby. My mother had no great love of doctors and her experiences of childbirth were not pleasant ones. She probably would have died were it not for the intervention of modern medicine but she was no great advocate for their cause and many times she advocated natural childbirth. She’d tell me about African women who had babies out in the fields, who’d just squat down, have their babies and then get on with sowing or whatever it was they’d been doing ten minutes earlier. There’s something luxurious though about not having to be responsible. People pay through the nose for others to take care of them but the difference there is that not being responsible doesn’t rob them of their power. Zelda is systematically robbed of her power. She is treated, and spoken to, like a child:

The new Sister on duty pops her head round. Mrs Harris has her eyes closed. Is she asleep? Is she dreaming?

She opens them and looks straight back.

“That’s right, Mrs Harris, have a sleep, you’ll need it, that’s a good girl.”

Good girl, Zelda.

In The Yellow Wallpaper the woman’s husband also uses this kind of demeaning language: when his wife asks about leaving the room in which she is resting he calls her “a blessed little goose” and later when she first notices a faint figure behind the pattern and calls his attention to it he calls her his “little girl.” It is this kind of treatment that causes Zelda to lapse into her childhood reminiscences.

What is interesting about the first memory that Zelda has is that it also incorporates a controlling male, her father. In the dark she creeps down to the kitchen where she finds her father making something on the hotplate:

He said without turning: “What in hell are you doing here?”

She said, “I’m hungry.”

He snorted. The thing on the hotplate whispered.

“What are you making?”

“Toast.”

She came and peered. “That’s not toast.”

“Call it what you like. I call it toast.”

The slice glistened on the stove, deep yellow, emitting tiny bubbles at its lower edges. She saw he’d done something new: buttered the bread first, before cooking. He did another for her, turned the loaf on its end and sawed across flatwise.

So he’s not uncaring. None of the men in the book are uncaring per se. They are all in charge though. Her father could just as easily have told her to go back to bed and he does exactly that when she starts to overstay her welcome. The same happens in the hospital. She gets hungry but is completely at the mercy of the hospital staff. They decide what she can have and when, even something as simple as a cup of tea. The machines are monitoring her so their contact is minimal. And even there it’s not her body that’s in control of her own contractions; she practices the natural breathing techniques she’s been taught but this only provides her with the illusion of control; there is nothing natural here. She’s praised for doing these but only because, because Zelda believes these are doing her good, they keep her quiet, calm. She gets a “good girl” for that. When she cries out in pain it’s another thing completely:

The nurse says, “Now come on. You were doing so well. Remember your exercises, you haven’t forgotten them, have you?” She shoots a meaningful glance. “And think about your baby. You haven’t forgotten him, have you? He’s best if you’re calm. That’s a good girl.

Interesting that the child is used to threaten her with. Much the same happens in The Yellow Wallpaper when John says, “I beg of you, for my sake and for our child’s sake, as well as for your own…” [Italics mine]

Zelda is a natural woman. By that I suppose I mean a child of nature but that sounds a bit pretentious. She has grown up at a time when children were used to roaming the countryside without the same fear of molestation that exists today. That was my childhood. Childbirth in the old days was very much a concern of women. The men toddled off hunting and left their wives in the care of “what Adrienne Rich has called the stereotype of ‘the filthy peasant crone’”[1] a character that wouldn’t look out of place in any of Grimm’s fairy tales. These roles are played by Zelda and her friends, Annie and Hilary – too old at thirteen? – who, along with Zelda, concoct magic potions in their den and attend to their plastic doll-babies. While the now-adult Zelda is drugged she hallucinates seeing Hilary there in the delivery room and imagines Roland saying, “What’s she doing here? Look, she isn’t scrubbed up, she isn’t aseptic, she’s a hazard, send her home.” In the den though the girls have all the power. Hilary drags along her little brother on occasion but all he seems to do is whinge. It is the boy, however, that reminds the girls about “the thirteenth fairy’s promise.” The childhood tale appears repeatedly throughout the book; the fish takes on a more pronounced role, that of guide.

After Zelda’s child is born she is lying in bed still sedated and memories of the recent and distant pass all are mixed up in her head:

Things gone wrong. Patterns inverted.

A simple start, a simple wish. A fish jumps, sperm-shape, comma in the flow of things, a simple movement, automatic, primordial. The fish blows a clean bubble. “Oh, Lord and Lady, thy wish shall be granted.” The pastel lady starts. Her husband in the distance is gathering blue nettles. The bubble bursts. The prophecy scatters, to reassemble in a different pattern.

[…]

It was wrong. An inversion. The princess mustn’t awake. Said the thirteenth fairy: the princess must die; and then the twelfth fairy spoke: I will lessen the spell; the princess will merely sleep. But only when it’s a prince who comes breaking through the tangle may there be waking, and the forest put out flowers like blood.

Who was her prince? The boy hiding behind the trees, who only wanted to play, who they left alone? Was he Roland, her husband, Roland the professional, the straight man, the stiff man, the man who never once had brought her to orgasm? Or is the prince her son whose arrival causes Zelda to wake up in the truest sense?

The Yellow Wallpaper ends with an escape:

“I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”

and so does The Birth Machine in fact Zelda doesn’t wait for her prince:

She can break the seal. She can make her own inversion.

I enjoyed this book very much. It’s the best thing I’ve read by her (I’ve also read her collection of short stories) and I’m happy to recommend it, to men (and not simply fathers) as well as women (and not simply feminists). There is a danger to reading this book simply as an historical document, a record of how women used to be treated during childbirth although it is that. At the time of the release of the first edition, Katy Campbell, reviewing the book for City Limits, declared the book “especially recommended for anyone involved in the Obstetrics industry.” The medical profession has moved on somewhat since then but have attitudes towards women? And what about women’s attitudes towards themselves? I’m as much of a feminist as the next man but what I have noted is that some of the problems women face are not because they are made to do things but they allow things to be done to them. The main male characters in this book are not bad men; are not out to hurt her. (There is one very bad man in the flashbacks who is out to hurt someone.) It’s Zelda that lies back – literally – and takes it. For the most part. We do witness her turn and that is why the whole fairy tale backdrop works so well; modern life is not a fairy tales and people don’t live happily ever after.

You can read a sample from the book here.

***

Elizabeth Baines' grandmother claimed to be a descendent of the family of the Welsh bard Will Hopkin. The fact that the truth of this is unknown was not enough to deter Elizabeth from deciding at an early age to be a writer in his footsteps. Born in Bridgend, South Wales, to a Welsh mother and an Irish father, she studied English at Bangor, and for several years was a teacher of English in schools in Scotland and England. She is the prizewinning author of prose fiction and plays, with an established career as an acclaimed radio dramatist. With Ailsa Cox, she founded and edited the acclaimed short-story magazine Metropolitan (1992-97). Her collection of short stories, Balancing on the Edge of the World, was published by Salt in 2007 and pronounced 'a stunning debut collection' (The Short Review). In 2004 she took up occasional acting by performing one of her own stage monologues for the 24:7 Theatre Festival. She lives in Manchester. She writes the well-regarded Fictionbitch blog and her own author blog.

FURTHER READING

Analysis of Grimm Brother's Briar Rose/Sleeping Beauty

Analysis of Disney's version of Sleeping Beauty

The Author’s Note from the book.

REFERENCES

[1] Tess Cosslett, Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discourses of Motherhood, p.31

Print Room; Hampstead; Vaudeville, all London

Like a good deed in a naughty, cuts-devastated world, a new theatre opened this week. Lucy Bailey and Anda Winters's Print Room, a privately funded 80-seater, based in a 50s warehouse in London's Notting Hill Gate, has a peculiarly self-defeating mission statement – "We aim to be a hidden artistic gem" – but a solid-sounding start. In the New Year they'll put on Alan Ayckbourn's little-performed thriller, Snake in the Grass. First off is a little-known work (actually, who outside Italy knows any of his plays?) by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Fabrication was written in 1966, but not performed until 1975, the year the film-maker was murdered.

Bailey's passion for the movies – she has directed steamy stagings of Baby Doll and The Postman Always Rings Twice – drives her production. It's projected with cinematic panache: the audience on two sides of the stage look at the action through a narrow gap in a mottled wall: you might be looking through a viewfinder into a place as confined as a coffin. Jasper Britton clenches and crumbles explosively; Geraldine Alexander stalks around him with chilly poise; Janet Fullerlove necromances with witchy conviction. Jamie McKendrick's new verse translation is aptly florid.

Still, you really have to be devoted to Italian cinema to find Fabrication anything other than bloated. A middle-aged industrialist is led by a dream and by self-mythologising into an obsession with his teenage son and a frothing mental breakdown. The ghost of Sophocles turns up from time to time. The spectre of Oedipus haunts the action. Priests visit. Penises are clutched. Chests are stabbed. People roar.

What's wrong with this is not only the mad medley and the overexcitement but the contradiction, the bad faith. Fabrication proclaims itself to be about the theatre's ability to embody rather than merely tell, but it is windy with expostulation. "I'll forever regret not showing enough of this in my tragedies," moans Sophocles. He's on his own there.

Athol Fugard both writes and directs the second play in Edward Hall's artistic reign in Hampstead. He supplies a first-rate production of a decent but flat play: The Train Driver is a South African parable inspired by the real-life story of a woman from a squatter camp who stood hand in hand with her children on a railway track until a train mowed them all down. In Fugard's play the emphasis is on the Afrikaner train driver who, half-crazy with the horror of what he has unwittingly done, visits a graveyard in search of his victims' remains. He begins with anger ("look what she's made me do") and moves through sorrow to expiation. He is overseen by a taciturn black gravedigger who adorns the graves with hubcaps and plastic bottles to stop himself digging up the unnamed bodies.

Owen Sejake, as the gravedigger, is a strong, deliberate, Charon-like presence; Sean Taylor is, in skilful turn, brittle, brutal and desolate. As they circle each other on Saul Radomsky's ochre design, with its leafless tree trunk, they create a powerful image of a guilt-riddled country. Nothing they say lives up to this: the dialogue, as so often in fables, has no distinctive savour, though the picture burns.

Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, first staged in 1895, can always find a topical chime. It features a revered MP who sold cabinet secrets early in his career and now risks public exposure, and his marriage, through the intervention of a blackmailing woman. Lindsay Posner's production hints at but doesn't catch all of the notes of a play which smuggles subtlety in under farce and melodrama.

The considerable gilt-and-ormolu beauty of Stephen Brimson Lewis's design installs a monumentality which infects some actors. The bons mots of the opening dialogue hover for moments in the air – as if waiting to be photographed and framed – before they are batted back. The exchanges between husband and wife involve so much bosom-heaving, kneeling and pacing that their real intimate pain more or less evaporates.

Still, as the woman who is "a genius in the daytime and a beauty at night", Samantha Bond, in the overbright satins of an adventuress, glitters like an adder. She darts venom with her silvery tongue and insinuates with her body – as she swivels on a chair to take a fan from a fan, she shows she is more conscious of her body than any of the other mightily frocked women on stage. And Fiona Button, who inquires after the condition of a bad bonnet ("any better?") with malicious tenderness, makes friskiness into a high-wire act.

An Ideal Husband will always find a theatrical home. But who, as cuts deepen, will take up Nell Dunn's fine and spirited verbatim play, Home Death, given a rehearsed reading at Rada last week? And who will help Valerie Jack, whose lively first play, Fireworks, deserved more than a week at the Etcetera in Camden?

Giuseppe di Lampedusa's masterpiece The Leopard was rejected twice and published only after the author's death. What did he do with his life? Julian Barnes finds clues in the reticent Sicilian's letters from abroad

Most writers have a slightly paranoid sense of not having had their due; it's often part of what keeps them going. Most sensible writers, however, keep to hand examples of others who have had it far worse. Consider, for example, this abbreviated life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Born 1896. Publishes three scholarly articles in 1926-7, then falls silent. In 1954, begins to write The Leopard. May 1956, sends first version to the publishers Mondadori. December 1956, Mondadori turns it down. Winter of 1956-7, completes second version of the novel. February 1957, submits it to Einaudi. April 1957, diagnosed with lung cancer. 2 July, Einaudi rejects novel. 23 July, Lampedusa dies. November 1958, The Leopard is published by Feltrinelli, and world fame immediately ensues – for the novel, but too late for the novelist.

A puritanical response might be to ask: what on earth was he doing with his life anyway, and why didn't he get down to writing earlier? David Gilmour, in his well-judged biography The Last Leopard (1988), explained some of the reasons. Lampedusa was afflicted with several handicaps (not so much to being a writer, but to being thrustful enough to dream of, and then achieve, publication): extreme shyness; enough money never to need take a job; plus a sense that, as a Sicilian aristocrat, he came from an exhausted, irrelevant culture.

There were other factors too, including a major nervous breakdown in his 20s, and a domineering mother, Beatrice Palma. When Giuseppe made a late marriage to the equally formidable Latvian psychoanalyst Alessandra "Licy" Wolff, Beatrice made her son choose between the two of them. Giuseppe weakly opted for his mother and settled into a lengthy marriage-by-correspondence (in French) with Licy.

As for what he was doing with his life, there are two answers. The non-literary one would be: not very much. In his mature years, on a typical day, he might first visit the bookshop and cakeshop, then sit reading in a cafe for hours, return home for tea and buns, and perhaps go out to the film club in the evening. The literary answer would be: waiting. The nature and texture of that wait – and the extent to which it was necessary for Lampedusa to write The Leopard – thus become of interest. Except that a biography of waiting is the hardest sort to write.

In Gilmour's book the subject's extreme reticence and perfect manners make him not so much a still centre as a black hole, around which more interesting lives swirl. Even the doings of Lampedusa's dogs seem more vivid than those of their master. Giuseppe and Licy had a large number of dogs, some as well-bred as themselves, others rescued mongrels, and spoke to each of them in a different language. The most cherished was called Crab (named after Launce's dog in The Two Gentlemen of Verona), who was addressed in Italian. Giuseppe spent the second world war in Sicily with his mother (Licy was in Riga and Rome), and Crab's diet was its master's constant preoccupation. Crab's birthday would be celebrated with a special dinner – for the dog, that is, not the master. One such consisted of: "Pate, peas and meat, followed by bread and honey; afterwards he would spend an hour in the garden with permission to bark at as many cats as he liked."

As the naming of Crab suggests, Lampedusa was a deeply literary Anglophile. He thought of Britain as his "ideal country". He told his wife that he had an English temperament. In his late 50s he gave private lessons in English literature to a small group of students: his notes were posthumously turned into a 1,000-page book, English Literature, published – perhaps with a touch of retrospective shame – by Mondadori in 1990-91.

Letters from London and Europe usefully illuminates his Anglophilia, shows him at epistolary play, and gets a little behind his perpetual guardedness. His uncle was the Italian ambassador in London from 1922-27, and Lampedusa made five trips to England between 1925-31 (with perhaps another in 1934); his northern journeys sometimes included other cities, such as Paris, Berlin and Zurich. His letters were mainly addressed to his cousins Casimiro and Lucio Piccolo – fellow-members of the Bellini Club, a Palermitan society for aristos only – who had nicknamed him "The Monster". He writes to them in the third person, describing the actions and reflections of "the wandering Monster", "the super-fed Monster", "the Monster made of delicate clay", "the Monster with a monogram on his rear", as he variously signs himself. (This sounds a little arch, and sometimes is; but more importantly, it seems to have been a distancing mode which helped relax the writer.) This additional, non-aristocratic title was awarded – it is a slight disappointment to discover – not for any scandalous or morbid behaviour, but for his "monstrous" habit of always having his nose in a book.

Even for an Anglophile, London came as a shock to the visitor from Sicily. Lucio Piccolo was so appalled by the city that he immediately took the first train home. Lampedusa found the place "dizzying, terrifying and fascinating"; it was "a most delightful inferno". Given that his entry-level was ambassadorial and aristocratic, he was protected from the grubbier realities of English life (he also preferred to visit cathedral towns rather than industrial cities). Though he could read English fluently, and says in one letter that he expressed himself in a "flowery and vaguely Elizabethan" English, other testimony suggests that he was too shy even to speak the language.

One advantage was that his working title happened to be "Duke of Palma": so he received many invitations addressed to "the Duke of Parma" – "perhaps in the belief", as Gilmour puts it, "that he was the heir of the former independent duchy rather than an impoverished nobleman whose title came from an obscure town in Sicily". The Sicilian connection did, however, get him to Powis Castle as a guest of Lord Powys's daughter Hermione, who was married to a Sicilian nobleman. Later, Hermione della Grazie said of her visitor that he was "a most 'shut-in' personality. One 'met' him but did not 'know' him."

Yet Lampedusa, for all his self-enclosure, was a writer-in-waiting: he saw more than he was seen. Sometimes his vision was filled with a distorted enlargement, or correction, of himself: the Anglophile meets the real English, the member of the Bellini steps into London's Clubland, the scion of a provincial aristocracy mixes with examples of the real thing. But the shy Sicilian was too intelligent, and too ironical, ever to kneel. "It is always a pleasure dealing with the English," he writes, "they are courteous and prompt, and their apparent stupidity is merely an immense and uncontrollable shyness."

Once he has overcome the dizzying terror of the metropolis, its great appeal is that it evinces "order without coercion". He loves London tailoring and London policemen. He delights in his English fountain-pen – or rather, his "lapis-lazuli Parker Duofold Senior Pen". He admires "the amazing serenity of the countryside". He reveres English cathedrals, which make him wish the Normans had stayed in Sicily five centuries longer than they did. He gazes wistfully at female typists on the train – "graceful creatures" he imagines taking to the movies. He likes the cinema, both the buildings and the latest films starring Monte Blue or Norma Shearer. Untypically for a foreign visitor, he even approves of English food: toast comes as a great and pleasant surprise; he looks forward, at the end of a meal, to "sinking a greedy spoon into the supplies of the lordly cheeses of Chester, rosy as onyx, or Stilton, green as aquamarine, or Cheddar, transparent and amber-coloured".

All this is playful, and funny, and mostly flattering to the British reader. But there are moments when the playfulness encloses more sober observation, when the seemingly irrelevant aristocrat from "the Iceland of the South", as he calls it, reveals his proper understanding of how the world works. Staying at the "Hotel Great Central, London NW1" in 1928, he finds that a fellow-guest is an African king from the Gold Coast, Nana Sir Ofori Atta. Lampedusa smiles and bows to him in the hotel corridor, and makes some period mock of him, but also notes that:

"He is one of the many princelings whom 'ruling Britannia' keeps chained to her steel trident and whom every now and then she is pleased to reward by inviting them to London so that they may admire the buses, the chorus girls, the artificial hares and other delightful British specialities, also not to forget the number and efficiency of the tanks, cruisers and bombers."

In 1930, he is in Berlin, and much enchanted by the city's "indecency". Scrutinising the "innumerable trollops" and rent-boys that crowd its bars and cafes, he notes how "overly elegant and overly shaven lads . . . sit and sigh at the corner tables until an old fat man, flushed and pop-eyed, decides to write something (what, ye Gods?) on the back of the bill and send a waiter with it to one of them. After that they sit at the same table and ten minutes later they go out together."

The moment passes; Lampedusa broadens his remarks to the German people in general, and "the zeal with which they pursue every activity to the extreme, and the desire for the absolute which always animates them." Here, he concludes, there is "an incredible ferment of life: within ten years they will, I think, send every nation a note, by means of the waiter . . ."

Throughout these letters, the sensibility of a monstrous reader is constantly present: thus a paragraph comparing the policemen of Zurich and London will naturally allude to Dante, while a description of a ball at the French Embassy in London brings in Paul Valéry, Herrick, Madame de Staël, Shelley, Yeats, Rossetti and Meredith. As this implies, the writer-in-waiting is never far away either. Replying to the Piccolos from Berlin, he takes up a point that one of them (presumably Lucio, the poet) has made about William Beckford's Gothic novel Vathek. "We must not forget," Lampedusa writes, "that Beckford is, basically, an 18th-century writer, and that therefore he regards [everything] with overarching irony." A comment which immediately launches us forward a quarter of a century to The Leopard, and to the overarching irony of Tancredi's famous line about the continuance of Sicilian aristocratic life: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

This enterprising publication is supported by Arts Council England. Jeremy Hunt might take a look at it; while Nick Clegg, who chose The Leopard as his book on Desert Island Discs, should definitely buy several copies.