Nwll Magazine

Nº 001 Nov. 2015

Nwll.

‘Carol’

Forbidden Romance

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Contents.

Nwll. featured.

Todd Haynes has adapted Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian-romance novel, The Price of Salt. And he’s taken what was once a taboo love story and has allowed it to speak to us with a directness and clarity that would have been hard to imagine more than six decades ago.

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Reviews.

3 Amy: ‘Piercingly Sad’

5 Classic Reviews: Blade Runner

Featured.

6 ‘Carol’ Explores the

Science of Magnetism.

10 The directors talk about ‘Ich Seh, Ich Seh’

Opinion

9 Annie Hall: the funniest

screenplay ever written

18 Film is still not dead afterall

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Music 14 Life in the vivid dream with the ultimate goddess: Grimes.

16 True Myth: A

Conversation With Sufjan Stevens.

Art 12 Jenny Holzer: drawn to the dark side.

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Reviews.

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Amy: Heartbreaking & Extraordinary Documentary Asif Kapadia’s controversial Amy Winehouse documentary eschews sensation and talking heads in favour of heartbreaking footage and difficult questions. it chronicled Winehouse’s turbulent and brief life, walks a thin line between insight and exploitation.

Raúl Rodríguez / David Mahoney

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owards the end of her short life, Amy Winehouse’s last single, Love is a Losing Game, sounded like a private lament – as if you were spying on her raking the embers of a lost relationship.

But in Amy, Asif Kapadia’s documentary about the singer’s life and death, the song seems to bounce back on its singer, turning the lament into an obituary.

“Played out by the band / Love is a losing hand.” “Though I battle blind / Love is a fate resigned.” Though she recorded these couplets in early 2006, at least a year before becoming a global star, there’s an astonishing far-sightedness locked away in them which emerges over the course of

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Reviews. this piercingly sad and honourable film.

Even more than her sky-scraping talent, love was Amy Winehouse’s tragic flaw – love for music, her audience, her father, her husband, and the ritual of performance itself. And in Amy, you often see how that love was variously

Even more than her skyscraping talent, love was Amy Winehouse’s tragic flaw – love for music, her audience, her father, her husband, and the ritual of performance itself. repaid with exploitation and betrayal.

It’s a film that makes you newly angry and sad about losing Winehouse so early – before albums three, four, five and more, before the lifetime achievement awards and glittering retrospectives, the scandalously young boyfriends and croaking Vegas residencies.

But in doing so, it forces you to recognise the sheer selfishness of that anger and sadness. As becomes shatteringly clear, the last thing we should have asked of Winehouse was more.

Kapadia makes you feel that pressure bearing down on her from the start: first lightly, as she sings in dark bars and jazz dens, spewing her soul into the audience’s laps, and then later, when she becomes caught in the machinery of fame, as unbearably as a thumbscrew.

Wrenching: Amy Winehouse is the subject of Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy.

As in the director’s previous documentary about the Formula One driver Ayrton Senna, this entire story is told through archive footage and photographs – though here they are often accompanied by audio interviews with her vampirish exhusband Blake Fielder (formerly FielderCivil), her father Mitch, mother Janis, other family members, and assorted close friends and associates.

Occasionally there are holes in the story, which is simply a drawback of the technique: understandably, no one wants to implicate themselves in Winehouse’s original discovery of heroin and crack cocaine, or the decision to keep her on the road when she was at her lowest ebb. But the gaps are largely drowned out by Winehouse’s own voice, which comes roaring back to life through openhearted home-movie conversations with friends, frequently insightful and funny interviews with journalists and on chat shows, and above all in her lyrics.

The songs are key – and Amy makes you realise they always were. Winehouse’s music was intensely autobiographical, and whenever it plays in the film, Kapadia runs the lyrics on screen in handwritten script, quietly drawing attention to the many contact points between her life and art. Stronger Than Me is a wry reflection on a feeble ex-lover, while What Is It About Men? picks over her father’s infidelity during her childhood. (“I felt Amy was over it pretty quick,” Mitch comments later: subtle moments like this make clear just how different the real Winehouse was from the versions that her family, management and fans believed in.)

What is clear, though, both through her father’s own words and the lyrics of the song Rehab, is that he was, for at least a while, a driving force behind keeping her on a lucrative concert tour and away from professional help. (No wonder Mitch, and the Winehouse family by extension, has

noisily disowned the film.) “I ain’t got the time / And if my Daddy thinks I’m fine…”: for a while those were words to live by, and later, words to die by too.

In fact, the most merciless trick in Kapadia’s arsenal is the way in which his film slowly transforms Rehab from a familiar hit record into a self-destructive mantra. It’s the song that signals Winehouse has “made it”, and when we first hear it, it’s accompanied by a lightning storm of flash photography.

But as she repeatedly performs it at gigs and on chat shows, you notice her adding little vocal flourishes, perhaps in an attempt to keep things interesting.

Later, at the series of abortive concerts before her death, the heavy footstep of the opening bars takes on a cortège-like quality.

So it’s perhaps wise that, towards the end of Amy, Kapadia chooses to dwell on something positive: a perfect commemoration of Winehouse’s oncein-a-blue-moon talent. It’s an encounter in Abbey Road Studios between her and Tony Bennett, to record the jazz standard Body and Soul for Bennett’s forthcoming album of duets. Winehouse, now 27 and three months from death, is overawed.

She paces back and forward, hemming and hawing, nerves obviously frayed to thread.

“Don’t worry, I’m the same,” says Bennett, with a crinkled smile: reassured, she breathes deeply, and they sing together, on the last song Winehouse would ever record. And for a few moments she becomes the perfect version of herself: voice low and whisky-rich, eyeshadow thick and feline, black hair bundled up in a cartoonishly beautiful heap.

“My life a wreck you’re making,” she purrs at the microphone. “You know I’m yours for just the taking. I’d gladly surrender myself to you, body and soul.” As last words go, they’re unbeatable.

Reviews.

Classic Reviews Blade Runner: a timeless sci-fi film.

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Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece, back on the big screen in this definitive version, is an overwhelming experience.

Illustration By: Dani Blazquez.

“I

’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”

When making the 2000 documentary On the Edge of Blade Runner, I asked Rutger Hauer why he thought Harrison Ford was so reluctant to talk about what is now considered a timeless sci-fi classic.

“He’s such a dumb character,” Hauer replied mischievously of Ford’s androidhunter Deckard. “He gets a gun put to his head and then he fucks a dish-washer!”

Ford, with his Star Wars cachet, was Blade Runner’s top-line draw, but it’s Hauer’s movie all the way, his shimmering “replicant” providing the tonal touchstone for Ridley Scott’s severally reworked masterpiece. The Dutch actor even contributed his own infinitely quotable couplet to the film’s epochal “tears in rain” scene, a moment as iconic as Casablanca’s “Here’s looking at you, kid”. As for Deckard, the stooge who falls for Sean Young’s artificial charms in rain-

drenched 2019 LA, Scott had his own way of explaining Ford’s robotic performance, a unicorn-themed conceit drawn not from Philip K Dick’s source but born out of a simple miscommunication between screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Peoples.

Having flopped in 1982, Blade Runner took years to find an audience, and to find itself – this “Final Cut” from 2007 supersedes an earlier “Director’s Cut”, cleaning up assorted blips (verbal, visual) in addition to stripping the tacked-on voiceover and dopey “happy ending” which marred the original release. Back on the big screen, Blade Runner remains an overwhelming experience, with Doug Trumbull’s photographic effects and Larry Paull’s production designs melding seamlessly with location shots of downtown LA to create a groundbreaking “retro-fitted” future. Vangelis’s glistening score is all landscape synths, tingling strings and yearning romantic melodies,

while Syd Mead’s vehicles drive the action delightfully. But in the end Hauer’s eyes have it – gazing into a future already lost in the past; shimmering, piercing, undying. It’s vision of the future seems so real and believable while at the same time fantastical. It’s one of the few films that manages to surround you with the atmosphere it creates. ‘Time to die.’

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Featured.

Todd Haynes’ ‘Carol’ is a Forbidden Romance Starring Cate Blanchett & Rooney Mara The director’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Price of Salt’ does justice to the work & then some.

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ho is the heroine of Todd Haynes’s “Carol”? There are two candidates.

One is Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), a wife and mother whom we first espy in a mink coat, and who never really sheds that touch of caressable luxury. The second is Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), who is only just a woman; in the 1952 novel from which the film derives, Patricia Highsmith’s “The Price of Salt,” Therese—pronounced the French way, bien sûr—is nineteen.

Mara’s poise may add a few years, but, nevertheless, a précis might suggest a disturbing tale of maturity preying on youth. Yet that is not what emanates from “Carol.” It feels more like a meeting, or a conflagration, of equals. “Take me to bed,” one says to the other, and the line is both a yielding and a command.

The time is the nineteen-fifties, perhaps the last epoch when, as a moviegoer, you could still believe that some enchanted evening you would see a stranger across a crowded room, and somehow know. The sighting takes place some disenchanted winter day, in Frankenberg’s, a department store in Manhattan, when Therese, a temporary salesgirl in a Santa hat, serves Carol at the peak of the

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Christmas rush. Carol leaves her gloves on the counter—a detail not found in Highsmith but cleverly stitched on by Haynes and his excellent screenwriter, Phyllis Nagy, who make us wonder, at once, whether Carol is being cunning or forgetful. Either way, she gets results.

Therese makes contact; Carol invites her out to lunch, and then to the Aird family home, in New Jersey. Before we know it—almost before they know it—the two women embark on a road trip. Carol’s smooth gray Packard glides along like a boat, as if roads were rivers, and the open country offers space, as New York could not, for the free play of forbidden love.

It’s possible that Carol and Therese might pause at an intersection to let another car, bearing Humbert and Lolita, sweep past.

The marriage of true minds, of course, demands impediment. Why should Haynes return to the patch of history that he visited in “Far from Heaven” (2002)? Because the period guarantees not only high-grade romantic trappings but also the basic thwarting without which romance cannot flower into drama.

If Haynes had updated “The Price of Salt” to the present, our response would have been: big deal. Trade your straight marriage for a same-sex relationship,

Like Thelma and Louise, our heroines are the story of the film. these days, and you will be hailed for your emotional honesty, whereas Highsmith, steeped in crime fiction, needed the creak of danger and the hiss of social disdain.

The film is at its best when it honors that craving for trouble—when Therese, idly picking through Carol’s suitcase and fingering the fabric of the clothes inside, discovers a gun. (Carol fears being trailed.) For an instant, the lovers might be thieves, fleeing a heist or a suspicious death.

But what, in fact, have they left behind?

Well, Therese is abandoning Richard (Jake Lacy), her tepid boyfriend, while Carol is faced with a graver loss. She and her husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler)— somehow, a whole bad marriage is contained in the monosyllabic thud of his name—are already getting divorced as the movie begins, and, once he gathers

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Featured. distributors couldn’t go the extra mile, show the film in AromaRama (first used in 1959), and pump the theatre full of Arpège and Femme de Rochas. In short, we suspected that “Carol,” like “Far from Heaven,” was holding its vision of the past in quotation marks, too chilled by cleverness to bother with our hearts. And guess what? It turns out that, all along, Todd Haynes was in the mood for love.

The league of Tom Hardy fans, whose optic nerves have yet to recover from “Mad Max: Fury Road,” are in luck. “Legend” gives them a double helping of their man.

Hardy plays two parts: Reggie and Ronald Kray, the criminal twins who swaggered through London in the nineteensixties. They were East End bullies who expanded their parish of intimidation to include night clubs in the West End, where lowlifes consorted with the well bred. Reggie was more of a businessman, evidence of what is regarded as his wife’s immoral conduct, he gets custody of their daughter, Rindy (played by Kennedy and Sadie Heim). Here the film stumbles, since we had little sense of Rindy in the first place, and Carol’s maternal agony, such as it is, does not endure. Her coolness, measured out in Blanchett’s every gesture, frosts over with a hint of cruelty. That, I guess, is true to Highsmith, who has scant interest in children or in the panoply of domestic joys, which to her are barely joys at all.

Where “Carol” does part company with the novel is in the testimony of the senses.

Highsmith soaks her prose in a disgust worthy of Graham Greene, starting with an account of lunch at the Frankenberg’s cafeteria (“a grayish slice of roast beef with a ball of mashed potatoes covered with brown gravy”) and scarcely letting up. Haynes, it is fair to say, does not do gravy. He does beauty, and a dread of the unbeautiful sustains his film. Carol tells Harge that, if they go to court, “it gets ugly. We’re not ugly people.” When she first appears in the store, you see at a glance that her hat, her soft scarf, and her nail polish form a chord of coral red, and you realize that a symphonic surge of loveliness is heading your way. So why fight it? Blanchett cocks her cigarette at the perfect angle, pearling our view of her in a faint mist, and the mink coat alone is enough to make animal-rights activists purchase a nice set of steel traps and head for the woods. Highsmith describes a “mob” at the mouth of a subway, “sucked gradually and inevitably down the stairs, like bits of floating waste down a drain,” but the only drain we see onscreen is an iron sewer grate, as delicate as the rood screen of a church, that serves as a backdrop to the opening credits. Even the habitations of trash can be adorned.

There can be something ruthless in this

hunt for style. In order for “Carol” to stay easy on the eye, the director must banish anything that feels maladroit or tough.

The sex could have been feral, a chance to snap the decorum that rules elsewhere, instead of which the bedroom looks as well behaved as a cocktail lounge. And where, pray, is the social mismatch? If Therese were some thrifty guy, toiling in a garage, you could bet that his fling with a rich and jobless dame would be taut with unease; think of Montgomery Clift, in “A Place in the Sun” (1951), shifting from the wrong to the right side of the tracks and finding Elizabeth Taylor. As two gorgeous people, they felt both fused and doomed, while Carol and Therese simply click, and to hell with class. That said, the film is a casting coup, with Blanchett’s inherent languor—plus that low drawl of hers, a breath away from boredom—played off against the perter intelligence of Mara, whose manner, as always, is caught between the alien and the avian. (“What a strange girl you are. Flung out of space,” Carol says to Therese.) Mara pecks at the world, testing it out before taking it on, and, if Haynes can’t resist adding winged liner to the corners of her eyes, thus recreating the young Audrey Hepburn, I don’t blame him.

Like Thelma and Louise, our heroines are the story of the film. Aside from Chandler’s baffled Harge, and a typically strong and witty performance from Sarah Paulson, as Carol’s gay best friend, almost everything else fades from memory, including sequences with lawyers and a meagre subplot about Therese’s ambitions as a photographer. Yet Carol and Therese are enough. The final scene between them—the final gaze—carries extraordinary weight and wields a delicious shock. We have spent the past two hours gasping on cue at the outfits and the jewelry, and asking why the

“Carol,” was holding its vision of the past in quotation marks, too chilled by cleverness to bother with our hearts. It turns out that, all along, Haynes was in the mood for love. though a brute when occasion demanded; Ronnie was a flat-out psychopath, glaring through spectacles with thick black rims along the top, like the bars of a cage.

“Legend,” pummels us into believing that it has a plot, where none exists. The Krays rise and fall, lash out, and rise again, and Helgeland strives to lend shape and purpose to that bestial rote by summoning witnesses. We get the Scotland Yard copper (Christopher Eccleston), who spends obsessive years attempting to nail the brothers, and Frances (Emily Browning), who is dazzled into marrying Reggie, and whose voice-over supplies frequent—and superfluous—reflections on the life of crime. There is something unpleasantly hectoring in the title, which assumes that the Krays were stars of their age. Is that really tenable, fifty years on? Were they genuine overlords or vainglorious goons? As you would expect, Tom Hardy is fearsome to behold.

Opinion.

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Annie Hall: the funniest screenplay ever written?

As the Writer’s Guild of America vote Annie Hall the funniest screenplay ever written, read this appreciation of the film from our archives.

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By: Raúl Rodríguez here’s an old joke,” begins Woody Allen, talking straight to camera. “Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’

The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know; and such small portions.’ Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life – full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.”

According to the Writers Guild of America, these are the opening lines to the funniest screenplay ever written.

In a ballot filled out by thousands of writers, Annie Hall, written by Allen and Marshall Brickman in 1975, was voted the film that made them all laugh the most, beating classics such as Some Like It Hot, Airplane! and The Big Lebowski to top the list of 101 funniest screenplays.

Allen’s film, starring himself and Diane Keaton as a neurotic couple living in Allen’s beloved New York, is often celebrated as a game-changing work by the director. It swept the 1978 Oscars, including best actress for Keaton, best script, best director and best picture.In an interview with the New York Times when

the film was released in 1977, Allen said he had written the film as a comic “stream of consciousness showing one individual’s state of mind, in which conversations and events constantly trigger dreams, fantasies and recollections”.

The film’s bitingly funny and neurotic script boasts some of the most-quoted lines in modern cinema about love and relationships. In one memorable scene, Allen turns to Keaton’s character in bed to say: “That sex was the most fun I’ve ever had without laughing.”

Speaking about the Writers Guild’s decision to name Allen’s film as the funniest ever written, Lowell Peterson,

Not many films stood the test of time, but Annie Hall certainly has. That speaks to the quality of the writing but also the experience of a New Yorker who absorbed the city he loved and described it to the world.

executive director of Writers Guild of America East, said: “I think it’s a combination of Woody’s unique sensibility and his commitment to drama as well as to joke. Annie Hall is the complete screenplay in that sense; it is that sublime intersection between compelling characters, dramatic conflict and great jokes. While it is not the only film of his to combine those things, I think maybe Annie Hall does it best of all.”

Peterson said the votes for Allen’s film proved that both the film-maker’s storylines and his jokes had not dated in the 38 years since the film was released.

“It was released alongside so many other films in the1970s heyday of Hollywood,” he said. “Not many of those films stood the test of time, but Annie Hall certainly has. That speaks to the quality of the writing but also the experience of a New York-based writer who absorbed the city he loved and described it to the world.

“It was a game-changer because the internal lives of these characters became something that could be laughed at in a knowing way, and people could laugh but also recognise themselves in these people.”

Despite the obviously autobiographical elements to the Annie Hall (Allen was in a relationship with Diane Keaton at the time and had been married twice before), he insisted that the film was mostly fiction. Allen did, however, concede that at least one aspect of his own life was reflected in Alvy: “There’s one clear autobiographical fact in the picture,” he said. “I’ve thought about sex since my first intimation of consciousness.’’

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o watch “Goodnight Mommy” is to experience this very nightmare.

The expertly crafted Austrian horror film — originally titled “Ich seh, Ich seh,” which translates to “I See, I See,” a German children’s game — stars a pair of identical twin brothers (Lukas and Elias Schwartz) whose mother (Susanne Wuest) has just undergone facial reconstructive surgery. But the mother who returns to their isolated countryside home is not the same as the mother who left in the first place. Her face is obscured with a haunting bandage, and her personality seems to have changed for the worse. She’s no longer the engaging, warm maternal figure the boys know and love.

Instead, she imbues the entire house with an aura of coldness. She’s detached and indifferent to the boys’ wants and needs.

She exhibits bizarre behaviors, including the apparent rejection of one of the twins, and doesn’t like the same things she did before the surgery. Sometimes, she even seems psychopathic. Who is this haunting simulacrum of a mother?

What begins as an uncanny undercurrent escalates into a twisted dissection of identity, a cat-and-mouse game that finds all parties fearing for their lives. The familiar transmogrifies into the gaping unknown. An atmospheric, tension-laden psychological thriller becomes a brutal horror film that challenges bonafide fans of the genre. With “Goodnight Mommy,” co-directing team Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz have tapped into one of the deepest fears in human relationships: that the person you know and love today may not be the same person tomorrow.

“Lots of children and teenagers experience a moment where they doubt that their parents are really their parents,” added Franz, co-director and Fiala’s aunt.

“It’s like coming of age, confronting who you are and who your parents are.

Lots of children think: Am I adopted?

Can these really be my parents?” Franz herself remembers experiencing this disorienting feeling. As a child, she would falter upon seeing her grandfather with a newly shaven face. But the scariest moment occurred while playing a game of hide-and-seek with her mother. “My mother was covered with a blanket and acting really scary,” Franz remembers.

“I thought: This is a monster now; she’s not my mom. She’s showing her true side and the monster is coming out.” That feeling of breached trust and dissociative identity never left Franz.

One day, Franz and Fiala were watching a reality television show featuring women who volunteer to undergo plastic surgery.

“Moms are separated from the children for a month or two and they get a new mouth, new teeth, new cheekbones, new

Nwll. 11 haircut, and new clothes,” explained Fiala. When the family is reunited, what is positioned to be a magical, musicswelling red carpet moment is subverted by unmistakable horror. “If you look closely at the children, their eyes are horrified,” said Fiala. Franz added: “There was even one moment when a girl grabbed her father’s arm and said, ‘This is not our mother.’”

For Franz and Fialia, this moment was the seed of the story. And how better to tell a story about identity than with a pair of identical twins? “It was quite easy to call schools and ask the principal if there were twins at the school, because every principal knew about them if there were,” said Franz. They called hundreds of pairs of twins into their casting office. It was a surreal experience; in the end, they had “quite a scary collection of twins sitting there,” said Franz. The directors asked each pair of twins to play a game of “I Spy” in front of the camera, but the game proved a moot point because the twins could read one another so well. “They each knew what the other was referring to immediately,” said Franz. The same phenomenon repeated with “Rock, Paper, Scissors.” “We actually also tried this in the movie, but we cut it out because the twins would always pick the same thing.”

Finally, the directors settled on a different audition tactic. “We tied the actors to a chair and told the children, ‘Okay, now this woman has kidnapped your mother, and you have to find out where your mother is,’” said Franz. “We told them you can do whatever you want to find out.” Most of the twins proceeded to yell and scream at the actress in an overblown theatrical manner. But Lukas and Elias Schwartz were calm and discerning, exuding a quiet courage. “We knew instantly that those were the ones,” said Fiala.

Because the violent scenes mostly came together in the editing room, the boys didn’t comprehend the extent of the gore.

At the premiere, the boys’ parents decided

“That’s the power of cinema, that it still works even if you know how it was made. You can’t distance yourself from what you see.” not to let them watch the second half of the movie. “They knew how the scenes were staged, and they remembered that it was kind of boring or ridiculous shooting those scenes,” said Franz. “But even at the beginning, which is not really scary, they were kind of like, ‘It’s not as boring as we imagined.’ That’s the power of cinema, that it still works no matter if you know how it was made. You can’t distance yourself from what you see. It was good that they didn’t see all of the film. I think they would have been really scared.”

According to Fiala, violence in art house horror films is more difficult to pull off than in big-budget slashers. “If you do it in an arthouse film, people tend to run away or say, ‘Why should I watch something like this?’” he said. “But this is a horror film, and a horror film draws you into it and at the same time repulses you.

You say I don’t want to look at this, but you look between your fingers because you want to see it. That’s what’s so great about horror.”

“We like to be challenged by films,” continued Fiala. “We don’t like films to just simply entertain. For us, a film also has to be problematic or unpleasant at the same time. It does something to you, to your body your mind afterwards.”

Art.

Jenny Holzer: drawn to the dark side

Jenny Holzer’s stark, often shocking slogans have graced T-shirts, posters, LEDs and even condoms. As a show of her early work opens, the US artist tells Stuart Jeffries why she’s drawn to dreadful things.

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By: Raúl Rodríguez

ne day, Jenny Holzer saw a picture. It showed a woman with her legs spread, lying in a forest after being raped and murdered. The drawing, by the unflinching German artist Käthe Kollwitz, provoked Holzer to write some text in the voice of an imagined adviser to the attacker. “Crack the pelvis so she lies right. This is a mistake. When she dies you cannot repeat the act. The bones will not grow together again and the personality will not come back.”

Another text, for the same Under a Rock series, read: “Nothing will stop you the mad foreigner. No one sees you walking with a tick tick in your dick. You set a bomb in the Queen City of the big nation to start the war that stops when silence breaks the ears of dead people.” She made these words flash across LED signs and carved them into stone benches. One of the LEDs is at the Sprüth Magers gallery in London for a show called Sophisticated Devices, featuring Holzer’s work from the 1980s, including her collaboration with New York graffiti artist Lady Pink.

In one work, a Holzer slogan howls from Lady Pink’s graffiti through the window to the street beyond: “I am not free because I can be exploded anytime.” It’s characteristic Holzer: text as punchy as a headline, yet confusing to unsuspecting passersby. Inside, there are marble benches inscribed with texts. Visitors seem unsure if they’re permitted to sit on them. Holzer hopes they will. Meanwhile, at Sprüth Magers’s sister gallery in Berlin, Holzer has a show of more recent work

called Endgame. For this, she plundered declassified US war documents, including autopsy reports, FBI emails from Guantánamo and letters from detainees – and meticulously reworked them in paint.

“Having torture seemingly normalised is, I don’t think, a positive thing.

Not enough people have stated that.”

Although two decades separate the work in the two shows, they are surely the work of a politically conscious artist. “On the worst days, I don’t feel like an artist,” laughs Holzer when I put this to her.

“The continuity between this show and the other is tough content. That’s what I gravitate towards.” Where does this dark aesthetic come from? “The desperate things seem to require attention, the lovely things seem to elicit celebration.

If I had to choose, I would go to the awful in the hope that doing something could yield a happier result.”

Holzer, now 61 and living in Hoosick Falls in upstate New York, is perhaps best known for the slogans she put on everything from T-shirts and caps to LEDs

and even condoms in New York in the late 70s and early 80s. In those days, she would skulk around at night putting up posters with texts culled from Karl Marx, Susan Sontag and other intellectuals: “The desire to reproduce is a death wish” was one; “Romantic love was invented to manipulate women” another.

“I would sneak around the morning after I’d pasted them up to see if anybody would stop,” recalls Holzer. “That’s the test of street art – to see if anybody stopped.

People would cross out ones they didn’t like and would star others. I liked that people would engage with them.”

Later, she put up a huge electronic billboard above Times Square that read: “Protect me from what I want.” There’s an endlessly reproduced shot from 1983 of Lady Pink, cigarette in hand, walking down a New York street wearing denim shorts and a singlet inscribed with the Holzer text: “Abuse of power comes as no surprise.” Have you ever worn one of your T-shirts? “No, that would be mortifying.

Shoot me if you ever see me in one.”

Holzer didn’t set out to be a conceptual

Nwll. 13 with other people.” One such project saw her projecting In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself, by Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, on to the Chicago Tribune Tower. She remembers fondly what the poet – who died aged 88 in February – thought of Holzer’s projections. “She watched them scroll over a castle and a river and laughed. She was a good laugher.”

artist who uses text, but rather an abstract painter. “I wanted to be soft like Rothko and ruthless like Ad Reinhardt.” So you were inspired by men not women? “There was a real paucity of role models. When I was a kid, the only artist I knew about was Picasso courtesy of Life magazine. And, as a little female kid in Ohio, it was hard to identify with Picasso: his life with his babes and my life with my cat were rather different.”

We’re chatting amid her flashing LED installations in the gallery’s basement.

Holzer is nursing a broken arm, the result of being smashed into by a cyclist in a park in Paris three weeks ago. Did the cyclist stop? “No, but a nice granny and grandpa hovered over me. Now I’ve got all kinds of metal and garbage in my arm. I’m the most scanned individual at an airport because I’m full of metal.” If only she’d been wearing a T-shirt with the slogan: “Cyclists should not race through parks like sociopathic boneheads.”

Holzer gave up her dream of emulating Rothko and Reinhardt in 1976 when, after a liberal arts education followed by art school, she took part in a study programme at the Whitney Museum in New York. Holzer’s tutor Ron Clark smothered her and her fellow students in texts. “He gave us a wonderful yet absolutely daunting reading list that, happily, I reacted against. I reduced all the reading to one-liners.” Her version of the list, turned into a work called Truisms, features such nuggets as: “A lot of professionals are crackpots.”

Why put these words on posters? “I knew the reading list had genuinely important material and I knew most people in the world wouldn’t read it. So I thought, ‘Maybe I can convey some of the valuable content in an accessible way.’”

In the decades that followed, Holzer developed more sophisticated ways of using text; her work moved from the streets into venerated art institutions, becoming infinitely more distinguished visually. As an example of her painterly sensibility expressing itself through electronic light, she is most proud of her 2001 installation for Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie: amber text scrolled along 13 LEDs 49 metres long that hung below a ceiling of black-painted steel beams, all of this inside Mies van der Rohe’s building. “We managed to turn the air amber – that was my equivalent to the halo in a Rothko.”This installation marked a break in Holzer’s work. From that point on, she would use only other people’s words. “Because I’m a bad writer. I was so relieved to stop, not just for sheer laziness but because I was able to expand what I could do when I work

Holzer also made entire novels scroll across a convention centre in Pittsburgh.

“Computers have big brains, so you can put a lot of stuff up. People who worked there would see something different every day.” Holzer now often projects words on to waves or around the contours of buildings. Why? “This is maybe ridiculously pretentious, but I want it to be a little like song. You know, rise and fall.”

Any suggestion that Holzer has softened politically is confounded by her work since 2004, much of it featured in Endgame. Catalysed by her loathing for war in Iraq and Afghanistan, she studied redacted, declassified documents from the US’s National Security Archive and made silkscreen paintings of the most striking. They include maps used to plan the invasion of Iraq; these look like parodies of US foreign policy but, disturbingly, are the real thing. Big arrows are marked with such words as “Exploit” and “Isolate”. She laughs: “They really did say shock and awe!” In 2010, she started hand-painting copies of some of these documents – why the return to painting after a three-decade layoff? “I wanted to show time and care. I wanted it to be an indicator of sincerity and attention. I wanted it to be human.”

Music.

Life in the vivid dream with the ultimate goddess: Grimes.

Nwll. 15 As she prepares to release Art Angels, we talk climate change, equal pay and medieval Mongolia with the sword-wielding vegan warrior of synthpop, the one and only Grimes.

By: Raúl Rodríguez

I

n her head she imagines herself as The Rock or Vin Diesel (“I wish I was strong and bald but friendly”).

In our heads we see her as a yetto-be-revealed character in Game of Thrones, an oracle bound to lay down her mystical services before the one true queen, Daenerys Targaryen. To the rest of the world however, Claire Elise Boucher is Grimes. Born in the year of the dragon, the 27-year-old Canadian is a mesmerising musician, with hair that has traversed the rainbow before settling on black - for now. She is known and admired for her enchanted synthpop with its perfectly crafted sonic textures and looped ethereal (sometimes backwards and demon-invoking) vocals that take listeners on a mood-altering trip. Not satisfied with audio adventures alone, her self-directed music videos turn dreams of a glittering fantasy future into a REALiTi.

Grimes vibes on protecting the planet too, auctioning her original artwork on eBay to fund a forthcoming environmental publication.

One day, way back when, Grimes was sitting in on the recording of her friend Sean Nicholas Savage’s album, and she was roped into singing backing vocals. “It wasn’t as hard as I thought,” she recalls.

“Then my other friend showed me how to make beats on a 404 in exchange for food.” The Vancouver-born, Montrealraised artist discovered a love of making music and now counts herself “lucky to be successful enough at it to not have to do other things”. Not long into the game, she was asked to support Lykke Li on tour and suddenly found herself performing to thousands of people and forced into conquering her stage fright. Although she’s three albums deep, Grimes wouldn’t advise young people to follow in her

footsteps. “Success in this industry is based on luck, chance and superfluous trends,” she explains. “The world needs doctors and teachers, people who care about things and help humanity in tangible ways.”

After much worldwide speculation, it is now known that the name Grimes was born when the genre popped up as an option on MySpace. She pluralised and adopted the moniker before exploring her namesake online and liking what she found. “I love Dizzee forever!” she says, excitedly. “He’s so creative with his videos. Skepta is a badass too. Bless grime forever.” She’s a particular fan of That’s Not Me: “I like how in the music video, their set-up looks like mine! I feel the vibe.” But as the genre infiltrates other scenes and reaches American shores, Grimes herself is currently listening to the likes of Sinéad O’Connor and Nine

Inch Nails, as well as emerging acts Dollanganger, Tei Shi, Aristophanes, Perfume Genius, Courtney Barnett, Conrad Tao and Shamir. She’s also an unapologetically huge fan of Dolly Parton, and spends her free time tweeting things that we imagine a lot of people have stored in their drafts folder, lacking the balls to hit publish on: “My Valentine’s Day plan is to eat an entire jar of hazelnut butter and work for like 12 hours in a dark room alone,” she admitted back in February. “If I had a dick I would put it in a hot dog bun and take a picture of it haha.” Oh Grimes, you make us lol.

Tapping into a rich and beautiful history, Grimes finds medieval Mongolia hugely inspirational and is currently reading books on the subject by anthropologist Jack Weatherford - books that she describes as “basically like watching Game of Thrones, except that it’s real”.

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Music.

She quickly follows this up by noting that she doesn’t approve of the conquests: “The massacres were definitely bad, but otherwise it was a really cool society.

They had really cool style and the best clothes possible,” she says. “I guess I’m really into medieval warfare in general.

I’m obsessed with European knights too.

I can’t believe people tried to fight with big pieces of cold sharp metal whilst covered in metal themselves.” Like all the best people, Grimes is obsessed with the aforementioned HBO series, and the fantasy fan certainly doesn’t hold back from proclaiming her love.

Having previously adopted the surname Targaryen on Twitter, posed for a Comic Con photo on the iron throne and met the author (prompting the tweet: “I just held hands with george rr martin for like a full minute, I am literally dying”), inspiration clearly bled through into the video for Go, in which Grimes plays a sword-wielding

warrior venturing through a faraway desert land. We wonder who her favourite character is. “I like Brienne. I vibe on the gender fluidity,” she says. “I’ve never seen a character on TV that I relate to more than her.”

Grimes vibes on protecting the planet too, recently auctioning her original artwork on eBay to fund National Observer, a forthcoming environmental publication in Vancouver. “Canada just has hella untapped reserves, so it’s an important player in the oil vs. climate change situation,” she says of her motherland. Just last month she joined fellow countrywoman Naomi Klein in promoting a Greenpeace climate march.

“I think I can at least kinda help mobilise the youth vote, which is important ‘cause the government is super pro-oil, and we have a federal election coming up and young people don’t vote much. Climate change hurts everybody.” It seems that

growing up with a mother running for local government has made its mark on our favourite vegan. “The government goes and does all this crap that only benefits specifically the most evil type of super rich person and screws over poor Canadians.

The ‘jobs’ the oil companies say they will create to construct pipelines would only be for maybe two years, you know?

There are people in Canada with unsafe drinking water and yet the government is spending all this money building this crap and not even bothering to deal with these major problems. If they spent that money on developing renewable resources, it would create jobs and boost the economy. It’s so transparently evil that it’s almost entertaining, but then I remember that it’s real and it makes me feel sick.” A master of using her platform for good, Grimes has also spoken out about the difficultly many men have in understanding that she is not only the face of her musical project, but the producer too. Yes, she is female. Yes, she understands technology. No, she doesn’t need your help. Ignoring the backlash, she went on to write an inspirational essay on being a young, female CEO for Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie Yearbook Three, in which she gave huge amounts of good advice and referenced Dolly Parton. “I doubt we’ll see true equality in our life time,” confesses Boucher. “Feminism as a fad is stupid… it’s not a fad, just treat all humans equally! Equal fucking pay — it benefits everybody. And don’t rape or abuse women or anyone else. My lord! So basic!” As she continues to work on her highly anticipated fourth album and an accompanying book of art, we leave you with the knowledge that we’re completely and utterly in love with Grimes. She is magic.

“I think the real world was always just this thing I had to deal with, and then Grimes could be a thing which was how I wished it was.”

Claire Boucher is behind the wheel of her white Ford hybrid, talking faster than we’re moving through space. There’s a faint ring of blue around her hairline— lingering make-up from an eight-hour photo shoot in Hollywood this morning— and her acrylic fingernails are clicking lightly against the car’s touchscreen,

Nwll. 17 fussing with the levels of bass, treble, and mids. The plan had been for her to play me her still-untitled, three-yearsin-the-making fourth LP in the car, but now, driving down Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, she seems reluctant to let any of it play for more than 10 seconds at a time. “It just sounds so tinny in here!” she exclaims, repeatedly raising and then completely lowering the volume on a guitar-studded power-punk anthem called “Flesh Without Blood.” “They told me I’m not supposed to play all the songs.

I hired these people to help me not fuck up with the press. Fuck! I just really want to play you these songs.”

Today, though, riding on just three hours of sleep, she seems a little nervous, a little distracted. She spent the past week making a foray into professional acting that she can’t tell me very much about, and she only has a few weeks left to finish the new record, which is slated to drop this October on 4AD. In a T-shirt and shorts, her home-dyed hair piled into a scraggly white, green, and purple bun, she’s hardly recognizable as the formidable heroine triumphantly raising a sword to the sky in the video for Visions single “Genesis.”

“The thing that I hate about the music industry is all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Grimes is a female musician’ and ‘Grimes has a girly voice.’ It’s like, yeah, but I’m a producer and I spend all day looking at fucking graphs and EQs and doing really technical work.”

For one thing, she doesn’t really know her way around Los Angeles yet. Following six months of self-imposed exile in the mountains of Squamish, a coastal region of British Columbia, and some time in Vancouver, she and boyfriend James Brooks, whose own musical projects include Elite Gymnastics and Default

Genders, relocated to L.A. just this past September. “I got to a place where I didn’t need to run away from the entertainment industry anymore,” she says of the move.

“I just had to do that to make sure I could get to a place psychologically where I wouldn’t go insane.”

Like many studio rats, Boucher says navigating daily life can sometimes be a challenge. “It’s important to be cognizant of making sure that you eat every day, and eat enough food, and sleep at night,” she will tell me later, speaking of the athletic recording schedule she’s been keeping for the new album, which sees her pulling 12 to 16-hour studio shifts at a time. “[Remembering to take care of myself ] sounds really basic, but for me, it’s not basic.” This morning, Boucher emerged from the studio wearing a brace over her right ankle—a sprain from jumping off a riser during her recent cross-country tour with Lana Del Rey, another seasoned architect of seductive, fictional worlds.

Her ankle isn’t the only thing that has made the last few weeks of recording a test of endurance. Occasionally, during our time together, Boucher frowns and

clutches her abdomen, plagued by a chronic stomach ailment she says has forced her to subsist almost exclusively on a diet of vegan burritos and spaghetti.

This March, Boucher released “REALiti,” a gauzy power ballad that seemed to grapple explicitly with the trials of daily existence, even as the neon-colored video, shot during a recent tour in Asia, showed Boucher leaping, twirling, and air-boxing her way through life: Oh, baby, every morning there are mountains to climb/ Taking all my time/ Oh, when I get up, this is what I see/ Welcome to reality.

With its playful handclaps and crunchy synths, the song seemed like something of a return to form after 2014’s “Go,” a pounding, EDM-inspired club tune that she’d penned with Kansas City-born producer and longtime best friend Mike Tucker, aka Blood Diamonds, as part of mysterious songwriting project for Rihanna. The pop star didn’t end up using “Go,” so they released it as a surprise. But according to a New York Times interview from September 2014, the song “upset” a lot of Grimes fans: “Everybody was like, ‘Oh, Grimes is pandering to the radio,’” she explained.

Music.

True Myth: A conversation with Sufjan Stevens.

The 39 year old indie musician Sufjan Stevens opens his office studio in Brooklyn to Nwll and talks about his new Studio Album, Carrie & Lowell, his mother, and God.

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or the last 15 years, Stevens has mixed his own life history with fantastical images and stories of the ages—from the Bible, from Greek mythology, from American fables—inventing a new sort of 21st-century folklore along the way.

But while this creative strategy has led to him being regarded as one of the finest songwriters on the planet, it’s also taken a personal toll.

recollections he has of his mother, who abandoned his family when he was just a year old. Her five-year marriage to Lowell Brams in the early ‘80s seemingly marked a high-point in a life struck by hardship; Carrie suffered from depression, schizophrenia, and alcoholism, and her contact with Stevens and his siblings, who grew up in Michigan with their dad and stepmother, was intermittent up until her death.

Named after his mother and stepfather, Stevens’ seventh studio album, Carrie & Lowell, once again combines fact and fiction, though it finds the ambitious artist’s more fanciful tendencies drastically pared-down. There are no orchestral crescendos, no electronic freakouts, no drums. Stevens jokingly describes the album’s sound as “easy listening,” though it’s more akin to the harrowing moodiness of Nick Drake or early Elliott Smith than James Taylor.

And there’s nothing smooth or simple about its subject matter, which revolves around the death of Stevens’ mother in December 2012.

But there were those summers. “A lot of the best times we had while we were married were when the kids were with us,” remembers the 63-year-old Brams, who made a point to keep in touch with Stevens’ family even after he and Carrie were divorced and is now the director of Stevens’ label, Asthmatic Kitty. “The kids were like little puppies around her, they just loved her.”

“I’ve grown up a lot in the past few years,” says the 39-year-old singer/songwriter, sitting in his modest office overlooking the East River on a sunny-yet-frigid day earlier this month. While somber life events and the stark new album certainly back this up, his look today does not; still boyish in a blue beanie, red sneakers, and a bright camo jacket, he could comfortably pass for a man 10 years younger.

There are several references to places within Oregon throughout Carrie & Lowell; it’s where Stevens spent three summers, between ages 5 and 8, with his mother and stepfather. These early memories are not just important because they came at a formative point in Stevens’ life—they’re actually some of the only

Carrie & Lowell is not a sentimental affair, though. Stevens brings out all of the hurt and confusion of his relationship with his mother, as well as the debilitating aftermath of her passing, with lyrics that are poetic and unflinching. He sings of suicidal thoughts, regret, violence, brushfires, hospitals, shadows, recklessness, blood. “I just wanted to be near you,” he pleads on the album, exposing the core of his own history.

Nwll: How would you describe your relationship with your mother growing up?

Sufjan Stevens: She left when I was 1, so I have no memory of her and my father being married. She just wandered off. She felt that she wasn’t equipped to raise us, so she gave us to our father. It wasn’t until I was 5 that Carrie married Lowell. He worked in a bookstore in Eugene, Oregon, and we spent three summers out there— that’s when we actually saw our mother the most.

But after she and Lowell split up, we didn’t have that much contact with Carrie.

Sometimes she’d be at our grandparents’ house, and we’d see her during the holidays for a few days. There was the occasional letter here and there. She was off the grid for a while, she was homeless sometimes, she lived in assisted housing.

There was always speculation too, like, “Where is she? What is she doing?” As a kid, of course, I had to construct some kind of narrative, so I’ve always had a strange relationship to the mythology of Carrie, because I have such few lived memories of my experience with her.

There’s such a discrepancy between my time and relationship with her, and my desire to know her and be with her.

Nwll: What was Carrie like as a person?

SS: She was evidently a great mother, according to Lowell and my father. But she suffered from schizophrenia and depression. She had bipolar disorder and she was an alcoholic. She did drugs, had substance abuse problems. She really suffered, for whatever reason. But when we were with her and when she was most stable, she was really loving and caring, and very creative and funny.

This description of her reminds me of what some people have observed about my work and my manic contradiction of aesthetics: deep sorrow mixed with something provocative, playful, frantic.

Nwll: Were you there when Carrie passed away?

SS: Yeah. She had stomach cancer, and it was a quick demise. We flew to see her in the ICU before she died. She was in a lot of pain, and on a lot of drugs, but she was aware. It was so terrifying to encounter death and have to reconcile that, and express love, for someone so unfamiliar. Her death was so devastating to me because of the vacancy within me. I was trying to gather as much as I could of her, in my mind, my memory, my recollections, but I have nothing. It felt unsolvable. There is definitely a deep regret and grief and anger. I went through all the stages of bereavement. But I say make amends while you can: Take every opportunity to reconcile with those you love or those who’ve hurt you. It was in our best interest for our mother to abandon us. God bless her for doing that and knowing what she wasn’t capable of.

Nwll: The sort of rebellion you’re talking about almost sounds like more of a teen-angst sort of thing.

SS: Fun, flirty, and 40! [laughs] I do feel like I’m 40 going on 14 sometimes.

I wasn’t rebellious as a kid. I was so dignified and well-behaved. But that kind of [destructive] behavior at my age is inexcusable.

Nwll: As in much of your work, there are references to Christianity and mythology on this album. What does faith mean to you at this point?

SS: I still describe myself as a Christian, and my love of God and my relationship with God is fundamental, but its manifestations in my life and the practices of it are constantly changing. I find incredible freedom in my faith. Yes, the kingdom of Christianity and the Church has been one of the most destructive forces in history, and there are levels of bastardization of religious beliefs. But the unique thing about Christianity is that it is so amorphous and not reductive to culture or place or anything. It’s extremely malleable.

Opinion.

Nwll. 21 Film has been replaced by digital in our cinemas. But some big names - including Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino - believe the switchover was a terrible mistake.

By: Raúl Rodríguez

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ne of the most urgent questions facing the film industry today is whether what’s obviously a dealbreaker for fine art should also hold true for the movies. If you’ve been to the cinema within the last 10 years, chances are the films you saw were all shown on digital projectors - which is, albeit in a hyper-evolved, infinitely sharper form, the same technology you use at home to watch a DVD. A silvercoloured brick called a digital cinema package, or DCP, is plugged into the projector, which translates a bundle of computer files into pictures and sound, then beams them onto the screen.

In and of itself, that’s fine. When it’s wellprojected, digital cinema has a sapphiresleek, almost minty visual freshness - and many new films made with digital technology, such as David Fincher’s Gone Girl, Michael Mann’s Blackhat, and anything shot by Steven Soderbergh (Magic Mike XXL springs glisteningly to mind), will never look better than when screened from a DCP. But many film-makers still prefer to work with film itself: the glossy photochemical strips that have been whirring through movie cameras since the late 19th century. Like digital, film has its own particular feel, which I’ll elaborate on in a moment, and it’s one that appeals to directors working at all levels of the business. SPECTRE, the new James Bond film, has been shot on 35mm film, as has Star Wars Episode VII and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice - as were Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Jurassic World and Cinderella.

Directors occasionally use other film formats as a stylistic choice: Sarah Gavron’s period drama Suffragette was shot on cramped, urgent 16mm, while Quentin Tarantino captured his new western, The Hateful Eight, on velvety 70mm. And while it comes as no surprise to hear Wes Anderson works exclusively on film, Zack “Man of Steel” Snyder is just as committed to the medium. You get the idea: this isn’t an affectation or a dying art. It’s one of the most basic creative choices a film-maker can make.

At the moment, though, it’s almost impossible to see any movie that was made on film, on film. When you go to the cinema, what you’re almost certainly watching is a video file: the poster, rather than the Klimt. Projectors that are capable of screening film prints have been largely phased out of British cinemas since 2005, when the digital revolution began to pick up speed with the move to 3D, and 98 per cent of cinema screens in the country are now exclusively digital. That means that unless you’ve specifically sought out a 35mm or 70mm screening, which are almost non-existent for new releases, or are a regular at your local independent cinema - if you’re lucky enough to have one - you probably haven’t actually watched projected film for at least 10 years.

One of the main obstacles to getting real film projection back into cinemas is dispelling the myths that surround it.

But the time might be ripe for a revival.

During this year’s London Film Festival, The British Film Institute organised a morning of discussion between people from all tiers of the industry – led by Christopher Nolan, the director of Interstellar and the Dark Knight trilogy, and the film artist Tacita Dean. Also

chipping in were Emma Thomas, Nolan’s producing partner; Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate; the legendary film editor and sound designer Walter Murch; representatives from various UK cinema chains; and also your humble correspondent. The discussion was chaired by Heather Stewart, the BFI’s Creative Director – a job that includes overseeing the National Archive, a cache of film prints that would literally stretch to the moon and back.

Dean, who worked with film since the early Nineties, neatly framed the problem.

“The industry has been thinking about film as a technology, and technologies go obsolete,” she said. “And anyone who says they want to continue using film has been positioned as standing against progress.”

Sir Nicholas drew a link between the filmto-digital changeover and the sudden craze for acrylic paint in the Sixties.

“It dried quickly, it was fluid, it did all kinds of things that oil paint couldn’t do … there was even talk about oil paint production being discontinued,” he said.

“But 10 or 20 years later, people began to realise that there are things you can do in oil that you cannot do in acrylic.”

Ten years on from the digital switchover, perhaps we’re about to reach the same conclusion.

One of the main obstacles to getting real film projection back into cinemas is dispelling the myths that surround it.

Film isn’t, for example, the more temperamental of the two mediums.

A movie stored digitally costs around £7,500 per year to maintain, and will

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Opinion. start to deteriorate after a decade or so imagine trying to use a laptop today that you bought in 2005.

With only £700 of annual upkeep (mainly cleaning and climate control), however, a 35mm print can remain pristine for a century or longer.Another is the idea of film as a dirty technology, with scratched and out-of-focus images spluttering across the cinema screen. It’s true that in the Fifties, film prints were made of notoriously meltable, scuff-able acetate - which itself was a step up from the terrifyingly unstable nitrate prints of the olden days, which would sometimes burst into flames mid-movie. But acetate was phased out around 25 years ago, and replaced by near-indestructible Mylar, a kind of polyester - and insofar as Mylar can be said to have a resolution at all, it’s significantly higher than the 2K digital standard.

Film can also carry billions of colours, as opposed to the 16million or so available on digital. The differences between these shades aren’t apparent to the human eye, but it means transitions between colours look smoother, particularly in very light and dark areas of the image.

Then there’s the texture of the image itself. Rather than the neat grids of pixels you get with digital, the colours on a film strip come from layers of microscopic silver halide crystals, the positions of which differ from frame to frame. That’s why a static digital shot of an unchanging scene looks frozen, while on film, you’re always keenly aware that time is passing.

“Digital might be more predictable, but the problem is you can no longer see the best version of the film,” Nolan told the group. “In other words, cinemas are taking the McDonald’s approach: yeah, it’s all a bit worse, but at least it’s consistent.”

When you see film and digital projected one after the other, the differences are obvious. But actually quantifying them

Nolan’s Interstellar was released on 35mm and 70mm prints two days before its digital roll-out.

Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight will screen on 70mm prints for two weeks.

can be tricky. People talk about film giving your eyes “something to touch”, or the image “looking alive” - which, as Nolan noted, can sound “overly precious”, particularly in the mass entertainment business. But I’ve never heard it summed up better than by American film editor and sound designer Walter Murch. He recalled an experiment he carried out in which he took identical shots of an empty room on film and on video, then played

When you see film and digital projected one after the other, the differences are obvious.

But actually quantifying them can be tricky. them back and tried to tell the difference.

“The feeling that I got from looking at an empty room on film is of a rising potential, as if somebody was about to come in,” he said.

“And the feeling I got on video was of somebody just having left.”

The arguments against film prints largely come down to convenience and expense.

They have to be set up and supervised by trained projectionists, which costs cinemas money - although as Nolan waspishly noted, any savings made in that area don’t seem to have been passed on to the customer.

“The idea that it’s too difficult to find or too expensive to employ projectionists would be an absurd problem in any other form of entertainment,” he said. “If U2 were putting on a concert and said, ‘To do this properly we’d need someone to plug in the speakers or whatever, and we don’t know anyone,’ they wouldn’t cancel the concert.”

At the moment, it takes a film-maker with the profile of Nolan or Tarantino to get projectors whirring. Nolan’s Interstellar was released on 35mm and 70mm prints two days before its digital roll-out, and in the US, Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight will screen on 70mm prints for two weeks in December before its “official” release in early January.

As a result, less influential directors might feel able to take a similar stand - and multiplexes, which are finding it increasingly hard to prise customers from their living rooms, will realise that this, rather than the omni-glowing hell of interactive apps and “parallel content”, will be the definitive only-in-cinemas experience.

For now, the future remains fuzzy though the picture is sharper than it was two years ago, when Fujifilm bailed out of the business and Kodak, the last film manufacturer standing, was mired in bankruptcy. Earlier this year, Kodak signed deals with Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros to manufacture film for all six studios, in an attempt to kickstart a new appetite for projection.

Like all the best decisions Hollywood ever made, it’s a gamble. But if it pays off, it’d be a flash of lateral thinking worthy of a Christopher Nolan film. Just imagine if century-old technology became the next big thing.

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Nwll.