Friday, September 21, 2007

Opera Jawa

Was reading the September issue of Sight and Sound this afternoon, and saw Tony Rayns' review of Opera Jawa. The film was one of six commissioned by The New Crowned Hope Festival to celebrate the 250th birth anniversary of Mozart last year. (I Don't Want To Sleep Alone and Syndromes and a Century were also commissioned for the same festival.)

Tony Rayns says:

The sets and props in fact deserve a chapter to themselves; created by Indonesia's leading installation artists, they include a butcher's slaughterhouse with carcasses hanging above blood-red candles in the shape of human heads, television sets carved from stone and wispy white muslin dummies hanging by the roadside to represent the dead. No film has looked or sounded like this before.





2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So....what do you think about these art installations?

Reminiscent, you think, of terracotta warriors and Bodies: The Exhibition?

Space Bar said...

Anon: I think it's impossible to have an opinion about them until one sees the film. If they were exhibits by themselves, perhaps; since they form a part of a film, it would need to be seen in context.

I don't know anything about Bodies: The Exhibition. Terracotta Warriors, now - that's an interesting comparison. I wonder how theatrical these installations wil lturn out to be. From the few images I've seen, it can be dangerously easy to over-interpret.