Nostalgia for Film: Trend on Trial

This month, I've seen French film The Artist and new play Travelling Light at the National Theatre.

Both loving homages to the history of film.

It seems there's something of a cross-media trend for looking back to the golden age of cinema.

Other works adding to the movement include Tacita Dean's installation, FILM in the Turbine Hall (a celebration of analogue filmmaking); and Martin Scorsese's latest offering, Hugo, which, like Travelling Light, is about the birth of cinema.

Now, to an extent, nostalgia is always going to be popular among theatre / filmmakers. It's safe, reassuring and hugely evocative. Why else would costume dramas, biopics and recent-past-based sitcoms / dramas have such large audiences?

But I can't help wondering if you can simply explain away this current craze for chronicling early cinema with "nostaglia wins".

Travelling Light was heavy on what JC calls Life-On-Mars quips: knowing nods to the wisdom of the audience when an unsuspecting character says something like: "If only I could move to America. No-one there would be bullying me about budgets and who to cast in my film…" and those of us in the auditorium can chuckle knowingly, feeling clever that we know more than those "schmucks" on stage. It's a fun device used sparingly; but one I felt wore slightly thin in the production I saw on Thursday.

Damien Molony and Lauren O’Neil in Travelling Light at the National Theatre. Photo by Johan Persson

As Pete Hammond points out, the tough economic climate does seem to have created an longing for watching rosier versions of ourselves.

Talking about the Oscar nominations, Hammond says,

"This year, at the top of most pundits lists... are... the kinds of movies that might have worked in the Great Depression of the 1930s, when pure entertainment ruled the roost and Shirley Temple and Astaire and Rogers were must-sees. It’s as if people are trying to use movies again for escape from the harsh realities of living in this modern, difficult world."

This is certainly true of Hugo and The Artist. But I think there's got to be more to it than simple nostalgia.

A second theory is that the movies and cinema are simply at the "right age." At more than 100 years old, have they suddenly reached a magical point where a medium simply stops being "new" or "now", and people are able to take a step back and analyse. Something like Dryden and Pepys being able to perform literary criticism on Shakespeare's plays 100 years after his those works were new. It might be a factor...

But aren't we usually told that today, fashions run in 30-year cycles? That when the kids grow up and finally get into position of power in fashion houses, film studios and design spaces, they create work that's a nod to the time when they were young and first inspired by fashion. Isn't that why they made Grease (set in the 1950s) in 1978? And The Sound of Music (set in the late 1930s) was made in 1965?! And of course, that 33 years Sam Tyler jumps in Life on Mars, conveniently both reassuring and strange for a modern audience. It's perhaps the reason Henry Holland's 80s-inspired clothes are hot right now, and hipsters are all wearing those too-short, baggy-at-the-hip and skinny-round-the-ankle trousers Mel and Kim wore on TOTP. (BTW, they're really unflattering.)

So this cross-genre nostalgia for early film doesn't quite fit this wait-30-years-and-repeat trend. There has to be other reasons for it.

Tacita Dean's Tate Modern Installation,
Photo by Eddie Mulholland

Now Tacita Dean's been quite explicit about the motivation behind her hugely popular Tate Modern work. She's concerned about the decline of film, as digital technology takes over and photochemical labs close down. She told the BBC:

"I suddenly realised we are just about to lose this really beautiful medium we created 125 years ago. Digital is also a fantastic medium. It's got massive potential. But I love film and I don't want to lose my ability to make film and it looks like I probably will."

It seems that in the dying moments of film's existence, writers, artists and directors are paying homage to the medium: Steven Spielberg has said, "its years are numbered, but I will remain loyal to this analogue art form until the last lab closes."

"No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings", says Martin Scorsese in the same article.

But I can't help thinking that while the perilous future of analogue film is a motivating factor for the guys at the top of the industry, it's not really something the average cinema-goer thinks about.

The final reason I think there's this new interest in the origins of film, the tools involved, the quirks of its history (like the change from silent films to talkies) must be the current democratisation of filmmaking.

With the development of technology -- a camera on every phone, simple editing tools available for free online, a near-universal platform to get your masterpiece seen -- an interest in how your predecessors went about making their "moving pictures" must have more appeal.

Part of the mystery of filmmaking has gone. With plays, art and film about film, particularly analogue film, that magic can be protected. The recent cluster of plays and films about films retain their fascination by turning to bewitching characters (like My Week With Marilyn as well as The Artist and Travelling Light), using tried-and-tested techniques from yesteryear, holding up a mirror to a happier past, as well as pulling on our universal love for nostalgia.

Combine all those factors together, and I think we're getting to the bottom of this current trend. It's a winning formula, and I'm certainly not complaining; I, too, am fascinated by the history of "moving pictures", the industry, where it's going, and where it's been. And if it results in more thoughtful, creative filmmaking like The Artist; well, that's got to be a good thing.

See Damien Hirst's Spot Paintings For Free at the Gagosian Galleries

Damien Hirst Controlled Substance Key Painting, 1994 Household gloss on canvas 48 x 48 inches 121.9 x 121.9 cm Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2011 Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

From Thursday, you can get a look at Damien Hirst's Spot Paintings for free.

They're going on display at the two Gagosian Galleries in London, as well as at all the other Gagosians (Gagosii?) around the world. (That's New York, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong, in case you were wondering.)

Hirst didn't make them himself: these are some of the very works that have caused David Hockney to declare of his own exhibition at the Royal Academy: "all the works were made by the artist himself, personally."

Hirst, on the other hand, used assistants to make his Spot Paintings, saying, "I couldn’t be fucking arsed doing it".

Visit the Gagosian Galleries between now and February to see what the fuss is about, and get in on Hirstmania early: later in the year, Tate Modern is holding a blockbuster Hirst show which'll cost you about £14 to see.

Read my original Damien Hirst post on londonist

Arts Ahead 18 - 24 January

Arts Ahead for this week, and it was high time the art section of my column got some proper attention.

So, a great image, and some lovely recommendations. The Royal Academy, the London Art Fair, Tate Modern's new one, and something curated by the Scissor Sisters all made it into the mix.

One thing that struck me while I was putting together this week's piece was The Country Girl at the Apollo, and its great review from the Telegraph. Billington quite liked it too. And yet I've heard nothing about this play the whole time it's been on. Nothing from PRs requesting previews / offering interviews. Nothing in terms of reviews when it opened. And now its closing earlier than we had listed. I guess it's just one of those things... a quiet success that passed most people by.

Read the rest of Arts Ahead on www.londonist.com

HappyCloud @ Tate Modern

An irresistible invite arrived on Tuesday:

Get set to see 2057 pink smiley faced clouds float over London's Southbank... Artist Stuart Semple is preparing to release 2057 smiling clouds in the sky of London.

The Happy Cloud installation aims to be a message of hope and positivism in reaction to the doom and gloom of current events, and is also a reminder of the importance of Art and of the cultural industries in our everyday life.

The 28-year-old says: "I just wanted to make a piece of work that could cheer people up a bit. I've had enough of the doom and gloom in the air and I wanted to show something completely positive floating up in the sky. I am hoping it might put a smile on a few people's faces as they go through their day. I know at times like this it's easy to make creativity a low priority but I want to show on a very human level that an artistic idea might be able to do something important, even for a fleeting moment."

It's not often I'm enticed to get up early, but for this? Absolutely.

I took the RV1 over to Tate Modern from Waterloo, glancing at the sky every so often, eager to spot my first HappyCloud. What would they be like? How big? How visible? How fast moving? How obvious?

But you couldn't see anything out of the ordinary from the bus.

Walking from the road through the gardens behind the Tate, I spotted something. A little like a frisbee, but weirder; lighter, thicker, somehow less aerodynamic than a disc, floating through the sky. There it was: my first HappyCloud.

Once I'd seen one, I realised there were a few of them, three or four, floating, twisting, turning, flopping around in the air above the Thames. I walked up onto the Millenium Bridge to get a better view. It was ace! Each time the team below "released" a cloud, it flew on the (quite strong) wind from the space to the right of the Tate, over the dome of St Paul's and the bridge, floating downstream like a HappyCloud tourist, desperate to survive for long enough to see the whole of that great London panorama it was involved in, to live long enough to travel down past the Gherkin, over Tower Bridge and on to the towers of Canary Wharf.

They floated and twisted around, occasionally revealing their smiley faces, at other times floating tantalisingly flat, like a slow-moving frisbee. But they didn't last long.

Sometimes they passed overhead unformed, missing features, lopsided, solid circles of foam. But a surprising amount were pretty much perfect smiles; when they turned to look at you, they got a few perfect smiles back in return.

What a great, mad, fun, silly thing to organise. Well done, Mr Semple.

I'm currently not able to get the pics and video I took of the HappyClouds off my mobile and onto a computer, but you can check out some great pictures here.

Edit: Londonist has some lovely HappyCloud pictures too.

London's South Bank Skyline: All Change

I posted about the developments taking place at Tate Modern on Londonist this week. Brilliantly, the PR from Tate Modern called me up, (after having sent an email to the same effect moments before) to reprimand me for the pun in my headline and subsequent copy.

His project is called Transforming Tate Modern. I'd played on the word modern. What's happening at Tate Modern isn't a modernisation. Tsk. I pointed out that I'd got his project name, and link to said project in the post at the bottom. I think he knew it was a silly complaint, but it was one he was required to make, and it all passed amicably once we'd had a chat about it. I changed one sentence, and added a new picture caption. Fairynuff.

It all looks like interesting stuff, tho. Especially in terms of what NA the geotechnical engineer is now working on: Project Bankside. I love knowing a geotechnical engineer. Particularly when he sends me beautiful pictures of what he's working on. JC and I have "plans" to live at the top of the yellow-topped building on the right of Tate (before, I think, we retire to live in the Barbican, or course), but it'd all look a bit different if we ever did that now!

All this new stuff reminds me of an amazing shot of the London skyline in Four Weddings and a Funeral. I think Hugh Grant has just woken up in the city; to demonstrate that, they show a shot of London. This being 1994 (yikes, more than 10 years ago!), the panorama includes no Eye, no Gherkin, nothing you'd particularly recognise as current film-language for the Lon.don. (Tate Modern only opened as a shiny museum, rather than a grubby power station, in 2000.) It's a quiet shot, a colourless sky across a murky river, showing London Bridge. Not Tower Bridge; London Bridge. Perhaps that was the point; Hugh, the "everyman", in a ordinary morning in an ordinary capital city. But it looks so dated now.