2013 top ten, 2: Tom Allen
At the end of every year each of us at Illuminations and at our sister company Illuminations Films contributes a top ten of cultural highlights of the year.
We run these through this holiday period, with the second contribution today from Tom Allen who is a recent recruit to the marketing team. As with most of these offerings, his ten is in no particular order.
1. Persona
“Nicholas Ray is cinema,” Jean-Luc Godard said of the great American director. That’s kind of how I feel about Ingmar Bergman after watching Persona (1966). OK, so that’s the feeling I get from watching most Bergman, but Persona is different, not least because watching Persona is watching a director at the very height of his powers. There are few films that I might describe as perfect, but Persona may well be one.
2. Skyrim
It was a toss up between Skyrim or Farcry 3 of the computer games that I have most enjoyed playing for the first time this year. Skyrim edges it, inasmuch as Farcry 3 is using Skyrim as a benchmark, and whilst Farcry 3 attempts to do some interesting things narrative-wise (shades of Heart of Darkness), it does fail in the attempt. Skyrim on the other hand, whilst failing in a different way with the narrative, makes up for this fact by the scale of the game.
Like any great work of fantasy, world building is key; and what a world Bethesda have created. It’s a credit to the game that the main story is only a minor part of the player’s experience, as it encourages the player to delve into this world with a vast array of sub-missions which are never repetitive. This is the equivalent of reading the appendices of Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillon and actually enjoying them. I started playing it at the beginning of the year and I’ve still not completed it and, if I’m honest, part of me doesn’t want to.
3. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
I had decided to re-read Kafka this year and in my secondary reading on him I encountered for the first time Deluze and Guattari’s slim and wonderful book. Deleuze and Guattari want to overturn the idea of Kafka as a dour theologian of the negative. Instead they read Kafka as a writer of affirmative becoming, which harks back to D&G’s theory of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus. But through Kafka they also develop the idea of minority literature of which Kafka is the preeminent writer, but which for them also includes Samuel Beckett. Becoming-minor is an ontological category that implies a primary term, but is not subservient to it, indeed it’s only by becoming-minor that one gains true freedom according to Deleuze and Guattari. Thus becoming-minor is an ethical and political act.
4. Karl-Marx-Allee
One of the themes of Owen Hatherley’s work is that architecture serves as beacons of lost or forgotten utopias. Hatherley’s prime example is brutalism, in particular Park Hill in Sheffield, but he could be describing Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin, albeit speaking of a socialist, rather social democrat lost future. I certainly had this feeling walking down the street. It’s radically different to the new buildings that have gone up since the wall came down and is quite different to those found in the former DDR! It is spectacular, the sheer scale of the buildings is jaw dropping.
5. The burgers at The Bird in Berlin
Not the best burger I’ve ever had (that is reserved for Ferg burger in New Zealand), but my god this was a good burger. Everything was just about perfect, but instead of burger buns they use English muffins. Seriously, it’s a stroke of genius, especially as the burger patties are far to big for the muffins themselves and so spill out from between the two pieces of bread. In the best way possible, you understand. Second best burger I’ve had, ever.
6. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
If Ulysses is a novel of affirmation, of saying ‘yes’ to life despite it all, Giovanni’s Room is a novel about a retreat from it. The novel starts with David, known as ‘Butch’, an American thinking back on his relationship with Giovanni who is to be executed in the morning. Whilst the overarching themes are bleak, the novel is deeply moving in its depictions of David’s coming to terms with his homosexuality and his feelings for Giovanni.
7. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Duchess Theatre
Brecht’s play on the rise of Adolf Hitler transposed to depression-era Chicago is one of his finest and in this production Henry Goodman in the title role was simply magnificent. Goodman’s portrayal of Ui’s transformation from pathetic petty criminal to a vision of the Fuhrer was both hilarious (I honestly have not laughed so much in a theatre) and terrifying.
8. Georges Bataille
I’m including Georges Bataille as my ‘discovery’ of a great thinker, having read both The Story of the Eye and the collection of his essays Visions of Excess for the first time this year. Like his friend Maurice Blanchot he is a tremendously influential thinker for post-war French philosophy (almost all the major figures have written on him) and for justifiable reasons. Bataille’s concept of base materialism prefigures Derrida’s deconstruction as that element which disturbs and disrupts an apparent stable binary opposition. At the same time The Story of the Eye is one of the most unsettling novels I have read in a long time.
9. Jack Wilshere’s goal against Norwich
What is the verb to create a gif? Giffing? Regardless, internet users have giffed (is someone who makes gifs, a giffer?) this sublime goal and so I have lost count as to how many times I’ve watched it – but it doesn’t get old. One touch passing, the volleyed shot, the fact that the Norwich defenders are left absolutely flat-footed as Wilshere receives Giroud’s return pass. I don’t even like to refer to it as Wilshere’s goal. Given all the parts in the build up, it is undoubtedly an Arsenal goal. Whatever happens this season (I’m writing this the day before the Chelsea game) moments like this are the reason I watch football. Of course if we (that is, Arsenal) can win something this season then I’ll already have a cultural highlight of 2014.
10. Richard II, Barbican
I have a sneaking suspicion that John Wyver may have put this Royal Shakespeare Company production on his top ten list. [John: my list is still to come, but it was on Linda’s list.] I am sure he would be much better than me in describing this production, so I’ll refrain from doing so. What I will say is that I put off composing this list until I had gone to see it wondering whether it really was that good. And yes, it was.
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