Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist is a hypnotic, puzzling film about private life and political commitment

The mood generated is one of fascinated perplexity. Bernardo Bertolucci is marvellously faithful not just to Alberto Moravia’s novel, on which this film is based, but to the spirit of all Moravia’s work, where, infallibly, the more vividly and lucidly events are described, the more incomprehensible they become.

Marcello Clerici, an agent of Mussolini’s fascism, travels to Paris to infiltrate a dissident movement led by his old philosophy professor, Luca Quadri. But, during the journey, Marcello receives fresh orders: he must assassinate the professor. Since Quadri’s beautiful young wife, Anna, is always beside him, she, too, is at risk. The scene is set for a double murder.

Our feelings are never those we expect from such a plot. Little attempt is made to evoke fascism’s menace; there are no scenes of mass hysteria or images of marching soldiers. For running alongside the political thriller, or rather superimposed over it, is a sentimental comedy of the French variety. Marcello has just married the empty-headed Giulia and is planning to carry out his deadly mission during his honeymoon. We don’t respond with the smiles and tender anxieties that this genre usually arouses. The world Bertolucci creates for his characters is wonderfully lush, yet ominous and oppressive, too. The most trivial transactions are heavy with premonition.

The Conformist is a masterpiece, using colour, camerawork, scene-setting and flashback to achieve a perplexity and wonder that is entirely cinematic and leaves Moravia’s literary construct far behind. Almost every scene is shot in surroundings rich in colour or chiaroscuro, yet disturbingly claustrophobic in their grid-like symmetry.

Just as The Conformist addresses existential issues, it also begins to say something interesting about fascism: for example, that life is so baffling in its comedy and beauty that there will always be those desperate to stamp order on it; or alternatively that fascism, unlike nazism, was often more of a dream of decisive action than the thing itself. Either way (or neither), with its visual, textual and symbolic density, its music sliding from sinister to vaudeville, and its plot ever more impenetrable as it accelerates towards the violent denouement, The Conformist remains a hugely entertaining conundrum. You can ask for nothing better of a film.

While the 9/11 attacks have spawned a number of recent novels, the decision ot go to war against Iraq has received relatively little attention in fiction. Melissa Benn’s second novel puts that disastrously decisive event at its moral centre as well as locating it within the wider context of the Labour party’s recent history. Few could be better placed than Benn to chart Labour’s painstaking reinvention of itself through the repeated election defeats of the 1970s and 80s, via the landslide victory of 1997, to the debacle of the Iraq war and its sorry aftermath. As the daughter of Tony Benn, the sister of Hilary Benn and campaigning journalist in her own right, she has witnessed public and private contours of Labour’s journey over the last 30 years.

Tempting, then, to approach ‘One of Us’ as a roman à clef, an insider’s guide to New Labour. But while it is certainly true that Benn is concerned with and perceptive about Labour’s transformation, particularly as experience by those involved, her real focus is a much bigger theme: the risks and rewards of kinship, political, professional and, most importantly of all, personal.

It was an inspired decision, then, to tell this tale through a reworking of the story of Antigone, of all the Greek tragedies the one that addresses most directly the dilemma of wise governance, the conflicting pulls of familial bonds, civic interest and political authority.

Benn is wonderful on the telling of family life, the delicate balance between individual and collective identities within a family. ‘One of Us’ is unashamedly a novel about politics, a damning indictment of New Labour and the fatal erosion of moral discernment in political life. It is a novel about marriage and the unseen, unacclaimed domestic lives that we lead. Above all, it is about the fragile, precious web of personal connections. Benn has succeeded in being the ancient themes which preoccupied Sophocles up to date with a keen eye and subtle intelligence.

The Franco-Nigerian singer explains why Lagos has got the funk.

One of the biggest stars in Nigeria right now is a masked singer known as Lagbaja, a Yoruban word that roughly translates as ‘somebody, nobody, anybody, everybody’. Asa, who was born in Paris but grew up from the age of two in the Nigerian capital of Lagos, thinks Lagbaja might be on to something. ‘I love his music and his costumes are a smart move’, she says. ‘That way, no one knows who you are.’

A craving for anonymity might seem odd coming from Asa, a hugely promising singer-songwriter who has just returned to Paris after a spell in London to launch her debut album and perform a stripped-back, funky-acoustic version of her single, ‘Fire on the Mountain’, on the BBC’s Later…With Jools Holland. But then Asa (pronounced as in ‘Brimful of…) is a compelling mix of such contradictory influences. While her father, a cameraman, was working in Lagos, his daughter grew up dipping into his rich collection of records and discovering traditional Yoruban music, pan-African artists and Western superstars.

All of this has given the 25-year-old’s music a Starbucks-friendly quality. Asa is all too aware that it is from Nigeria’s capital that she draws her strength. ‘I need to get back to Lagos soon. I need that energy, that struggle. I need more information to feed into my music. In many ways, all major cities are the same, everyone striving to be noticed. But Lagos is crazy, with many problems – from the abuse of children to the fact that it is a very strict, very religious society’, she says.

Asa plays the Carling Academy Islington, on 12 May, and the Club Academy, Manchester on 13 May. Her debut album is out now.

Ono – returning more than 40 years after her notorious performance there in 1967, in which she invited her audience to ‘fly’ from a stepladder and handed them a broken vase – will be inviting visitors to write down their ‘wishes’, as well as giving a typically unpredictable performance on April 4.

Ono performs as part of Now Then, a celebration of the history and architecture of the Bluecoat centre. It gave Picasso, Van Gogh and Cezanne their first major UK exhibition outside London in 1911.

Many chefs regard their dishes as a work of art. Now the concept is to be turned on its head by an artist who plans to prepare a giant salad, dress it, mix it, and dish it up for 300 people in an event at the Tate Modern.

Alison Knowles, an American experimental artist, will coordinate the chopping, mixing, and serving, set to the music of Mozart, in a performance designed to blur the line between the aesthetic and the everyday.

Knowles, born in 1933, was an early member of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s with Yoko Ono, John Cage, and Joseph Beuys. The avant-garde group, which was at its height from 1962-1964, specialised in staging simply event combining different art forms and media. Her art is preoccupied with meditating on the everyday.

The premiere of Make a Salad took place in 1962, and there have been occasional performances in America in the past decade. This event will take place on the spring holiday weekend on May 24 as part of a Fluxus extravaganza.

This time Knowles will buy her ingredients – hundreds of lettuces, cucumbers, carrots, and tomatoes – at a supermarket. She will act as the ‘head chef’, but will be assisted by five members of the Tate’s catering department, chosen for their cutting skills. A large trestle table will be laid out, crossing 25ft above the turbine hall. A cellist playing a Mozart concerto will signal the start of the event, and once the music is over, the chopping will begin. The sound, amplified by speakers, will be relayed around the gallery for 15 minutes. The ingredients are then thrown, in order, down into a plastic-lined vessel below. Knowles and her assistants then move downstairs to begin mixing.Knowles has stipulated that olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and herbs such as rosemary and fennel should be added to the final miz, before it is served to the 300 strong audience.

‘It’s a participatory event in every sense’, said Kathy Noble, the event’s curator, ‘the work of the chefs, the observation of the audience and then the chance to eat what they have seen put together.’

Who is Asne Seierstad? A journalist, chasing the truth? A danger-junkie, thriving on the thrills? An agent of revelation, exposing political crimes and atrocities across Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Chechnya? The man at the heart of her previous book The Bookseller of Kabul accuses her of simply being a meddler in other people’s affairs, and one who gets it wrong at that. What is her purpose?

Sierstad’s book is the result of a series of visits to Chechnya, to Moscow, to post-war Grozny. She steps nimbly from place to place, from world to world. Much of her work as already been filed in reports to her newspaper back in Oslo, dating back to 1995 when, as a freelance writer, she entered the Chechen battle zone after Yeltsin sent the tanks in.

The Chechen republic had been proclaimed some three years earlier. Seierstad watched on television as the Russian army suffered a humiliating catastrophe. She was 24 years old, a rookie journalist. She hitched a ride on a Russian military aircraft, arriving amid mayhem. The book charts her journey, her enlightenment. She reported Chechnya’s horrors for over two years. Ten years later she returned, and was shocked to find what war had done to a brutalised people. You want to trust what she says because of the steely stare of her prose, and because she seems trusted by everyone else.

She can transport you into suffering and squalor; into palaces of demagogues, cold-hearted liars. She can paint you into the presence of those who lie and steal and kill because they are brutalised. Among them Timur and Liana, a brother and sister, haunt this tale. Then there is Nikolai, the infantryman destroyed by a rebel landmine, and Tamara whose son disappeared. She spends time with them all, rigorously conjuring the minutiae of what happened.  It is chilling reading.
There are heroes here, but their feet are mostly of clay. The exception is Hadijat, the house-mother running her refude among the remains of what was once a civilisation, giving shelter, lover and structure to Grozny’s lost children. The ‘Angel’ herself.

It becomes a harrowing portrayal, a gleam of defiance amid the detritus of hope. The whole account esudes a sense of unfinished business, both political and human, a sense of the scale of tremendous oppression.

‘Probably the most powerful spare poet of his generation; recognition of his genius cannot be much longer delayed’. It is now almost a quarter of a century since Martin Seymour-Smith pronounced this accolade in his Guide to Modern World Literature.

Born in 1919, Ashby is hardly yet a household name, but he ought to be, at least among those who care for poetry. He has just published what must be the most remarkable swansong offered by a writer in their 89th year – 16 new poems in a collection entitled A Few Late Lowers.

A good starting point with this collection is ‘It Being Lent’. This stands to demonstrate what makes Ashby good, verging towards natural surrealism. There are other poems as quirky and memorable, in particular ‘A Report for Ann’, where the poet addresses his dead wife.

Although an unpromising title, this small book could one day become a collector’s item. A sequence of original poems, it is a bittersweet distillation of a lifetime’s experience. Ashby’s themes are, in fact, the classics of love and death, but treated with a complete lack of fuss, much deep thought, and feeling packed into homely images.

A full-scale recreation of the Beethoven Frieze, the huge 34 metre long installation by Gustav Klimt, which can only be seen in Vienna, is to be one of the highlights of the first comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK.
Tate Liverpool announced on 3 March that the frieze copy, made in 1984 and rarely loaned, will travel to the city for this summer’s Klimt exhibition, which is expected to be one of the biggest crowd pullers among the European capital of culture events.

The actual frieze, 34 metres long and two metres high was inspired by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was created by Klimt in 1902 as a ‘total work of art’, celebrating a unification of different art forms including painting , sculpture, architecture, poetry and music. The original plan was to destroy it after the exhibition.

Christopher Grunenberg, director of the Tate Liverpool, said that the Frieze was ‘an icon of 20th century art’. The Frieze is a highlight in an exhibition of 270 Klimt-related works, including 26 paintings and 29 drawings.
Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life in Vienna 1900, May 30-August 31, Tate Liverpool.

With little more than cow horns, 8ft drums and hollow shells, Guinea-Bissau throws one of the best parties on earth.
A chiming melody rings through the crumbling streets of the city of Bissau, the capital of the west African Republic of Guinea-Bissau. An old man, dressed in a Rafia skirt with strings of pink and white seashells draped across his torso, presses a spectacularly curved cow horn to his lips. He puffs his cheeks and blasts a tune, raw and rasping, which echoes through the rapt crowd. Behind him a parade of pubescent girls, glistening in the sun and dancing to the beat of a cracked wooden drum.

Bissau’s carnival, which takes place over the four days before lent, is like no other. Although traditionally a Christian celebration, less than 10% of Bissau Guineans call themselves Catholic; the rest worship either Allah or the spirit of the island and forests. Today’s carnival, which has been going for as long as anyone in the city can remember, is, as one long time Portuguese resident put it, about ‘local ethnic traditions combined with a Portuguese date’. Guineans have taken an imported religious festival and used it as an excuse to have a very big, cultural celebration.

But there is no electricity in the country, and petrol is too expensive for most people to afford. So there are no motorised cavalcades of elaborated expensive costumes or amplified music, as in the grand carnivals of Rio or Venice. Instead, hundreds of groups representing the country’s various different tribes charter wooden boats and battered trucks and pour into the city.

It is one of Africa’s most vibrant celebrations in a country that is chaotic and quirky at the best of times. Guinea-Bissau is just twice the size of Wales, dwarfed by its larger Muslin neighbours Senegal, to the north, and Guinea Conakry to the south. It is a country of forests and islands. Once a colony of Portugal, it gained its freedom through a violent 11-year war of independence that ended barely 30 years ago. Since then the country has been under the rule of ruthless dictators and army generals, and emerged just a few years ago from a short but brutal civil war that left the economy in tatters.

This year’s Bissau carnival has a theme, inspired by the country’s latest woes. A slogan is hand painted on banners strung between rough wooden poles: ‘Support the fight against illegal immigration and drug trafficking.’ It is carried by the leaders of each carnival group. Guinea-Bissau, with its unprotected borders and insufficient law enforcement, is suffering the depredations of drug lords using the fragile country as an easy route for sending massive quantities of cocaine to Europe.

Noah and the Whale
These guys have been making a name for themselves for creating beautifully crafted folk pop, singing about the traditional ideas of love, loss drinking, zoo visits and James Dean impersonations. Some of their songs may start off as slow ballads, but there is always a happy, clappy delight to follow that you will want to be listening to whenever the sun comes out. They have only released a couple of singles on Young & Lost Club so far, but expect to catch them, possibly with a little help from Laura Marling, at a number of festivals over the summer.

Listen: 5 Years Time [YouTube]
http://www.myspace.com/noahandthewhale

Friends of the Bride
Sounding like they’ve come straight out of the 1960s and looking sharp in snazzy sports coats, these crooners add a modern twist to the sounds that made London swing half a century ago and make you want to find your dancing shoes. Catchy rhythms and crooning vocals that wouldn’t sound out of place in Bugsy Malone are blended together to create songs that will make you want to dig out your dancing shoes. Only a few singles are available to buy via Young & Lost Club and Brainlove, but you want to hear them live for the full experience.

Listen: So, You Think You Can Dance [YouTube]
http://www.myspace.com/friendsofthebride

Broken Records
Glasgow generally gets the credit for the birthplace of great Scottish bands, but Broken Records from Edinburgh are evening that up a bit. Their influences shine through with some elements of Scottish folk, a vocal drawl that is reminiscent of Johnny Cash and a climatic elegance like Sigur Ros which they develop into their own unique style. You can pick up their EP from their MySpace or at their live shows and catch them at the Bongo Club when they come home in April.

Listen: Slow Parade [MP3 via TheBlueWalrus]
http://www.myspace.com/brokenrecordsedinburgh

The Moths
The Moths are getting major label interest and for good reason after winning a RockSellout unsigned competition and doing sessions for XFM. With just a singer, a guitarist and a keyboard player over a drum machine they offer exciting, growling punk pop with influences from ranging from the Buzzcocks to the Killers. So far they have only released a triple A-side (yes that means three awesome tunes for the price of one) on Fandango, and have plenty to download on RCRD.LBL.

Listen: Valentine [MP3 via RCRD.LBL]
http://www.myspace.com/themothsuk

Bag Raiders
If electro is more your thing you need to get hold of the dirty growling beats that is currently coming out of Australia with the Bag Raiders. Think a heavier version of Daft Punk with all that synth dominated elctro goodness and beautifully crafted climaxes that make you want to hit the dancefloor. They have so far just released a fucking awesome 12” EP on Bang Gang that gives you a taste of their full breadth of styles from more poppy danceable disco of Fun Punch to the electro house of Nil By Mouth.

Listen: Nil By Mouth (Knightlife Remix) [MP3 via TheBlueWalrus]
http://www.myspace.com/bagraiders

We Are Terrorists
With all the great electro coming out of France on labels such as Ed Banger and Kitsune it is no surprise that neck of the woods. These guys are from around Lyon and unsigned but create some of the most catchy and danceable yet heavy electro that I’ve heard in a long time. You want this blearing from your speakers and you want it loud.

Listen: Western Spaghetti [MP3 via TheBlueWalrus]
http://www.myspace.com/weareterroristsmusic