From The Workforce Of The Bucharest Heavy Machinery Plant, With Love

I've been meaning to write about this for some time. Taschen's book of political souvenirs has been lying around on our office bookshelves for so long I can't recall who brought it in. It features photographs of hundreds of political gifts presented to the East German Communist Party leadership by visiting dignitaries from the fifties to the late eighties.

They are fabulous objects, combining political/military bombast with miniaturisation. Many of them take the format of elaborate retirement gifts (which some of them in fact are) or executive toys, but with the toys replaced by representations of rockets, heavy machinery or spaceships.

They are kitsch and full of bathos. Many of them serve an obvious function of declaring political obedience, or as examples of mutual back scratching or one-upmanship. They are baldly literal but put together with an eye for surreal juxtaposition.

My personal favourite is the "Desk Set" at the top, a gift from Lieutenant Colonel Kurkotkin to Erich Hoenecker on the occasion of his 60th birthday. I was hoping for something similar for mine.



The book is now sadly out of print. The objects are from the Deutsches Historiches Museum in Berlin, and the photographs are Sebastian Ahlers.

Incidentally this post is also a kind of parting gift to you, People of the Blogosphere (alright then, Person of the Blogosphere), as I am off on holiday for the next couple of weeks to a distant land with no broadband. So there will be a break in broadcasting. No twittering neither.

Modernism, Historicism and Julie Christie's Eyes

As an oblique follow on from my previous post about 1970's DIY habits, I've been thinking about period dramas. In particular I've been thinking about different periods of period dramas. Even though their setting is historical, such films are often more about the period in which they're made than the one in which they're set.

Take a film made in the late 1960's such as Far From The Madding crowd. It's a great film, but one of the most striking things about it if you watch it today are Julie Christie’s eyes. And Terence Stamp’s sideburns. Neither appear remotely correct for the period. Christie's eyes in particular are smudged with Kohl in an iconically late '60’s manner and her hair is made up in a beehive. Stamp’s sideburns are equally à la mode. These are not so much deliberate anachronisms as evidence of a distinct lack of interest in historical authenticity.



Far from the Madding Crowd is a Victorian period drama in as much as it is based on Hardy’s 1874 novel, but in many other respects it's a 1960’s film. Despite its period setting it looks like a 1960's film. Equally, Richard Burton and Liz Taylor’s 1963 epic Antony and Cleopatra plays fast and loose with historical verisimilitude. The interior sets for this film are completely outlandish, more redolent of a lavishly vulgar Las Vegas hotel than ancient Egypt. The fact that the film's narrative echoes the real life love affair of Burton and Taylor only increases the sense that the setting for the film, for all its self-consciously historic-epic quality, is secondary to the real story.



The muted colours and artfully dishevelled haircuts of 2005's Pride and Prejudice will no doubt become as outlandishly dated in time as Stamp's sideburns. The film's historical authenticity may be just as bogus but it also seems emblematic of a distinctly different sensibility. Pride and Prejudice is overflowing with a reverence for the past. It is as in love with its setting as the characters are with each other, the camera drooling over distressed paintwork and marble statues as if they were the real subject of the film.


Pride and Prejudice (Image source)

Not only that but there is a direct collusion between films like Pride and Prejudice and the heritage industry. The buildings and landscapes associated with such films become objects of increased touristic value as a result. In this sense period dramas form a sort of aesthetic propaganda wing of English Heritage. It's difficult to disassociate the relentless recycling of Austen adaptations from a more general and pervasive historical genuflection.

Is there a connection then between an attitude that had no time for the niceties of 19th century make-up and a lack of reverence for historic architecture? Is there a relationship between a late 1960's building such as Robin Hood Gardens, with its indifference to ideas of contexualism or 'fitting-in', and the equally startling modernity of Julie's Christie's eyes?

Never Neverland

This may well be stretching everyone's patience but, seeing as how I am researching Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch for a slightly longer article, I thought I would post up a link to some fascinating photographs of it from the LA Times.

The follies and grottoes that populate the estate are now in the early stages of dereliction apparently, having never exactly been built to last. They're now appropriately merging into the picturesque tradition of ruins that the whole estate mimics, albeit in fibreglass and fake stone. All of which reminds me of this, a slightly embarrassing fictionalised account of Disneyland I wrote for a fantastically obscure German magazine a few years back.

Currently owned by LA investment company Colony Capital (who bought Jackson's loan on the property - a sort of superprime mortgage foreclosure) Neverland is slated to re-open as a shrine to the singer.

There is a good article by India Wright on the Architect's Journal website about the Architecture of Neverland which is worth reading too.