Germany
james.woodall
Wim Wenders (b 1945) is one of the great travellers of contemporary cinema. Multi-disciplinary and theme-driven, his work often asks questions about memory and identity, and pulsates with the strong spirit of very particular places. The worldwide success of Paris, Texas (1984), winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, made him a bankable director in the transatlantic movie business, but he’s always remained very European, if not necessarily in topic and location, then certainly in sensibility: sombre, quite slow, metaphysical on occasion – the latter displayed no better than in his famous portrait Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Pina Bausch decided: “Words can’t do more than just evoke things - that’s where dance comes in.” Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Only if they’re bad words and good dance - bad writhing instead of, say, Shakespeare’s words isn’t much of a swap. But with Bausch, people tended to hang on every word, probably because so much of her dance was indeed pretty damn good, and it’s so difficult to put into words just why that was.Part of it was that it was a theatrical expression of adult instincts that we all share, rather than a school of dance that you had to know standards to access. Wim Wenders Read more ...
graham.rickson
Unpleasant feelings of confinement and claustrophobia hit you when the curtain rises after Beethoven’s disconcertingly jolly overture; one small room is visible on stage, framed by black curtains. The sun shines oppressively through the barred windows, and the characters look constrained, physically awkward. After the occasionally over-the-top visuals of several recent Opera North productions it’s good to watch something so clean and uncluttered. The beauty of Tim Albery’s production, originally staged by Scottish Opera in 1994, is its unfussiness and clarity – nothing happens on stage that Read more ...
mark.hudson
You hardly expect to turn out for an exhibition of cutting-edge photography because of what the images are of. You go for the style, for the technique, for what’s being said about the medium and the, er, beauty. Yet at least one of the nominees for this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize – an event that seems to be emerging as a kind of Turner Prize for photography – belongs to the old, subject-oriented approach to the lens. A member of the legendary Magnum agency, American Jim Goldberg is a photojournalist, who travels the world looking for bad stuff – torture, refugees, human Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The political background is vital to the play, so pay attention: during the Second World War, the small Baltic state of Latvia was threatened by its two big neighbours, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In fact, when these countries signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, this document included a secret clause which put Latvia in Russia’s “sphere of influence”. Soon after, Soviet troops occupied the country, only to be chucked out when the Nazis invaded in 1941. Then the Soviets returned at the end of the war, and some Latvians joined the Germans in fighting to keep them out. After the war Read more ...
fisun.guner
The sea: the depths from which all life emerged, and a force of destruction. Anselm Kiefer contemplates its sublime beauty and terror in a new exhibition of 24 panoramic photographs, ranged three-deep on two facing walls. Each grey and grainy seascape has been smeared and splattered with white paint and transformed by “electrolysis”, a process which isn’t further explained in the press release but which sounds suitably and impressively dramatic.Characteristically, Kiefer takes as his starting point a work of literature, references to which have been elegantly scribed in a looping hand on Read more ...
josh.spero
Is there a televisual instruction manual for Nazi-era dramas? Cabaret singers with heavily kohled eyes, champagne from unmatched glasses in a shabby-chic apartment, smoke-filled gay bars in cellars with muscled trade, Stormtroopers marching in lockstep and Nazi banners unfurling from windows would all be on it. If there is, Christopher and His Kind last night was following it - but then it also wrote it.Christopher Isherwood is responsible as much as anyone for our perceptions of the period, but after decades of cinematic and theatrical adornments and encounters in this mode, a production of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Alan Bleasdale, along with Dennis Potter one of the truly original voices of British television drama, has spent the past decade in silence. His brand of epic narrative, his penchant for letting his characters talk and talk, went out of fashion when along came a generation of younger writers who nicked Yosser Hughes’s catchphrase - “I could do that” – and slipped into his slots. He has returned with this, a sweeping drama replete with all the Bleasdalian virtues: a huge cast of characters, an astute eye for the historical hinterland, and a belief that human decency abides in Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There are few more beautiful sounds on this planet than a consort of viols well played. Like a quiet conversation overheard from across the room, it combines intimacy and secrecy, together with a kind of conspiratorial subtlety of feeling – intellect and passion fused but disguised. And the sound has a delicacy and refinement hardly matched in any music I know.All this is partly explained by the fact that in their heyday viol consorts played music that was one step away from the voice; they were the pioneers of instrumental chamber music. They let the catgut out of the bag; and once Read more ...
Ismene Brown
An audience favourite has a USP that fills the house as long as they maintain the suspense - with William Forsythe, it’s the quality Diaghilev prized: unpredictability. When he set out in Germany in the 1980s he evolved an extreme classical ballet. Just as people got used to his distortions, he went into conceptual theatre. Expected to be gnomic and abstract, he then did emotional dance-theatre about his young wife’s death. Now to comedy territory in I Don’t Believe in Outer Space, which is only on for two nights at Sadler's Wells, indicating that his old London muckers worry about this Read more ...
james.woodall
Another 400 films, another rush for seats, another biting wind from Vladivostock: the 61st Berlin Film Festival - the Berlinale - has packed ’em in in the centre of town at Potsdamer Platz (mainly) over the last 10 days and hoped to light up the inevitably gloomy middle of February, and almost succeeded. But boy were there some tedious competition films this year.2011's Golden Bear Jodaieye Nader az Simin ("Nader and Simin: A Separation", the lead actors Leila Hatami and Peyman Moadi pictured below) was a hot contender from the moment the Iranian film hit Berlin. Director Jafar Panahi, Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The Detroit electro-techno duo of James Stinson and Gerald Donald aka Drexciya never gave away their secrets easily. Almost completely anonymous and never photographed during their 10-year existence – which ended with Stinson's 2002 death after a long illness – they surrounded their music with a complex mythos and mischievous wit comprehensible only to a small, obsessive cult audience. Only now are they getting wider appreciation, with a new generation of electronic musicians like Rustie hugely influenced by their sparse electronic funk, and the art world being introduced to their Read more ...