Posts Tagged Film
Guardian young arts critic competition 2011: Our critics’ picks
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 20, 2011
From an illicit Pixies gig to a Mesopotamian ziggurat, Guardian critics recall their biggest moment of inspiration in their respective fields
How to enter this year's competition
Pop: Alexis Petridis
Can any gig you see as a critic ever match the ones you saw as a teenager? Bizarrely, going to a gig when I was 17 was harder work than writing reviews has ever been. It involved not merely getting to London, but lying to my parents about where I was going, lying to my friend's parents about where my parents thought I was going, bunking off school, and then convincing somebody who looked 18 to go to the bar on my behalf.
But none of that mattered the night I saw the Pixies supported by My Bloody Valentine, in September 1988. It's not every night you see arguably the two most important guitar bands of the era on the same stage at the peak of their powers: the Pixies had just released their incredible second album, Surfer Rosa, while My Bloody Valentine had released the astonishing single You Made Me Realise.
It says something about the pre-internet age that, before they walked on, I had no idea what the Pixies looked like. I didn't expect the guy who sang all those dark songs about sex and violence to be chubby and balding. This was nothing compared to the shock of their sound: a ceaseless roar, with the next song starting as the last chord of the previous one was still dying away.
I remember that gig in snapshots. Two roadies having to hold on to My Bloody Valentine's drumkit as Colm O'Cíosóig hit it with such ferocity that it started moving across the stage. The Pixies performing Hey, a song so self-evidently filthy it seemed to have been beamed in from another world. But most of all, I remember feeling more excited than I'd ever been in my life. You could argue that my career has involved chasing that feeling ever since.
Visual art: Adrian Searle
The first serious art exhibition I ever saw was on a school trip to Goya and His Times at London's Royal Academy in 1963. I have seen many Goya shows since and think I know his art well, but he always surprises me, even when I look at paintings I have known for most of my life. How time flies.
I can't say this was the best show, or even the best Goya show, I have ever seen. I was, after all, only 10. But I remember being struck by Goya's weirdness: the distorted faces of the Spanish royal family, the isolated, looming figure of the Duchess of Alba (Goya's lover), the strange skies. Decades later, I saw that the clouds over Madrid often look like old, torn tapestries.
I must have about 20 books about Goya now, including the tiny paperback I bought at the time. It's a useless book – pictures too small, colours all wrong – but I kept it. Another book is Goya's Last Portrait, a play by the critic John Berger. A few years ago, Berger and I had a long talk about that dog Goya painted, the one that could be drowning in quicksand or might just be sticking his nose up over a hill to sniff the sky.
I remember wondering why Goya's paintings meant so much to me when I knew nothing about art and had never been anywhere, least of all to Madrid. Maybe that show only became important later, because of things that happened in my life. Many roads lead back to a kid looking at Goya and understanding nothing.
Classical music: Erica Jeal
It was 10 years ago, but I remember it better than things I heard last week. The Alban Berg Quartet and the cellist Heinrich Schiff were playing Schubert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall: the String Quintet in C, the one with two cellos and the glorious first-movement melody that begins again and again, as if the composer couldn't bear to let it go.
A few minutes in, I knew this performance was different from any I'd heard before. Then I realised why. It was all coloured by death, every note. Something in the Alban Berg's playing made it obvious: Schubert, at 31, knew he was dying, and had composed a love letter to the world that was as sweet as it was sincere, full of anguish, acceptance, anger and serenity. I wondered if I was just a bit strung out: perhaps I was the only one experiencing it this way. But at the end, the usually reserved QEH audience was on its feet.
There are few things more depressing than a performance of a work you love that leaves you cold. But there is nothing more exciting than hearing a musician, or an orchestra, take something you thought you knew, and make you realise there is still more to fall in love with. I felt that way hearing Iván Fischer conduct the Budapest Festival Orchestra in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony in January this year. I felt that way in 2003, when I heard veteran tenor Peter Schreier sing a searing Die Schöne Müllerin, somehow bringing an old man's wisdom to a young man's tale.
That was Schubert again. I'm starting to suspect that Schubert understood everything there was to know about the world, and that the answers to all life's big questions might be found in his music. I haven't uncovered them yet, but I'm still listening.
Architecture: Jonathan Glancey
For as long as I can remember, right back to when I was a teenager trying to piece together the story of architecture, the ziggurat at Eridu had been a presence in my life. I was haunted by the thought that somewhere in deepest Mesopotamia, today's southern Iraq, there lay, in ruins and largely hidden under sand, what might be the world's first monumental building: the mother of all architecture in the world's first metropolis.
I finally got to Eridu just months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Somehow I had persuaded the right people to let me go, and a platoon of Saddam's soldiers now escorted me along routes flanked by unexploded munitions dating from the first Gulf war. The heat was intense: 50 degrees. On the way, we stopped to climb the ziggurat of Ur, walking the site's excavated streets in the zig-zagging shadow of the great pyramid.
When we reached Eridu, the young soldiers were as excited as I was. We almost fell on the sands. It was thrilling to palm them away and find the stepped form of its crumpled ziggurat, built and rebuilt over thousands of years. There was a lake here once, and marshes. Eridu, founded in 5,400BC, was a sacred place for millennia until finally being abandoned in the 7th century AD. In 1949, excavations were undertaken, but it became a no-go zone after the first Gulf war.
At the same time as those excavations were taking place, Le Corbusier was designing his astonishing Unité d'Habitation, a block of flats in Marseilles. Although ultra-modern, this building also managed to be as elemental in form and as ancient in spirit. Great architecture connects with the past and pushes into the future.
Film: Peter Bradshaw
In my time as a critic, there have been many films that have made me want to punch the air with joy (and a few that made me want to punch a brick wall). But the film that I come back to, over and over, is Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, a beautiful, sad, sexy, mysterious movie that came out in 2000, when I'd been in this job for less than a year.
The premise is simple enough. The scene is 1960s Hong Kong, and Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung play neighbours who discover their spouses are having an affair. The realisation gives them a kind of intimacy: they have a tragic, erotic quasi-affair of their own. It is electrifying. Leung's desperate sadness is something he cannot admit to anyone, and the final sequence, in which he "confesses" it secretly to himself, is heartbreaking.
So many mainstream films have everything signposted and underlined, leaving no doubt as to what you are supposed to think and feel. In The Mood For Love demands you notice nuances and subtlety; you have to exert yourself to see, really see, what Wong is doing.
Theatre: Michael Billington
The toughest challenge for a theatre critic, and the greatest excitement, comes from responding to something new. How to describe, interpret and evaluate a play that expands the frontiers of drama? My mind goes back to a night in April 1975, when I reviewed the first performance of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land at the Old Vic.
I knew something about Pinter, having seen The Homecoming, The Caretaker and The Birthday Party. But I'd never reviewed a Pinter premiere, and this one had the smell of a big occasion: a production starring Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud.
I know I got some things wrong. At one point, Hirst (Richardson) engages in a prolonged reminiscence with Spooner (Gielgud). I took that as genuine rather than a parodic fantasy. But I did intuit that the play was a reflection of Pinter's own fears: that Spooner, the shabby minor poet, was the man he might have been; and Hirst, the literary celebrity cut off from life, was the figure he was terrified of becoming.
What I remember above all is the crackling comic vitality and sombre poetry of Pinter's language. In the mouths of Richardson, who was all spring-heeled ebullience, and Gielgud, who looked like some seedy, downmarket WH Auden, Pinter's phrases bounced off the walls like a ball in a squash court. In the play's overpowering final moments, one had a sense of Hirst starting to crawl unburdened towards death. Or, at least, to what Pinter poignantly calls a no man's land "which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains for ever, icy and silent". That struck me as theatrical poetry at its best: distilled, precise, yet infinitely mysterious.
Trying to pin down a Pinter play at first sight was exhilarating, like stepping into a ring with a champion boxer: one ran the risk of being knocked out.
Dance: Judith Mackrell
It was a Royal Ballet matinee in April 2001, and the hairs on the back of my neck started prickling: I realised I was witnessing the start of one of the great careers. Alina Cojocaru was just 19 and performing her first Giselle, a role that challenges even the most experienced ballerinas. In act one, she has to play a naive peasant girl, her heart broken by the aristocratic love rat Albrecht; in act two, she is a ghost, her dancing as transparent as air. Cojocaru did more than dance both roles with mesmerising beauty: she made you believe she had performed Giselle in some other, previous life.
I have seen more technically brilliant performances (although in act two, Cojocaru's dancing was so eerily exquisite, her feet barely seemed to touch the floor), but I have never seen a dancer live the role with such intensity. In the mad scene that leads to Giselle's death, Cojocaru's body looked so broken with pain you weren't sure she was acting.
Other great productions I have seen would include Les Noces, created by Bronislava Nijinska back in 1923 with a visual, emotional and musical power that blows your head off; Mark Morris's fierce Dido and Aeneas, with himself as the lead; Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring, a dance to death on a stage covered with black earth; and Frederick Ashton's poetically exact Scènes de Ballet.
The best moments I have as a critic are when I forget I'm working, when nothing I know has prepared me for what I'm experiencing. As I wrote on that extraordinary day back in 2001: "You felt that flukey thrill of being in exactly the right place at the right time."
TV: Sam Wollaston
The best thing I've ever watched on TV? That's impossible. If you're including drama, news, sport, documentary, comedy, everything, how can you possibly say which is better: news coverage of the twin towers coming down (extraordinary but hardly "good") or series four of The Wire (extraordinary, but less important in terms of changing the world)? Then there's Mad Men, The West Wing, The Thick of It, Ali G, The Office. And Big Brother's first series, when Nasty Nick was kicked out, because it changed television for ever. No, I don't dare pick that – too scared of the flak.
I'm going for Seven Up on ITV. Or 49 Up, as the last instalment, in 2005, was called. Back in 1964, 12 seven-year-olds from a wide range of backgrounds told film-maker Michael Apted what they wanted and expected out of life. Every seven years, Apted has been back to check on them. We've seen them grow up, become adults, fall in love, start careers, get married, have children, succeed, fail, despair, get more posh, get less posh, become Australian, have grandchildren.
It's been an extraordinary journey, a social history of this country: we've seen how attitudes to class, work and family have changed, along with clothes and hairstyles. But it's also, more importantly, the story of 12 individuals. This is real reality TV, touching, sad and funny – and about as important as television gets.
• This article was amended on 20 June 2011. The original stated that 49 Up was in 1995
Guardian young arts critic competition 2011: Our critics’ picks
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 20, 2011
From an illicit Pixies gig to a Mesopotamian ziggurat, Guardian critics recall their biggest moment of inspiration in their respective fields
How to enter this year's competition
Pop: Alexis Petridis
Can any gig you see as a critic ever match the ones you saw as a teenager? Bizarrely, going to a gig when I was 17 was harder work than writing reviews has ever been. It involved not merely getting to London, but lying to my parents about where I was going, lying to my friend's parents about where my parents thought I was going, bunking off school, and then convincing somebody who looked 18 to go to the bar on my behalf.
But none of that mattered the night I saw the Pixies supported by My Bloody Valentine, in September 1988. It's not every night you see arguably the two most important guitar bands of the era on the same stage at the peak of their powers: the Pixies had just released their incredible second album, Surfer Rosa, while My Bloody Valentine had released the astonishing single You Made Me Realise.
It says something about the pre-internet age that, before they walked on, I had no idea what the Pixies looked like. I didn't expect the guy who sang all those dark songs about sex and violence to be chubby and balding. This was nothing compared to the shock of their sound: a ceaseless roar, with the next song starting as the last chord of the previous one was still dying away.
I remember that gig in snapshots. Two roadies having to hold on to My Bloody Valentine's drumkit as Colm O'Cíosóig hit it with such ferocity that it started moving across the stage. The Pixies performing Hey, a song so self-evidently filthy it seemed to have been beamed in from another world. But most of all, I remember feeling more excited than I'd ever been in my life. You could argue that my career has involved chasing that feeling ever since.
Visual art: Adrian Searle
The first serious art exhibition I ever saw was on a school trip to Goya and His Times at London's Royal Academy in 1963. I have seen many Goya shows since and think I know his art well, but he always surprises me, even when I look at paintings I have known for most of my life. How time flies.
I can't say this was the best show, or even the best Goya show, I have ever seen. I was, after all, only 10. But I remember being struck by Goya's weirdness: the distorted faces of the Spanish royal family, the isolated, looming figure of the Duchess of Alba (Goya's lover), the strange skies. Decades later, I saw that the clouds over Madrid often look like old, torn tapestries.
I must have about 20 books about Goya now, including the tiny paperback I bought at the time. It's a useless book – pictures too small, colours all wrong – but I kept it. Another book is Goya's Last Portrait, a play by the critic John Berger. A few years ago, Berger and I had a long talk about that dog Goya painted, the one that could be drowning in quicksand or might just be sticking his nose up over a hill to sniff the sky.
I remember wondering why Goya's paintings meant so much to me when I knew nothing about art and had never been anywhere, least of all to Madrid. Maybe that show only became important later, because of things that happened in my life. Many roads lead back to a kid looking at Goya and understanding nothing.
Classical music: Erica Jeal
It was 10 years ago, but I remember it better than things I heard last week. The Alban Berg Quartet and the cellist Heinrich Schiff were playing Schubert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall: the String Quintet in C, the one with two cellos and the glorious first-movement melody that begins again and again, as if the composer couldn't bear to let it go.
A few minutes in, I knew this performance was different from any I'd heard before. Then I realised why. It was all coloured by death, every note. Something in the Alban Berg's playing made it obvious: Schubert, at 31, knew he was dying, and had composed a love letter to the world that was as sweet as it was sincere, full of anguish, acceptance, anger and serenity. I wondered if I was just a bit strung out: perhaps I was the only one experiencing it this way. But at the end, the usually reserved QEH audience was on its feet.
There are few things more depressing than a performance of a work you love that leaves you cold. But there is nothing more exciting than hearing a musician, or an orchestra, take something you thought you knew, and make you realise there is still more to fall in love with. I felt that way hearing Iván Fischer conduct the Budapest Festival Orchestra in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony in January this year. I felt that way in 2003, when I heard veteran tenor Peter Schreier sing a searing Die Schöne Müllerin, somehow bringing an old man's wisdom to a young man's tale.
That was Schubert again. I'm starting to suspect that Schubert understood everything there was to know about the world, and that the answers to all life's big questions might be found in his music. I haven't uncovered them yet, but I'm still listening.
Architecture: Jonathan Glancey
For as long as I can remember, right back to when I was a teenager trying to piece together the story of architecture, the ziggurat at Eridu had been a presence in my life. I was haunted by the thought that somewhere in deepest Mesopotamia, today's southern Iraq, there lay, in ruins and largely hidden under sand, what might be the world's first monumental building: the mother of all architecture in the world's first metropolis.
I finally got to Eridu just months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Somehow I had persuaded the right people to let me go, and a platoon of Saddam's soldiers now escorted me along routes flanked by unexploded munitions dating from the first Gulf war. The heat was intense: 50 degrees. On the way, we stopped to climb the ziggurat of Ur, walking the site's excavated streets in the zig-zagging shadow of the great pyramid.
When we reached Eridu, the young soldiers were as excited as I was. We almost fell on the sands. It was thrilling to palm them away and find the stepped form of its crumpled ziggurat, built and rebuilt over thousands of years. There was a lake here once, and marshes. Eridu, founded in 5,400BC, was a sacred place for millennia until finally being abandoned in the 7th century AD. In 1949, excavations were undertaken, but it became a no-go zone after the first Gulf war.
At the same time as those excavations were taking place, Le Corbusier was designing his astonishing Unité d'Habitation, a block of flats in Marseilles. Although ultra-modern, this building also managed to be as elemental in form and as ancient in spirit. Great architecture connects with the past and pushes into the future.
Film: Peter Bradshaw
In my time as a critic, there have been many films that have made me want to punch the air with joy (and a few that made me want to punch a brick wall). But the film that I come back to, over and over, is Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, a beautiful, sad, sexy, mysterious movie that came out in 2000, when I'd been in this job for less than a year.
The premise is simple enough. The scene is 1960s Hong Kong, and Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung play neighbours who discover their spouses are having an affair. The realisation gives them a kind of intimacy: they have a tragic, erotic quasi-affair of their own. It is electrifying. Leung's desperate sadness is something he cannot admit to anyone, and the final sequence, in which he "confesses" it secretly to himself, is heartbreaking.
So many mainstream films have everything signposted and underlined, leaving no doubt as to what you are supposed to think and feel. In The Mood For Love demands you notice nuances and subtlety; you have to exert yourself to see, really see, what Wong is doing.
Theatre: Michael Billington
The toughest challenge for a theatre critic, and the greatest excitement, comes from responding to something new. How to describe, interpret and evaluate a play that expands the frontiers of drama? My mind goes back to a night in April 1975, when I reviewed the first performance of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land at the Old Vic.
I knew something about Pinter, having seen The Homecoming, The Caretaker and The Birthday Party. But I'd never reviewed a Pinter premiere, and this one had the smell of a big occasion: a production starring Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud.
I know I got some things wrong. At one point, Hirst (Richardson) engages in a prolonged reminiscence with Spooner (Gielgud). I took that as genuine rather than a parodic fantasy. But I did intuit that the play was a reflection of Pinter's own fears: that Spooner, the shabby minor poet, was the man he might have been; and Hirst, the literary celebrity cut off from life, was the figure he was terrified of becoming.
What I remember above all is the crackling comic vitality and sombre poetry of Pinter's language. In the mouths of Richardson, who was all spring-heeled ebullience, and Gielgud, who looked like some seedy, downmarket WH Auden, Pinter's phrases bounced off the walls like a ball in a squash court. In the play's overpowering final moments, one had a sense of Hirst starting to crawl unburdened towards death. Or, at least, to what Pinter poignantly calls a no man's land "which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains for ever, icy and silent". That struck me as theatrical poetry at its best: distilled, precise, yet infinitely mysterious.
Trying to pin down a Pinter play at first sight was exhilarating, like stepping into a ring with a champion boxer: one ran the risk of being knocked out.
Dance: Judith Mackrell
It was a Royal Ballet matinee in April 2001, and the hairs on the back of my neck started prickling: I realised I was witnessing the start of one of the great careers. Alina Cojocaru was just 19 and performing her first Giselle, a role that challenges even the most experienced ballerinas. In act one, she has to play a naive peasant girl, her heart broken by the aristocratic love rat Albrecht; in act two, she is a ghost, her dancing as transparent as air. Cojocaru did more than dance both roles with mesmerising beauty: she made you believe she had performed Giselle in some other, previous life.
I have seen more technically brilliant performances (although in act two, Cojocaru's dancing was so eerily exquisite, her feet barely seemed to touch the floor), but I have never seen a dancer live the role with such intensity. In the mad scene that leads to Giselle's death, Cojocaru's body looked so broken with pain you weren't sure she was acting.
Other great productions I have seen would include Les Noces, created by Bronislava Nijinska back in 1923 with a visual, emotional and musical power that blows your head off; Mark Morris's fierce Dido and Aeneas, with himself as the lead; Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring, a dance to death on a stage covered with black earth; and Frederick Ashton's poetically exact Scènes de Ballet.
The best moments I have as a critic are when I forget I'm working, when nothing I know has prepared me for what I'm experiencing. As I wrote on that extraordinary day back in 2001: "You felt that flukey thrill of being in exactly the right place at the right time."
TV: Sam Wollaston
The best thing I've ever watched on TV? That's impossible. If you're including drama, news, sport, documentary, comedy, everything, how can you possibly say which is better: news coverage of the twin towers coming down (extraordinary but hardly "good") or series four of The Wire (extraordinary, but less important in terms of changing the world)? Then there's Mad Men, The West Wing, The Thick of It, Ali G, The Office. And Big Brother's first series, when Nasty Nick was kicked out, because it changed television for ever. No, I don't dare pick that – too scared of the flak.
I'm going for Seven Up on ITV. Or 49 Up, as the last instalment, in 2005, was called. Back in 1964, 12 seven-year-olds from a wide range of backgrounds told film-maker Michael Apted what they wanted and expected out of life. Every seven years, Apted has been back to check on them. We've seen them grow up, become adults, fall in love, start careers, get married, have children, succeed, fail, despair, get more posh, get less posh, become Australian, have grandchildren.
It's been an extraordinary journey, a social history of this country: we've seen how attitudes to class, work and family have changed, along with clothes and hairstyles. But it's also, more importantly, the story of 12 individuals. This is real reality TV, touching, sad and funny – and about as important as television gets.
• This article was amended on 20 June 2011. The original stated that 49 Up was in 1995
Tanzania’s art deco ruin, the Majestic cinema, inspires restoration campaign
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 3, 2011
At 'the Cinema Paradiso of Zanzibar' old films are watched under open sky – director Nick Broomfield hopes to put the roof back on
Every Friday they gather there, seven or eight elderly men in a ramshackle auditorium of cobwebs and broken chairs. Sitting under an open sky (the roof fell in long ago) they watch the flickering images of old films projected on to the wall.
"It's the Cinema Paradiso of Zanzibar," said Martin Mhando, director of the annual Zanzibar International Film Festival (Ziff), which takes place on the Tanzanian island next month. "Cinema Paradiso was heavenly compared to what's there."
This is the Majestic, one of Africa's first cinemas, an art deco gem from the 1920s that lost its lustre. Mhando is leading a campaign to restore the ruin to its former glory – vital, he says, because where Tanzania and its islands once had 53 cinemas, now there are only two.
The effort in Zanzibar's Stone Town is backed by the award-winning British film-maker Nick Broomfield, known for documentaries such as Biggie and Tupac, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, and Battle For Haditha.
Broomfield said he has been inspired by the diehards who keep the Majestic alive despite its decline.
Speaking from Los Angeles, he added: "Even though the cinema doesn't have a roof, people are using it and setting up their own projector. It probably has a lot of memories for them. It was the place where people went on dates and met their first girlfriends.
"Cinema is a shared experience. As a film-maker, the most wonderful thing about watching with a group of people is that you can tell which parts of the film are working and which aren't.
"It's a bonding thing, a way of holding a group or locality together. When I was growing up, everyone went to the cinema on Saturday morning to see the cartoons. It was social cohesion, and that's one of the exciting things that could happen with the Majestic in Zanzibar."
Broomfield will be running workshops at the Ziff and is set to shoot his next feature film in Tanzania.
"East African film-making is going to grow and become more important," he said. "The Majestic is a wonderful piece of architecture … In terms of the east African film-making community, the relevance of Zanzibar would be enshrined in the Majestic. It would be an encouragement for people to take cinema seriously. It would also be a fantastic venue for the Zanzibar International film festival."
The Royal Cinema Theatre, as it was originally known, was designed by Scottish architect John Sinclair, mixing Moroccan and Oriental-inspired styles. Renamed the Majestic a few years later it was destroyed by a fire in 1953. An art deco-themed replacement opened two years later, showing Indian and Hollywood releases such as The Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston. Gone with the Wind, Jaws and Love Story were all big hits on Zanzibar.
The economic slump of the 1980s closed cinemas all over the country. The last of three on Zanzibar, Cine Afrique, recently closed and was converted into a supermarket. The Majestic itself is said to be under threat of being turned into an office block.
Mhando said the Ziff uses a cinema on nearby Pemba island but it does not run full-time. That leaves Tanzania with two multiplexes in the commercial capital, Dar es Salaam.
"The economy got bad in the 1980s," Mhando said. "Tickets had cost $1-2, but we knew if it got to $3 the cinema economy would collapse and that's what happened. People could no longer afford to watch movies. Videos came along and they stayed inside. By 1996, all the cinemas were closed."
Despite this gloomy backdrop, the Ziff claims to be east Africa's biggest arts and film festival since launching 14 years ago. "At Ziff we have full houses of 1,500 people every night. So we started thinking about rebuilding the Majestic.
"I think if it was refurbished properly, people could go to movies there on a regular basis. It still has beautiful art deco."
Mhando hopes to make a cost assessment and raise funds so the Majestic can become a 200-seat multipurpose venue with space for corporate events, seminars and workshops along with a cafe.
Then, he hopes, the faithful who gather there each Friday will be joined by a new generation. "The old men still have their dreams of watching movies every week. They remember the old splendour of the Majestic and the moment of their youth. That's the relevance of cinema culture to them. Once you've been bitten by the bug, there's no escaping it."
• This article was amended on 3 June 2011. The original said: "That leaves Tanzania with two multiplexes in the capital, Dar es Salaam". This has been corrected.
The Observer Summer Arts Calendar
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 30, 2011
Our critics pick the season's highlights: From Lady Gaga to Harry Potter, Coppélia to Tony Cragg, this summer has something for all
MAY
4 FILM The Tree of Life
The much-delayed fifth feature from director Terrence Malick, snapped up by Icon for UK release ahead of its Cannes showing, is a multi-generational drama featuring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn – and, reportedly, dinosaurs.
5 CLASSICAL From the House of the Dead
Opera North's production of Janáek's final work, directed by John Fulljames and conducted by Richard Farnes. Stars Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, Alan Oke and Roderick Williams. Leeds and touring
DANCE By Singing Light/Romance Inverse
National Dance Company of Wales bring Stephen Petronio and Itzik Galili's arresting double bill to Dance City in Newcastle, with the former set to the poetry of Dylan Thomas.
6 THEATRE Shrek
Nigel Lindsay plays the lime-coloured, lovelorn ogre, with Amanda Holden as Princess Fiona and Nigel Harman as Lord Farquaad, in this Anglo-American production at Theatre Royal Drury Lane.
CLASSICAL The Damnation of Faust
Ex-Python Terry Gilliam takes on the devil as director of this ENO staging of Berlioz's masterpiece, conducted by Edward Gardner and starring Peter Hoare, Christine Rice and Christopher Purves.
7 CLASSICAL Steve Reich at 75
UK premiere of Steve Reich's WTC 9/11, part of the two-day Reverberations festival at the Barbican. Then toured by the Kronos Quartet in Glasgow (13 May) and Norwich (17 May).
10 THEATRE The Cherry Orchard
Zoe Wanamaker stars; Howard Davies, who has excelled in the staging of Russian drama, directs in the National's Olivier, with a design by Bunny Christie and a translation by Andrew Upton.
11 FILM Cannes film festival
Robert De Niro heads the jury at Cannes this year, casting his eye over eagerly awaited films by Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodóvar, Lynne Ramsay and Woody Allen, whose Midnight in Paris opens the competition.
13 DANCE Royal Ballet
The season's penultimate triple bill at the ROH includes the Royal Ballet premiere of Balanchine's Ballo della regina and a new work, Live Fire Exercise, from Wayne McGregor, set to a score by Sir Michael Tippett.
FILM Attack the Block
The debut feature from Joe Cornish, of Adam and Joe fame. A "hoodie horror" about aliens landing in south London and teenage gangs uniting to fight them.
14 ART Tate St Ives
Treats at the Cornish gallery's Summer Exhibition include late paintings by Agnes Martin, installations by Martin Creed and sculpture by Naum Gabo.
16 POP Kate Bush: Director's Cut
While fans await an album of new material, the fabulously eccentric Bush has chosen to rework a selection of older songs: "The Sensual World" gains a new title and lyrics from Ulysses.
THEATRE Much Ado About Nothing
Hotly anticipated. David Tennant and Catherine Tate play the sparring lovers at Wyndham's in London. They are directed by Josie Rourke, who takes over as artistic director of the Donmar next year.
18 ART Tracey Emin: Love is What You Want
Tracey Emin needs no introduction, and quite possibly no huge solo retrospective, but this show of sculptures, photographs, films and drawings at the South Bank's Hayward Gallery will no doubt thrill her fans and infuriate her detractors alike.
19 THEATRE Lord of the Flies
William Golding's savage fable, adapted by Nigel Williams, plays in the open air until 18 June at Regent's Park theatre, which is enjoying its most imaginative era for decades.
21 ARCHITECTURE The Hepworth Gallery
The second David Chipperfield-designed gallery in two months. The Hepworth promises to be as good as the first, the Turner Contemporary in Margate. No beach in Wakefield, but a fine permanent collection of Barbara Hepworth's sculpture.
23 POP Lady Gaga: Born This Way
Two taster tracks have overtly recalled Madonna, both musically ("Born This Way") and irreligiously ("Judas"). But the proper follow-up to Monster remains this year's most eagerly awaited pop release.
27 POP Take That
Britain's best-loved manband have sold out 27 nights at the UK's vastest stadiums, with the Pet Shop Boys supporting.
JUNE
2 DANCE Un peu de tendresse bordel de merde!
Dave St-Pierre is the enfant terrible of Canadian dance and has provoked comparisons with Pina Bausch. In this production at Sadler's Wells, his 20 performers are literally and figuratively stripped naked.
3 ART The Government Art Collection
Discover which works of art your government owns; which Lowrys, Turners and Bridget Rileys hang in Downing Street. All is revealed at the Whitechapel Gallery.
4 ART Venice Biennale
Quite simply the most important international art event in the world; 82 artists in the official Giardini pavilions, with many more off site at the Arsenale. Until 27 November.
7 ARCHITECTURE Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
Usually less stuffy than its art counterpart; curated this year by a stylistic odd couple of the flamboyant postmodernist Piers Gough and the more restrained Alan Stanton.
8 DANCE Coppélia
Peter Wright's production of Coppélia with the Birmingham Royal Ballet is a funny, occasionally spooky, family ballet, set to Delibes's irresistible score. At the Lowry, Manchester, and touring.
10 POP Meltdown
Former Kink Ray Davies is this year's curator at the South Bank, recreating 60s TV show Ready Steady Go!, and springing surprises such as the Fugs. But will the Kinks reform?
CLASSICAL Aldeburgh festival
Opens with Simon Rattle and the CBSO. Premieres by Elliott Carter and Harrison Birtwistle , as well as Netia Jones's site-specific Everlasting Light, set in Sizewell. Runs until 26 June.
15 FILM Edinburgh film festival
Instead of an artistic director, EIFF has appointed guest curators, including Isabella Rossellini and Gus van Sant, who should make this year's event particularly interesting.
21 ARCHITECTURE Transport Museum Glasgow
Zaha Hadid now has several UK works to her name, but this will be her biggest public work to date, pending completion of the Olympic aquatic centre.
22 THEATRE Ghost: the musical
Matthew Warchus's production of the 1990 movie moves from Manchester to London's Piccadilly, with music by Dave Stewart. Stars Richard Fleeshman.
POP Glastonbury festival
Barring any mishaps, U2 finally lead the charge at Worthy Farm, with Beyoncé, Coldplay, the Chemical Brothers and Morrissey providing backup. NB: Dengue Fever are a band on the bill, not this year's health scare.
24 CLASSICAL Two Boys
ENO premiere of Nico Muhly's co-production with the New York Metropolitan Opera about a teenage stabbing. With a libretto by Craig Lucas, directed by Bartlett Sher and conducted by Rumon Gamba.
FILM The First Grader
When the Kenyan government introduces free primary schooling, a former Mau Mau fighter, now in his 80s, applies for an education. Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl) directs, Naomie Harris co-stars in this British film which won an audience award at Tribeca.
ART Magritte: The Pleasure Principle
Still the best of the surrealists, with this first show in a generation focusing on eroticism, visual revelation and the influence of commercial design. More than 100 paintings at Tate Liverpool.
FILM Bridesmaids
In this female riposte to the stag-party-gone-wrong subgenre, produced by Judd Apatow, Saturday Night Live regular Kristen Wiig (who co-wrote the script) plays a lovelorn maid of honour ill-equipped to organise her best friend's pre-wedding rituals.
29 POP Arcade Fire
First, the Texan/Haitian/Canadian indie wunderkinder took London's O2 Arena. Now, they are taking Hyde Park, with help from Mumford & Sons, Beirut and the Vaccines.
30 ART Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography
Brassaï, Robert Capa, André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy: more than 200 works showing the astonishing impact of this single country on photojournalism, documentary, fashion and art photography. At the Royal Academy until 2 October.
THEATRE Manchester international festival
The flourishing festival will include Robert Wilson's The Life and Death of Marina Abramović and Victoria Wood's The Day We Sang, inspired by Manchester Children's Choir. Runs until 17 July.
JULY
1 ARCHITECTURE Serpentine Gallery Pavilion
Every year the Serpentine asks a famous architect to design the gallery a temporary pavilion. This year it has lured Peter Zumthor out of his Alpine lair.
3 POP Ke$ha
America's second-most outrageous starlet is back on our shores. Ke$ha's Get $leazy world tour is oversexed and over here until 13 July.
5 DANCE Sylvie Guillem
New contemporary works by William Forsythe, Mats Ek and Jiří Kylián performed by the celebrated ballerina. Essential. To 9 July at Sadler's Wells.
6 ART Thomas Struth
One of Germany's most praised photo artists comes to Whitechapel Art Gallery. Includes the celebrated Museum series and recent installations of Cape Canavarel and the Korean shipyards.
7 ART Glamour of the Gods
Hollywood portraiture from the industry's golden age, 1920-60. From Greta Garbo to Audrey Hepburn, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe: portraits that transformed actors into international style icons. At the National Portrait Gallery.
8 THEATRE Double Feature
Four new plays by Sam Holcroft, DC Moore, Prasanna Puwanarajah and Tom Basden - all writers new to the National Theatre - are staged by a new ensemble in the Cottesloe.
FILM Jack Goes Boating
Philip Seymour Hoffman makes his directorial debut and stars in this tale of lost souls and confused love lives in snow-bound New York. It's based on a 2007 play in which he also appeared.
12 THEATRE A Woman Killed With Kindness
In what promises to be a radical production, Katie Mitchell directs Thomas Heywood's celebrated but rarely seen play. The domestic tragedy, written in 1603, will be staged in the National's Lyttelton.
15 FILM The Deathly Hallows: Part Two
After 10 years the Harry Potter franchise reaches its denouement with a film set to keep box-offices busy.
CLASSICAL The Proms
The BBC Proms opening fortnight includes Havergal Brian's mammoth "Gothic" symphony, new conductor Juanjo Mena, soloist Steven Osborne and pianist Lang Lang. To 10 September.
POP POP Latitude
The headliners may be iffy – the National and Paolo Nutini – but Latitude in Suffolk is a sublime antidote to the mud and mayhem of other festivals. And Alan Hollinghurst is in the Lit Tent.
POP Snoop Dogg
The lazy drawl of Calvin Broadus has long been eclipsed by the rapper's multiplatform media career. It's worth savouring, as he performs 1993's Doggystyle at Manchester international festival and Lovebox Weekender.
20 DANCE Roland Petit
Triple bill of works by the French choreographer, Margot Fonteyn's lover and husband of Zizi Jeanmaire. Includes the sexy, existentialist Le Jeune Homme et la Mort. ENB at the Coliseum.
FILM Nader and Simin, A Separation
Winner of the Golden Bear award at Berlin in February, Asghar Farhadi's fine film explores class tensions in present-day Iran as a middle-class couple on the verge of separation battle over the care of an elderly relative.
26 CLASSICAL St Endellion festival
An ambitious festival in north Cornwall (stars perform for no fee). Includes Wagner's Die Walkure with Susan Bullock (30 July), which then goes to Truro's Hall for Cornwall (2 Aug).
POP Womad
Womad's organisers are on solid ground with headliners such as Baaba Maal and Rodrigo y Gabriela, but the splendour of Womad is always in the discovering.
29 FILM Horrid Henry
The popular series of children's books about a troublesome pre-teen gets the 3D treatment, with Theo Stevenson as Henry, and Anjelica Huston and Richard E Grant among the adults.
30 ART Tony Cragg
Huge retrospective for Tony Cragg, senior British sculptor, with an emphasis on the cast-art of the last decade. At the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to 6 November.
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How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster? – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 30, 2011
This admiring, hugely enjoyable, largely uncritical documentary on Norman Foster follows the career of Britain's most successful living architect, from Manchester, where he was born quite literally on the wrong side of the tracks (a railway line separated his parents' working-class home from a prosperous middle-class area), via Yale to international renown.
Foster is an eloquent speaker with a touch of Lancashire in his voice, a likable man, who uses a sketch pad as a way of thinking, and we get to see stunningly photographed images of his work from Manhattan to Beijing, including his breathtaking Millau Viaduct over the Gorges du Tarn.
The commentary is written and spoken by the architecture critic and director of the Design Museum Deyan Sudjic, and the question in the title was posed by Buckminster Fuller when he flew with Foster over the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia.
Building an audience for architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 21, 2011
From The Fountainhead to Blade Runner, the way films portray buildings and architects has nothing to do with reality, right? You'd be surprised
Howard Roark is, up to a point, a plausible name for an architect, but I am less convinced by Stourley Kracklite. Roark, played by Gary Cooper in King Vidor's schlockfest The Fountainhead is a picture of toned muscle and angst, handy with a rock drill and brutal in his wooing. In contrast Kracklite, played by Brian Dennehy in Peter Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect, has a waistline that authentically overwhelms his belt in the manner pioneered by the 20-stone James Stirling.
Both films have always fascinated me. In the case of The Fountainhead, it's not so much Roark – a tortured genius somewhere between Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright – who's the special attraction, although it's hard not to warm to an architect who, rather than see his work compromised, breaks into a building site and lays the dynamite charges to blow it up. Even if you might not want to actually hire him, he gets your attention. But what is really seductive is the idea that The Fountainhead's villain-in-chief is an architecture critic. The silkily evil Elsworth Toohey is portrayed filing copy from his bathtub and inciting the masses against Roark. If only.
Kracklite, even without the same mercurial menace as Gary Cooper, was equally fascinating as a kind of awful warning of the worst things that can happen to a curator. I saw The Belly of an Architect when, not unlike Kracklite, I was curating an architectural exhibition in Italy. In his case, it was on Étienne-Louis Boullée in Rome; in mine, the Venice Architecture Biennale, although I am happy to say I managed to get through the experience without being poisoned, which was more than Kracklite achieved.
Cinema and architecture have a relationship that goes back a long way, and is both superficial and profound. Half a century before Brad Pitt began hanging around Frank Gehry's studio and working on sustainable low-cost houses for New Orleans, Alfred Hitchcock was obsessed by architecture. He filmed it, he designed it, he evoked it. North By Northwest is full of architecture, starting with Saul Bass's titles, which begin as an abstract grid that is gradually revealed as the glazed facade of the UN building in Manhattan. Later in the film, you see a lot of the UN's interiors, which through the lens look much like the kind of buildings Zaha Hadid is designing today (North By Northwest is one of her favourite films). Later in the narrative, there is the Vandamm house in North Dakota that looks more like Frank Lloyd Wright than Frank Lloyd Wright, but which was actually a set built by Hitchcock.
Camille Paglia pointed out Hitchcock's continuing architectural obsessions years ago. The architecture critic Steven Jacobs has documented them in detail. Jacobs has examined, shot by shot, Hitchcock's key scenes, used them to draw floorplans and published the results in a book entitled Hitchcock and the Wrong House. It's a remarkable exercise that demonstrates the unpredictable interaction between spaces that can only exist in the film world and those that are more physical and can be realised in the architectural world.
We know what the flat in the Maida Vale terrace that is the setting for Dial M for Murder ought to look like on the basis of the exterior shots. Jacobs's drawings show that the simple orthogonal plan, implied by how the spaces looked through a camera lens, would actually have been overlaid by wedge-shaped projections to achieve the shots that Hitchcock wanted.
What makes it so fascinating as a study is that it shows the precise point at which physical reality overlaps with dreamlike images. There are other connections between film and architecture worth pursuing, too. They are both activities that require introversion and extroversion of their practitioners. To make a film, just as to design a building, takes a creative impulse, as well as the business acumen to assemble the finance, and the personality to impose one's will on construction workers, actors and crew.
What is not always clear is the precise nature of the comparison. Is the architect playing the part of director, or the star; the headline name that can get a development funded, in the same way that signing up Colin Firth or George Clooney can greenlight a film? It does happen occasionally when a developer looking for visibility or an easy planning consent, commissions Norman Foster or Frank Gehry, and bankers come up with the mezzanine finance to build a business park or a block of flats or a skyscraper on the strength of their involvement.
A more plausible analogy for the architect is with the screenwriter, whose work is rewritten until everything that made it distinctive has dissolved under layer upon layer of mush.
But just because a film has an architectural theme does not necessarily tell us much about architecture. Watching a lifesize replica of the spiral of the Guggenheim museum being obliterated in a storm of automatic gunfire in The International is more architectural product placement than spatial insight. Michael Caine's walk-on performance as an architecture professor in Inception is no more helpful as an insight into the mother of the arts than the random fact of Woody Harrelson's character in Indecent Proposal being an architect.
It's not simply a question of the distinction between arthouse and blockbuster. While a documentary such as My Architect may tell you a lot about the inner life of the son of an architect, it does not reveal much about architecture, perhaps because it was architecture that ultimately deprived Nathaniel Kahn of his father, Louis. In the Die Hard films, on the other hand, Joel Silver (who collects Frank Lloyd Wright houses) took audiences deep into the entrails of skyscrapers and airports, to demonstrate how buildings and complex spaces work, drawing a much less two-dimensional portrait of them than he achieved of his human characters.
In Heatwave, director Phillip Noyce provides another take on The Fountainhead. Richard Moir plays Steve West, an ambitious architect on the verge of his breakthrough project, a housing complex called Eden, in a rundown part of Sydney. "Why are you doing this?" asks Judy Davis, playing the community activist trying to stop the project from demolishing her neighbourhood. "Because if I didn't, somebody with half my ability would." Later, when West sees what the work has become in the hands of his ruthless property developer client, he echoes Roark: "It's not what I designed."
Some films can capture an architectural mood even before architects are aware of it. Blade Runner really did trigger an interest in dystopia, an exploration of the city of the future as messy and dark. It's not a film's namechecks or plotlines that can really tell us something new about architecture. Of course there is a certain narcissistic flutter when Maria Schneider, playing an architecture student, appears in The Passenger: would anybody else be discovered lurking in quick succession outside both the brutalist concrete of the Brunswick Centre in London and on the roof of Gaudí's La Pedrera in Barcelona?
But there is more to it than that. The real architectural quality of the film is in the climactic, uninterrupted, seven-minute continuous take that begins inside Jack Nicholson's hotel room in southern Spain, moves round the room and out through the window, to make a circuit of the square outside. It's the same sort of crystallization of space that the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro achieved in The Conformist, when Jean-Louis Trintignant is lost in the endless spaces of a fascist minister's office, and the screen is suddenly filled by a vast bust of Mussolini's head that is carried across the screen from left to right.
This is the kind of magic that architects always wish that they could work, but their buildings are static, and they can't impose their viewpoints on the people who experience their buildings. It doesn't stop them from trying.
Deyan Sudjic is an architecture critic. He narrates the film How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?, released on 28 January.
‘This is not criticism in a vacuum’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 28, 2010
From demolishing Alice in Wonderland to deciphering Macbeth, our young readers bowled over the judges with their wit
Fresh bands, young directors, hot new actors and artists straight out of college are the lifeblood of the arts. And, to ensure that criticism doesn't get stale, it's essential that their generation is represented in our reviewers. The Guardian's annual young critics competition is designed to ensure that arts criticism can reflect the voices of a younger arts audience. That said, youth alone is not enough. These days, it's easier than ever to find a platform on which to voice your opinions – by blogging, tweeting, or posting on comment threads – but with all that competition, it's more essential than ever that you have something worthwhile to say.
The entries confirmed that there are 10-18-year-olds out there with perceptive, funny things to convey about subjects ranging from the Selfridges building in Birmingham to tattooed LA rockers Buckcherry. What's more, the best of our critics seemed to be predominantly female – of the 14 finalists, only three were male. There were eight categories and two age groups in each: under 14s and 14-to-18s, though not all art forms had enough entries to qualify. Classical music critics aged under 14 are still thin on the ground.
The overall winner, 15-year-old Rebecca Grant, won the judges over with her demolition of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which she described as a "beautifully eccentric odyssey" reduced to "disgusting dregs". "She managed to be witheringly critical without sounding as if she was grandstanding," said Liz Forgan, the chair of Arts Council England. Rebecca will win a trip to a film screening with a Guardian film critic, and get the chance to write about it in g2.
All runners-up get a £25 book token, and have their review published on guardian.co.uk today. Two were highly commended. Pandora Haydon's review of All My Sons at the Apollo theatre, London, "brilliantly captured the taut physicality of David Suchet's performance", said Andrew Dickson, our online arts editor. Frances Myatt – a winner in the under-14s dance category last year – impressed dance critic Judith Mackrell once again with her review of Mutatis Mutandis at the Macrobert theatre in Stirling.
Yinka Shonibare – the artist who put a ship in a bottle on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square – judged the visual art category with the Guardian's chief art critic Adrian Searle. Twelve-year-old Mark Hardy won the under-14s category with a review of Fiona Banner's installation of two fighter jets at Tate Britain. Jo Waugh, 15, won the 14-18 category with a sophisticated review of Recollection Has Not Been Mentioned by Tony Swain. "This is not criticism in a vacuum," Shonibare said. "I like the way the work is contextualised in relation to modernism, surrealism and Kandinsky. She also describes the ambiguity in the art world very well."
The winner of our architecture category, India Miller, was also prepared to look beyond the work and discuss its significance in the wider world. Her review of Selfridges in Birmingham impressed architect Amanda Levete, whose practice Future Systems designed it. "She sets the context of a 'city left in tatters', and alludes to the paradox of the democracy of impact that the building has had on Birmingham in becoming symbolic of the city while at the same time representing a 'bubble of wealth'," said Levete.
Sasha Millwood, 18, won the classical music category with a fluent review of the National Youth Orchestra conducted by Semyon Bychkov at the Royal Albert Hall. Ella McCarthy, 13, won the under-14s theatre category for what the Guardian's Michael Billington termed a "graphic account" of Macbeth in Regent's Park.
Two entries stood out in the TV category. Seventeen-year-old Lilith Johnstone's review of Mo "showed good awareness of the context, and of the elements that were generic and original," said critic Mark Lawson. A special mention should go to Nathan Ellis, who was a winner in the same category last year, and whose review was enjoyed by Lawson's fellow judge Fearne Cotton. "He gets straight to the point with his slick, humorous and analytical review. Rounded off nicely with a heartfelt quip, it didn't drag."
There was only one winner in the pop category – Fin Murphy, 17, for his Buckcherry review. Michael Hann, the editor of the Guardian's Film&Music section, said it had "a good opening that tricked me into believing I was going to read a string of cliches, then undercut expectations". His fellow judge Tinchy Stryder was moved to check out Buckcherry's music online "in spite of the genre not being my kind of thing" – or the review being all that positive. It was a reminder that reviews can expose you to art you wouldn't otherwise have considered or known about – and that's something valuable whether you're 10 or 80.
• This article was amended on 21 October 2010. The original misspelled the name of the winner of the classical musical category as Sasha Millward. This has been corrected.
The scariest building in Britain?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 28, 2010
Is the Royal Masonic School for Boys the scariest building in Britain? As Halloween looms, Jonathan Glancey visits the school adored by film-makers that's being turned into luxury flats
When the film-maker Merlin Ward was scouting for a location for his 2003 film Out of Bounds, a psychological thriller set in an eerie boarding school where bells toll ominously and a chill wind rarely stops moaning, he could scarcely believe his luck when he was shown the Royal Masonic School for Boys, a hulking structure built in 1903, in the Hertfordshire town of Bushey.
"It wasn't just that this vast Edwardian school was conveniently close to London and the film studios around Elstree," says Ward. "It was the gloriously spooky entrance tower and the sense of foreboding evoked by the surrounding buildings: cavernous, ominous, Halloween-like. I couldn't have asked for a more unnerving setting."
Nor could other directors. When Ward began filming in 2001, four other production companies were busy there. In fact, before it closed in 1977, the school had been a popular setting for murder mysteries and thrillers, including the cult 1960s TV show The Avengers. Since then, it has featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Harry Potter movies, Monty Python's Meaning of Life, and 1985's Lifeforce, in which a shuttle returns to Earth carrying space vampires. Scarier still, it even served as a law court in EastEnders.
When the school, surely a contender for Britain's scariest building, closed, its next incarnation was as an international college, before becoming the property of Comer Homes, a company founded by Brian and Luke Comer, two plasterers from County Galway. They have redeveloped some great abandoned buildings, including Colney Hatch Asylum in London, which they rechristened Princess Park Manor, after turning it into sumptuous flats complete with gyms, swimming pools, spa facilities and pretty much every luxury expected by their clients, who include high-earning footballers. They have now repeated the trick with the Royal Masonic School – or Royal Connaught Park, to give it its new name.
"It's sad in a way that it's been redeveloped," says Ward. "The school was such a brilliant studio. It was highly atmospheric. We camped out there during our shoot. It was cold and forbidding. We never saw a ghost, sadly, not even in the mortuary." The mortuary? "Oh yes – the boys who came here as orphans from the Boer and great war would sometimes die of flu and TB, if not from beatings. It seems odd today, but there was nothing unusual about a school mortuary then."
Comer Homes employed architects ADP, specialists in such work, to exorcise the Halloween spirit from the old school. "I've spent more years involved with Royal Connaught Park than any schoolboy did," says project architect Catherine Yeatman, who, with Comer's Basil Nwalema, is taking me on a tour. "Planning began in 1998, and it has evolved gradually ever since."
There are 157 flats in the old buildings, with 200 to come in new residencies hidden in a dip in the extensive grounds. The cheapest flat, which has just one bedroom but could never be described as cramped, costs £369,000; the most expensive, a three-bedroom penthouse, is £2.5m.
"It's hardly a fast-buck project," says Nwalema, "but this type of complex – big and beautifully built, at a time when British architecture was exceptionally well crafted – makes for special homes today."
As a mournful drizzle sets in, we start off from under the clock tower. Originally built by freemasons for sons of impoverished and bereaved families, the white-stone-and-red-brick complex was designed by the firm Gordon, Lowther and Gunton. Their approach was, to say the least, eclectic. For their schools, chapels and office blocks, the architects employed a pageant of styles drawn from the spectrum of British history: the daunting tower alone reads like an encyclopedia of gothic design.
Their work could be epic, though. It takes an age to walk from the tower to the enormous dining hall at the far end of a cloistered quadrangle. Almost too large for the eye to take in, the hall, which will be used for big social events, boasts dark timber panelling, exposed beams and lofty gothic windows that pour light into an echoing cavern. I'm assuming it wasn't much fun here. A record of school life written by Geoff Kirby, a pupil from 1949 to 1953, is divided into sections entitled: I Enter Hell, The Curse of Games, Censored Letters and Beaten Bare Buttocks, and My Eyes Are Ruined By Incompetent Medical Staff.
Today, a glazed section in the dining hall floor gives a glimpse of the luxurious underground swimming pool. Its blue waters look enticing: for a happy moment, all the daunting school architecture is warmed and tamed. Yet if the old dining hall, with its horribly long echo, feels in any way sinister, the unrestored assembly hall is the stuff of a Hammer House of Horror nightmare. Yeatman tells me that this appallingly large room will eventually be conjured into five four-storey flats, each with a pair of cathedral-sized windows.
We move on to imposing towers and wings, now flats, some big enough to house an entire football team. There is an impressive gym with gothic decor; and that swimming pool, underground yet ingeniously daylit; as well as other rooms due to be turned into club rooms and restaurants. A magnificent kitchen block, with clerestory windows, is to be made into further flats boasting impressive top-lit, oak-beamed roofs.
"One of the good things," says Yeatman, "is that we've been able to demolish poor ancillary buildings that grew up alongside the walls of the Edwardian school like architectural fungus. Now the school has been turned into homes, you see it more as it was [originally]. We've also been able to replace black-pitch yards and playgrounds with gardens."
"And," says Nwalema, "the birds have returned, along with a lot of wildlife." Just as I'm about to suggest bats, rats and giant spiders – if not vampires and zombies – a murder of crows alight on a gothic gable and arrange themselves into a line, cawing menacingly.
There are still a large number of buildings like this in Britain: schools, hospitals, asylums dating from a time when Britain was able to indulge in architecture that was the stuff of architects' dreams and gothic horror nightmares. While it is good to see them returning to favour, their ghosts and demons expelled, it does pose a question: where will directors of the future go to find places as scary and Halloween-like as the Royal Masonic School for Boys?
For sale: Dennis Hopper’s house
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 6, 2010
The Easy Rider star's sleek mansion, designed in part by Frank Gehry, is up for sale. But no one is buying. Could its edgy location in Venice, LA, be putting people off?
It was one of those Hollywood-in-the-hood myths, part of the fabric of living in a town with a single industry: entertainment. Deep in Los Angeles's Venice district, it was said, less than a mile inland from the heft of the Pacific, was the house. It stood in the hood, down on Indiana and fourth, past Broadway, past Brooks – an area that scared the lights out of Charles Bukowski, the drunken postie-turned-poet who was afraid to look out of the window when he lived there, for fear of the eyes peering back in at him.
A haven for low-lifes and low-riders, crackhouses and gangbangers, that spit of Venice was immune to the polite society emerging around it. Instead it revelled in the fear; the fear where black met Latino and joined together to glare at the Anglo. The first time I came here, the estate agent I was following stopped her car, got out and clack-clacked her way back to me to profess that she was lost. Then she looked around. "I can't believe I got out of my car!" she screamed. "I'm a white Jewish princess out of my car! Here!"
In a frenzy of sequins she skanked back to her car and we sped off, bouncing through the storm drains, crossing the crucible of fourth-fifth-sixth-seventh avenues before arriving at Lincoln Boulevard and the security of its third-world shanty.
I often wondered if it was really Dennis Hopper's house there on fourth and Indiana. By then I was living a few blocks away, in one of the safely gentrified parts of Venice. Julia Roberts lived across the block, Ed Ruscha had his studio at the end of the street, and I never walked as far as Indiana. But still, you could drive past – and I did, peering at the fences, the walls, the hedges. And then I found it: deluxe, A-list-size palms towering overhead, skewed building blocks piled one upon the other.
The giveaway that there was some big mother of a star living there, behind the barrier, was that this was a triple lot. Want to tell people you've arrived in this town of infinite real estate? Bag a double lot, or bigger. Then they'll notice you, even in little old Venice. Frank Gehry did it (out-did it, even) by seizing his own triple-lot a few blocks away. The lot's still there, in fact, ringed by chain-link and as bare as the day he bought it – the planners, the zoners and the permit department having aced the hot-shot architect with his wibbly-wobbly planes and crow's-nest shtick.
Gehry also designed parts of the Hopper Compound, as it is known, to house the actor's formidable art collection. Forget about Hopper's own pretensions, his abstract fancy-pants photos of street paintings, those candid snaps of his fellow myths in their heyday and his papier-mache banalities. That was just dabbling. His eye as a collector – now that was for real. His early investments in art, when he played the penniless punk (long before he played the advertising icon), helped pay the debts and move him up the ladder. Hopper, he would tell you, was the first to buy one of Warhol's Campbell's Soup paintings. For $75.
I met him once, and told him about my interest in his house, how we were near neighbours, and he told me the story of how a Guardian journalist had come to his house for an interview and fucked him over. Invitation aborted.
Now that he's dead, the Hopper Compound, one of the stranger remnants of his idiotic reign, is on page 15 of the local rag's property listings; the fruit of a dispute between Hopper's estate and his estranged widow. To date, there are no takers. The price has dropped from $6.245m to $5.194m, and the Hopper myth is reduced to a banality that might serve as a motif for the death of celebrity: the knowledge that his house had "dishwasher, dryer, garbage disposal, refrigerator". TS Eliot probably had something to say about it all. Or Charles Bukowski.
• This article was amended on 5 October 2010. The original referred to Charles Bukowski as the drunken Polish postie-turned-poet. This has been corrected.