The Pace Gallery is housed in an abandoned factory with a typical Bauhaus style saw-shaped roof design that allows diffused light to enter the building.
Christian Jankowski, “Museum Director’s Chair”
the art factory An abandoned East German-built factory complex is the unlikely setting for Beijing’s cutting-edge modern art scene. by michael spencer / photography by benya hegenbarth any first-time visitors to Beijing head straight for the Forbidden City, continue on to the Summer Palace and end with some photographs on the Great Wall. Throw in some shopping at a giant mall followed by a Peking duck dinner and most people will feel that they have more or less covered the city. However, for those with a bit more time at their disposal or a desire to experience a different face to Beijing, a day spent at the Dashanzi Art District and its neighbouring Caochangdi Artists Village offers a most rewarding and unusual experience. Located in the northeast of the city between the Capital Airport and the 5th Ring Road, Dashanzi, with its famous Factory 798 Art Space, has established itself since 2002 as an artistic hub of both national and international repute. Unlike the superbly regimented neighbourhoods constructed for the Beijing Olympics and most other Chinese civic projects of note, the creation of an art district in Dashanzi was never an officially planned or sanctioned initiative. Rather, it grew organically from 2001 when a few artists set up their studios in the disused factory buildings of a shuttered manufacturing complex dating back the Maoist era.
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In the past 20 years, vast swathes of old Beijing, including its ancient hutong neighbourhoods, with their characteristic narrow lanes and courtyard houses, have been bulldozed to make way for massive housing projects, office buildings and glittering malls. Given its prized location near the airport, Dashanzi was destined for a similar fate and is still constantly threatened with demolition itself. After multiple reprieves of its death sentence this industrial relic has found new life as a cosmopolitan urban space filled with art galleries, museums, chic restaurants, boutiques, cafes and bars. Perhaps Dashanzi has been spared the wrecker’s ball precisely because it was never just an ordinary factory complex. Historically, it has an impressive pedigree as a monument to international Socialist
Works by the Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat line the walls of the Faurshou Foundation gallery.
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Monumental sculptures by Beijing-based sculptor Shu Yon.
cooperation and was once mooted as the ideal blueprint for all industrial spaces in China. Designed and mostly built by East Germans at the behest of Russia in the 1950s, Joint Factory 718, as it was first known, was at the time a state-ofthe-art electronics and military components manufacturing complex. Built in the Modernist Bauhaus architectural style the East Germans created a model township unlike anything that had existed in China before. Factory 718 became a source of national pride for both China and East Germany. For China it could boast that it owned one of the largest industrial complexes in the world, 20 times bigger than anything else in the Communist bloc, and it allowed East Germany to showcase its prowess in electronics manufacturing on a massive scale. In time the complex grew
into a self-sufficient industrial town complete with theatres, sports stadiums, schools, swimming pools and its own dance and drama groups. Factory 718 became a Socialist workers paradise and the best engineers and technicians in China competed to be employed there. By the 1960s, it had become too large to manage as a single entity and was broken up into independent factories numbered 706, 707, 718,797 and most famously 798. By 2001 the factories were closed as their once cutting edge technology became obsolete. It was then that artists began to move in to Factory 798, the largest of the buildings, dividing it into studios and galleries as a place to create and exhibit their art. To take a stroll through the perfectly aligned streets of the complex is to be immersed in Christian Jankowski, “Museum Director’s Chair” a post-industrial landscape re-imagined as a Disneyesque theme park. Even though some of the factories are imposing with towering brick chimneys, it is mostly built on an approachable human scale. The atmosphere is oddly cosy, resembling nothing so much as a transplanted German factory town from the Rhineland complete with linden trees lining the wide streets and small and intimate public squares. Few cars are allowed inside Dashanzi making it one of the best places in Beijing to go walking or biking. Plentiful signboards with English-language maps make it easy to get around but half the fun is randomly wandering the lanes to see what turns up next. Street art in the form of oversized sculptures and colourful graffiti abounds and even the skeletons of heavy machinery do duty as imaginary art works themselves. Huge pipes painted different colours snake between the factories reminiscent of the Gallerie Pompidou in Paris with its inside-out architecture and giant boilers
Contemporary art on display in 798 includes paintings, photos, sculptures and glass works.
A permanent street installation by Chinese artist Sui Jian Guo.
standing in serried ranks like forgotten robots waiting for orders that will never come. For the overall concept and design of the complex the East Germans drew on their native Bauhaus style of architecture with its sober, almost stern emphasis on function and form. They resisted Russian demands to build grandiose monuments that would have reduced the workers to miniscule cogs in a massive Communist industrial machine. The buildings all look remarkably solid and well preserved, and so they should be. Factory 718 was built to exacting German specifications for quality and strength. Even the Russians thought the East Germans were going too far when they insisted that standard No 500 type red bricks be used as they would resist crumbling in up to Force 8 earthquakes. These bricks were not available in China so a factory had to be specially constructed near the site to produce them. Throughout, the architects created large indoor spaces designed to fill the workplaces with diffuse natural light. Despite Beijing’s northern location, the windows all face north as the gentle light cast from that direction casts fewer shadows. As artists were quick to realise, this brilliant design solution is also perfect for art galleries and studios that traditionally eschew harsh direct lighting. Inside the structures, arch-supported sections of the ceiling curve upwards and then fall diagonally along the high slanted banks of windows like the flying buttresses of an industrial cathedral. This pattern, when repeated several times in the larger rooms, give the factory roofs their characteristic sawtooth appearance. Any visit to Dashanzi should take in 798 Space (www.798space.com ), the original factory building that artists first colonised. The sober
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grey concrete roof is enlivened with massive red painted slogans from the Cultural Revolution, and although artists have now moved their studios elsewhere the galleries, shops and exhibition spaces here are still the vibrant heart of the district. Other galleries of note that regularly host major exhibits of both foreign and Chinese contemporary art in the district are the Beijing Tokyo Arts Project (BTAP), Fourshou Foundation, China Art Seasons, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art and Pace Beijing. In between the serious galleries the district is full of quirky shops, restaurants and sidewalk coffee shops like the brick-walled AT Café that are perfect to chill out and watch the eclectic crowd of visitors that Dashanzi attracts. At night a few bars and nightspots cater to revelers especially at Yan Club Arts Centre, a venue that combines exhibitions with party events that pull in a young crowd of foreign and local students as well as hipsters from Beijing who dance until the early hours with music mixes from imported DJs and VJs. The restaurants tend to be as varied as the clientele but for fiery Sichuan cuisine try Tianxia Yan and for more upscale dining Yi House restaurant in the Grace Hotel is the best on offer. This chic boutique property that was converted from a former worker’s dormitory is also the best place to stay right in the heart of the district and is a favourite with visiting artists. 798 is a popular theme for urban planning dissertations since its construction, eventual decay and modern revival echo many of the changes that have taken place in the urban and cultural landscape of Beijing during the past decades of explosive growth. Rising rents and gentrification as corporate tenants oust artists’ studios
The 798 art zone is one of the few places in China where graffiti is tolerated and even encouraged.
A massive steel sculpture dwarfs a worker.
is just the latest stage of this transformation, similar to what happened with the artist colony of SoHo in New York. Original residents complain that the artistic purity of the experiment has been supplanted by its current role as an upand-coming tourist attraction. Many admit, however, that its growing popularity may well be the key to its long-term survival and the best means of holding off the ever lurking pack of avaricious developers intent on its destruction. It is said that most of the Chinese art on display at 798 is no longer created there but in the nearby Caochangdi Artists Village, where cheaper rents and less tourists offer better conditions for artists to work. Caochangdi is just a short taxi ride from 798 over the 5th Ring road near to the China Railway Museum. A pleasant leafy suburb populated with art colleges, its most famous resident is the artist/architect/filmmaker and dissident Ai Wei Wei, whose Fake Studio sits behind a high wall and a solid metal gate painted an unusual shade of blue. The main street is lined with Gingko trees planted for the Beijing Olympics and CCTV surveillance cameras every 50 metres, including a larger more sophisticated one pointed at Ai Wei Wei’s studio gate. Opposite his studio is one of the better restaurants in the area, The Fodder Factory, serving a hearty selection of home-style cuisine from around China. The courtyard tables are the perfect place to enjoy a meal after a long day at the galleries and museums and is often frequented by local artists and those involved with the 798 art scene. Caochangdi has its fair share of galleries and exhibition spaces that are aimed more at the art cogniscenti than the more popular offerings at 798. In particular, the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and the Red Brick
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Original residents complain that the artistic purity of the experiment has been supplanted by its current role as an up-and-coming tourist attraction.
The 798 art zone is packed with galleries, cafes and restaurants.
Walking the streets of 798 is like being inside a giant outdoor art galery.
Galleries, both designed by Ai Weiwei, hold regular exhibitions of high quality. Also in Caochangdi, the China National Film Museum is well worth a visit with excellent, well-presented permanent exhibits that chronicle the rich history of film in China. The Expo section of the museum reveals the secrets of filmmaking from shooting to editing, music scores, special effects and film developing and allows visitors to make their own short films in a fun interactive experience. Whether Dashanzi and Caochangdi survive in their present form is open to debate as the pressure to develop the surroundings grows more and more intense. All the more reason to visit this remarkable agglomeration of artistic talent and creativity set in a unique post-industrial landscape before it disappears.
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Love is all Around
The enfant terrible of Asian photography Leslie Kee on his upbringing, love, jail sentence and passion for naked men.
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t’s a chilly autumn evening in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. On the streets, people are putting on jackets and heading for home or seeking out bowls of hot ramen. Meanwhile, Asia’s most celebrated photographer, Leslie Kee is hugging himself in a small, warmly-lit cafe. “Thanks for flying to see me,” he says. As I sit face-toface with him, Leslie is far from what I expect him to be, based on his work. He is energetic, extroverted and trendy, of course, but the more he speaks, the more we discover the person that lies beneath his sophisticated surface. He is warm and relaxed. He talks to you as if he has known you for a decade, as if you’re the most important person in the world. In the hyper-competitive world of photography, Leslie is approaching legendary status. He has shot more than his fair share of global celebrities, among them Beyonce Knowles, Lady Gaga, Kate Moss, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Anna Wintour, Karl Lagerfeld, Yohji Yamamoto, Gong Li, Daniel Wu, Shu Qi, Rinko Kikuchi, Ayumi Hamasaki, Godfrey Gao. This is a photographer who is shaping up to be as prolific as Mario Testino, and almost as powerful. Today, he can book almost any top model with little effort. What makes his meteoric rise all the more impressive is that it wasn’t achieved by churning out soft focus portraits for mass consumption. Yes, he shoots fashion photography, but what has really elevated Leslie to global notoriety are his nudes, published in his SUPER photobook series. Each edition of this slickly produced photobook features male and female artists and models posing semior sometimes fully naked. This has proved fruitful.
“I worked so hard for 13 years in magazines, but with these pictures, I made more money than I made in my entire career,” he once told Singaporean fashion magazine Men’s Folio. Thanks to their success he has become one of the most in-demand Asian fashion photographers around, with a rumoured fee rate of up to $20,000 a day. Indeed, things were going very smoothly for Leslie. That is until earlier this year, when he was arrested for selling obscene photographs in Japan and put in jail for two days. After that debacle, people were expecting him to disappear for a while, but he’s back as if nothing had happened. He decided to host an exhibition and publish a new photobook – of course, featuring nudes. It seems that Leslie didn’t learn anything from his stint in jail. Or did he? Humble Beginnings It’s fair to say that most people born in Singapore have a good start in life, but Leslie was different. “I didn’t have a father and my mother, who worked as a hostess in a nightclub, passed away when I was 13,” he says. “When that happened I realised that I had a responsibility to be a good brother to my sister. Because we didn’t have parents, the government arranged for us to be placed into the Singaporean orphanage system, and because of that I got to work in a Japanese factory from Fridays to Sundays for a few hours.” Working in a Japanese factory gave him more than just money – it gave him a passion for Japanese culture, one that would later inspire him to move there. What was the appeal of his Japanese co-workers? “The fashion, hair, the way they spoke and ate and everything was just different – just classy,” he says. “I had a question: ‘Why are they so different from
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my Singaporean friends? Why are they so special?’ I worked Behind the lens in that Japanese factory for six years, and it was my dream to As it turned out, Leslie did survive in Japan for the full 90 days, earning enough to pay his way through photography visit the country to find who they really are.” school. These lessons in theory would serve him well, but Leslie’s passion for photography started long before that. Bleak Times Fast forward twenty years and Tokyo is where Leslie calls home; “For my 13th birthday I asked my mother for a camera,” this despite his relatives still living in Singapore. Looking he recalls. “Until then, I didn’t have a picture of myself. at him now it would seem to have been the right move, Not one. I didn’t want my sister to be like me, so I decided to use that camera to take and yet life in Japan hasn’t pictures of her. So she was my always been rosy. In fact, first model. When I worked the early days were far in the Japanese factory, I saw from perfect. “After saving a lot of Japanese magazines enough money I went there and record covers, and I in 1993 when I was 23 years used those ideas. It was all old. My first job was washing very experimental. I didn’t dishes in Tokyo’s Korea know any photographers. town, Okubo, with other Before the school, I didn’t immigrants from Myanmar, even know there’s a magazine Thailand, the Philippines called Vogue.” and China,” he says. That first camera became “I didn’t know anybody more than a storyteller, but his or have much money, so I main way of communicating brought my bags to a capsule during his years backpacking hotel and spent a whole week in Asia. “I shot smiles with there while I looked for jobs.” that camera. It was really It was perhaps the toughest beautiful. One thing I have time of his life. “My student always been good at, from visa lasted for only three then till now, is looking at months, and I had no idea if I people. When I talk to people, would last that long or be sent I look at them. I see them back to Singapore. It was like naked in their heart – what a game of Survivor – could I they believe, what they like, what they appreciate, whether last the full 90 days?” This was 1993, a time when Japanese society was they like me or don’t like me. It’s a hard to describe feeling not as welcoming to outsiders as it is today. Southeast Asians, he – I call it a ‘skinship.’” This ability grew the more he travelled. “It became a part says, were treated like aliens. “When I first came here, Japanese people discriminated against Asian people like me. I didn’t of me. Before then, I was nobody, nothing shined in my life. blame them for it – it was a phobia tied to past bad experiences. But with this camera I became more outspoken. It opened up my heart and other people’s hearts to me.” It wasn’t really their fault.” I worked in that Japanese factory for six years. It was my dream to visit the country to find out who they really are.
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In New York, I saw works that enlightened me: showed me that the male, as a subject, is a beautiful thing. After photography school, Leslie became a jobbing photographer, shooting everything from commercials to magazines. But the biggest turning point of his career came in 1998, when he was assigned to photograph the JapaneseTaiwanese star Takeshi Kaneshiro for Hong Kong’s City Magazine. “Think about it. In 1998, everybody wanted him and I shot him for a cover. It sold well. And then Vogue Taiwan offered me work with them, and we have worked together ever since then, for fifteen years. In Asia, I was the first photographer to do editorial for Vogue every month. So I used the opportunity to book great models and actresses – Ayumi Hamasaki, Namie, everybody – for the covers. And I convinced Vogue Taiwan’s editor-in-chief to give me the cover every six months. That was the golden time before I went to New York. Looking back, it was the turning point for me because if I hadn’t photographed Takeshi Kaneshiro, then Vogue Taiwan, and all the Hong Kong, Singapore and Japanese magazines that came afterwards, might never have given me a chance.” A Bite of the Big Apple Just when his name was rising in Asia, Leslie turned his back on the continent and moved to New York. The timing was right, the offers just too good to turn down. “I met Jed Root, an agent for the photographer Michael Thompson. He liked my energy so he offered me to come to New York.” Looking at Leslie’s body of work, his sexual orientation
seems quite obvious. But he wasn’t always gay. “New York opened my mind. Sexuality is open, and gay people are very common; it’s no big deal. After four months in New York, I met my boyfriend.” “I had a wife,” he adds. “She was with me for six years. Everybody in the industry knew who my wife was and then we divorced after one year because I was too busy. When I shot more males – not naked – it became a certain natural attraction. Not sexually, but an appreciation. And that’s when I started fantasising about them. In New York, I saw works that enlightened me: showed me that the male, as a subject, is a beautiful thing.” Leslie spent five years in New York and, like so many creatives who take their chances there, thrived. He was particularly inspired by the American photographers Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe and Bruce Weber. “I went to Avedon’s last exhibition in 2004 before he passed away,” he says. “I got to meet him. He signed my book. It was the most amazing moment of my life. And I saw all the pictures he shot all his life, from the Kennedy family, Marilyn Monroe, all the way to the supermodels, to the Vietnamese, to the famous ballet dancer. They show such a strong identity of American people and history. He’s my hero.” Having been inspired and empowered, he and his boyfriend decided to make their own magazine, SUPER. “The story behind it is simple,” he says. “When I was
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“SUPER Stars featured 200 artists, eight of which were models who posed fully naked. Why did I put eight unknown models into a book? At first it was supposed to be only 50 people but the list kept growing. And towards the end I thought – all of them are superstars, the book will be successful and I will be better known.” “I decided to be a bit more challenging, and play with the idea of the superstar. A superstar is someone you admire and believe in. He or she has a certain power. And I asked myself: ‘Who’s my superstar?’ Superstars, to me, are not necessarily famous, but people who are important to me. So I decided to add a couple of pages for them because they’re the superstars in my life.” Was it easy getting people to strip off in front of him? “People who pose for me know about my background and work, so maybe this makes it easier for them Superstars stripping off to break their own rules. It was around this time that However, it still wasn’t Leslie started shooting fulleasy – ninety percent of frontal nudity. “The first time them still don’t want to be I was actually quite nervous,” shot showing their penis. he laughs, as he recalls his But I think for many, it first nude shoot in New York. was a once-in-a-lifetime “It was a guy called Little Reed. chance to break their own He wasn’t famous but he was rules. If you break your own very open about showing his rules, you create something body. He was in my studio. I new. They will be like: ‘Oh, asked him to [strip off]. Then Leslie Kee approached me to shoot naked once. I realised the freedom of a body with no clothes.” The book featuring Little Reed, SUPER Stars, signalled He wants to shoot naked because he wants to express perhaps the first time somebody was able to gather so many an acceptance of equality. By expressing my body, major Asian stars in once place. It was also the first time maybe it’s worth it. Because once I get older my body might not be like this anymore.’” he had shot Asian nudity. young the first movie I watched was Superman. I like the word Vogue, that style of word, and so I looked for a wordwith five characters. SUPER was the one – it looks good and symmetrical on the page. If you look at my photos, I always look for symmetry – that’s how I look at people.” The first SUPER magazine, SUPER Icons came out in summer 2004 featuring clothed models, closely followed by SUPER Fantasy in the fall. It was an instant success and by 2006, Leslie had stirred up the Asian entertainment scene by introducing SUPER Stars, a 640-page photobook featuring 250 top Asian artists, such as Edison Chen, Shu Qi, Daniel Wu, Wang Leehom, Mika Nakashima, and Ayumi Hamasaki, all of them in revealing outfits. It was so revealing, in fact, that it was banned in straitlaced Singapore.
I wanted to see how far I could push the barrier so that people might accept nudity.
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A price to pay After the success of SUPER Stars, Leslie became even hotter. He was asked to photograph world celebrities such as Karl Lagerfeld and Kate Moss. He rolled out several editions of his SUPER photobooks, some of which featured collaborations with top names such as Yohji Yamamoto and Lady Gaga; others featuring yet more full-frontal male nudity. Eventually this caused him some trouble in Japan, a paradoxical country that sits high on the global list of porn producers, but would still prefer to keep nudity, especially of the homosexual variety, underground. “Japan wants to keep gay matters under wraps, but I worked against that by packaging them in a fashion book with beautiful paper and design.” “Japanese people aren’t good at expressing who they are from the outside, which makes me something of a weirdo, as I’m very expressive. At first people didn’t really accept it, but the second and third time it got better, and they were like: ‘Oh, Leslie is doing gay. It’s not a big deal. It’s not too much.’” Unfortunately for Leslie, Japanese officials thought differently. Last February, while showcasing his exhibition in Roppongi, he was arrested, put in jail, and fined one million yen for selling obscene publications featuring male genitals. “I think someone reported it to the police. After a few conversations they told me they had been following me for half a year. But why they decided to catch me at that time I still don’t know.” As is the nature of publicity, Leslie’s popularity since has only continued to soar. “My name has gone even higher, my followers increased and I have been able to do more interesting collaborations with different artists.”
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Was he shocked to be locked up for his art? “I was,” he says, “but I shouldn’t really be, because I knew this could happen one day. But I did wonder why it happened now and not in previous years? Maybe it was the right time, when my career was at its peak. Of course I knew about the officials. I wanted to see how far I could push the barrier so that people might accept nudity. Using my name, popularity and connections, I decided to ‘sacrifice’ myself to test this to see if I’m able to bring people to accept nudity, gays, and homosexuality. If they can accept men and women naturally, why can’t they accept men and men? It’s all part of nature.” News of his arrest went international. He received thousands of tweets and messages of support around the world, including from superstar friend Ayumi Hamasaki. The crackdown and the media storm it created helped him spread his message. “The arrest might have stopped me from depicting nudity,” he says, “but it has actually accelerated my message faster than if I had just been making books or putting on exhibitions. Think about it – do people need to see my naked photos to know why they are important, or see the barriers they are working against? No, they don’t.” Lessons behind bars It was during his 48-hour incarceration that Leslie came up with the idea for his latest photobook, SUPER Love. “When I was in that cell, I told myself that if I get released and can stay in Japan I’m going to make something really big and loud. ‘There is a scar inside my body right now,’ I thought, ‘But I
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To me, the meaning of love changes as I get older. It becomes more about responsibility.
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can make that scar into something amazing.’” For the project, Leslie went back to basics. “When I started out it was easy: I talked to people and photographed them. So I decided that one simple word to represent everything is love – love between a photographer and an editor, love between a person and a family, love between a person and his lover, love between friends, love between neighbours, love between people you meet on the street. Love is everywhere. Whether you feel it or not is really up to you. Some people live their whole life not realising it. Some people live their whole life, realising it every second. It’s amazing. ” The Meaning of love “SUPER Love is a way to express diversity. I shot people from different languages, different ages, different skin tone, all in the same way with a piece of cloth,” says Leslie, explaining the concept of his newest photobook. But to him, what is love? “To me, the meaning of love changes as I get older. It becomes more about responsibility as you gain more and more experience. When I was twenty I said I love my manager, but twenty years later the nature of that love has changed: I have a deeper bond and responsibility to that person.” Despite his philosophical musings on love, Leslie rarely talks about his own love life. “I always tell the media not to write much about my relationships. My boyfriend has a family in America who doesn’t know he
is gay, and my sister and auntie also don’t know. I decided not to be ‘open’ but maybe one day I will be. I realise that I have a responsibility to them even though I’m not with them. If this article goes to them, it might hurt them. And it’s not worth it.” What are his views on gay marriage? “One day I want to use this [marriage to his boyfriend] as an encouragement for people to say that it’s okay that you get married to a boy. But I don’t know when.” Appreciation of life When they say life is what you make of it, Leslie Kee is living proof. From poor orphan to a successful photographer living in a f a n c y t h re e - b e d r o o m apartment in Tokyo’s Aoyama, Leslie has proved that tough upbringings can lead to meteoric success stories. “If I had been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, I don’t know if my appreciation of life would have been this strong. I’m proud of everything. If you ask me details about what I’ve been doing, I remember almost all of them because they have allowed me to grow.” It looks as if Leslie Kee is here for the long haul, far from bored with the lifestyle he has created. “I’ve never once felt that my career has become routine,” he says, “I always push myself to do something new. Luckily boredom hasn’t happened yet, and hopefully, it never will.”
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The Bangkok Type Why the writer William Warren has stayed in Thailand for 53 years and counting. Prateep Kochabua, “When Humans Ignore... Art” Prateep Kochabua,“When Humans Ignore... Art”
by nicholas grossman
A file picture of William Warren.
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the story’s authenticity because he enjoyed his childhood. “But I did want to get out,” he says. “I wanted to go somewhere.” The road to “somewhere” was first paved by the United States Air Force, which he joined after graduating from the prestigious Emory University in Atlanta. The Korean War petered out, so he was never sent overseas. But he did make it as far as Maine. Then in 1953, at the age of 23, he travelled – like so many others in search of something more – to New York. “I loved being there,” he recalls. “It is a good place to be in your twenties because you don’t have to have any money. No one I knew had any money. We were all poor, but we all had nice apartments, safe apartments.
Warren’s first home in Bangkok was previously occupied by Jim Thompson before Thompson moved into his own famous house.
here was something distinctly cinematic about my visits to William Warren’s residence over the years. He always waited in near darkness in the foyer off his living room. As I entered his Sukhumvit home, which is surrounded by lush gardens and teeming with antiques, a gravelly but distinctly welcoming “Hello” would put me at ease. Only then would I see him in the dim light, holding a cigarette or tumbler (a stiff gin and tonic or whiskey soda), sitting completely composed. Our conversations also seemed to follow a pattern. Each chat would start with pleasantries before meandering through a list of common expatriate topics – Thailand, Thais, living in Thailand – before some detours into the quite personal, with an occasional digression into scathing gossip, which we both relished. One could listen to Warren speak for hours: the southern drawl still intact after decades in Bangkok, his recall of
favourite anecdotes ever at the ready, his insider stories about Thai society perhaps unsurpassed among foreigners (though perhaps to be taken with a pinch of salt), the barbs still sharp, his cynicism never overwhelming his civility. One felt that Warren descended from a great line of raconteurs. When he noted something he found truly remarkable, he would punctuate it with a pause, a gape and wide-eyed look of sincere wonder that spoke volumes about how much he clearly delighted in his time in Thailand. illiam Warren was born in Albany, Georgia in 1930. His father, who was in insurance, secretly wrote poetry. “My family was an old family, but we didn’t have very much money,” says Warren. There was a legend, he says, that someone asked him, “What do you want to do when you grow up and he replied, ‘Get out of this town.’” Warren doubts
Warren on the deck of the Dutch freighter that brought him from New York to Bangkok.
And it was safe to walk around at night. That was the last time New York was really livable.” He worked at New York University, as a writer for a CBS Television show and at The New Yorker as a proofreader, or “copy stylist” as they called it then, before being let go. In 1958, he accepted an assignment to travel to the Far East as a scriptwriter for a film company called Alfred Wagg Productions. Wagg was, in Warren’s words, “a crook” and “a conman” who milked the budgets set aside by organisations such as the United Nations for documentary work. Almost nothing is revealed about Alfred Wagg Productions through a cursory Internet search. Perhaps its most lasting legacy in Asia is William
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Warren and a friend on a Bangkok pond. Warren has written definitive books on tropical gardens and designed several as well.
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In 1960, he took a leap that bewildered his mother and friends and booked a Dutch freighter for Bangkok. Warren himself. Warren’s assignment took him to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Manila and Bangkok, where Wagg had instructed him to call on Jim Thompson, the silk entrepreneur. “He said Jim would cash a check for me and find me a cheap hotel for me to stay in,” he recalls. “He did cash a check and find me a cheap hotel, which turned out to be a whorehouse.” The Coronet by Lumpini Park, where Warren stayed for three weeks, wasn’t a brothel but a short-time motel sandwiched precariously over a busy lane and a canal. “It offered a steady stream of experiences that were not always pleasant but were certainly never dull: earthquakelike tremors when large trucks passed beneath, nearly grazing the floor; midnight knocks and mysterious phone calls, though rarely for me; an attempted
murder in the room next to mine, complete with bloodcurdling screams; and once a police raid that revealed me to be the only guest alone in his bed,” he once wrote. Warren loves to recount how one day years later when he passed by The Coronet, the staff remarked to each other, “That was the one who got mail!” When Warren returned to New York City in 1959, after Alfred Wagg Productions collapsed, “it was with a strange sense of loss.” The Big Apple had lost its lustre. “The magic had gone as it does sometimes,” he says. After experiencing Asia – he preferred Manila the most – he realised his fate and success likely lay elsewhere. “I grew to dislike New York more. I realised I wasn’t going to be a big success. And New York wasn’t a place to be if you weren’t going to be a success. I didn’t have the drive anymore.”
So in 1960, he took a further leap that bewildered his mother and friends and booked a Dutch freighter for Bangkok. Before embarking, he wrote to Chulalongkorn University inquiring about a position and asked around at publishers to gauge their interest in stories from Asia. He received no promises, but went anyway. The Dutch freighter carried only eight passengers: a missionary, his wife and three children, a couple from New Jersey and Warren. The young man from landlocked Georgia had a large cabin to himself, received four meals a day, watched a movie once a week, and passed the time by reading and keeping a journal he describes as “pretentious.” “[Freight passage] wasn’t the way to go if you were in a rush,” he says. “But it was a great way to travel. I would love to
do it now.” The ship stopped in Sicily and Alexandria, passed through the Suez Canal, and then docked in Aden, Mogadishu, Ceylon, Penang and Singapore, before arriving, after eight weeks, in Thailand. By that time, Warren was the only passenger left. he story that was to unfold for Warren in Thailand is typical of many expatriates who truly come to call the country home. He did not arrive purely for business nor for pleasure, knew no one well, and had no idea how long he might stay, but Bangkok quickly cast its spell. “The Thais of all the Asians I knew were the most sympathetic and the most pleasant,” he says. And in Thailand, Warren’s undying curiosity was quenched. Cooking on a charcoal stove and
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living without air-conditioning, a telephone or consistent water pressure were just added charms. Through his connection to Thompson, he was quickly welcomed into the community of expatriates. “People in Asia were very generous,” he says. “They invited you over and you could easily meet people. And you could meet Thais too. I was very social. I liked meeting people.” Besides Thompson, the most important of these was the Texan Charles Sheffield, who was the number two at the silk company and in charge of exports. Warren shared Jim Thompson’s former home with Sheffield throughout the 1960s and early 1970s
and the pair became constant companions, frequently traveling the region and to Warren’s favorite destination Japan, and amassing an impressive array of antiques, many of which still decorate Warren’s residence. Soon after his arrival, Warren received a position at Chulalongkorn, where he would teach English and literature for the next 30 years. Asked what the monthly wage was, Warren says “not much.” He shared his housing allowance from Chulalongkorn with Sheffield, who otherwise took care of most of the household expenses. In 1973, Sheffield passed away from lung cancer. “We had a happy life
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together,” Warren reflects. “But it was not a sexual relationship. We had the same tastes, we liked the same things, we liked most of the same people.” Warren then embarked on his incredibly prolific writing career in earnest, a bibliography that features over 50 books and countless newspaper and magazine articles to date. “I look back on it now and think about how much I wrote, all of it was after work and on weekends. I really did work my ass off,” he says. “I wrote as much – especially at the beginning – to learn as I did to tell. I wanted to find things out. I wrote endless articles for the Reader’s Digest and a
magazine called Asia for the Asia Society. Every one of them was an exposé. Nobody had written anything about Thai architecture or tropical gardens for example.” This made much of Warren’s work – which is almost all nonfiction and largely reference oriented – trailblazing. Countless expatriates who followed have read one of his books. Indeed, the very first book I picked up while traveling on assignment here was his biography of Jim Thompson. Given how much shelf space Warren’s books occupy perhaps it is not so surprising. Warren also developed a reputation as a reliable writer
“A few months became a year, then a decade, suddenly, almost without realising it, one has become an old-timer, an alleged authority.” 244 Warren won a chili contest held in Bangkok by simply opening a can and heating the contents.
in a part of the world that had few. Charles Orwin of Editions Didier Millet (EDM), one of Warren’s publishers, says Warren “always delivers readable prose requiring little editorial intervention, on time and to the requested length. This makes him a godsend to editors everywhere.” As Thailand continued to captivate Warren, “a few months became a year, then a decade, suddenly, almost without realising it, one has become an old-timer, an alleged authority. (But only alleged: the longer one lives in a city like Bangkok, the more aware one becomes of things unknown, or imperfectly understood). He came to realise that he was what he calls the “Bangkok type,” inexplicably drawn by the city’s unpredictability and mystery. Not everyone was, as Warren likes to illustrate with one of his favourite anecdotes. In his volume Bangkok, he recalls a family of Americans who lived near him that “went slowly to pieces. The husband took to muttering incoherently about the way people drove and did business, the teenage son discovered Patpong bar girls, and the wife, who worried obsessively about snakes and germs, finally broke one afternoon and ran down the street stark naked. They were quickly shipped home, where I was told, they resumed their normal, placid life.” As time passed, Warren himself developed an antipathetic attitude toward America. He says he was largely unaware of the American presence here in the 1960s and 1970s and “wasn’t traipsing around Petchaburi Road” like the GIs, but he did make sure he avoided that conflict, a “nightmare” he calls it, by getting discharged from the US Air Force. “I lived in horror of being
called back in. I am not the military type,” he says with a hearty laugh. “America is not a very admirable country,” he adds. “I don’t like what they do. I think they are crazy. I was disillusioned with the Civil Rights movement. Albany, my hometown, has dissolved into bitterness and meanness. The whole AIDS thing depressed me. I lost so many friends I loved. And nobody seemed to give a damn about any of it so I stopped giving a damn.” Instead, Warren’s fate, like Thompson’s, was to become one of the country’s most famous expatriates here, with excellent connections, and friends in high places – American and Thai ambassadors among them. Anand Panyarachun, who spent a decade in America as a diplomat before becoming prime minister in the 1990s, says Warren “is one of the few expats who understands Thais and appreciates Thainess.” Warren famously brought his friend, the starlet Lauren Bacall, to the launch of his book Thai Style. Through his biography of Thompson, The Legendary American, which is an engaging read, Warren’s association with the silk entrepreneur was solidified. Today, a library at the Jim Thompson house is named after him. The book itself, first published in 1970, is still a consistent seller. Reflecting on the start of his friendship with the former OSS agent, Warren says, “Jim Thompson was kind to a lot of people. Some people say he was a snob, only entertained rich people. I can certainly say that wasn’t the case with me. I wasn’t rich and I wasn’t important.” Warren, by the way, scoffs at the notion that Thompson was gay, citing affairs he had with many Western women over the years.
Like many expatriates in Thailand, Warren came with nothing, made a go of it and succeeded.
A later biography Warren wrote about Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanonda, published in the 1990s, was not as well received. Warren describes the book as a favour to a friend and rather “deadly.” On their Friday morning interviews together, Prem preferred to talk about his boyhood, but he “was a very sweet and generous man” and “a gentleman,” says Warren. Warren himself largely disassociated himself from the news events and Thai crises that excited international correspondents. “I always felt that foreigners in Thailand should not get involved in politics. I couldn’t give a damn who was in charge because they were all crooks as far as I was concerned,” he says in typically unsparing fashion. Warren rarely minces his words. Indeed, he seems to take pride in being frank in a country he sees as marred by incorrigible dishonesty. But what he has learned about
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Thailand hasn’t eliminated his warmth for it, and his understanding of what it has given him. In his book Bangkok, Warren quoted the following passage from the Somerset Maugham novel The Moon and Sixpence: “I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they always have a nostalgia for a home they know not… Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth.” And then to this Warren added himself: “To some it may seem peculiar, that anyone could feel at home in the Coronet Hotel. They may well be right. Or, on the other hand, they may just not be the Bangkok type.”
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cinematic sicily Scouting the Italian island from film location to film location. by keith mundy
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Taormina, Mount Etna and the Ionian Sea
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n the movie The Star Maker, a Roman conman called Doctor Joe Morelli is the central character, touring the island doing fake movie auditions. Exasperated with the people, at one point Morelli snaps, shouting, “What is Sicily? A boiling, bubbling pot! And who knows why? Tell me why!” Perhaps because it hosts Europe’s most active volcano, Mt Etna. Always roiling beneath the surface, Etna erupts with fury at unpredictable intervals. Living in a rugged and unforgiving landscape, the Sicilians, volatile in temperament, seem to mirror the volcano. A triangle of arid, mountainous land set at the midpoint of the Mediterranean Sea, settled or invaded by Phoenicians, Greeks, 274 Palazzo Adriano
Carthaginians, Romans, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Swabians, Catalans, Albanians, French, British, Germans and Americans in the course of three thousand years, the island has a history with more twists and turns than a heap of loose celluloid. Inheriting a unique racial mix, imbued with a rich folklore and boasting its own language, Sicily has a culture which perplexes and perturbs other Italians, let alone the rest of us. Driving into another town of Sicilian speakers, the conman Morelli despairingly asks: “You understand Italian here?” All that makes for the sort of stories on which cinema thrives, and so it is that Sicily has been the setting for scores of films,
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Inheriting a unique racial mix, imbued with a rich folklore and boasting its own language, Sicily has a culture which perplexes and perturbs other Italians, let alone the rest of us... All of this makes for the sort of stories on which cinema thrives, and so it is that Sicily has been the setting for scores of films. above all by Italian directors. Many have been excellent and several have won Oscars. The leading Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia went so far as to say, “Sicily is cinema” – such is the drama of the landscape, the turbulence of its history and the passion of its people. In fact, it’s reasonable to say that no region has been used so well in Italian movies as has Sicily, and by many of the greatest Italian directors too: Rossellini, Visconti, Rosi, Germi and Antonioni are just a few examples. None of them was Sicilian by origin, but all were drawn to the island for its rich cinematic possibilities. One of them, Pietro Germi, made four outstanding films in Sicily between 1949 and 1964. He set his Oscar-winning comedy Divorce Italian Style (1961), taken from a novel set in the Rome region, in Sicily with Sicilian characters because, he said, the island was Italy writ large, with all the national foibles exaggerated in the sultry
heat of the deep south. In recent decades, however, a native Sicilian has been the most prominent director filming on the island: Giuseppe Tornatore, most famous for his Cinema Paradiso (1988), an Oscarwinning film of homage to both small-town Sicily and the cinema. Few who saw this movie failed to fall in love with the little boy Toto, who became a film projectionist whilst still in short pants. In fact, since just about every place on the island worth seeing has featured in a good movie, an excellent way to tour Sicily is to go from film location to film location, comparing the places now and then. All the films mentioned here are available on DVD, so you can view them beforehand or – most intriguingly – view them on your laptop while there. Sicilian society, along with Italy as a whole, has changed significantly in a half century, and the contrasts are fascinating to see. What you don’t see, because it’s a secret society, but which often comes to mind – the Mafia – is still there, but weakened, even in Palermo, the island’s capital city and great honeypot. Having many airline connections, Palermo’s a natural place to start a visit. From here, we’ll be making an anticlockwise tour of the island, mostly keeping close to the coast, where most Sicilians live, and therefore where most of the movies have been set. As the city with the most power, money and people, Palermo has had plenty of dramas and featured in plenty of films. And before you can say Francis Ford Coppola, straight from the airport you’re into a scene from a mafia movie. As you drive along the coastal motorway into the city, you
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Stromboli of the Aeolian Islands
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Syracuse, Palazzo delle Poste
Despite severe war damage, Sicily’s capital retains much of the grandeur it gained in the medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and Art Nouveau periods. In this incomparable urban circus, filmmakers find outstanding settings with ease.
ride straight over the climactic scene of Excellent Cadavers (aka Falcone, 1998). A dramatisation of the Italian state’s struggle against the mafia in the 1980s and early 90s, led by the tireless prosecuting magistrate, Giovanni Falcone, the film was extensively shot in the streets and official buildings of Palermo where he was based. Finally in 1992, the mafia got rid of Falcone by blowing his car to pieces on that autostrada near the town of Capaci. Palermo is a sprawling, chaotic and noisy city that has sat beside a natural harbour since classical times. Despite severe war damage, Sicily’s capital retains much of the grandeur it gained in the medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and Art Nouveau periods, amidst much that is desolate and crumbling. In this incomparable urban circus, filmmakers find outstanding settings with ease. Coppola shot the climactic scene of The Godfather III (1990) on the monumental steps of the Teatro Massimo, the largest theatre in Italy and the biggest opera house in Europe after those of Paris and Vienna. In the Palazzo Gangi’s ballroom, Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale danced in the gorgeous grand ball scene of The Leopard (1963), Luchino Visconti’s version of Lampedusa’s superb historical novel on Sicily. The palazzo is a treasure chest of aristocratic living, held by the same family since 1652, and is thought to be one of only a dozen family homes of such splendour left in the world. Princess Carine Vanni Mantegna welcomes visitors by special arrangement. As if the city had sucked all grandeur and wealth into itself, the rural hinterland of Palermo was notorious for the miserable
As if the city had sucked all grandeur and wealth into itself, the rural hinterland of Palermo was notorious for the miserable conditions of its inhabitants in a world of banditry, extortion and exploitation, especially after World War II.
A view of Savoca, a location from The Godfather
conditions of its inhabitants in a world of banditry, extortion and exploitation, especially after World War II. Montelepre is a byword for this, a poor mountainous area to Palermo’s west rocked in the late 1940s by a rebellion led by the bandit Salvatore Giuliano. The harrowing story was filmed in the Montelepre area by Francesco Rosi in 1962 under the title Salvatore Giuliano. In the same year, but this time with much humour, the director Alberto Lattuada shot a mafia satire just south of Palermo in the town of Belmonte Mezzagno, squeezed in a valley beneath looming mountains. A black comedy called Mafioso, the film is about a local man who has made good in Milan as a factory manager, one of the many southerners who went north for a better life in Italy’s “economic miracle” of the 1950s. He comes back to his home town – named ‘Calamo’ in the film, an
anagram of a notorious mafia town called Alcamo – with his blonde northern wife and little daughters for a summer holiday. After a few days of family warmth and beachside bliss, he finds that he can’t escape his obligations to the community, ie. the local mafia godfather, who picks him for a job – a killing. Holiday-maker to hitman – he can’t refuse. The town is dusty and poor, dominated by churches, the mature women all dressed in black, horses and carts trotting the streets and cars a rare sight. Today, famous for its olive oil and goat’s cheese, the town is mildly affluent, if still scruffy around the edges, and cars abound. Whilst nasty apartment blocks, some six storeys high, now disfigure the main square, the Santissimo Crocifisso Church of 1776 still lords it over the scene, painted in yellow ochre and cream. As for the mafia, it’s got a history here in reality, and presumably
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a present too. A mafioso convicted of the killing of magistrate Giovanni Falcone, Benedetto Spera, was from Belmonte Mezzagno. In Mafioso, the mafia boss Don Vicenzo lives behind the walls of a rambling old estate in the town centre; what you see is actually the Villa Palagonia in Bagheria, a town set amongst citrus orchards just to the east of Palermo, about 10 minutes’ drive from Belmonte Mezzagno. Once an elegant place full of fine villas owned by wealthy Palermitans, today it is scarred by thoughtless modern development, with the monstrous statues of the Villa Palagonia its main attraction. Created in 1715, this was originally the estate of Francesco Ferdinando II Gravina, Prince of Palagonia, and is an early and richly eccentric example of Sicilian Baroque, an architectural style which gives theatricality to many Sicilian towns, as if the Sicilians didn’t have enough drama already in
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their personalities and their landscape. The prince’s wife got around, it seems, and as a revenge he erected scores of monster statues with the faces of her lovers in the garden and atop its wall. These grotesques have drawn tourists for two centuries, including famous writers like Goethe and Alexandre Dumas, and also drew Antonioni for some suitably disorienting scenes of L’Avventura (1960). There’ll be more on that seminal film later. Bagheria is the hometown of Giuseppe Tornatore, whose boyhood there inspired his breakthrough movie, Cinema Paradiso (1988). Two decades later, he went so far as to make a 150-minute epic about his beloved town, via a family story
For The Godfather films, the Corleone Mafia was none too keen on Coppola filming in their town, so it was substituted with the hilltop villages of Forza d’Agro and Savoca on the east coast, becoming much prettier in the process.
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spanning the 1930s to the 1980s, called Baaria (2009), its local nickname. But neither of these period films was shot in Bagheria, so much had the town changed. For Baaria, Tornatore constructed a replica of mid20th century Bagheria in Tunisia. For Cinema Paradiso’s main location shooting, Tornatore went up into the hills to the south. The peerless travel writer Norman Lewis, a lover of Sicily, made a springtime trip into this western heartland of the island. “There were no houses, villages, people, animals, trees and little by way of scenery but vague mountain shapes scribbled on milky skies,” he reported, but further on came “surrealistic tableaux of rocky outcrops, tiny pyramidical mountains capped with enormous crags.” The only significant town in this godforsaken territory is Corleone, a name to send chills down your spine. The family name and ancestral home of the New York mafia boss in Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy, Corleone has long been a mafia stronghold in actuality. More than that, it has been mission control of the Sicilian Mafia since the 1980s, under the boss of bosses, Toto Riina, and then Bernardo Provenzano. For The Godfather films, the Corleone mafia was none too keen on Coppola filming in their town, so it was substituted with the hilltop villages of Forza d’Agro and Savoca on the east coast, becoming much prettier in the process. Once seeming irremediably grim, with unpaved streets inhabited by goats and chickens, Corleone today is still no beauty spot but is a much more prosperous place. If you wind on through the hills southwards, you get
to a small town called Palazzo Adriano, Tornatore’s main substitute for Bagheria in Cinema Paradiso. You instantly recognise the expansive square hosting the main church and – for the film only – the little Nuovo Cinema Paradiso with its Art Deco sign. Sited in one of the island’s poorest parts, Palazzo Adriano was founded by Albanian immigrants in one of the many twists of Sicilian history, but it puts on a well-scrubbed face for the curious film fans who turn up here. Winding on down to the south coast, you arrive at the seaside town of Sciacca, an old Arab fishing port which drew Pietro Germi twice. In 1949 he made In The Name Of The Law here with the young Fellini as his assistant, a law enforcement drama, but far more entertaining is his hilarious send-up of Sicilian courtship customs and family relationships made in 1964, Seduced and Abandoned. As the wilful young daughter at the story’s centre tries to navigate her way through the repressive minefield laid by local tradition, the camera climbs uneven steps, snakes down narrow alleys, pans across a rough sun-baked square, and peeps inside the confessional, where the priest has the face of a gargoyle. As barren and hidebound as Belmonte Mezzagno in Mafioso, Sciacca evokes the Sicily of old in this film, but again like that other town, today it has a measure of affluence that is the mark of 21st century Sicily. Much more spick and span than the weatherbeaten town of old, with virtually no women in black, Sciacca looks like a place where girls can no longer be locked in at home by their God-fearing – or gossipfearing – parents. The upper town retains
photo: ©corbis / proile
the knot of narrow passages and steep stairways of its Arab origins, opening out into the Piazza Scandaliato with its terrace cafes and sea views. The busy port with its trawler fleets and fishy odours is a surprise, because it doesn’t feature at all in Seduced and Abandoned, a brilliantly acted film that startles and amuses like few other classics. Sicily’s long southern coast is a delight for beach lovers. The coast road runs easily eastwards, featuring many sandy stretches, passing the near-perfect Greek Temple of Concord at Agrigento – but strangely no well-known movie locations – until it reaches the island’s well-populated southeast corner hosting the extravagant but crumbling Baroque towns of Ragusa, Ispica, Modica and Noto. Here Germi filmed his satire, Divorce Italian Style (1961), an international hit which won a screenplay Oscar, starring Marcello Mastroianni as an impoverished, unhappily married aristocrat with a passion for his pretty young cousin. The faded Baroque towns, conflated under the fictitious name of Acramonte, were ideal for evoking the ambience of Sicily’s decayed nobility living in much reduced circumstances. A joy to visit today, enhanced with many restorations, these towns are relics of the island’s most prosperous period in the 18th century, when the nobles built lavish palaces and churches in the outlandish style of the Sicilian Baroque. It’s not Germi’s film which makes the most of the area, though, but another work by Giuseppe Tornatore, The Star Maker (1995), shot in colour as opposed to Germi’s habitual black and white. In this film, set in the late 1940s, “Doctor” Joe
Morelli is a conman from Rome who trundles about the Ragusa region in a van with a big motion picture camera, offering screen tests to gullible locals. Sicily’s southeast corner comprises a series of high plateaus, undulating with parched farm fields, punctuated with rocky outcrops and deep gorges, with a great blue sky above. Tornatore’s shots of this countryside are ravishing, and some of the scenes of arrival in the vertiginous hill towns are breathtaking. They make you want to get your own vehicle, preferably more roadworthy than Morelli’s flimsy wagon, and take to the same roads. “What a face!” the fake talent scout keeps saying, gulling the locals into parting with 1,500 lira for the chance that a producer in Rome might pick them for a movie role. Except that the tests are never developed, and it’s all a scam. To get customers in one town, Morelli hands out lines from Gone With The Wind, and there’s a marvellous sequence of people all over the town walking around reciting, “After all, tomorrow is another day”, the famous closing line. In Italian, of course. Or Sicilian. Tornatore’s next Sicilian film, Malena (2000), again looked back to the 1940s, using Siracusa on the east coast as its setting, focusing on the isle of Ortigia that is its ancient centre. Monica Bellucci is Malena, an elegant widow who sashays through the old city at regular intervals, acquainting us with its mellow streets as well as her voluptuous figure. Often she traverses the lengthy Piazza del Duomo at the city’s heart, lined with grand façades and leering males. One of Sicily’s glories, Siracusa – long known in English as Syracuse – was in classical times a great Greek
Stromboli Island
city, the most powerful city in the western Mediterranean, and it has accrued monuments from every era since then. The Baroque cathedral began life as the Greek Temple of Athena, whose Doric columns are still there. For anyone seeking to dig into the many layers of Sicilian history, or to enjoy the beauty and charm of a fine old Sicilian city, Siracusa is unmissable. Driving halfway up the east coast you reach the port of Catania, Sicily’s second biggest city, where Marcello Mastroianni again had romantic problems, as an impotent Casanova in Il Bell’Antonio (1960), much to Claudia Cardinale’s chagrin. The city also disappoints, its many fine buildings outweighed by its heavy industry and brash commerce, so it’s best to press on northwards. Soon the 3,300-metre-high cone of Mt Etna rises up, brooding over the seaside village of Aci Trezza, whilst offshore there jut from the sea towering pinnacles called the
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Rocks of the Cyclops, a mythic feature of Homer’s Odyssey. Here Luchino Visconti made a masterpiece of neorealism, La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), a drama acted by the poor fishing community itself in the Sicilian language. Deeply moving, the film shows the rebellion of a fishing family against the fish wholesalers who exploit them. Not surprisingly with such scenery, Aci Trezza is now a popular holiday spot. The locals no longer worry about the fishing catch, only about snaring enough tourists. In the harbour bob brightly painted boats with traditional designs and there’s a little museum dedicated to the film, run by one of the cast. Of all the locations of classic Sicilian films, Aci Trezza has seen the most amazing change of fortune, transformed from dire poverty and grinding labour into a laidback resort at the heart of “The Riviera of the Cyclops”. Taking the busy coast road
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northwards, passing the pretty hillside resort town of Taormina with its Roman theatre, and then heading into the coastal hills, you find Forza D’Agro and Savoca, the substitutes for Corleone in The Godfather, where Michael Corleone gets married to Apollonia Vitelli. The Bar Vitelli where he asks her father for her hand is still there on Savoca’s main square and none too different either, with simple tables outside and locals passing the time of day. Taking a road across the island’s northeastern tip, you arrive in the ferry port of Milazzo, from which boats leave for the Aeolian Islands of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Volcanic in origin, the archipelago has landscapes of stony desolation 280
Corleone, Sicily
unlike anywhere else in Italy. That quality drew Michelangelo Antonioni to shoot the pivotal episode of L’Avventura (1960) there, on the uninhabited islet of Lisca Bianca, an easy yacht voyage from the larger inhabited island of Panarea. The film explores the empty lives of Rome’s young bourgeoisie as two couples take a weekend trip. The key moment happens when a beautiful woman goes missing on the desolate island and is never found. Take a boat north from Panarea and out of the sea looms the conical profile of the most northerly and most dramatic of the Aeolian Islands. Stromboli is a huge active volcano rising directly from the waves, whose fiery nature came to symbolise the love between
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Ingrid Bergman, Hollywood’s top female star, and Roberto Rossellini, the leading filmmaker of Italy’s neorealist movement. In 1949, Bergman wrote an admiring letter to Rossellini; very quickly he cast her as the central character of a film to be called Stromboli. Filming on the volcanic isle, they fell in love and conceived a child. Bergman plays a foreign internee in a wartime Italian camp who marries an Italian to get free. Taken to his remote island home, she finds herself imprisoned again by a wild and strange land with hostile people. Always the volcano looms above, then erupts with boulderhurling fury. A psychological drama memorable for its exotic setting
and its snapshot of a vanished way of life, Stromboli includes rare scenes of the bloody tuna hunt called the mattanza and of an actual volcanic eruption – fortuitous for the film-maker, and just one more travail for the islanders. Today, there’s no more hunt and much less fishing of any kind, the islanders instead welcoming tourists to their sole settlement, Ginostra, with its terraces of white houses adorned with bougainvillea and wisteria. Ever restless, the volcano throws up showers of sparks and flaring rocks every twenty minutes or so, best seen by making a night-time ascent to the crater rim. A fireworks display always makes for a good ending.