Gentry style

Picture it:  London’s Stansted airport, departure lounges filled with art-going professionals and their hangers-on, many travelling in their carefully selected sunset cocktail frocks in order to avoid ‘economy class’ creases that no steam iron could remove (this is Ryanair to Treviso, after all). No doubt this is a scene repeated across airports, as the ever-burgeoning art world began its descent on the Biennale, the first to be curated by an American, Robert Storr.

With our leather weekend bag in tow, exclusive preview and party invites in hand, Gentrystyle perambulated to the nearest vaporetto. We head directly to the Russian party held on the (more…)

War is bad, we’re all going to die, and men with bird heads are a very bad sign … in a special report from the world’s biggest arts jamboree, Adrian Searle reveals what the Venice Biennale has to teach us. Standing in a huge, daylit room lined with vast new paintings by Sigmar Polke, I feel breathless. Their colour is translucent, resinous, and as dark as toffee. There are things going on in, under and behind the surface. At the top of one painting, a group of eager children peer down into the gloom, where something horrible and nacreous is half-visible. It might be a landscape, a wound or something children aren’t meant to see. It is hard to know what one is looking at, and I’m tempted to follow the advice of Robert Storr, director of the 52nd Venice Biennale, who calls his (more…)

5. Frantic
4. Rififi
3. An American in Paris
2. Les Quatre Cents Coups
1. Le Samourai

5. Frantic (198

Polanski’s thriller begins with a gripping sense of confusion and desperation, flowing unevenly into a scarcely believable but hugely enjoyable clandestine world of missed connections and secret alliances. Whilst Walker takes a shower, his wife, Sondra, simply disappears and he is left to his own devices, attempting to retrace her steps through the Parisian underworld, accompanied only by Ennio Morriccone’s haunting synths. Polanski saw the film as a moment when a line is crossed, somewhere between the past and present; what a man used to be and what he might become. The stunning rooftop sequence purposely recalls Vertigo, reminding us of another detective in search of more than just a woman. Frantic explores the idea of the city as a place where anything can be discovered or regained, a space where nothing is lost, except those who are searching.

4. Rififi (1955)

Celebrated for the remarkable, wordless, 32-minute heist at the centre of the film, Jules Dassin’s intricate thriller is so consummately constructed that many forget that it arrived five whole years after John Huston (more…)