Sing Your Song (dir. Susanne Rostock)

“One person can make a difference, and every person should try” – this statement by John F. Kennedy, whose assassination in 1963 is featured in this documentary, is a good example of the thrust of Belafonte’s decades of activism. Susanne Rostock’s detailed, rousing biographical documentary, which looks at the art and activism of the “King of Calypso” Harry Belafonte, is as much about a changing America as it is about its charismatic and influential protagonist.

Belafonte’s life story is vast and epic, and the scope of this documentary follows suit, swooping over influential periods of American history in some detail without falling into the trap of getting lost in material. Born into extreme poverty in Harlem in 1927, Belafonte went on to live in Jamaica and later in New York, where as a young man he served in the Navy. After receiving two free tickets from work to a show by the American Negro Theater, Belafonte fell in love with acting and crucially, met one of many people who would inspire him along his journey, the award-winning actor and film director Sidney Poitier. Belafonte’s life takes in three marriages, a hugely successful career in acting and music often dominated by taboo-breaking performances, consciousness-raising protests and marches in an increasingly politicised America, the death of friend and fellow activist Martin Luther King, the assassination of J. F. Kennedy, the end of apartheid, and numerous other key historical events, which Belafonte found himself firmly in the middle of.

The pace of the film is fast and exciting, and manages to cover much ground with little obvious strain. The range of footage is absolutely extraordinary. We have news footage from the period, incredible musical performances, photographs from his acting days, and scenes from Belafonte’s film career, from his more famous roles in Carmen Jones (1954) to more obscure ones, such as science-fiction flick The World, the Flesh and The Devil (1959). Talking heads range from Belafonte himself, who narrates a great deal of the film, and his family of children, to his impressive second wife Julie Robinson, a dancer and civil rights activist who was the girlfriend of Belafonte’s friend Marlon Brando, until Brando asked him to take her out on a date as a favour to him; they quickly fell in love and got married. We also hear from Desmond Tutu, and witness exchanges between Belafonte and Nelson Mandela.

Of particular interest are the clips of film and television footage which were deemed ‘problematic’ at the time. A lot of Belafonte’s performances, in particular his series of award-winning variety shows, involved racially mixed dancers and actors, and often incorporated African music and dance in a way that hadn’t been seen before on American television. Though some of these clips can be accessed in sadly grainy quality on Youtube, “Sing Your Song” provides the audience with the chance to observe these key cultural and historical moments on the big screen. One of these is a clip from the controversial film Island in the Sun (1957), which showed the romance between black politico David Boyeur (Belafonte) and an upper class white woman called Mavis Norman (Joan Fontaine). One of the most moving pieces of archive for me, was a television moment in 1968, when Belafonte and Petula Clark performed the anti-war song “On the Path of Glory” on her show; during the performance she innocently places her hand on his arm which she holds there throughout. This tender moment was deemed contentious due to “interracial touching”. “Sing Your Song” brings home the shocking prejudice of a world but 50 odd years from where we stand today.

You’d be hard-pressed to produce a bad film when the material is this interesting. However, Rostock has put together a seamless and exciting film, which though it looks at the past, also explores the future of black communities in the US through Belafonte’s outreach work. If I have one criticism, it’s that we don’t get to see more of his later work with young black and Latino communities. Several scenes of Belafonte in his 80’s, showing little to no signs of frailty or weakness, singing gospel with prison inmates are upsettingly short-lived. This is a fabulous documentary about a man and the times that were, and hopefully still are, a-changin’.

Nuclear Film Festival

My review of the Tricycle Theatre’s Nuclear Film Festival for CineVue can be read here. I wrote mainly about BBC nuclear tv series from the ’80′s ‘Threads’, which has to be seen to be believed. Seriously heavy stuff!

Oz magazine

Oz magazine was the hippies handbook on sex, drugs and psychedelia, as well as the forefront of the ’60′s underground movement. It featured articles by Germaine Greere, incredible psychedelic illustrations and graphic design by Australian pop artist Martin Sharp, cartoons by Robert Crumb and a host of weird and wonderful, and frequently obscene and anti-establishment writings from a host of radicals, artists and hustlers of the time. Oz, and its editor Richard Neville (below) are the subject of my new favourite book Hippie Hippie Shake – the book is a must-read for anyone interested in journalism, radicalism or the 60′s.

While many have accused Richard Neville and Germaine Greere (as well as other fellow writers of their time), of being stuck in nostalgia for the ’60′s, Neville actually provides an insight into radicalism and journalism in the 21st century, suggesting (as I feel), that new media forms, like blogging, are providing an outlet for people young and old to put across their views. In the appendix to Hippy Hippy Shake, he writes:

“While baby-boomers have been laying down their weary tunes and fantisising about communal psychedelic retirement yurts, though probably destined for nursing homes reeking of urine, several new generations have taken the stage. It is easy for us ancients to pour scorn on irritating youngsters with six packs, fussed-over hair and an encyclopaedic knowledge of pop lyrics, giving the world a makeover one step at a time with their fabulous food, reality tv, cheap travel and web-twitter [...] Technology fosters intimate networked friendships, innovation and knowledge, all of which may come in very handy when the chips are down. Another piece off picture is the rumbling desire to punch a whole in the matrix.

Numerous activist groups are springing up, recruiting members and gaining momentum. Blogs boom as the mainstream media bleeds. The conglomeration of formerly diversified outlets into half a dozen global behemoths has drained newspapers of independence and irreverence. Not surprising, as their boards are often stacked with directors of brands that are bad for you and the manufacturers of weapons”.

The book provides great background on the period, includes some fabulous illustrations and photos of Neville and co. The book is also going to be turned into a movie of the same name (which was meant to have come out some time ago, I believe there have been problems in post-production); I don’t really have high hopes for it, given the below parr Sienna Miller is playing Louise (Neville’s partner, below).

“We are band-aids”: Groupies in film

“We are not groupies” – so says Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) in Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical film Almost Famous (2000) about a young Rolling Stones journalist touring with the band Stillwater. Penny is emphatic about the fact that groupies are more than just star-shaggers: “We are here because of the music, we inspire the music. We are Band Aids”. Star-shagger, band-aid, or muse – the groupie has undoubtedly played a major role in the evolution of bands past and present, as well as in the counterculture films of the period.

The rose-tinted nostalgia of Almost Famous couldn’t be further away from the gritty groupie experience of British ‘sexploitation’ films of the late 60′s, such as Lindsay Shonteff’s Permissive. On location shooting in grizzly hotel bars and disused rubbish dumbs bring alive the bitch-eat-bitch world of the groupie. Suzy (Maggie Stride) is a girl from the country who infiltrates the scene, shagging around with up-and-coming bands, including her best friend’s boyfriend, Lee (Allan Gorrie). Lee is the lead singer of the real 60′s folk band Forever More, and even though he comes across in the film as little more than a hairy buffoon, his status is god-like and untouchable. Permissive avoids the romance of Almost Famous, in favour of the grim sleaziness of a life on the road. Extra-diegetic flash cuts are interspersed throughout the film, breaking up moments of violence or sexual gratification with proleptic visions of Fiona’s suicide and Pogo’s death. Groupie Girl (1970) is an equally bleak vision of the life of a band-aid. Produced by Stanley Long and directed by Derek Ford, the film was based upon the real-life sexual exploits of groupie Suzanne Mercer. As in Permissive, the men are misogynistic and sleazy, and the women merely sex objects, there to screw, clean and do little else.

The presence of the groupie in film shows one of the ways in which film directors sought to exploit the sexual liberation of the counterculture, in order to show shocking material to an audience desperate for titillation. This material could include lesbianism (such as the soft-core breast-baring, semi-conscious lesbian scene in Permissive), promiscuity, and of course, drugs. There are similarities between groupie films and other ‘permissive dramas’ about late 60′s counterculture, such as Primitive London (1965), London in the Raw (1964) and Extremes (1971). Interest in the high-profile groupies of the moment was a feature of the rock press of the late 60′s. The ‘supergroupie’ included such names as Lori Maddox (who apparently lost her virginity to David Bowie aged 13), the GTO’s, Sable Starr, Pamela Des Barres, and Cynthia Plaster Caster. Cynthia Plaster Caster was particularly notorious for taking plaster moulds of rock stars’s penises, from Frank Zappa to her first, and arguably the biggest cock in rock, Jimi Hendrix. Cynthia was a member of the groupie group The Plaster Casters, who apparently introduced themselves to Jimi and the Experience by saying “We are The Plaster Casters of Chicago and we want to plaster cast your Hampton Wick!”. Cynthia’s exploits are immortalised in the rockumentary (or is that cockumentary) Plaster Caster (2001). Cynthia started plaster casting in college, when her art teacher assigned the class the assignment to “plaster cast something solid that could retain its shape”. Her idea was to use the assignment as a way of enticing rock stars to have sex with her so she could finally lose her virginity.

Relatively speaking, groupies have declined, and this isn’t just a result of the waning sexual revolution, and the fear of AIDS. The sort of girl that was a groupie is probably now a WAG. With footballers having replaced rockstars as society’s gods, you’re more likely to see the 21st century groupie shagging a member of the Chelsea football team than hanging out backstage.


Sable Starr

MUTATE BRITAIN mural.

This mural was part of the Mutate Britain exhibition in Ladbroke Grove, link here. The exhibition was part of the Portobello Road winter festival, and was an outdoor series of rooms with artwork absolutely everywhere. An artist that really seems to be making waves is Dan Hillier, I keep seeing his stuff in Brick Lane, and he had several artworks at Mutate. His website www.danhillier.com gives you a nice example of his psychodelic Victoriana-seaworld mutations: Victorian men with octopuses for hands coming onto women with no feet; tophats with hands coming out of them. It reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, if Alice in Wonderland were under the sea and in a gentleman’s drawing-room in the 1800′s.

Films, Films, Films

In order to understand today’s world, we need cinema; literally. It’s only in cinema that we get that crucial dimension which we are not yet ready to confront in our reality. If you are looking for what is, in reality, more real than reality itself, look into cinematic fiction.’
-Slavoj Zizek

As it’s the holidays, I’ve been catching up on my film-watching. We’ve been watching some great stuff: Astra Taylor’s film Zizek, Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom, Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny, John Curran’s beautiful film The Painted Veil, Steve McQueen’s Hunger, Marry Haddon’s I Shot Andy Warhol and The Notorious Betty Page , Jean-Luc Godard’s SERIOUSLY WANKY Sympathy For The Devil, John Maybury’s film about Dylan Thomas and his two loves, The Edge of Love, Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep and the new Star Trek film (alright, I guess…). My current favourite was Mary Harron’s film I Shot Andy Warhol about the radical feminist Valerie Solanis, who wrote the cult feminist manifesto SCUM (Society For Cutting Up Men!) and eventually shot, though not fatally, Andy Warhol, after he rejected her play Up Your Ass! I’ll be writing a review of this at some point.

John Maybury’s The Edge of Love was beautiful. It both made me want to go to Wales, and to permanently wear flowery tea-dresses and lovely grey woolly socks, and get drunk in pubs all day.

And here are several old film reviews I wrote last term for The Cherwell.
1. My review of Last Chance Harvey .
2. A silly column on Vampire films.
3. An old review of Valkyrie.

Review of Looking For Eric + interview with Eric Cantona, Steve Evets and Ken Loach

Ken Loach –celebrated film director known for his left-wing politics and socialist realist films – is not generally described as an all-round crowd-pleaser. But with his latest film, Looking For Eric, he’s produced a masterpiece, and I don’t use that word often. It tells the story of a depressed , disfunctional postman with a problematic family that threatens to drag him into even deeper waters. An epiphanic apparition (probably the result of some heavy-duty dope smoking) in the form of 90’s cult French footballer Eric Cantona proves to be the emotional lift to get his life back on track. A heady mix of high comedy, gritty realism, and the nonlinear philosophy of Eric Cantona, this film is a kooky, clever and moving piece of cinema.

For all the high comedy, and football hallucinations, this is still a Ken Loach film, and thus the problems of gun crime, drug-taking and violence in working-class Manchester are explored, albeit in a way consistent with the axioms of class war and at least some version of Marxist ideology. “The issue of guns is a huge one,” Loach says. “We’ve made a society which is built on aggression, greed and acquisitiveness. We’ve destroyed the pattern of people becoming adults and we’re now surprised when kids with no visible future want all the things that we’re told we need and, of course, resort to violence and guns.”The main theme running through the film –the importance of solidarity in a working-class community- is carefully explored by Loach. “Individual glory”, Loach tells us, “is not as important as working with a team”, and this is clearly the undercurrent of the film. “Trust your teammates always” is a line of Cantona’s during the film, which eventually builds up to the collective revenge on the psychopathic drug dealer. Loach describes Looking For Eric as an Anti-Thatcherite film about “what we can do collectively”. Whether you find this attitude admirable or tiresome, it is hard to deny Loach’s technical artistry. The direction still retains all of the Loach techniques –working without scripts, and shooting in sequence. Evets praises this technique because “you as a person are going on the same journey as the character”. The complex story-line between little Eric and Lily (phenomenally played by Stephanie Bishop), with its flashbacks to the past and its realistic scenes in a rockabilly club, is moving to the core.

Eric Cantona –the cult French football legend and philosopher of such obscure lines as “When the seagulls follow a trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea. Thank you very much”, is a man who draws out intense devotion from many football-lovers. His presence in the film is nothing short of immense; it as if a god has appeared among humanity. And for all its undercurrent of socialist politics, and the importance of working-class solidarity, this is essentially a film about the Ultimate (Middle-Aged) Male Fantasy – getting stoned and having a beer with Eric Cantona. One of the very best concepts of the film has to be just that – watching little Eric (Steve Evets) and Cantona smoke a joint and philosophise about the meaning of life. One of the subtlest but most effective comedic moments of the film, the dialogue between the two retains its sharpness due to the fact that at no point in the film does little Eric surrender to Big Eric in adulation. As Loach explains, “On the one hand, we wanted to celebrate his artistry on the pitch, but we also want to puncture the idea of celebrity”. He adds, “We didn’t want to make any less of him. One false move, and we could somehow devalue him”. This is what is so effective about the Cantona persona –part mirage, part real- is his ability to take the piss out of himself without losing his dignity and cult status. In a classic scene in the film, little Eric turns round to Cantona, and tells him “sometimes we forget you’re just a man”, to which Cantona retorts, “I am not a man –I’m Cantona”. Rather than iconoclastic, the film reverses the icon, leading us to question the concept of celebrity, and the all too commercialised nature of modern football.

The mixture of proletarian grit and fantasy may not be to everyone’s taste, and the contrast between comedy and earthy Loachean realism can sometimes jar on the audience. The film is asking the audience to suspend their disbelief (as Cantona appears as if by magic throughout the film), and this can be tricky with the realistic subject matter involved –mental health, drug addiction, divorce, violence, poverty, and gun crime. In conversation, Steve Evets describes the Cantona mirage as “that tiny little spark of survival instinct” in his character’s mind. The appearance of Cantona, he explains, is part of “the body’s mechanism in order to survive”. I still retain my scepticism.

Passion and the need for freedom are strong threads both in the film’s ideas, and in conversation with the actors and director. Cantona explains that “When I retired from football, it was because I had lost passion for the game. I wanted to be honest with myself and the fans, so I retired”. Finding it hard to do anything else (“there is nothing more intense than football”),Cantona found a new passion, cinema. “Players should be prepared for a life after football. Football is so strong, that when it’s finished…,” he tails off thoughtfully, with a detectable air of nostalgia. Cantona has also taken up the trumpet, after being suspended for acts of spectacular violence against the crowd. A fantastic scene in the movie involves little Eric watching in admiration as Big Eric starts playing the trumpet on a grotty-looking housing estate. When asked in interview how his trumpet-playing is coming along, Cantona replies with majestic self-effacement, “It’s even worse today”.

The passion Cantona feels for football is reflected in both Loach’s direction and Evets’s acting. Evets recalls the Careers officer asking him which department of the local factory he wanted to work for. Acting is clearly his passion. “You’re born here. You die here. Let’s decorate the points in between. The day I lose passion for what I do, I’ll stop it too”. It’s clear that the philosophical footballer has got to Evets too. Cantona draws an interesting parallel between Alex Ferguson and Ken Loach. Both value freedom by allowing genius to flourish unfettered. Cantona becomes serious: “We need this freedom. Everybody needs this freedom”. So what we get is a look at the life of a postman, the presence of a demi-god, drugs and philosophy, veiled radical politics and some spectacular goals plus a tender line in romance. It is hard to imagine a modern Briton who will not engage with at least some of these themes.

This review appears in The Cherwell, www.cherwell.org

Dissocia Zine

Work has started on Jay and I’s new zine, Dissocia. Here’s our creative mess, below. Thou must follow us on Facebook, Twitter, the Dissocia blog, and whatever goddamn piece of technology we can master.
Contribute, contribute! We’re looking for prose, poetry, fashion writing, satire, comics, doodles, paintings, photography, one-page plays, jokes, essays, sketches, book reviews, film reviews, rants; write about politics, or art, or sport. And send in your stuff: dissocia @googlemail.com.

Randomly, while flyering around Cowley Road, Rosy and I came across this gem of a wall:

“DISSOCIA, DISSOCIA, WELCOME TO DISSOCIA!”
-Anthony Neilson, ‘The Wonderful World of Dissocia’ (2004)-

Burlesque: porn or politics?

In earlier times, when the supply for unadulterated pornography was constrained by social mores, burlesque provided the necessary “artistic” overlay to pedal smut and soft porn to predominantly male audiences. Burlesque has evolved from this to become, among other things, a political art form with a largely female audience; a dance form which reflects on, or responds to, the social status quo. The current popularity of burlesque reflects both its current and historical forms. Male execs now go to burlesque shows instead of strip joints, as do women in hen parties, along with genuine aficionados. Bearing in mind the above, it is perhaps appropriate to consider whether burlesque, a form which involves the artful striptease, is an empowering or an exploitative art form for women. Can a burlesque dancer be a feminist and vice versa?

Burlesque embraces female sexual stereotypes –the archetypal male fantasies – and parodies them. Acts parody the stripper, the housewife, the pin-up, the rock chick and the slut. By performing erotic clichés to a knowing audience, the performer is pushing towards a new sexual role for women. In her book Burlesque and the Art of the Tease/ Fetish and the Art of the Tease, Dita Von Teese describes feminism as “being as feminine as possible”. A performer uses the spectacle of her own femininity to rechallenge society’s perceptions of female beauty. Burlesque performers can and often are fat (for example the rather hefty Fat Girl Revue), are often heavily tattooed or pierced, and embrace exaggerated makeup, and fetishistic or sadomasochistic carapaces. The burlesque performer Beau Burlington argues that “you have to be a feminist to be a burlesque performer, as you have to be proud of, and willing to share your femininity, in whatever shape or form it comes in”. You are displaying your femininity to a predominately female-dominated audience. According to Jackie Wilson in The Happy Stripper, modern audiences are half or three-quarter female. Beau Burlington adds “If you’ve ever heard the expression that women dress for other women instead of men, then this is what I think is going on with burlesque. It’s the women that enjoy the fur, feathers, the hairstyles, and the exploration of feminine characters”. And yet, for a dance form that looks to express the sheer variety of female beauty, why is it still so white-dominated? There is still a small minority of black burlesque performers (Miss Coco Mae is the main black British burlesque performer), and also a minority of Asian performers. Can it really be that progressive?

Burlesque essentially involves a woman being paid to strip. She may be economically independent, yet she is still selling her brand of femininity in exchange for cash, an image that is dependent on being sexually provocative. By being dependent on money, youth and various concepts of beauty, isn’t burlesque putting across a brand of sexuality that both typifies and limits the woman involved? Dita Von Teese is a prime example. Her diminutive frame, her soft-spoken voice and submissive dance routines (such as her suggestively child-like sponge-bathing) seem to adhere too closely to the stereotypical, repressive representation of ideal womanhood. By lacking any sort of political message, Von Teese’s performance becomes more pastiche than parody, a dangerously unchallenging cocktail of faux feminism in sexy suspenders.

With every performance comes a different interpretation. The beauty of burlesque is in its malleability, its variation from artist to artist. The problem with this is that it can be misinterpreted by people, and turned into something that exploits and confirms female stereotypes. Burlesque’s move to the mainstream has had a positive as well as a negative effect on the form. Burlesque classes are springing up everywhere, introducing new women to the form and encouraging new, varied and more interesting interpretations. However, with an increase in popularity comes a decrease in the quality of the form. There is also the risk of losing the strong sense of history and politics that comes with the dance form, so that instead it becomes a way of selling Wonderbras.

Burlesque can and should be political. The most challenging and interesting performance I have seen in a while was Miss Fancy Chance at The Smoking Cabinet Festival. She came onto the stage dressed up as a Chinese DVD saleswoman, calling out “DVD, DVD”. Having reached the stage, she performed a striptease only to be carted off kicking and screaming by Immigration Control. Miss Fancy Chance’s performance was a tribute to the Chinese Hollywood actress Anna Mae Wong, the Chinese-American movie star whose career was affected by California’s anti-miscegenation laws. Miss Fancy Chance’s performance consciously used her Chinese ethnicity to create a political dialogue about immigration, class, and multiculturalism in modern Britain. Politically radical comedians often make the transit from the fringes to popular culture successfully, without losing their radical edge. Perhaps it is the sexualised content of burlesque that makes it hard to keep its radical edge and move to the popular mainstream- how easy can it be to sell unusual erotica to a mass audience more comfortable with the eroticism of Nuts magazine and Page 3 of The Sun? The danger is that, in sanitizing (and intellectualising) burlesque, we risk delivering neither porn nor politics.

Some version of this article will be featured in Trinity Term’s issue of The Isis, check it out. And for something much more erudite, read Penny Red’s views on the topic in the following Guardian article.

The Ruby Revue

Illustration by M.

Even though I was pretty annoyed at missing the London Burlesque Festival, I still got to catch a bit of burlesque during my stay here in Sydney. I’m working on an article on the politics of burlesque for The Isis magazine, so “in the name of research” (hoho) I went to see the Ruby Revue at the Arthouse Hotel on Pitt Street. It was so much fun! The night was a mixture of cabaret, vaudeville and burlesque, and included a balloon-popping act, and a hilarious Marie Antoinette-inspired performance by Vivi Valentine; a superbly performed cabaret act combining violin and cello-playing with tango, fire-eating and stripping; a performance by the Australian burlesque performer Danika; a can-canning sailor by the name of Semen something, and a retro singing group called The Fabulous Chandeliers, who were a hilarious throwback to the forties, and then the fifties. It was a really great night.

Danika’s feather dance
(sorry for the bad quality photo, it was really pretty dark in there)