Here’s a review I wrote of the BFI’s Counter-culture night over at Permanent Plastic Helmet.

Firstly, how did the Counter-culture night at the BFI come about?

It’s part of a regular strand called Essential Experiments. Flipside is once a month, and Essential Experiments is twice a month. I programme it with someone else from the BFI, Rhidian Davis who works in the educational department and Kingston University partner on it as well. We meet and programme the slot, and work out what we’re going to show. We’ve been working through the years in quite a chronological way, so we started with ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ (1919), which worked really well as an opener and that was just over a year ago. From there we’ve progressed to European surrealist films, and then beatnik cinema. We got to Maya Deren and we did a focus on Kurt Kren, an Austrian filmmaker who started making films in 50s. We were in the ‘50s for a very long time!

I’m very interested and into the 60’s period. Because the London Filmmakers Coop has really dominated the way we see the history of experimental film in this country, particularly in the post-war period. A lot of people focus on that work, and that work has a very particular ideology to it, and that’s focusing on the particularly formal elements of film. I suppose that kicks off in the late ‘60s and I particularly wanted to look at films that maybe had a relationship with that but that also came before that, and had a slightly different sensibility, and show that there’s a variety of different experimental cinemas going on.

It was good to show the Peter Gidal film ‘Room (Double Take)’, which is great. He was one of the key proponents of the Structuralist Materialist movement in the ‘70s, but to show that with the Mark Boyle film ‘Beyond Image’, which is an almost stereotypical psychedelic film with oils and bubbles and music and backwards stuff, very immediately psychedelic, hopefully opens things up a bit more. I’m not sure how often or if ever those films have been shown together, so it’s nice to look at a lot of different stuff from that time and move away from the obvious things which people show. I mean, I’m sure people have done similar showings before, but it’s nice to make links with youth culture as well, rather than always this more purist, more theoretical experimental film.

These films would have been shown at the UFO club in Tottenham Court Road. Did you find it weird presenting it at the BFI? Do you feel these films can be stand-alone films or that they need that kind of environment?

I think they can be stand alone films, but it’s good to have a bit of energy with the films you’re showing. So if you show it at a nightclub or something, then hopefully there’s something going on in the nightclub which mirrors what’s going on in the film. It does feel a bit weird, and I talked about that a little bit during my introduction. It’s that fine line really, because we can’t recreate what it was like in the 1960’s, but at the same time it can feel quite sober showing these films at the BFI sometimes.

It was and it wasn’t. The Latham one I thought worked amazingly. It was so visual and fast-paced that you could just lie back in the seat and let it wash over you. What is it you think about the psychedelic, or the drug elements that work so well on screen?

Gosh. I think they do really work together. Psychedelic experience, I think about as being a full sensual experience, so involving all the senses. Bands were playing, there were projections, as the backdrop for things to be projected onto as part of that experience, and traditionally film is described as the seventh art – it incorporates all the different art forms. You know, you can have spoken word, music, pictures, illustration – there’s a whole list of them. And so there is that kind of parallel. There’s a great Jodorowsky quote that says something like “I look for in film what North Americans look for in psychedelic drugs”. That element of film as a trip, which i definitely got from the Counter-culture night.

Yeah. That kind of other-worldliness and other visions and metaphysical states as well as being something very sensual. So yeah, I do think they work well together.

I also didn’t expect the humour element to be so prevalent. Jeanetta Cochrane and the Gidal one. Is humour something you look for in the films you show? Because on Flipside the humour element seems to be very strong.

I think I do naturally. I’m sort of drawn to that. I’m doing a project now on an artist and filmmaker called Bruce Lacey, who in a way we could have profiled in that film programme. Well, I kind of feel like there were different types of counter-culture activity going on in the ‘60s. We had the counter-culture club scene, the psychedelic scene, and we did a Pop Art programme of screenings which was interesting because it was the same period of films that we showed in the Counterculture screenings, but it had a different emphasis. There was also a more satirical wing of the Counter-culture that was influenced by The Goons. And leading towards Monty Python, with references to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah band. Which again has links to psychedelia, but is also more playful. So Bruce Lacey is more part of that. But he’s also the same generation as Jeff Keen. People don’t take humour seriously – because it does have an immediate impact, people don’t look at it in any depth. But I do think there’s a generation – the National Service generation – who saw action in the Second World War, who had these very extreme, very visceral experiences, and there’s a lot of artists working in the ‘60s who drew that into their work, like a darkness or a bleakness. But as a sort of counterpoint to that, often a sense of humour as well.

That’s a very British thing, as well!

Yes absolutely! With Jeff Keen’s work, it’s not comedy, but there’s a sort of playful element. Peter Gidal’s not known for his humour. No disrespect to him of course..

I’m a big fan of 60’s cinema, and often surprised by the amount of criticism directed towards it. A lot of p people claim that British cinema stopped in the ‘60s. There’s a great quote by Alan Parker that goes: “Whatever the Swinging Sixties are going to be remembered for, it won’t be films. The moment you saw a Red London bus go through the shot, you knew you were in for a rotten time”!

Oh my god!

Obviously you don’t agree. But what is it about 60s British cinema that causes such a response?

I was talking to someone else about this earlier. In the 60s, you get this idea of serious film criticism developing, and the European auteur idea developing. And I don’t know if there were serious film critics and directors who wanted to turn film into a ‘serious’ art form, because they enjoyed seeing films, but their way of doing that was to look abroad, because foreign films had a more novel quality, because it was less about the everyday life that they saw around them. So art was something that happened abroad. And maybe that’s part of the British sensibility – playing yourself down. So I think there’s a lot of snobbery about British cinema, and it would be very interesting to try and look into that precise moment when that shift happened, and people started denigrating cinema in this country. A lot of cinema in the 60s has a popular culture element that appeals to the masses in some way. But that doesn’t mean that it’s in any way less interesting or less rich or made with any less integrity. And there are so many films that aren’t really very well known, which is part of the reason behind the Flipside project: to try and dig that stuff up.

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What do you look for in a Flipside film?

Well, you know we have the monthly Flipside screenings at the BFI, and then the Flipside DVD. And they have slightly different identities. So the Flipside DVD is very much looking at films from the 60s and 70s that have slipped through the cracks. British filmmaking that is interesting and overlooked. Whilst we do that in the cinema strand, we also look at foreign work and television as well, and all different periods. It’s anything that hasn’t really been taken seriously before. But I suppose we’re also saying that cinema is a fun experience but we can also take it seriously as well. That’s the remit of the Flipside cinema shows. And then we do the Q & As with people and try and tease some of those things out. But it’s quite a strange assortment of different things. Defining the exact criteria is kind of tricky, but I feel like people understand what it is.

What’s next for Flipside?

In January, we’re doing an Andy Milligan night. Andy Milligan was a gay underground film-maker, who came from what gets called the Off, Off Broadway theatre scene, so very underground cafes, quite theatrical, quite transgressive, almost violent theatre, really pushing the boundaries. So he got into making films, with the people he worked with in the theatre. He made his own costumes for the films. And I think he showed films on the same line-up as Kenneth Anger but then at some point he got into making horror films and was showing stuff on the grindhouse circuit, and not really making much money, but just doing stuff all the time, and doing everything himself, in a very primitive style. And then in the late ‘60s, he came over to London, I think almost to get away from the New York Scene and William Mishkin, his producer, who I don’t think he really liked working with, but no-one would ever give him money, so he always had to work with this guy and it drove him crazy. So he came over here to have a break, and then shot four films over here, I think.

One of the films he made was called ‘The Body Beneath’, which he shot in and around Highgate, and partly in Highgate cemetery. It’s about this vampire who’s pretending to be the local rector or reverend, and who tries to re-establish his bloodline, and has this big vampire party to celebrate. It’s funny because at the time Milligan was shooting this, there was a flap about the Highgate vampire in the press. I think he must have read about that and then shot the film, but it was happening at almost exactly the same time. So we’re showing ‘The Body Beneath’ and then this BBC news item about the Highgate vampire.

What Flipside are you proudest of?

I’m quite clear about the DVDs: Deep End, which I first saw a long time ago. It has the music by Can, the great acting, the scenes of Swinging London, it’s quite artistically shot and it’s very much a comment on early ‘70s Britain. I saw it in 1996? 1997? At this club called Little Stabs of Happiness, and I always wanted to show it again. Again, that was a case of having to sort out all the rights, over two years. It was very complicated. But that felt like a genuine rediscovery. We showed that in the cinema too, and that felt really special, and to have Jane Asher come and John Moulder-Brown. Some people know that film and are surprised that it hasn’t been screened more. And then there’s a film called ‘Moon Over the Alley’ which is included in the ‘Duffer’ DVD. It’s shot on black and white 16mm, I guess is kind of cheap looking, but all shot in and around Notting Hill and in this big house where all these different people live. There’s songs in it and the guys that wrote the songs wrote the music for ‘Hair’. It starts off as this very light-hearted drama, with a multi-racial cast, going around the house and meeting other people; everything’s quite nice and jolly. And then in the second day, it all turns to shit; it’s like an apocalypse, people get killed and there’s muggings. The two days completely contrast with each other.

And there’s another one – ‘Primitive London’, the mondo-style documentary. When I came here [to the BFI] I realised that we had the negatives for it and we even had a digibeta of it. And Vic Pratt, who also presents the Flipside with me, also wanted to see it. Then there was an opportunity to present something in the ‘Projecting the Archive’ strand.

And then when we put it on, Ian Sinclair wrote a whole page about it in The Guardian. We were hip for a moment! Loads of people came to the NFT and it was a really big deal! And then, following that, people asked us to start a regular cult strand, and we came up with the Flipside. It’s definitely one of the special ones.

One of my favourites is ‘Carousella’. There is this weird dichotomy – where its sleazy but they’re selling the striptease kind of well. Of course, burlesque now is very middle-class and trendy, but in the ‘60s, it wasn’t. It’s kind of mind-boggling. There’s this middle class mother with two kids, who seems so gentle and unlikely, and then, bang, next scene, she’s wiggling around on stage.

Have you seen ‘Strip’? Because it’s slightly more grimy, though also a documentary about strippers in Soho. You see them eating baked beans out of a tin before they get ready. In ‘Strip’, there’s sequences where people are about to go out, and you see a guy backstage setting up a film projector, and you have films being shown inbetween the strip shows. It’s kind of like the people filming it are a bit shy but they’re also showing a lot of what goes on and what it’s like. There are a whole load of films that tap into that. Have you seen ‘The Small World of Sammy Lee’? That’s a really great film, which Network put out as part of a box-set of films about London, along with ‘The London that Nobody Knows’. It’s an Anthony Newley film where he plays a spiv-type comedian who does very short, stand-up routines in between strip acts in Soho, and then he gets into debt, and he has to work out how he’s going to get the money. Then this woman who he met on holiday appears, and she ends up getting a job as a stripper. It’s this intense drama set in Soho; a lot of it shot on location. There’s a book I just bought called ‘Skin Deep in Soho’, which I think may have been written by a guy who worked on ‘Carousella’. It’s more than just about strippers in Soho, though.

The Flipside: Body Beneath + 24 Hours: Highgate Vampire is on the 26th January 2012 at the BFI Southbank, 8.45pm

Several films from Zamibian-born, British conceptual artist John Latham were the theme of this BFI evening, part of the ‘Essential Experiments’ programme which ran at the BFI in association with Kingston university.

John Latham was a key artist of the ‘50s and ‘60s, whose work still remains controversial (the Tate Britain removed one of his pieces ‘God is Great’ from an exhibition of his work in 2006, without his permission). Latham’s work was influential in emerging arenas of performance art and ‘happenings’ in the ‘60s. In 1966, Latham was involved in the Destruction in Art Symposium in London, along with Fluxus artists Gustav Metzger and Yoko Ono. He built three “skoob towers” (‘skoobs’ are books spelt backwards) outside the British Museum, and then set fire to them, calling them “the laws of England”, all this without permission from the relevant authorities. Also in the ‘60s, he invited his students to a meal where they had to eat Clement Greenberg’s book of art theory “Art and Culture”. Once they had chewed this up and spat it out, it was bottled for Latham to decant into a phial and put into a leather case; this was later displayed as “Spit and Chew: Art and Culture” in the MOMA.

This evening at the BFI featured some of his recently restored early 1960’s works, such as ‘Unclassified Materials’ (1960), ‘Unedited Materials from the Star’ (1960), ‘Talk Mr Bard’ (1961) and ‘Erth’ (1971). The programme started with some of Latham’s skoob works. The image of the book – as moving object, as site of destruction – is a clear focus for Latham. Books, of course, represent knowledge, civilisation, and differing points of view; the burning of books symbolises the destruction of all this, a hark back to Nazi times. In ‘Unclassified Material’, books flick and move, and change colour and pattern randomly, recreating the movement of butterfly wings or the blink of an eyelid. In ‘Encyclopedia Britannica’ (1971), the pages of an encyclopaedia are filmed being quickly flicked so words and images resemble a geometric pattern of undulating shapes. As David Toop (2010) writes: “This eye blinks rhythmically, silent but musical, because pages are turned when the camera is not running, then filmed in their new open state for a brief but specific number of frames. Colours change, the configuration of books is altered, the distance between gaze and object shifts, yet the scene is in another sense unblinking because it remains fixed upon the unreadable book”. Some of his films are a pleasure to watch; others, like the 24 minute ‘Erth’, which consists of a black screen with a woman’s voice reciting the earth’s timescale in German, and the occasional image of the earth – are impenetrable and frustrating.

Essential Experiments: John Latham at the BFI, 6th Decembert 2011

For a film based on Kate Bush’s whimsical 80’s song to love and interpretative dance, Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, 2011) has surprisingly little music. Little to none, in fact, until the final burning throes introduce the plinkety plonk of Mumford and Son’s own brand of generic, Alpha Course “nu-folk” (Andrea, how could you?). Jokes aside, Arnold’s adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Gothic 1847 novel offers much in the way of a radical reinterpretation of the text. And the lack of music is only the beginning.

This film is bound to be celluloid Marmite, hated by purists, and loved by those tired of the same old run-of-the-mill adaptations. Arnold dispenses with the staid clichés of period drama – the brooding music, heaving bosoms, and Mr. Darcy pole-up-the-bum mutterings of so many past literary adaptations – and replaces it with a visceral, seething ramble through the wild Yorkshire moors and turbulent emotions of young, destructive love.

Whether you like this film or not, Arnold’s take is admirable for its bravery and radically anti-commercial stance. With little to nothing in the way of dialogue or background music, the sounds of nature – the crunching and squelching of soggy leaves, the splat of clay-grey mud, a bird’s call or the yelp of a beaten dog – dominate the soundscape. The young actors, as you are likely to have read or to expect from Andrea Arnold, are mostly unprofessional, offering a rather amusingly odd English drama version of mumblecore with their broad accents, grunts and mumbles, all “fucks” and “cunts” and “sods”. I loved this. My best mate scoffed. The film also dispenses with any attempts at period realism; costumes veer from the Regency period, to rough and mud-spattered 19th century Yorkshire country clothing, and even to a dash of This Is England skinhead glamour in the bald skull and tanktop work gear of Cathy’s brother. You can almost see the Fred Perry insignia through the thick Yorkshire mist.

Arnold is mostly true to the text, and yet peculiarly leaves out the second half of the novel. This is much to the benefit of the film, it has to be said, which suffers from being half an hour or so too long. The two young actors who play Heathcliff (Solomon Glave) and Cathy (Shannon Beer) are terrific, the older two – James Howson and Kaya Scodelario – much less so. Apart from the Mumford and Sons end piece, my main annoyance with the film was in the transition from young to older actors. The older actors bore no resemblance – physical or emotional – to the young ones, and as such, disrupted the credible flow of the film. For a film so ground in cinematic realism, this felt awkwardly artificial. By purposefully choosing to have unprofessional actors, it also felt weird to cast Kaya – an actress well-known for her role as drug-taking nympho Effie in zeitgeist-inflected teen drama Skins – in the role of Cathy. Effie (as psycho poster girl for the meow meow snorting middle class) has many potential similarities with Cathy, but Arnold doesn’t utilise any of this. Kaya’s Cathy is cruel but not fucked up, while Sharon Beer’s young Cathy’s gutsy earnestness, and her innocent yet animalistic sexual connection with Heathcliff, was much more credible. Howson’s Heathcliff is much better, but you can tell he’s never acted before. He just doesn’t have the brooding gravitas you would expect such a Byronic anti-hero, and he doesn’t engage convincingly with the rest of the cast.

The potentially most radical reinterpretation of Bronte’s text is to make Heathcliff black. Much has been written or said about this, leading many (myself, before watching the film, included) to feel the change is a bit gimmicky. Well it works. His blackness is, to a certain extent, already present in the text, where he is described as both a “dark-skinned gypsy” and “Spanish castaway”. It also emphasises his outsider role, by positioning him within a racial, rather than a class-based, dynamic of otherness. He is repeatedly called “nigger”, is beaten and abused, accused of thieving and murder, and vilified by his adopted family. While this reinterpretation is interesting, it doesn’t feel wholly credible. The point of Heathcliff’s outsider position, I feel, is due to the ambivalence of his background. He is a mysterious Other, with no past, no cultural roots, no ties to anything other than Cathy, and the emphasis on his race brings this out more clearly.

The great power of the film, which in my mind overwrites its obvious flaws, lies in the way in which Arnold recreates the chaotic and tumultuous romantic and visual landscapes of the novel. Arnold’s famous hand-held camera trawls through long, dew-stained grasses, and spiky yellow heads of gorse. It hangs behind Cathy’s head, catching the faint down of hair on her neck, or the bright red of her hair in the sun. It soars across moors lashed by rain and wind, catches puddles of mud being squelched through the fingers of little hands. The bright pink of a flower immediately floods the screen with colour; the grey doom-laden clouds hang suspended in a sky so wet with the oncoming storm you can almost smell it. Forgive my poetic license. This is the kind of cinematography you can get really excited about. Through Arnold’s eye, people morph into animals, animals into people. Cathy’s brother and his wife fuck like dogs on the moors, while young Heathcliff looks on. Dogs are taunted by man, hung up on fences to squirm and writhe, or kicked, like Heathcliff is repeatedly throughout the film. In one of the most beautiful scenes in the film, young Cathy tenderly licks the wounds on Heathcliff’s back, lapping a small tongue like an animal would milk or a wound, while a fat tear drips down his face. The wound metaphor is one of many in the film. Heathcliff’s family and circumstance have created the welts and bruises which young love tries to heal, and which Heathcliff seeks to reopen as an act of revenge. The film is also rich with symbolism, a lot of which is laden with a heavy hand. Cathy in the living room is contrasted with a bird in a cage; Heathcliff with a dead rabbit. The horse – a favourite of Arnold’s it seems, and used to similar effect in Fish Tank – is rendered symbolic of brutalised, restricted freedom. Yes, yes, alright, geddit. The subtler elements of symbolism and parallel are far more effective. Cathy’s brother’s girlfriend giving birth standing up with her legs open on the moors is as clear an image as any of the parallels between man and beast which Arnold draws from the text.

For the cinematography alone, Arnold’s Wuthering Heights is a flawed but fresh must-see. Just make sure to make a bee-line for the bog as soon as the end credits come on.

This review is featured over at film website Permanent Plastic Helmet.

Dolan, in an interview in The Village Voice, has firmly denied both the Art Cinema influences, and his preference for style over substance: “I wouldn’t say the film is lacking any depth. It’s stylish and campy, but so what? It’s what I wanted to do. It’s about two people infatuated with a perfect stranger who’s beautiful but banal and uninteresting”. Of course, the problem with a banal but uninteresting lead, is that it leaves you without an engaging core to the film. Having said all this, the film was a pleasure to watch from beginning to end.

First and foremost, it is visually, gorgeously over-the-top: beautiful people talking about art fart in cafes, blocks of bright, clashing, saturated colours, retro furnishings and saliva-inducing vintage dresses, and a male lead (Niels Schneider) who looks like a cross between Bob Dylan and Michelangelo’s David by way of French Canadian hipsterville. In one scene, the obsessed male (Xavier Dolan) buys marshmallows in the cornershop and imagines the object of his infatuation being showered naked by hundreds of marshmallows against a blue background. How joyously unsubtle.

What Heartbeats does, and does so well, is render the minutiae of everyday life in the grandiose light of past Art Cinema. It also, perhaps unconsciously, reveals how culturally emaciated our generation has become. Apart from a brilliant soundtrack by Swedish electro group The Knife (and Karin’s spin off band Fever Ray), nothing in this supposedly contemporary film is ‘of the moment’, but instead, looks to the past for its visual and cultural inspiration. The two infatuated leads consciously resemble James Dean and Audrey Hepburn (although the lead girl starts off looking like Ana Karina), the 60s furnishings and slow-motion shots of characters walking down the street in vintage dresses recall Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood For Love, and the nod to Jules et Jim and The Dreamers in the cinematic set-up is directly referenced when Dreamers star Louis Garrell appears at the end party. What Heartbeats doesn’t look at enough is what it seems to set out to do at the beginning, before it gets lost in its own visual lushness; that is, explore the complexities of young, twenty-first century sexuality, and what happens when your unrequited obsession for someone goes far too far. This is the kind of obsession you get in your twenties, and Xavier Dolan (WHO IS ONLY TWENTY TWO, yes, TWENTY TWO, and this is his SECOND feature) is the perfect man to do this. In a sense, his beauty-saturated, narcissistically shallow amour fou is perfectly pitched then – for and about trendy twenty-somethings in love or lust. Heartbeats is visually successful, but culturally problematic: in trying to tell the story of twenty somethings in love, why is it so stuck in a cinematic past?

“I was one of the insatiables. The ones you’d always find sitting closest to the screen. Why do we sit so close? Maybe it was because we wanted to receive the images first. When they were still new, still fresh. Before they cleared the hurdles of the rows behind us. Before they’d been relayed back from row to row, spectator to spectator; until worn out, secondhand, the size of a postage stamp, it returned to the projectionist’s cabin. Maybe, too, the screen was really a screen. It screened us… from the world”

- Matthew, The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003)

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011) must be the filmic equivalent of a cigarette and small talk with a Dalston hipster. Everything looks bloody great, don’t get me wrong, until you start talking, and quickly begin to realise that this is going to be about as deep as a puddle. Based on a novel by James Sallis, Drive tells the story of an unnamed mechanic and stunt driver for films (Ryan Gosling), who becomes embroiled in the seedy LA underworld of speed racing and gangster crime, while also falling for his married neighbour, a young single mother whose husband’s in prison (Carey Mulligan).

For all the soaring LA skylines and Friday night sex music, the film remains an attractive disappointment. What would make a cracking music video, just doesn’t have the depth of human interest or emotion to be sustained over two hours.

Ryan Gosling has all the charisma of a bowl of porridge, and his dialogue’s about as lumpy. Irene (Carey Mulligan) is utterly cute and charming, but entirely miscast as a lonely single mother. For a start, her creamy, dimpled, Hollywood complexion and calm exterior belie apparent years of single mothering in a rough part of LA. Her chemistry with Gosling is zilch, though at least this is more than what fizzles between her and her gangster husband (which can only be succinctly graded as double zilch). Apparently, Driver and Irene’s relationship is platonic and romantic, and this is the point. I’m sceptical. At the very least, I can believe why she would fall for Gosling, and the gentle way he looks after her child; you can practically hear her ovaries pinging away as she watches Gosling and son together in front of the TV, though if you listen more carefully, they’re probably those of the audience behind you. Am I being unkind? Probably.

Drive, like many mainstream ‘alternative’ or ‘artsy’ films at the moment, is just too aware of itself to provide anything other than feather light escapism. I know this is why most people, myself included, go to the cinema, but sometimes escapism can be so light as to poof away into nothingness. I was so looking forward to the film, after rave reviews from good friends and film critics, but Drive left me bone cold and bored. It also reminded me of (500) Days of Summer (Marc Webb, 2009), although it’s not that bad, little is. In a similar way, (500) Days used trendy actors, obviously targetable indie music, artsy angles and “Super 8” style shots that are to independent film-making what the Hipstomatic app is to photography. Combine all this with lazy dialogue and little to no character development, often dropped altogether in favour of a flavour-of-the-month indie track, and you have yourselves an artsy box office hit, my friends.

With its visually stunning LA pulp noir backdrop and incredible soundtrack, Drive is much better, though, in my mind, no more genuine, than 500 Days. At least it shows off its influences more subtly (though just how subtly it does this is debatable). Man-of-the-moment Ryan Gosling cruising around LA in his white scorpion bomber jacket is reminiscent of Nicolas Cage in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart, and the trashy landscapes could be straight out of a Tarantino, or True Romance, all minus the black humour and surrealism. This hark back to ‘80s trashy chic, exemplified by the slashed pink typeface in the film, and Gosling and Hendricks’ costumes, is so culturally trendy it seems like its lost its edge. With Carey Mulligan and Christina Hendricks, Refn has also scored a tick on the artsy Hollywood checklist, although Hendrick’s ten minute cameo is so minor as to be practically meaningless (what’s that, Peter Bradshaw, she steals the show? She’s barely in it – all simpering chavvy sex appeal until she gets walloped over the head by allegedly tender Gosling before having her brains blown off by a loaded gun). And don’t even start me on Drive’s lazy chauvinism.

Look. Films don’t have to be realistic, they don’t have to have dialogue, they can even just look good. But for me to buy into their world, I have to care, and for me to care, I have to believe that there is something genuine about it. And the problem with ‘hipster cinema’, for want of a better label for these types of films, is that it is so stylistically aware and postmodern that it ends up coming across as fake, shallow and void of human interest. I define ‘hipster cinema’ as cinema that isn’t genuine; cinema that’s cool for the sake of it, knowingly cult, and utterly aware of itself.

Ryan Gosling’s scorpion bomber jacket seems to exemplify this style of hipster cinema: it is the cult symbolic object that is also immediately purchaseable and attainable. It both harks back to past cultural references and ’80s cultural retromania, but also looks towards the future as a trendy fetishisable commodity. Rumours that the scorpion bomber jacket is soon to be released in Urban Outfitters are proliferating the blogosphere, and a quick look through American Apparel confirms that this 80s trash trend is very much in vogue. “Since Drive hit the cinemas, Gosling’s James Dean-inspired look is noticeably influencing shoppers,” says Lee Douros, menswear buying manager for my-wardrobe.com. “We have seen a rise in the sales of Levi’s black 501 jeans and leather bombers from the likes of Acne, D&G and Swedish brand Jofama.” I mean even the launch party for Drive was sponsored by Doc Martens, with a pre-party music video starring Agnes Dean in Docs – that has to be the ultimate symbol of hipster cinema if nothing else is!

Drive is one of the latest in a long line of stylistically aware ‘cult’ films, from the trendy Gallic combination of Marxist philosophy and 60s colour blocking in the Nouvelle Vague, to Jim Jarmusch’s rock ‘n’ roll styled rockabilly films. But what sets these films apart from Drive and 500 Days, is that I don’t feel like I’m being conned into buying the latest pair of Doc Marten Chelsea boots, or a trip-hop soundtrack. Those films may be stylish, but they have substance. Drive does not. It’s lush American escapism with a moody existentialist babe in the driving seat, and we’re the ones being taken for a ride. Cynical, moi?

Grayson Perry – the Turner Prize winner, transvestite artist and writer known for his polemical pottery – has put on quite a show. ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman’ is his shrine of love to the British Museum, and boy, is there a lot of love. This exhibition is like a grand-scale ‘cabinet of curiosities’ or a 21st century Great Exhibition, where we are encouraged to wonder at disparate and exotic objects from around the world, from Tibetan shrines and pilgrim souvenirs from Eastern Indian, to Corinthian penis-shaped oil flasks and a Hello Kitty pilgrimage hand towel. Objects are arranged around themes or symbols, but all have been chosen for their aesthetic quality: everything here is beautiful.

But what sets this exhibition apart from other collections of beautiful objects, is the skill and attention to detail with which these objects have been chosen. Old collection pieces take on a new energy by being placed in a contemporary setting. For example, an ancient painted tunic from Northern Nigeria becomes much more interesting two exhibition rooms later when it can be contrasted with Perry’s High Priestess cape – a camp, Elvis Presley-esque white tunic decorated with multi-coloured penises and red bell-ends excreting pink flowers. A Samoan tortoiseshell bonnet becomes reminiscent of Perry’s own headgear. Real world maps contrast with Perry’s imagination maps. We are encouraged to do a double take – is this Perry’s? Or an anonymous craftsman’s? Perry’s exhibition worships ritual, sacrifice and pilgrimage, and yet he manages to bring these old fashioned ideas firmly into the present. On describing an Asafo flag from Fante in Ghana, Perry writes: “The freshness of these flags compared to British pageantry makes me think that ritual can become stultified if not kept relevant to its time and context”.

A trip to the British museum becomes a symbol for the ancient art of pilgrimage, and the objects themselves take on shrine-like connotations. This idea is exemplified in the final room of the exhibition, with the sculpture ‘The ‘Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman’, a beautifully ornate memorial ship designed by Perry and laden with bottles of strange liquids and ancient craft tools. While it seems particularly trendy of late to get celebrities of the art or fashion world to curate exhibitions, in Perry’s case, it really does work. Grayson Perry is, quite simply, incredibly interesting. His skill as a craftsman is obvious, but it is his ‘vision’, for want of a better word, that is so seductive. The show itself really is its own little world, ruled over by Alan Measles (Perry’s teddy bear and “embodiment of … male rebelliousness”) and peopled by strange objects, maps and characters. It’s not just that he manages to pick and choose beautiful things, but that he can make the ugly beautiful through selection alone (Hello Kitty, anyone?). From Mexican shrines to garish neon motorcycles, Perry is a big fan of kitsch, which pleases me no end (although for the wrong side of ‘kitsch’, you only have to glance at the British museum gift shop, which assaults you on the way out with its collection of over-priced ‘ethnic’ trinkets, that you know cost the museum about 20p to buy, and will look like crap on your mantelpiece).

Even though I loved the exhibition, I can see that many British Museum ‘types’ are predictably going to get a bit rattled – there’s a bit too much cock and drag for the staid, Lady Grey-sipping types that frequent the British Museum in hordes. As I wandered around the show, a rather posh old man whispered furtively and very theatrically to his wife: “I mean, it’s really very FUNNY but nobody seems to be LAUGHING”. However, for the twenty indignantly cancelled memberships, a whole swathe of new people, I think, are going to fall in love, or reignite their love, for the British Museum. Because if this exhibition does anything other than entertain for a couple of hours, it shows you a new way to look at old collections.

A version of this is up on The Spectator arts blog. Grayson Perry’s ‘Tomb of The Unknown Craftsman’ is showing at The British Museum until 19th February 2012