The Secret Life of Edward James (1978)

The Secret Life of Edward James, George Melly's documentary film from 1975. The film is a biography of surrealist art collector Edward James. James was patron of René Magritte, Leonora Carrington and Salvador Dalí (the Mae West Lips sofa was originally designed for his house Monkton), and lived the only life a responsible aristocrat can lead: inventing impossibilities and flouting convention. 

James' life is a catalogue of incredible moments: the argument of his royal paternity, defacing his Lutyens-designed home with surrealist flair, his scandalous divorce and bisexual forays. All of this was a prelude to his final monument: Las Pozas. A surrealist sculpture garden filled with gigantic concrete structures that burst out of the Mexican jungle, it is full of needless and wonderful invention.

Not screened since its first appearance over 35 years, this film is a serious addition to the canon of British eccentricity. Jazz musician and art historian George Melly teases out James' unique character as only a fellow member of the rarefied clan could. The film includes footage of Leonora Carrington, the great surrealist artist, as she smokes, drinks and laughs at a gathering and working in her studio on a drawing.

Edward James​ was charming, eccentric, generous and immensely wealthy. For most of his life, his greatest talent was placing himself in interesting situations, often having used his wealth to make them happen. In 1931, he was the first to publish John Betjeman, who had been a fellow student at Oxford. In 1933 he financed the final collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. When Salvador Dalí was nearly suffocated by the diving suit he wore to the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, it was James who prised it off with a billiard cue. The back of his head features twice – once in the mirror – in René Magritte’s Not to Be Reproduced (one of Magritte’s most reproduced works). In 1937 he bought in advance everything Dalí painted that year, a gesture that, unlike most of his patronage, increased his net worth considerably.

James wrote poetry, some of which he had privately printed, but for the first half of his life he mostly produced, published and facilitated the work of others. It was not until the 1960s, in Mexico, that he began work on his enduring creation: a surrealist sculpture park in the jungle-covered hills of Xilitla above the Gulf coast. Over the next two decades, he expanded it to fill a twenty-acre valley around a cascade of waterfalls and pools. Las Pozas (‘the pools’) turned out to be the perfect project for someone with a fertile imagination and almost unlimited resources who was far more interested in starting things than finishing them. One structure after another rose among the ferns, magnolias, bromeliads and mango and banana trees: tier on tier of platforms from which sprouted nonsensical concrete shapes and flourishes, wrought-iron gates leading to secret gardens, staircases and bridges leading nowhere. When the limits of gravity were reached, a structure would be abandoned and another begun.

See the entire article on The London Review of Books.

Wild Style (1982)

Wild Style is an American hip hop film directed and produced by Charlie Ahearn. Released theatrically in September 1982 by First Run Features and later re-released for home video by Rhino Home Video, it is regarded as the first hip hop motion picture.

AlphaGo - The Movie | Full Documentary

With more board configurations than there are atoms in the universe, the ancient Chinese game of Go has long been considered a grand challenge for artificial intelligence. On March 9, 2016, the worlds of Go and artificial intelligence collided in South Korea for an extraordinary best-of-five-game competition, coined The DeepMind Challenge Match. Hundreds of millions of people around the world watched as a legendary Go master took on an unproven AI challenger for the first time in history.

Directed by Greg Kohs with an original score by Academy Award nominee, Hauschka, AlphaGo chronicles a journey from the halls of Oxford, through the backstreets of Bordeaux, past the coding terminals of DeepMind in London, and ultimately, to the seven-day tournament in Seoul. As the drama unfolds, more questions emerge: What can artificial intelligence reveal about a 3000-year-old game? What can it teach us about humanity?

Don Cherry Swedish TV Documentary 1978

"It Is Not My Music"

Swedish TV documentary from 1978
Produced and directed by Urban Lasson

This film from 1978 is about Don and Moki Cherry and others who lived with them in the school house in Tågarp, Skåne, Sweden, in the 1970s and onwards. It includes sequences from SoHo, New York, and Moki Cherry’s textiles on the walls in Hästveda and Long Island City.

with Rashied Ali, James Blood Ulmer, Nana Vasconcelos, Denis Charles, Huss Charles, etc

A Conversation with Bertrand Russell (1952)

Romney Wheeler interviews British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic Bertrand Russell (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) at Russell's home in Surrey, England.

Russel speaks about his work and thought, his life, including revelations about his grandfather, who was John Russell, 1st Earl Russell. He had been British Prime Minister 1846–1852, and 1865–1866 during the early Victorian era. Russell had a 90-minute meeting with Napoleon in December 1814 during the former emperor's exile at Elba. Bertrand was raised by his grandparents Bertrand was 4 years old when his parents died, his mother of diphtheria and his father of bronchitis in 1876. In his will, Bertrand's father John Russell, Viscount Amberley named Douglas Spalding and T. J. Cobden-Sanderson as Frank and Bertrand's guardians, not wishing his children to be raised as Christians, but Lord and Lady Russell successfully contested the stipulation and assumed full guardianship. The deeply pious Lady Russell, notwithstanding her undoubted disapproval of its content, made sure that her son's book "An Analysis of Religious Belief" was published a month after his death. Both Amberley's sons eventually succeeded to the earldom.

John Stuart Mill was Russell's secular godfather. But Mill died when Bertrand was 2 years old. His grandfather died in 1878, and was remembered by Russell as a kindly old man in a wheelchair. His grandmother, the Countess Russell (née Lady Frances Elliot), was the dominant family figure for the rest of Russell's childhood and youth.

Russell's adolescence was very lonely, and he often contemplated suicide. He remarked in his autobiography that his keenest interests were in "nature and books and (later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency;" only his wish to know more mathematics kept him from suicide. He was educated at home by a series of tutors. When Russell was eleven years old, his brother Frank introduced him to the work of Euclid, which he described in his autobiography as "one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love."

During these formative years he also discovered the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Russell wrote: "I spent all my spare time reading him, and learning him by heart, knowing no one to whom I could speak of what I thought or felt, I used to reflect how wonderful it would have been to know Shelley, and to wonder whether I should meet any live human being with whom I should feel so much sympathy." Russell claimed that beginning at age 15, he spent considerable time thinking about the validity of Christian religious dogma, which he found very unconvincing. At this age, he came to the conclusion that there is no free will and, two years later, that there is no life after death. Finally, at the age of 18, after reading Mill's Autobiography, he abandoned the "First Cause" argument and became an atheist.

Gandhi (1982)

Gandhi is a 1982 epic historical drama film based on the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the leader of India's non-violent, non-cooperative independence movement against the United Kingdom's rule of the country during the 20th century. The film, a British-Indian co-production, was written by John Briley and produced and directed by Richard Attenborough. It stars Ben Kingsley in the title role.

The film covers Gandhi's life from a defining moment in 1893, as he is thrown off a South African train for being in a whites-only compartment, and concludes with his assassination and funeral in 1948. Although a practising Hindu, Gandhi's embracing of other faiths, particularly Christianity and Islam, is also depicted.

Divine Waters (1981)

This hard to find documentary by Vito Zagarrio focuses on the careers of influential partners in filth, John Waters and Divine. Includes lengthy interviews with John's parents and sister, Edith Massey treats us to two songs ('Punks, Get off the Grass' and 'Fever'), as well as a live performance of Divine performing his own song, 'Born to be Cheap'. A must see for any John Waters fan.