Above all, White Sun of the Desert celebrates Russian men. Perhaps that is the secret of the film's enduring success and why it is still one of the top five bestselling DVDs in Russia. Ravaged by alcoholism and cursed with plunging life expectancy, Russian men today need reasons to feel good about themselves. Blue-eyed Comrade Sukhov fits the bill. He is the embodiment of Russian macho cool, the sort of guy who serenely lights his cigarette with a smouldering bunch of dynamite. Even in the dramatic final shoot-out on the beach, he remains laconic and unruffled.

This sangfroid appealed to Soviet cosmonauts. Bizarrely, White Sun has become a lucky talisman, ritually watched to this day before each and every launch. Even the recent space tourist Charles Simonyi had to sit through it. "Not bad for a Soviet movie," concluded the Hungarian-born Microsoft billionaire when I called him on his yacht in the Mediterranean. Georgiy Grechko, who made three Soyuz flights and trained with Yuri Gagarin, compares the film to a "tuning fork".

Wild, wild east

Suppose that the film you're watching is a very minimal and abstract show. It doesn't fill the whole of the screen's rectangle with colourful business. What you see is only a single thin line of bright white, with darkness all around. The light beam that projects this line will not have the form of a pyramid. It will be a mere plane, triangular in shape, with its apex at the projector, its base on the screen.

Introduce some smoke, and you'll see it – a thin, flat, sharp-edged dart of light, hovering in space, cutting through the dark. And if the bright line on screen should move or bend or grow, the projected sheet of light will evolve accordingly. Cinema can generate a form of immaterial, kinetic sculpture. These are the basics of the art of Anthony McCall.

British artist Anthony McCall (born 1946) has a cross-disciplinary practice in which film, sculpture, installation, drawing and performance overlap. McCall was a key figure in the avant-garde London Film-makers Co-operative in the 1970s and his earliest films are documents of outdoor performances that were notable for their minimal use of the elements, most notably fire.

After moving to New York in 1973, McCall continued his fire performances and developed his ‘solid light’ film series, conceiving the now-legendary Line Describing a Cone, in 1973. These works are simple projections that strikingly emphasise the sculptural qualities of a beam of light. In darkened, haze-filled rooms, the projections create an illusion of three-dimensional shapes, ellipses, waves and flat planes that gradually expand, contract or sweep through space. In these works, the artist sought to deconstruct cinema by reducing film to its principle components of time and light and removing the screen entirely as the prescribed surface for projection. The works also shift the relationship of the audience to film, as viewers become participants, their bodies intersecting and modifying the transitory forms.

Read a review in The Independent. (Excerpt above)

Serpentine Gallery: Anthony McCall

The essay is in a bad way.

It’s not because essayists have gotten stupider. It’s not because they’ve gotten sloppier. And it is certainly not because they’ve become less anthologized. More anthologies are published now than there have been in decades, indeed in centuries. The Best American Essays series, which began in 1986, has reached 20 volumes. The problem is that these series rot in basements -- when they make it as far as that. I’ve found the run of American Essays in the basement of my local library, where they’ll sit -- with zero date stamps -- until released gratis one fine Sunday morning to a used bookstore that, in turn, will sell them for a buck to a college student who’ll place them next to his dorm bed and dump them in an end-of-semester clean-out.

That is the fate of the essay today.

What’s Wrong With the American Essay

Happy birthday!

Mr. Barzun always sought to be a teacher in the widest possible sense, and his books were directed as much to those outside the walls of academia.

In his memoir of this time, Mr. Barzun quotes Matthew Arnold: "The men of culture are the true apostles of equality. They have a passion . . . for carrying from one end of society to the other the best ideas of their time." Then Mr. Barzun adds: "It is clear in retrospect that not we alone but the mid-century as a whole, particularly in the United States, made a many-sided effort to carry out the Arnoldian mandate. The hope of a collective enjoyment of the best in thought and art was still strong."

Two other posts on Barzun's 100th:

Age of Reason, in The New Yorker
Jacques Barzun at 100 , in The New Criterion

For more, see Barzun 100, a blog dedicated to the celebration of Jacques Barzun's 100th year.

Jacques Barzun Turns 100

Yehudi Menuhin plays Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 5 in G minor.

Yehudi Menuhin plays Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 5

A fervent following is eagerly awaiting the final season of an HBO drama.

No, this story isn't a year old.

While the final hurrah of "The Sopranos" had the weight of a genuine cultural event, the last season of "The Wire" is a more cultish affair.

The longest-running dramatic series on HBO, "The Wire" will enter its fifth and final season Jan. 6.

In certain circles, this is already cause for nail-biting anticipation.

Count mine bitten.

Gritty 'Wire' wrapping up final season

Click through to browse some great photos.

National Geographic International Photography Contest

So the other day I asked: If “good design” is more important than ever, then why is (the basically hideous) MySpace so popular?

MySpace aesthetics revisited

This is the start of a new series, collection of the most inspiring & hard-to-find retro-futuristic graphics. We will try to stay away from the well-known American pulp & book cover illustrations and instead will focus on the artwork from rather unlikely sources: Soviet & Eastern Bloc "popular tech & science" magazines, German, Italian, British fantastic illustrations and promotional literature - all from the Golden Age of Retro-Future (from 1930s to 1970s). Click to enlarge most images.

Rare & Beautiful Vintage Visions of the Future

If you are planning (you should) to go see Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary "Manufactured landscapes", which opened last week in theaters across the US after spending a year mesmerizing film festivals audiences and will soon arrive in Europe, make sure you get there in time, for nothing describes the scale and essence of today's globalized industry more tellingly than the opening scene: a seven-minutes tracking shot of the floor of a boundless Chinese factory, row after row after row of disciplined workers and efficient repetition that Stanley Kubrick could have filmed.

Regarding the repetition, in one scene which observes the manual assembly of circuit breakers, I thought of Michael Haneke and the ping-pong scene from 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. (In the film, this scene runs for around seven minutes.) The opening scene of "Landscapes" brought to mind Jean-Luc Godard's Tout Va Bien, especially the closing scene, consisting of a long tracking shot along the innumerable aisles of check-out counters in a supermarket.

The film is now available on DVD. Amazon says:

Manufactured Landscapes works triple-time as a documentary portrait, a tone poem, and a work of protest.

Ed Burtynsky's beautifully monstrous 'Manufactured landscapes'