Reminds me of the sports-car view of early morning Paris in C’etait un Rendezvous, but with a stronger sense of imminent death. The dog cameo is brilliant, and I swear about halfway through you can actually hear the rider chuckle.

Via Film Ficciones.

Bad Things That Could Happen from This Is It on Vimeo.

Via Dom, who is off to Portland in a couple of weeks. Good luck Dom!

Working in the performing arts means giving birth every time. My job is to provide a context within which the audience will receive a work of art. A creative role, not an interpretive one.

It’s a Faustian job. Being a director requires arrogance. No one tells you as a child that you’re going to be a director, you have to decide on it for yourself and then convince everyone else. A duality of self-love and self-loathing – the desire to make something better than ourselves, wrapped up with the urge to destroy.

When someone offers you thousands of Euros and hundreds of people to help you build a world it’s a responsibility and an opportunity. The temptation to play God is enormous, but it must be resisted. Build the world with those people, and give the audience maximum responsibility to enter and respond to the work.

Without an audience, a work of art is nothing. You can have the most perfect dress rehearsal, but if only the director is there to witness it then it hasn’t really happened. The perception amplifies the work. Everyone understands his own response to the work; you contribute to the living thing. You don’t need an education or programme notes in order to receive a work of art, you just need to encounter it.

The arts in the UK are blighted with fearfulness, conservatism, reactionary ordinariness. Our job is to build a more exciting, bolder future than the past has been. There is no such thing as tradition. The earth never stops moving. Stasis is a delusion. Be open to changeability.

Ivory tower syndrome. Opera companies and universities alike can become sealed units. Get a life, get out more. Too often community outreach happens in a separate sphere, with no impact on the work. The art itself is sealed off.

The hijacking of art for prestige. Take pride in our people, not our institutions. Rather than devoting our resources to consultants and PR and bid-writing, lets put that effort into making life in this city worthwhile. This constant desire for approval is cheapening.

Hand over the future, don’t hang onto the past.

Sort of reminded me of ‘The Day of the Premiere of Close Up’, with Nanni Moretti losing sleep over the box-office reception for a Kiarostami film. (On youtube, but only in Italian I’m afraid.) And on a similar tack, in this article Mark Cousins talks about showing ‘The Red Balloon’ to hordes of kids in northern Iraq when filming his documentary The First Movie.

A gentle nudge from Jim himself has reminded me that I was going to tell you about Dummy Jim. This is a mooted feature film by Edinburgh-based filmmaker Matt Hulse, who regular Flatpack-goers may remember from his all-enveloping Audible Picture Show and the mysterious Harrachov Exchange. The film is based on the journals of James Duthie, a profoundly deaf Scotsman who cycled to the Arctic Circle in 1951, and this snazzy online portfolio includes a wealth of gubbins relating to his tale including cine footage, thought-provoking homilies (’Never let your sorrows rise higher than your knees’) and cake recipes. There are also details on how you can contribute to the production yourself.