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When you understand the systems, you understand yourself:

She married one of the Beatles, divorced him, married Eric Clapton, hung out with the Rolling Stones, drank with the Who, toured with Cream. Pattie Boyd has some stories. Like other Beatles plus-ones early on, she kept to the background. She occupied herself by taking Polaroid pictures, serendipitously documenting one of the most important eras of music history (her photos can be seen on her website).

After years of struggling with her past—the broken marriages and knock-on effects of a rock‘n’roll lifestyle—Boyd was able to write about her experiences. Her biography, "Wonderful Today", which debuted at the top of the New York Times best-seller list in 2007, begins in Kenya, where she spent her early childhood. She then recounts her modelling career in London, her time with the Beatles and her role in inspiring such songs as “Something”, “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight”. Lately Boyd has devoted herself to photography. "Through the Eyes of a Muse", a collection of personal photos from her years with George Harrison and Clapton, recently finished making a grand multi-year tour through America, Canada, Britain and Australia.

In a conversation with More Intelligent Life, Pattie Boyd spoke about her past and the way photography helped her heal.

More Intelligent Life: What convinced you to dig up the past and sort through your memories to put together "Through the Eyes of a Muse"?  read more »

"There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator," declares Maria to her underground followers in "Metropolis". When Fritz Lang's apocalyptic silent film premiered in Berlin in 1927, it was the most expensive German film ever made. It was also a commercial and critical flop. Paramount Pictures swiftly acquired the film, trimming its length and simplifying its plot to appeal to an American market. It didn't work: the film bombed in America, too, and the original cut was presumed to be lost forever.

In the meantime, Lang's stylish vision of a grim future has become a cult relic, fascinating cineastes and inspiring directors such as Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick. Now, over 80 years later, the film recently enjoyed another world premiere, again in Berlin—this time as the director's cut.

Set in the year of 2026, "Metropolis" features lowly, expendable labourers toiling in polluted darkness to support the wealthy few. Lang's imagery is bizarre and haunting, full of grinding machinery, a mad scientist and a fembot villain. It also boasts a plot full of weird gaps and confusing transitions. In 2008 a previously unknown copy of "Metropolis" was found in a museum archive in Buenos Aires, complete with missing scenes. This "sensational discovery", according to Rainer Rother, the head of the Berlin film museum Deutsche Kinematik, has filled in some of the more mystifying parts of the story. Smaller characters are fleshed out; bigger characters are better motivated.  read more »

Terry O’Neill, a British photographer, is renowned for his images of stars such as Audrey Hepburn and Frank Sinatra. His work, recognisable for its candid informality, has appeared in magazines such as Life, Vogue, and Rolling Stone, and his access to high-profile subjects led him to become one of the most published photographers of the 1960s and '70s.

Now 71, O’Neill made his name when London was a swinging, creative and altogether chummier place. Evenings at Soho’s Ad Lib Club, a popular haunt for actors, models, musicians and photographers, brought him close to his subjects, and he became friends with the likes of Richard Burton, Michael Caine and David Bowie. His photographs reveal the conflicts, contradictions, desires and dreams that lurked beneath groomed surfaces. He amassed a vast collection of negatives over the years, but as with many photographers of the time, archiving and cataloguing went by the wayside.

Thanks to Getty Images, O'Neill's archive has been properly assessed, and over 40 previously unseen photographs have just gone on show at the Chris Beetles gallery in central London. They are a revelation. O’Neill has an eye for the moment when his subjects are comfortable enough to give something away. The relaxed feel of these images is a world away from those we see of celebrities today, either airbrushed to perfection or snapped on the run.  read more »

As an X-certificate actress, Sasha Grey perfected a thrashing sensuality far more cathartic and psychologically fraught than her moaning, grunting contemporaries. Her smouldering looks and unapologetic public appearances snared millions of mostly male fans and turned the teen porn performer into a cult figure. She is considered cool to watch.

Buoyed by her status as an underworld icon, Grey has participated in fashion spreads, starred in a Smashing Pumpkins music video and worked the talk-show circuit. Then at the age of 21 she made her first foray into “legitimate” cinema, landing the role of the laconic escort in Steven Soderbergh’s "The Girlfriend Experience". But Grey might better be suited to highbrow performance art than Hollywood glitz.

She spoke with More Intelligent Life after appearing at PERFORMA 09–a biennial performance-art festival organised by RoseLee Goldberg. She had just performed in "Case", a six-hour theatrical reading of William Gibson’s science-fiction classic "Neuromancer", arranged by Brody Condon, a performance artist, and adapted by Brandon Stosuy. She appeared in the role of Molly Millions, a clawed, mercury-eyed assassin.

Grey, who was home-schooled, retains the strange intellectual sparkle of a true autodidact. Here she considers the line between porn and performance art, the cultural appeal of pre-war Berlin and the beginnings of a new cyber-hierarchy.

More Intelligent Life: How did you get involved in this performance piece? Did they approach you with the part, or you them?  read more »

The director Michael Hoffman is a master at embellishing stories with period trappings; he has proved as much with films like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Restoration". "The Last Station", based upon Jay Parini’s 1990 biographical novel of the same name, recounts the final, tempestuous months of the life of Leo Tolstoy, incarnated on screen by Christopher Plummer. Hoffman endows this adaptation with misty steppes, waxed moustaches, peasants bundled in swaths of linen and an ample supply of those droshkies without which no character from any of Tolstoy’s own novels would have gotten very far.

Trappings aside, the plot itself is a knotted one, with almost enough characters to warrant one of those genealogical charts that Tolstoy himself so often provided. We gain access to the writer’s private life by way of Valentin Bulgakov, a naïve young scholar (played by a baby-faced James McAvoy), who is hired on as Tolstoy’s secretary. In contrast with Valentin’s vulnerability (he’s a virgin with a nervous cough), Tolstoy appears luminous, his greatness blinding, complete with a biblical white beard and gauzy robes. Upon arrival at the estate, Valentin is immediately pulled into a venomous struggle between Tolstoy’s wife, Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren), and the author's scheming disciple, Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti). The two vie for the rights to Tolstoy’s work: the countess is wary of seeming greedy as she grasps for her inheritance, while Vladimir, a commune leader, conspires to transform Tolstoy into an icon.  read more »

Prompted by this very clever montage of horror films in which each clip features someone bemoaning a mysterious lack of cell-phone service at a crucial moment (hat tip: Very Short List), I began to ponder how many classic plots would be compromised by the ubiquity of mobile telephony in modern life.

The one that stuck out in my mind is the classic French heist film “Rififi” (best known for a half-hour heist scene in a jewellery store, shot in near silence). The film's climax involves Tony, the hero, rescuing the kidnapped son of his friend Jo. Returning victorious, with the kid in tow, Tony learns too late that the boy’s father has just gone to pay the ransom, only to be killed by the double-crossing kidnapper. Tony is then mortally wounded taking his revenge for the murder.

These days the plot would go something like this:

“Jo? Yeah, it’s Tony. I rescued Tonio. Nah, don’t worry about it. That’s what friends are for. I took out Grutter’s two brothers, too, so make sure you stay far away from that guy. He’s probably pretty mad. Anyway, looks like I saved you a bundle in ransom cash, so dinner’s on you?”

Or, imagine how differently the climactic scene in “Rear Window” would have played out, had Jimmy Stewart’s character been able to warn Grace Kelly that the murderer was returning to his apartment via text-message, instead of a series of flashbulb signals from across the courtyard.

This situation is hardly limited to classic thrillers.
Consider:  read more »

In an era when affected quirkiness stands in for originality (eg, Diablo Cody, "My Life As Liz", taxidermy as hip decor and anything with Michael Cera), it is rare and refreshing to behold the real thing. "House" (1977), Nobuhiko Obayashi’s absurdist horror classic, is now being screened in American cinemas for the first time, thanks to a new 35mm print from Janus Films. To call "House" original is an understatement. "Dizzyingly, effervescently insane" might be more appropriate.

What exists of a narrative unravels over the first third of the 87-minute film, which begins with a duo of schoolgirls taking glamour shots of each other and gabbing about summer vacations. More schoolgirls appear. For a moment the film is all love, pigtails, and knee-socks, with a central character named Gorgeous and a giggling retinue of pals who worship her. When Gorgeous heads home one day to find that her father has acquired a girlfriend to accompany the two on their summer vacation, she flips out and devises a plan to spend the summer instead with her aunt, a mysterious figure who is happy to accommodate Gorgeous and her six friends for the summer.  read more »

The Whitney Biennial is something of a coming-out party for mostly young and mostly unknown contemporary artists working in America. To announce the much-anticipated list of artists selected for this year's show, which opens in New York on February 25th, the two curators, Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari, have supplemented the traditional press release with a short, weird film. Art wags are now scratching their heads, wondering what this could possibly mean.

“Whitney Biennial: The List” features a cherubic Carrion-Murayari and bewhiskered Bonami bellowing their 44 picks while being shot at extreme angles in odd locations around an unusually monochromatic Whitney Museum of American Art. Meanwhile, the artists’ names scroll by below, replete with exclamation marks! Is this a call to arms? An attempt to infect the tweet-set on the cheap? Puerile inside baseball on par with the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s rickroll?  read more »

As media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch and Walter Hussman fight to monetise internet content, others are wondering what it means to have their entire life available on the web free of charge.

Josh Harris was once an important cog in the wheel of internet development. His heyday came in the 1990s, when he created the first internet television network, Pseudo.com. An early internet multimillionaire, he soon became known as "the Warhol of the Web". But his dramatic rise was followed by an even more dramatic fall in 2000, when Pseudo.com filed for bankruptcy and his public image was tarnished by his own project to chronicle his life on the web. Years later, most people have no idea who he is.

Harris's grim fate as an entrepreneur and web celebrity is the subject of Ondi Timoner's documentary We Live in Public, which won the 2009 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. After screening as part of the 53rd annual London Film Festival, the film is now in select cinemas in America and Britain.  read more »