Ingmar Bergman passed away this year. It was not unexpected of course—he was after all 89 years of age—, but time still stopped for an instant. An era died there. Will he ever have an heir? I was curious about the world’s reaction. Not surprisingly, America, alongside Sweden, reacted the most. In the New York Times obituary he was compared not to Welles, Fellini or Kurosawa, but Mozart and van Gogh. An artist had passed away; one of the great artists not just of our generation, but of all time.

Emblazoned on the walls of Islington Underground Station in 1965 were the words “Clapton is God”. Rock stars experienced such cult status particularly in the sixties and seventies when London was described, by Clapton himself, as “an extraordinary melting pot of fashion, music, art and intellect”. As the graffiti faded in time so did this cult status of musicians, bowing to consumerism and the slippery concept of celebrity, ultimately creating disillusionment summarised by The Arctic Monkeys’ declaration “There’s only music so that there’s new ring tones”. Whilst quoting the aforementioned group from Sheffield may be considered blasphemous by some, their lyrics do summarise the sentiment from a modern view point. Although the writing on the wall may have faded, Clapton’s music is still relevant and part of British music folklore. Whilst he may be a musician primarily, should we also take the lyrics of his works into account or merely accept them as pop music? His songs have great power vested in them as they have been influential in our culture and therefore would a better understanding of the inspiration behind them offer us anything more?

Perhaps one of the most telling displays of a sense of western “identity” is the adaptation of internationally successful (but ultimately foreign) films. Whether motivated by capitalism or an inability to relate with characters outside of our own cultural context, a trend has risen in the remaking of eastern films for western audiences rather than importing the original. What transformations, however, are deemed necessary for the transition to western screens?

Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) is a supremely violent, unnerving Austrian film. In March next year it is going to acquire a supremely violent, unnerving, American remake. However, while the Hollywood revision essentially translates originals into “American” by Americans, this case saw Haneke remain as the director. Furthermore, as we are talking of a player […]

Heroin is freedom-freedom from the garish, ever-increasing demands of the West. “Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose D.I.Y. and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning”. Life on the outside of accepted society offers heroin, sex, booze, cocaine, youth and identity. “Choose. Choose. Choose” makes you wonder “who the fuck you are”.

What do we see when we look at a photograph? Do we expect to see a representation of actual events, or do we allow the photographer some artistic licence? In the age of photo-editing software and digital photography, how can the maxim “the camera never lies” be true?

For the techno-fetishist of the 80s cyberpunk culture, Tokyo is the City. It is vast and incomprehensible, yet depressing and exhilarating too. It is the future: a mass of concrete, asphalt, and neon signs that expands almost infinitely–a human creation that has attained an inhuman life of its own. That being said, it is interesting to notice that “Godzillas” and other “ends of the world” have apparently menaced the city throughout its living history. Of all the meanings the super-city embodies, the urge to destroy it is the integral corollary to its allure: a result of all the intellectual machinations–desires, metaphors, elaborations—attached to the juxtaposition of human flesh and urban context.

The greatest flaw of British post-war drama is arguably its unabating commitment to realism. While on the continent dramatists such as Samuel Beckett, Berthold Brecht, Eugene Ionesco or Jean Genet were breaking the boundaries of drama with radical new forms and theories, Britain was already unsettled by the likes of Osborne. Even as innovations such […]

In film theory, the discussions of what defines cinema classically revolve around the questions of either format or narrative. Is it film editing that makes cinema what it is, or the use of different focal lengths, the focus, or the frame? On the other hand, most viewers equate cinema with story-telling; so is the unique way that cinema can impart narrative the key to its identity?

In around 750 BC an anonymous poet put the finishing touches on his epic The Odyssey. It is no accident that Odysseus’s name means “trouble”, or indeed, that the ancients called the unknown bard “Homer” or “Homeros”–which literally translated means “someone displaced and vulnerable”, a word with similar connotations to the modern terms “asylum seeker” and “refugee.” It is this idea of asylum, and Odysseus as the “eternal traveller” which, nearly three millennia later, has captured David Farr’s imagination. A synopsis of his stage adaptation of Homer’s work could easily be mistaken for a modern story of a refugee: “a man is washed up on a foreign shore and confronted by immigration officers as he wakes up on the beach. Refusing to answer his questions, they throw him in a detention centre with a torrent of abuse.”

Art, says Justin Mullins, whose recent exhibition Mathematical Photography: an exhibition of the world’s most beautiful equations has intrigued journalists from sources as varied as The Guardian and the London Mathematical Society. Surprisingly, Mullins is not a mathematician; he regards himself as a kind of “photographer”, retracing the steps of “great explorers returning from distant shores with tales of fantastic lands and magical creatures”. His presentation of equations as works of art is certainly striking, but what emotions do these pieces inspire in their observers?

The potent force of a Pavarotti aria; the sentimentality of a rom-com; the dashing Mr Darcy look; the sun setting over a moorland landscape; the distant song of a nightingale. What is the common denominator among these disparate items? We might link them by one adjective–romantic. But what does this word mean?

The Classicist H. D. F. Kitto described the Greeks as “A people not very numerous, not very powerful, not very well organised [but a people] who had a totally new conception of what human life was for, and showed for the first time what the human mind was for.” These people have had a greater influence on Western civilisation than any other people or nation in the last two and a half millennia. Philosophy and ethics, the fundamentals of science and maths, prevailing notions of governance and citizenship, literature and both the performing and visual arts as well as sport and the spirit of competition derived their seeds and, indeed, much of their substance, from the Greeks

Buildings fulfil the roles that we assign to them: as meeting places, for administration of public affairs, for capitalism, as venues for entertainment, as accommodation, as symbols. We all think of certain spaces as ’special places’ and see them differently from any other observer. The first house we remember living in, the place we used to go when we were sad, the first tree we climbed, a best friend’s bedroom, the turning off the main road that meant we were committed to school for the day.