Byron (2003)

Byron is a British television film based on the adult life of English poet Lord Byron. Written by Nick Dear and directed by Julian Farino, it features Jonny Lee Miller in the title role alongside Vanessa Redgrave who portrays Lady Melbourne. It was first aired by the BBC in two, 75 minute parts in September 2003.

Part 1: The Summer of a Dormouse

Part 2: The Eloquence of Action"

Writer: Nick Dear

Director: Julian Farino

Executive producers: Laura Mackie, Hilary Salmon & Andrea Miller

Producer: Ruth Baumgarten

Production company: BBC

Original network: BBC Two

Be Here To Love Me - A Film About Townes Van Zandt (2004)

Directed by Margaret Brown, Be Here To Love Me chronicles the often turbulent life of American singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. The film includes interviews of Van Zandt's immediate family and contemporaries such as Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle and Guy Clark, along with "home movies, old TV performances and, especially, mid-Seventies footage originally filmed by James Szalapski for his outlaw country documentary Heartworn Highways.

Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg

Anita Pallenberg (6 April 1942 – 13 June 2017) was an Italian-German film actress, artist, and model. A style icon and "It Girl" of the 1960s and 1970s, Pallenberg was credited as the muse of the Rolling Stones: she was the romantic partner of the Rolling Stones founder, multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, and later, from 1967 to 1980, the partner of Stones guitarist Keith Richards, with whom she had three children.

Pallenberg appeared in over a dozen films over a 40-year span. One of her first appearances was as the Great Tyrant in Roger Vadim's science fiction film Barbarella (1968); however, the character's actual voice was dubbed by Joan Greenwood. She played the sleeper wife of Michel Piccoli in Dillinger Is Dead (1969), directed by Marco Ferreri. Pallenberg also had roles in the German crime thriller A Degree of Murder (1967), which featured music composed by Brian Jones; the cult film Candy (1968) as James Coburn's possessive nurse; Volker Schlöndorff's Michael Kohlhaas – Der Rebell (1969), which was filmed in Slovakia; and the avant-garde Performance (1970), in which she played the role of Pherber. Performance was shot in 1968, but a nervous studio delayed its release.

Pallenberg appeared in a documentary about the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (1968), directed by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. In an interview she gave The Independent, which published it on 16 March 2007, she related her encounters in Rome while La Dolce Vita (1960) was being filmed, with its director Federico Fellini, other filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and with the novelist Alberto Moravia.

In 1985, for the video of "Wild Boys," Duran Duran used a clip of Pallenberg from Barbarella. She portrayed "The Queen" in the comedy-drama Mister Lonely by Harmony Korine, and played a character named Sin in Go Go Tales (both 2007).

In the 1990s, Pallenberg returned to education to study fashion. She graduated from Central Saint Martins in London in 1994 with a fashion and textile degree. However, she decided not to forge ahead with a career in fashion, finding it too cutthroat and cruel.

Pallenberg has been portrayed several times by other performers. Monet Mazur played a young Pallenberg in the film Stoned (2005), a biographical film about the last year of Brian Jones's life, while the NBC television show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (2006) included a story arc in which the character Harriet Hayes was hired to play Pallenberg in a film.

Pallenberg's burgeoning relationship with Jones encouraged him to experiment musically in their 1966 album Aftermath, while her intelligence and sophistication both intimidated and elicited envy from the other Stones. Pallenberg played an unusual role in the male-dominated world of rock music in the late 1960s, with Jagger respecting her opinion enough for tracks on Beggars Banquet to be remixed after she criticised them. In the 2002 compilation release of Forty Licks, Pallenberg is credited as singing background vocals on "Sympathy for the Devil".

Tony Sanchez's account of his time as Richards's bodyguard and drug dealer mentions Pallenberg's spiritual practices: "She was obsessed with black magic and began to carry a string of garlic with her everywhere—even to bed." Sanchez goes on to describe Pallenberg as having been "like a life-force, a woman so powerful, so full of strength and determination that men came to lean on her".

Jo Bergman, who was the band's personal assistant from 1967 to 1973, said of Pallenberg: "Anita is a Rolling Stone. She, Mick, Keith and Brian were the Rolling Stones. Her influence has been profound. She keeps things crazy."

In the 1977 Toronto heroin arrest, Pallenberg pled guilty to marijuana possession and was convicted and fined several weeks after Richards' arrest.

Pallenberg was a friend of singer Marianne Faithfull, Jagger's girlfriend in the late 1960s. They appeared together in the fourth series (2001) of the BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous in episode four, "Donkey", with Faithfull playing God and Pallenberg the Devil.

Pallenberg died on 13 June 2017, aged 75, due to complications from hepatitis C.

This films is based on an autobiographical manuscript titled Black Magic discovered by Pallenberg's children after her death in 2017.

Cick on the above image for the full film.

Harry Smith: American Magus

 

A documentary about the brilliant and versatile cult figure Harry Smith (1923-1991) – compiler of a famous three-part folk album, film-maker, painter, anthropologist, obsessive collector and thinker.
The films, paintings, and recordings of Harry Smith pay tribute to his genius. Filmmaking, painting, anthropology, musicology, and the occult. His knowledge of each was encyclopedic and firsthand. As might befit a man of such varied interests, his circles of friends were large and, for the most part, wholly independent. This film demonstrates how differently Smith appeared to friends from each circle, offering personal recollections that present a multidimensional, largely contradictory picture of the man. Together with artwork, the interviews director Paola Igliori conducted with such friends as William Breeze, Robert Frank, John Cohen, Jonas Mekas, and Allen Ginsberg make up a sizable portion of the film.

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.

Paul Bowles-An American in Tangier (1993)

Paul Bowles-An American in Tangier (1993)

Paul Frederic Bowles (/boʊlz/; December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with Tangier, Morocco where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life.

 Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making several trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for theatrical productions, as well as other compositions.

He achieved critical and popular success with his first novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, at that time in the Tangier International Zone, and his wife Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was Bowles' home for the remainder of his life.

He came to symbolize American immigrants in the city. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried near family graves in Lakemont Cemetery, in upstate New York.

Leonora Carrington - The Lost Surrealist

Leonora Carrington was one of the most prolific members of the Surrealist movement. After rejecting her upper-class upbringing in northern England, Carrington embarked upon a relationship with Surrealist artist Max Ernst, and became central in the Surrealist circles of France and New York. 

After hanging out with celebrated names such as Andre Breton and Pablo Picasso, the artist then moved to Mexico where she spend the rest of her life painting, as well as making sculpture, tapestry, writing poetry and designing for theatre and film.

Coleridge: One of the Greatest Biographies of the Century - Darker Reflections (1999)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (/ˈkoʊləˌrɪdʒ/; 21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence on Emerson and American transcendentalism.

Throughout his adult life Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, which had not been defined during his lifetime. He was physically unhealthy, which may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction.

Between 1810 and 1820, Coleridge gave a series of lectures in London and Bristol – those on Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright as a model for contemporary writers. Much of Coleridge's reputation as a literary critic is founded on the lectures that he undertook in the winter of 1810–11, which were sponsored by the Philosophical Institution and given at Scot's Corporation Hall off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street. These lectures were heralded in the prospectus as "A Course of Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry." Coleridge's ill-health, opium-addiction problems, and somewhat unstable personality meant that all his lectures were plagued with problems of delays and a general irregularity of quality from one lecture to the next. As a result of these factors, Coleridge often failed to prepare anything but the loosest set of notes for his lectures and regularly entered into extremely long digressions which his audiences found difficult to follow. However, it was the lecture on Hamlet given on 2 January 1812 that was considered the best and has influenced Hamlet studies ever since. Before Coleridge, Hamlet was often denigrated and belittled by critics from Voltaire to Dr. Johnson. Coleridge rescued the play's reputation, and his thoughts on it are often still published as supplements to the text.

In August 1814, Coleridge was approached by Lord Byron's publisher, John Murray, about the possibility of translating Goethe's classic Faust (1808). Coleridge was regarded by many as the greatest living writer on the demonic and he accepted the commission, only to abandon work on it after six weeks. Until recently, scholars were in agreement that Coleridge never returned to the project, despite Goethe's own belief in the 1820s that he had in fact completed a long translation of the work. In September 2007, Oxford University Press sparked a heated scholarly controversy by publishing an English translation of Goethe's work that purported to be Coleridge's long-lost masterpiece (the text in question first appeared anonymously in 1821).

In April 1816, Coleridge, with his addiction worsening, his spirits depressed, and his family alienated, took residence in the Highgate homes, then just north of London, of the physician James Gillman, first at South Grove and later at the nearby The Grove. It is unclear whether his growing use of opium (and the brandy in which it was dissolved) was a symptom or a cause of his growing depression. Gillman was partially successful in controlling the poet's addiction. Coleridge remained in Highgate for the rest of his life, and the house became a place of literary pilgrimage for writers including Carlyle and Emerson.

In Gillman's home, Coleridge finished his major prose work, the Biographia Literaria (mostly drafted in 1815, and finished in 1817), a volume composed of 23 chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. He composed a considerable amount of poetry, of variable quality. He published other writings while he was living at the Gillman homes, notably the Lay Sermons of 1816 and 1817, Sibylline Leaves (1817), Hush (1820), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830). He also produced essays published shortly after his death, such as Essay on Faith (1838) and Confessions Of An Inquiring Spirit (1840). A number of his followers were central to the Oxford Movement, and his religious writings profoundly shaped Anglicanism in the mid nineteenth century.
Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834 (1999) by Richard Holmes is the second volume of the widely celebrated biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It Chronicles his final 30 years—including his travels in the Mediterranean, his opium addiction, and his literary rebirth as a philosopher and critic.The biography rescues Coleridge from the stereotype of an "opium addict" and paints a highly empathetic, brilliant, and complex portrait of the Romantic poet’s later life. You can find purchasing details and reader reviews on Amazon or check digital availability on the Internet Archive.
“Almost unfairly gifted both as a writer of living, luminous prose and as a tireless researcher” (Time), Richard Holmes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a knight in the Order of the British Empire. He is best known for his biographies of Romanticism’s leading figures, including The Age of Wonder, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Royal Society Prize. This Long Pursuit is a meditation on the art of biography that fuses the author’s own story as a biographer with a history of the genre that reveals how it expresses both fiction and fact.

Hetty MacLise 1931-2011

Hetty MacLise (pictured right with her late husband Angus) speaks about ironing and 'those ghastly catalogues' in this video from 2007.

Hetty had a much greater story to tell. She was literally at the centre of the American avant gárde in the late 1960s and early 1970s as an artist, musician, poet and muse. She inscribed a brief memoir of the time on a blog that was updated in 2008 and 2009; http://www.phantomlyoracula.com/ -  from living with The Grateful Dead, performing in the underground art music scene of the time, early work with tape recorders, as a staff artist on The San Francisco Oracle (as Hetty McGee), traveling to India, Nepal, London and all over the USA and Canada, to the communes, city collective, working with the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol and as a mother to a recognized incarnate tulku lama. You can download a PDF of the full 73 pages of writing by Hetty about her life. There is music featuring Hetty here (along with her husband Angus (1938-1979). Hetty died in London on the 10th June 2011, aged 80.

Hetty played organ, tampura, and other instruments in the Universal Mutant Repertory Company, which played psychedelic drone trance music with an Indian flavor. One track by the Universal Mutant Repertory Company, "Heavenly Blue Pt. 4 & 5," appears in The Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda, a collection of musical endeavors in which Angus MacLise participated between 1968 and 1972. The 39-minute title piece, a live improvisation while Ira Cohen's Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda film played at St. Mark's Church in New York. It is not explicitly credited to the Universal Mutant Repertory Company, but the five musicians listed, including the MacLises, are the ones that comprised that group. The MacLise's work has made them bona fide legends among vintage psychedelia enthusiasts! Hetty and Angus produced a magickal child, a son by the name of Ossian. The couple moved to Kathmandu, Nepal where Ossian was later 100% recognized as a Tulku (an incarnation of Sang gyes Nienpa Trulku Rinpoche) at the Swayambu Buddhist Monestary by His Holiness, The Gyalwa Karmapa! A Tulku "literally means, an emanation body; a term used for the incarnations of Buddhas, Arya Bodhisattvas and Bodhisattvas, as well as for the reincarnations of spiritually achieved practitioners or Lamas"


Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda
Film by Ira Cohen. (1935-2011)

Little Ashes (2008)

A romantic adaptation of the friendship and love between Salvador Dali and Fredrico Garcia Lorca.  

Donald Cammell - The Ultimate Performance (1998)

Donald Seton Cammell (17 January 1934 – April 1996) was born in Edinburgh on 17 January 1934 into a formerly wealthy family that had lost its considerable fortune in the crash of 1929. A precocious boy, he obtained a scholarship to the Royal Academy and after further studies in Florence successfully set himself up as a portrait artist in London in the early 1950s.

By the mid 1960s he had given up painting to concentrate on filmmaking. His first two scripts, The Touchables (d. Robert Freeman, 1968) and Duffy (d. Robert Parrish, 1968), combine crime and hippies to unremarkable effect (The Touchables was re-written by Ian La Frenais). Cammell decided to try the same formula again in his next script, but to preserve his work insisted on directing as well. His agent, the aspiring producer Sandy Lieberson, paired him with cinematographer Nicolas Roeg as co-directors of Performance. The film brilliantly melds the narcissistic glamour of London's East End gangsters and the late '60s rock star phenomenon, but its mixture of homoeroticism, violence and rock music so alarmed its backers that it sat on the shelf for over a year before its release in 1970. The final version, completed without Roeg in Los Angeles by Cammell and editor Frank Mazzola, is a rich, sophisticated and stimulating work, elliptically shot and magnificently 'performed' by its stars James Fox and Mick Jagger. The themes of masculinity in crisis, sexuality, death and rebirth, transformation and extreme violence would re-appear throughout the rest of the films Cammell directed, all of which were made in America.

After a number of false starts, Cammell accepted an offer from MGM to direct Demon Seed (US, 1977), a science fiction horror story about a supercomputer that imprisons the wife of its creator inside their home so as to make her bear its child. Although eventually taken out his hands, its lurid premise (from a novel by Dean Koontz) is offset by a strong performance from Julie Christie and a kinetic 'shock' finale that has an emotional ambiguity reminiscent of the ending of Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (US, 1968). Cammell subsequently wrote a number of scripts, spending a long and fruitless period collaborating with Marlon Brando on Jericho, a project that was never made. The only one of his films over which he maintained complete control was White of the Eye (US, 1987), co-written with his wife China Kong, a sympathetic look at a homicidal psychopath featuring an uncompromising performance by David Keith as the misogynist killer.

Wild Side (US, 1995), Cammell's last film, was first released in a version heavily re-edited by its production company, but was eventually returned to an approximation of his original intentions by Kong and Mazzola and re-released as Donald Cammell's Wild Side (2000). With its original non-linear structure restored, this version closely resembles Performance in its fragmentary editing style - full of flashbacks and flash-forwards - and in its candid and exhilarating sex scenes. A true visionary, Cammell sadly only completed four films as a director before committing suicide at his home in Los Angeles in 1996.

Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998)

Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon is a 1998 film made for television by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It was written and directed by John Maybury and stars Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, and Tilda Swinton.

A biography of painter Francis Bacon (Jacobi), it concentrates on his strained relationship with George Dyer (Craig), a small time thief. The film draws heavily on the authorised biography of Bacon, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon by Daniel Farson, and is dedicated to him.

The film won three awards at the Edinburgh International Film Festival: Best New British Feature (director John Maybury) and two Best British Performance awards, one for Jacobi and, the other for future James Bond actor, Craig. The film was also screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.

Francis Bacon (28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992) was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, graphic and emotionally raw imagery. His painterly but abstracted figures typically appear isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon began painting during his early 20s and worked only sporadically until his mid-30s. Unsure of his ability as a painter, he drifted and earned his living as an interior decorator and designer of furniture and rugs. Later, he admitted that his career was delayed because he had spent too long looking for a subject that would sustain his interest. His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion which sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition.

Margaret Thatcher described him as "that man who paints those dreadful pictures"

Pink Floyd Syd Barrett Interviews with Friends (2009)

Nice film that looks at the early career of Roger "Syd" Barrett - Cambridge Autumn 2009 Interviews with friends Richard Jacobs, Sue Unwin, John Watkins, Stephen Pyle, Warren Dosanjh, Diana McKenna, et.al. Made by Alexandros Papathanasiou.

In Search Of The Great Beast 666

Aleister Crowley, self proclaimed "The Great Beast" and known by the sensationalist press as "The Wickedest Man in the World", was perhaps the most controversial and notorious individuals in early 20th century England. This dramatically reconstructed film unearths the barely believable and shocking facts surrounding a man who was voted in a BBC poll to be one of the most influential Britons of all time. Was he related to US President George Bush? How was he connected to the founder of Scientology, NASA, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jack the Ripper, Winston Churchill, Ian Fleming and how did this Occultist, Spy, Poet, Writer and accomplished Mountaineer come to know and influence so many other remarkable people?

In Search Of The Great Beast 666 - Aleister Crowley

Featuring the Voice of Joss Ackland and Music Score by Rick Wakeman

As I posted this entry, my blog statistics come up as:

56666 pageviews - 881 posts, last published on Apr 22, 2013

A Conversation with Ingmar Bergman (1971)

Cavett’s wide-ranging, 60 minute interview comes in six parts. Part 1 appears above. The remaining clips are here: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.

Ernst Ingmar Bergman (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈɪŋmar ˈbærjman] ( listen); 14 July 1918 – 30 July 2007) was a Swedish director, writer and producer for film, stage and television. Described by Woody Allen as "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera", he is recognized as one of the most accomplished and influential film directors of all time.

The Fall - The Wonderful And Frightening World Of Mark E. Smith

A 1-hour Documentary looking at the Manchester post-punk group and its infamous leader Mark E Smith. The Film follows the current band recording their final Session for the John Peel Show (they were his favourite group and recorded more sessions than any other band) as well as chronicling the chaotic history of the band & its numerous line-up changes. Featuring John Peel, Stewart Lee, Marc 'Lard' Riley alongside The Fall.

Sebastian Horsley on Dandyism

"It's just a joke, life,” Sebastian explains. “It's a whole joke. And given that life is absurd, given that it's pointless, given that it's meaningless; to mirror it with an absurdist dance is in many ways taking up a real position. Dandyism is a ghost dance in the face of defeat.” He grins. “That's a good sentence.”

George Steiner

Part One Part Two

An interview with the literary critic and writer George Steiner on his life and work, made in 2007. For a higher quality (downloadable) version, and many video interviews of others, please see www.alanmacfarlane.com

Professor George Steiner was born in Paris on 23 April 1929. His family moved to the United States in 1940 and he was educated at the Universities of Paris, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. He was a member of the editorial staff at The Economist in London during the 1950s before beginning an academic career as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in 1956. He was appointed Gauss Lecturer at Princeton in 1959. He has been a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, since 1961 and was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva between 1974 and 1994.

Professor Steiner has held visiting professorships at Yale, New York University, the University of Geneva and Oxford University. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary fellow of Balliol College Oxford, and has been awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French Government and the King Albert Medal by the Royal Belgian Academy. He received the Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature in 1998 and in the same year was elected Fellow of the British Academy. 

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Revealed

June 24 (Bloomberg) -- "Bloomberg Game Changers" profiles Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive officer of Facebook Inc. and one of the world's youngest billionaires. This program includes interviews with Tyler Winklevoss, Cameron Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, who accused Zuckerberg of stealing their idea for the social-networking website. On June 23, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss said they won't ask the U.S. Supreme Court to undo a settlement of their claims. (Source: Bloomberg)

Keith Richards at New York Public Library

Stones Guitarist Keith Richards Talks About 'Life'
The New York Public Library