DV8 Physical Theater was formed in 1986 by dancer and choreographer, Lloyd Newson. Over the past twenty-five years, DV8 has produced 16 internationally successful dance pieces and 4 award-winning films for television.

From the start Newson’s work has been controversial. In 1990, the Sunday Mirror denounced DV8’s television production, Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, a piece inspired by the career of the serial killer Dennis Nilsen, as a “Gay Sex Orgy on TV”.  Such “rabid headlines” gave the program an unexpected boost. It also revealed Newson’s considerable intelligence at work behind DV8’s provocative performances. As he explained in an interview with Article 19

One of the things about DV8’s work is it is about subject matter, for a lot of people who go and see dance it is not about anything and DV8 is about something. I think the other thing that is important is the notion of humour and pathos, of tragedy, of multiple emotions and responses to my work –I’ve been so tired over the years of watching so much dance on one level, it may be very pretty, but it just goes on and on, it’s pretty nice, pretty much the same and pretty dull really, a lot of it.

So my big concern is to try and present images through movement and to talk about the whole range of social and psychological situations.

 

 
In 2004, DV8 made The Cost of Living, for Channel 4 television. Based on a longer performance piece, The Cost of LIving was devised by Newson and the dancers, who range from “extremely able-bodied to a man with no legs,” David Toole whose incredible performance challenges our perceptions about ability and adds to the film’s “critique of society’s obsession with image.” As Newson explained in 2004:

The Cost of Living is very much about those people who don’t fulfill the market value, in the sense of playing on the words the cost of living in terms of the financial issue and looking at what happens through experience as you live do you lose your naiveté? As you live do you lose a lot? Or does experience assist you?

What I’m interested in [with] this piece is: do you become cynical and bitter as the cost of living, or do you not? So we’ve got lots of different characters; those who play the more embittered ones, we have the notion of Stepford [Wives] the idea that it’s important for all of us to join the club, whether it be dressing well, being attractive, being successful, and if we can’t be really successful financially or in terms of fame or celebrity, at least we can be normal.

But what happens to those people who don’t fit into any of those categories?

So there are lots of different parallels – dance is a beautiful parallel. So much of dance is about the youthful, beautiful, slender, able-bodied performers. Dance I think is a great form to talk about these issues. It’s a bit like a beauty contest, in fact we have a beauty contest or a physical contest, so underneath all the smiles and attractive bodies on front covers of magazines we want to know what else is going on; who has had the tucks, who is hiding their faults.

Some people can’t hide them as much as others, we have a disabled performer in the company, we have a very large, fat dancer, and on a very obvious visual level they look very different to us.

So what about those people on a psychological level who may be able to hide their physical imperfections, but [cannot hide] their psychological imperfections and why is it so important that we have this ‘Prozac face’? I used to refer to dance as being the Prozac of the art forms. So that is what the piece is about – it’s about those who aren’t perfect and who can’t pretend, those who don’t fit in because they don’t play the game.

There is also the notion throughout the piece about rules. We have a big LED board that has displays about certain rules. The whole set is made of what appears to be fake grass and the board reads like a sign in a park, or a traffic sign “keep off the grass”, also at times it tells the audience and the performers what to do. Do they obey those rules? They’re some of the ideas we’re playing with really, who sets the rules who follows the rules.

So it’s pretty epic in what it’s dealing with.

 
The rest of ‘The Cost of Living’ after the jump…
 

 
April Fool’s Day 1998, David Bowie hosted a party, at Jeff Koon’s studio in Manhattan, for the launch of William Boyd’s biography of the Abstract Expressionist painter, Nat Tate. As Boyd describes in Harper’s Bazaar, the book, Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928—1960 was, :

...full of photographs and illustrations, and it was written by [William Boyd]. Nat Tate was a short-lived member of the famous New York School, which flourished in the late 1940s and 1950s and included such luminaries as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning. Tate committed suicide in 1960 by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry (his body was never found) after having burned 99 percent of his life’s work during the last weekend of his life.

It was a coup for the author Boyd to have uncovered this forgotten and ignored artist. He gave interviews to the major dailies, the BBC and alike, and had extracts serialized in the Sunday Telegraph. All well and good, except, Nat Tate had never existed, and Boyd’s book was a hoax.

When I first heard about Nat Tate, from keen researchers suggesting a possible doc, it struck me as bogus. I thought this for two reasons: firstly, I’d just read a weighty tome on Jackson Pollock, which made no mention of this genius Tate. Secondly, and more importantly, it was the name Nat Tate, which sounded more like a Folk singer or a Blues percussionist than a painter. Nat Tate is overly familiarly, and moreover, if he had been an Abstract Expressionist, it would have been Nathaniel Tate, as de Kooning was William and not Bill. Smart ass, maybe, but you see, I’d been regularly writing hoax letters to newspapers under various names (Elsie Gutteridge (Mrs)., Edna Bakewell, Ian M. Knowles, The Reverend Desmond Prentice, Richard Friday and Bessie Graham) since I was a 12, and if these seemed hollow to the ear, then, for me, Nat Tate just didn’t ring true.

Okay, my quibbling dickheadery aside, Boyd had worked hard on making Tate “real”, as he told Jim Crace in the Guardian last year:

“I’d been toying with the idea of how things moved from fact to fiction,” says Boyd, “and I wanted to prove something fictive could prove factual. The plan had been to slowly reveal the fiction over a long period of time, but it didn’t really work like that.”

It took Boyd a couple of years to construct Tate’s persona. It wasn’t so much the framework – the reclusive genius who, conveniently, destroyed almost all of his own work and who killed himself at the age of 32 in 1960 – as the details that took the time. “Much of the illusion was created in the details, the footnotes and in getting the book published in Germany to make it look like an authentic art monograph,” he says.

“I went to a lot of trouble to get things right. I created the ‘surviving’ artworks that were featured in the illustrations and spent ages hunting through antique and junk shops for photos of unknown people, whom I could caption as being close friends and relatives.”

It was a good literary hoax, reminiscent of playwright and artist, John Byrne‘s faux naif painter, Patrick, who Byrne created after he failed to sell his own paintings to London galleries during the 1960s. Byrne claimed Patrick was his father, a self-taught artist, whose his fake paintings proved so successful with critics and cognescenti, they led to a major London show, and a memorable commission from The Beatles.
 

 
Boyd went further with his creation, as he managed to get David Bowie, Gore Vidal and Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, in on the act.

“None of them needed much persuasion,” Boyd laughs, “and they all went further that I would have dared ask them. Bowie gave a quote for the front jacket that Tate was one of his favourite artists and that he owned one of his few surviving works.

“Vidal allowed himself to be quoted in the book saying, ‘Tate was essentially dignified, though always drunk and with nothing to say,’ while Richardson told of how Tate had been having lunch with Picasso when he came to visit. It was these details that made it. People stopped wondering why they hadn’t heard of Tate when Vidal, Picasso and Richardson started appearing.”

The best was saved till last. At the launch party for the book at Jeff Koons’ studio in Manhattan, David Lister, the then arts editor of the Independent who was also in on the hoax, spent the evening asking guests what they remembered about Tate. A surprising number seemed to have attended one of his rare retrospectives in the late 60s and everyone lamented how sad they were he had died so young.

The hoax was so good, in fact, that Lister couldn’t stop himself from letting everyone know. “I was pissed off,” says Boyd, “because we had the London launch planned for the following week at a trendy restaurant called Mash, and we were going to repeat the experiment. I’d already done a large number of interviews with British radio, TV and print journalists – who shall remain nameless – and they’d all been taken in. But by the time their copy appeared they all swore blind they knew it was a hoax.

But Boyd’s point was made. And weirdly Tate continues to have a meta-life more real than the rest of us. Tate has now been the subject of three documentaries and has made a walk-on appearance in another fictional memoir, Boyd’s Any Human Heart. His art also lives on. “It’s strange,” says Boyd, “because whenever a friend gets married I always seem to find another Tate in the attic. I’m almost tempted to take one along to Christie’s and see what it sells for.” And most of us would love to buy one. Because some things are too good not to be true.

Boyd writes about the Nat Tate hoax in this month’s Harper’s Bazaar.
 

 
Derek Jarman’s collaboration with Psychic TV Pirate Tape: A Portrait of William Burroughs, from 1982. This experimental film shows William Burroughs in London, cut to a loop of his voice. For copyright reasons, this clip tends to disappear quickly, so watch it while you can.
 

 
Bonus clip, Derek Jarman and Psychic TV’s ‘Force the Hand of Chance’ plus ‘Catalan’, after the jump…
 

Shinboru (2009)
 
These are films, but not as we know them. Movie Barcode compresses every frame of a feature film into a single image. They may look like hair samples, but I like to think these images tell you something other about the movies they represent. Delicatessen looks strangely edible; Tron has a hint of lightning blue; Goodfellas is dark with thick crimson lines; while Speed Racer looks far more exciting than the actual film.

A full index of compressed films, can be found here; and if you fancy one of these prints on your wall, check here.
 

Goodfellas (1990)
 

Tron (1982)
 
With thanks to Jeremy Kelly
 
More Movie Barcodes after the jump…
 

 
The composer Kurt Weill was born today March 2 1900. Best known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht on The Threepenny Opera,Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Der Jasager and The 7 Deadly Sins, Weill was a committed socialist, who believed music must serve a socially useful purpose. However, it was politics that eventually split the brilliant partnership of Brecht and Weill, as the musician felt the playwright was pushing too far to the left without question, or as Weill joked, he felt unable to set the Communist Party Manifesto to music.

Weill was married to the brilliant actress and singer, Lotte Lenya, who starred in The Threepenny Opera and later played the SMERSH assassin, Rosa Klebb in the Bond movie, From Russia With Love. With the rise of Hitler, the couple quit Germany and moved to America, where they worked in Hollywood (as did Brecht).

Though Weill’s music is best associated with cabaret and political theater of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s (influencing John Kander and Fred Ebb’s musical Cabaret), he also wrote two symphonies, several cantatas, a great number of songs, set the poetry of Rilke and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myslef to music, and worked with Ira Gershwin on the Hollywood musical Where Do We Go From Here?. Weill died of a heart attack in 1950.

To celebrate Weill’s birthday, here is the brilliant Lenya from 1962, in fine form, singing a selection of her husband’s best known songs “Mack the Knife”, “Pirate Jenny”, “Sarabaya Johnny” and “Alabama Song”. This clip has sub-titles, but that’s unimportant, when compared to the quality of her voice and performance. The production was filmed by Ken Russell for the BBC’s arts series Monitor, and the segment was introduced by legendary arts editor, Huw Weldon.
 

 
Previously on DM

 
A taste of things to come - two of David Lynch’s early films.

The Grandmother (1970):

The plot of the Grandmother centers around a boy who, looking for an escape from his abusive parents, grows a grandmother to comfort him. “There’s something about a grandmother…It came from this particular character’s need - a need that that prototype can provide. Grandmothers get playful. And they relax a little, and they have unconditional love. And that’s what this kid, you know, conjured up.”

The film has little dialog and combines animation with film, in its exploration of the “myths of birth, sexuality and death.”
 
The Alphabet (1968):

[David] Lynch’s wife, Peggy, told him of a dream her niece had during which she was reciting the alphabet in her sleep, then woke up and starting bouncing around repeating it. Lynch took this idea and ran with it. First he painted the walls of his upstairs bedroom black. Lynch painted Peggy’s face white to give her an un-real contrast to the black room, and had her bounce around the room in different positions as he filmed. This footage was edited together with an animated sequence where the letters of the alphabet slowly appear and a capital A gives birth to several smaller a’s which form a human figure.

 
The rest of ‘The Grandmother’ plus Lynch’s ‘The Alphabet’, after the jump…
 

 
The DM postbag always brings an assortment of delights, and this week was no different, as Anne Pigalle’s latest collection of songs L’Amerotica landed on my desk.

It was back in 1985 that Miss Pigalle’s exquisite voice first lit up the world with her brilliant album Everything Could Be So Perfect. It was a stunning debut, and revealed a gifted singer with a voice as richly emotive as Piaf and as strong as Lotte Lenya.

Raised in Paris, Anne’s earliest musical memory was the excitement caused by theme to Third Man TV series, which would make her rush from the kitchen to the sitting room. Pigalle started singing in the school choir, and was praised for her “golden voice.” Though father played double-bass, Anne had no musical training, and it would be the influence of Punk that set off her career. Punk showed the young singer everything is possible, as she later said:

“Growing up at the punk time gave me a great sense of integrity, which really saved me in the end. I’m not saying I never made any mistakes, but I always had a base to go back to. My music is not punk but it has a punk ethic behind it .”

Punk led the fifteen-year-old singer to pick up a guitar and start performing. In the 1980s, Anne moved to London, where her incredible voice soon enchanted audiences and critics alike, and led to her collaborations with Adrian Sherwood, Michael Nyman and Trevor Horn, who produced her album Everything Could Be So Perfect.

Pigalle was signed to Zang Tumb Tuum Records, the label founded by journalist Paul Morley, producer Trevor Horn and his wife Jill Sinclair. ZTT were behind such acts as Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Propaganda and Art of Noise, but while the label prospered, the artists didn’t always fare so well, as Anne explained in 2005:

“ZTT wanted to do a second album with me. There was talk of me working with Peter Hammill (a Brian Eno associate). They wanted Anton Corbijn to do the photography etc. etc. I felt dissatisfied. My contract was a bad one. I didn’t feel controlled by ZTT, I just felt things were not advancing and the contract was too bad to allow me to do what i wanted… Other ZTT acts such as Instinct didn’t even get to have their albums released. I found seeing the recent Trevor Horn tribute concert rather depressing. After 1988 I left ZTT and moved to America. I had such an interesting time. I got to perform with Leonard Cohen’s backing band. Very much more relaxed. America gave me so much more confidence in my own ability as a performer. My ex-writing partner at ZTT, Nick Plytas, went on to play with Nick Cave.”

In the 1990s, Anne moved to Los Angeles where she met Donald Cammell, director of Performance, with whom she worked on an idea for a film. Sadly, Cammell, who suffered from depression, committed suicide before this could come to fruition. Pigalle then appeared in Zalman King’s The Red Shoe Diaries, (“always decent”), and performed for the homeless, in downtown LA. She also performed in a theatre production about poet Charles Bukowski where she played Death.

Since then the multi-talented singer has established herself as a successful poet, artist, model and photographer. Two years ago, she exhibited a selection of her Amerotica Polaroids at the Michael Hoppen Gallery, and has since merged image and song together into a series of critically acclaimed multi-media performances across London, that mix cabaret with personal imagery.

Now the release of L’Amerotica confirms Anne Pigalle as one of our best and most important talents. The album, co-produced by Pigalle with Tommaso Del Signore, is a breath-taking mix of electronic beats and ballads, with such highs as “With My Blonde”, “The Pleasure Ground” (described by Chris Roberts, in Uncut Magazine as “chilly as Iggy’s ‘Fall in Love With Me’”), as well as the excellent “Mary Mother of God”, “Sesso” and the beautiful “Je te veus toi” and “Espore Spirale”. Throughout Anne’s vocals are nothing other than superb.

It’s been a long time coming, but the quality of L’Amerotica makes it all worth the wait. Here’s to more soon form the wonderful Miss Pigalle.

L’Amerotica is available on i-tunes and CD, details here.

If you’re in London, Anne Pigalle plays Le Montmartre Bistro, 144 Essex Rd, N1, on the 24th February.
 

 
Bonus clip, Anne Pigalle sings ‘He! Stranger’, directed by Bernard Rose, after the jump…
 

 
I started reading Christopher Isherwood in my late teens when I became a “paying guest” to an elderly spinster who lived in an old tenement in the West End of Glasgow. She lived in a top floor apartment, where I rented the large front room with a view onto the oval-shaped park below. My landlady was in her late seventies, bird-like, translucent skin, who whistled music hall songs and took snuff in large pinches, sniffed from the back of her hand. She had inherited the apartment from her sister, and the interior had remained unchanged since the 1930s. The hallway with its bell-chimes for Maid, Bedroom 1, Bedroom 2, Parlor, and Dining Room, all still worked. In the kitchen was a range, and a small scullery with its fold-down bed, where a servant would have slept. Coal fires were in all of the rooms except mine. Of course, there was the occasional modern appliance, a TV, a one-bar electric fire, and an electric cooker, which was still in its plastic wrapping, and was “not to be used under any circumstances.” Food was cooked over something that looked like a bunsen burner (what my landlady called “a blackout cooker”), and chilled products were kept in a larder. As for hot water, well that was never available—the boiler was kept under lock and key, and toilet paper was sellotaped to ensure I bought my own. The front door was locked at eight o’clock and the storm doors bolted at nine. After ten, she never answered the door.

At the time, I was reading Goodbye to Berlin which as you can imagine very much suited my environment. Like Isherwood’s character, Herr Issyvoo, I was surrounded by “the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.” A mantel-clock, a heavy glass ashtray, a green baize card table, orphaned figurines of a shepherd boy and shepherd girl tending to their flocks, a large wooden bed (one leg broken) made in the 1920s. But perhaps most significantly was the fact my landlady had worked in Berlin as a furrier for a department store during the 1930s and she often told me tales of her time in Germany. “Oh those Hitler Youth,” she once said, “Such smart uniforms, but the terrible things they did.”

At times it all made me feel as if I was living in Ishwerwood’s world. In the evenings I would hear the whistles out in the park below. But unlike Herr Issyvoo, these were not young men calling up to their girlfriends but neighbors calling to their dogs.

The son of landed gentry, Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was born in 1904 at the ancestral seat of his family, Wybersley Hall, High Lane, England. His father was an army officer, who was killed during the First World War. His mother Kathleen had a fractious relationship with her son, and she later featured in his stories.

At school he met and became life-long friends with W. H. Auden and Edward Upward. He attended Cambridge University but found he had no interest in his studies and was sent down for writing a facetious answer to an exam question. It was while at university he became part of the famous literary triumvirate with Auden and Stephen Spender, who were hailed by the Left as “intellectual heroes.”

Instead of studying, Isherwood wrote an anarchist fantasy with Upward, centered around the fictional Mortmere:

...a village inhabited by surreal characters modelled on their Cambridge friends and acquaintances. The rector, Casmir Welken, resembles a ‘diseased goat’ and breeds angels in the church belfry; his sidekick Ronald Gunball is a dipsomaniac and an unashamed vulgarian; Sergeant Claptree, assisted by Ensign Battersea, keeps the Skull and Trumpet Inn; the mannish Miss Belmare, domineering and well starched, is sister to the squire, and Gustave Shreeve is headmaster of Frisbald College for boys.

Though none of the stories were published at the time (and Upward destroyed most of them later on), it was the start of Isherwood’s writing career, and led on to his first novel All the Conspirators in 1928.

Stifled by England, Isherwood followed in his friend Auden’s footsteps and moved to Berlin. It proved an historic re-location, one that inspired the first of Isherwood’s important novels Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin. Literature aside, Isherwood’s main reason for going to Berlin was “boys” - blonde, working-class youth.

Isherwood supported himself in Berlin by working as an English tutor, and he used this experience to form the basis for his Berlin stories, and the creation of his eponymous central character. “I am a camera,” Isherwood famously wrote at the start of Goodbye to Berlin, for he saw Herr Issyvoo as “unobtrusive, sexless,” someone who could only observe, and examine the lives of those around him. When later asked why he had not been more explicit about his character’s homosexuality, Isherwood said that if he had come out, then it would have been “a production,” something that would have “upset the apple cart” for the other characters. The poet Stephen Spender claimed Isherwood once claimed he couldn’t imagine how people behaved when he was not in the room.

During all this, Isherwood continued to write novels, most notably Prater Violet, based on his first dealings with film-making and the rather brilliant, but under appreciated, Down There on a Visit. On a more personal note, in 1953, he met Don Bachardy, the man who became his life-long partner.

In the sixties, Isherwood achieved considerable success with his “devastating, unnerving, brilliant book” about middle-age, A Single Man. The novel’s central character George, is like Isherwood, and describes a day in his life, when he no longer fears annihilation but survival, and all the debilitating side affects old age will bring. Isherwood said the book was about:

“...middle age, because what I wanted to show was the incredible range of behavior in middle age, part of the time one is quite tending towards senility, and other times one is rash that is way a way boyish, and apt to indulge in lots of embarrassing behavior, at the drop of hat.”

In the 1970s, Isherwood returned to the Berlin of his youth with his autobiographical memoir Christopher and His Kind, it was a crowning achievement to a literary career that had already delivered at least three or four of the twentieth century’s best novels.

Gore Vidal has said Isherwood is “the best prose writer in English,” which is perhaps true as Isherwood’s writing is subtle, clever and is always fresh, even after repeated readings.

This documentary A Single Man: Christopher Isherwood 1904-1986 was made not long after his death and composed from a selection of interviews from British TV from the 1950s-1970s.

For fans of Isherwood, the BBC has just completed a drama Christopher and his Kind, adapted from Isherwood’s book, starring Matt (Doctor Who) Smith in the title role, which will be broadcast later this year. Further information can be found here. 
    The rest of ‘A Single Man: Christopher Isherwood 1904-1986’, after the jump…  

 
Director Nendie Pinto-Duschinsky is currently finishing a documentary on mime and dance legend Lindsay Kemp, which is due for release this summer. Called Lindsay Kemp’s Last Dance, the film has had exclusive access to Kemp’s personal archive and offers unique and highly personal insight into the life and art of the reclusive genius.

Lindsay Kemp, who claims he began life in his mother’s lipstick and shoes, was born in South Shields, England in 1938, and has been a major figure in dance, mime and theatre for over forty years, during which time he starred, choreographed and produced some of the greatest dance productions ever seen. He famously taught David Bowie mime, and collaborated with Kate Bush. As actor he has appeared in Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane and Jubilee; and in Ken Russell’s The Devils and Savage Messiah, he also gave a memorable performance performance in the original version of The Wicker Man. Now Pinto-Duschinsky has filmed Kemp on a tour in Italy, Japan and the UK.

The world’s most famous mime, believing himself to be Queen Elizabeth I travels to Japan to face his own mortality.

What happens when genius is most active in advanced years?

Does an artist’s greatest work hover achingly close to the restraints of their own body?

A unique and captivating feature-length documentary, Lindsay Kemp’s Last Dance is the powerful story of the world’s greatest theatre performer facing his own mortality at 70. The film grew from a childhood meeting between the director of the film and Lindsay Kemp. This turn of fate brought about a friendship that was to take the director on a three year journey to Japan, Italy and the UK to film Lindsay Kemp’s Last Dance.

In contrast to this work and its core meanings, the director has been given access to Lindsay’s personal archive which contains very rare footage spanning his lifetime from his relationship with David Bowie to his work with Kate Bush. His seminal work Flowers, of which no other copy exists, is contained in this archive.

Deeply comical, provocative and emotional, Lindsay’s world onstage and offstage are one seamless act. With his cast of international performers, some of whom are ex-lovers, the score of Carlos Miranda is enhanced by a script in six different languages. Woven into the film are interviews with artists with whom Lindsay has worked. Lindsay comes across as a perfectionist and a seismic personality.

 
Previously on DM

Amazing Home Movie Footage of The Ballet Russes in Australia

 
With thanks to Steven Severin
 

 
Happy Birthday William Burroughs, born today in 1914, one of the most “culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century.”

Here’s Burroughs in the “informal documentary” The Commissioner of Sewers from 1991, where he discusses his writing, his life, his thoughts on art, literature, and the use of language as a weapon, his world view, as well as space and time travel, mummification, and politics.
 

 
You wouldn’t mess with Klaus Kinski. He had a look that said it all - a cross between Iggy Pop and a drug-addled psycho. His mental health had been an issue. In the 1950s, Kinski spent three days in a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. In 1955, having failed to find any work as an actor, he attempted suicide - twice.

By the late 1950s, he had slowly established himself as an actor in Vienna, but the anger, the passions, that fueled his performances meant he was always labeled difficult. To overcome this, Kinski started performing one-man shows, reciting Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Francois Villon.

In the sixties he found some security as a bit player in Spaghetti Westerns such as For a Few Dollars More, but Kinski had an ambitious ego that inspired him to greater, more confrontational things.

In 1971, Kinski hired the Deutschlandhalle to perform his own 30-page interpretation of Jesus Christ. It was no ordinary show, and the audience was a mix of radical students, religious followers and those intrigued to see the “mad man Kinski”. Even then, before his work with Werner Herzog, the public thought of Kinski as either mad man or genius.

Moreover, there was some confusion amongst the audience, who seemed to think Kinski was an evangelist, rather than an actor interpreting a role. This led to constant heckling from the spectators - both the happy-clappy Christians, who thought he was blaspheming; and those on the Left, who though he was soft-soaping Christianity. Kinski was doing neither. His Christ was part Kinski, part Anarchist-Revolutionary, and he repsonded fulsomely to the abuse, as Twitch Film notes:

For example, after someone stated that shouting down people who disagreed with him was unlike Christ, Kinski responded with a different take on how Christ might respond: “No, he didn’t say ‘shut your mouths’, he took a whip and beat them. That’s what he did, you stupid sow!”

In another scene, he brow beats the audience by saying “can’t you see that when someone lectures thirty typewritten pages of text in this way, that you must shut your mouths? If you can’t see that, please let someone bang it into your brain with a hammer!” The evening’s festivities also turned physical as an audience member is shown getting bounced from the stage by a bodyguard. Someone responds that “Kinski just let his bodyguard push a peaceful guy, who only wanted to have a discussion, down the stairs! That is a fascist statement, Kinski is a fascist, a psychopath!”

Kinski continued undaunted:

“I’m not the official Church-Christ, who is accepted by policemen, bankers, judges, executioneers, officers, chruch-heads, politicians and other representatives of the powers that be. - I’m not your super-star!”

The evening was filmed by Peter Geyer, who later assembled the footage together into an incredible documentary film Jesus Christus Erlöser (Jesus Christ Saviour) in 2008. It is a film well worth seeing for Kinski’s powerful, passionate and unforgettable performance, which gives an unflinching insight into the man, the ego and the mad genius that was Klaus Kinski.
 

 
Bonus clip in color, after the jump…
 
Previously on DM

 
With thanks to Little Stone
 

 
In 1993, Scottish artist Douglas Gordon exhibited his 24 Hour Psycho, a slowed-down screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film that lasted twenty-four hours. The project contained “many of the important themes in Gordon’s work: recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, authorship and authenticity, darkness and light.”

In 2005, talented artist Chris Bors created his own version of the film and art work, but this time as 24 Second Psycho.

24 Second Psycho appropriates the entire Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho and condenses it into twenty-four seconds. Tweaking the concept of artist Douglas Gordons 24 Hour Psycho, where Hitchcocks masterpiece was slowed-down to a crawl, here the process is reversed to accommodate society’s increasingly short attention span. Seeing Hitchcocks most lasting contribution to cinema flash before your eyes in a matter of seconds represents our new information age where culture is packaged for easy consumption at a breakneck pace.

Bors work has been exhibited at PS1 MoMA, White Columns, Sixtyseven and Ten in One Gallery in New York, Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg, and the Videoex Festival in Zurich, Switzerland.

Update:

Also over on You Tube, Joe Frese has created a variety of mini masterpieces, including his own Sixty Second Psycho.
 

 
Bonus clip Joe Frese’s ‘Sixty Second Psycho’, after the jump…
 
With thanks to Henri Podin
 

 
Last year, Dangerous MInd writer, Bradley Novicoff posted a link to this excellent BBC documentary on William S. Burroughs. At the time it wasn’t possible to embed Arena: Burroughs onto our site, but now it is.

Burroughs was originally made in 1983 by Howard Brookner and Alan Yentob, as part of the BBC’s art strand Arena, and repeated after Burrough’s death in 1997. It is an exceptional documentary, one that gives an intimate and revealing portrait of Burroughs, as he revisits his childhood home; discusses his up-bringing with his brother, Mortimer; his friendship with Jack Kerouac, Allen Gisnberg, and Brion Gysin; and has a reunion with artist Francis Bacon, who Burroughs knew in Tangier. Other contributors include Terry Southern, Patti Smith, and James Grauerholz.

 
The ending to B. S. Johnson’s film Fat Man on a Beach proved rather prophetic, as the author walked fully clothed into the sea, until he disappeared. It was the last sequence filmed for his documentary, and recalls the opening scene to the BBC comedy The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, and, more significantly, Stevie Smith’s poem “Not Waving but Drowning”. Three weeks after filming this scene, in 1973, B. S. Johnson killed himself.

I’ve liked Johnson since I first read him as a teenager, and he is one of the many authors whose books I still return to all these years later. Although I like his work there is something about Johnson that reminds me of the well-kent story of Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman during the making of Marathon Man, where each actor approached their role through their own discipline. Olivier had learnt his technique from treading the boards and performing Shakespeare alongside John Gielgud; Hoffman was a different breed, his muse was Method Acting, where motivation is key. When Hoffman’s character was supposed to have been without sleep, Hoffman decided to stay up all night in order to perform the scene. When Olivier heard the length to which Hoffman had gone to interpret his role, the aging Lord, said, “Have you tried acting, dear boy?”

There was something of the Hoffman in Johnson, or at least, in the shared need to have the experience before creating from it. What Johnson did not do was write fiction - or so he claimed. He saw stories as lies, citing the term “telling stories” as a childish euphemism for telling lies. Johnson did not believe in telling lies, he believed in telling the truth. And it was this that would ultimately destroy him. For once one has abandoned imagination, there is no possibility of escape, or creative freedom.

In 1965, Johnson wrote a play called You’re Human Like the Rest of Them - a grim, unrelenting drama, later made into an award-winning short film in 1967. In it, the central character Haakon realizes his own mortality and the inevitability of death.

We rot and there’s nothing that can stop it / Can’t you feel the shaking horror of that? / You just can’t ignore these things, you just can’t!

For Haakon, and so for Johnson, from “the moment of birth we decay and die.” An obvious proposition, as Jonathan Coe, pointed out in his excellent biography on Johnson Like a Fiery Elephant, one which any audience would have understood before watching. Not so for Johnson the realist - death is the final answer to life’s question, and once realized nothing else is of significance. You can see where this is heading, and how Johnson started to unravel. Though he did go on to write three of his greatest novels after this: Trawl, about life on a fishing vessel; The Unfortunates the episodic tale of a friend’s death from cancer; and the brutally comic Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, in which the titular hero becomes a mass murderer and succumbs to a sudden death form cancer; you can see the pattern, all three were shadowed with death. However, each is so brilliantly and engagingly written their dark heart is often overlooked.

There is a key moment in Fat Man on a Beach, when Johnson described a motorcycle accident in which the cyclist was diced by a barbed-wire fence, like “a cheese-cutter through cheese.” He explained the story as a “metaphor for the way the human condition seems to treat humankind,” then digressed and said, life is:

“...really all chaos…I cannot prove it as chaos any more than anyone else can prove there is a pattern, or there is some sort of deity, but even if it is all chaos, then let’s celebrate chaos. Let’s celebrate the accidental. Does that make us any the worse off? Are we any the worse off? There is still love; there is still humor.”

This in essence is what is so marvelous about Johnson and Fat Man on a Beach, as Jonathan Coe later wrote as an introduction to the film:

One evening late in 1974, the TV listings announced that a documentary about Porth Ceiriad was to be broadcast. It was being shown past my bedtime (I was 13), but was clearly not to be missed. After News at Ten, we settled down to watch en famille.

Instead of a tourist’s-eye view of local beauty spots, what we saw that evening was baffling. A corpulent yet athletic-looking man, bearing some resemblance to an overweight Max Bygraves, ran up and down the beach for 40 minutes gesticulating, expostulating, reciting strange poetry and chattering away about the randomness of human life, his quasi-mystical feelings about the area and, most passionately, the dishonesty of most modern fiction and film-making. With disarming bluntness, the programme was called Fat Man on a Beach. We could not make head or tail of it.

And yet memories of this film, so unlike anything seen on television before or since, stayed with me, and 10 years later, when I was a post-graduate student, I stumbled upon a reissued paperback novel by someone called B. S. Johnson and realised that this was the same person. Amazingly, it came with a puff from Samuel Beckett, someone not known as a regular provider of jacket quotations. Encouraged by this, I bought the novel, which was called Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, devoured it in a matter of hours (it’s less than 30,000 words long) and realised that I had found a new hero.

When I thought about the film that we had watched in a daze of collective bewilderment all those years before, I remembered the sense of fierce engagement, combined with a spirit of childish fun, that had characterised BS Johnson’s virtuoso monologue to camera. I remembered his strange, unwieldy grace - the sort of fleet-footed grace you find unexpectedly in a bulky comedian such as John Goodman or Oliver Hardy. And I remembered the wounded eyes that stared at you almost aggressively, as if in silent accusation of some nameless hurt. It was impossible not to recognise the pain behind those eyes. Even so, I had not realised at the time that I had been looking at a dead man.

The writer David Quantick has uploaded this and some other excellent films by Johnson onto You Tube, which I hope will provide a stimulus to reading his exceptional books.
 

 
Previously on DM

 
More form ‘Fat on a Beach’ after the jump…
 

 
They were two men best known by their surnames, two giants of their disciplines, but when Warhol met Zappa in 1983, on the Pop Artist’s TV show, it was less a meeting of great minds than a few questions from fan Richard Berlin, who did the interviewing for Warhol. Zappa briefly talked about fans, music and fun, and, well, gee, that’s about it. I was left wanting to know what was said off camera. Answers on a postcard, please.
 

 
With thanks to Andrea Nussinow