The Art of ‘The Christophers’: How the Film Created an Artist’s Fabled Oeuvre - Artnet News

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There have been a fair few Resurrection Symphonies this year, and a positive glut on disc, but Antonio Pappano has form with Mahler and the London Symphony Orchestra can be relied upon to follow where he leads. First, though, the UK premiere of a new work by Dai Fujikura that had precisely nothing to do with the main event but was no less interesting for that. Amber Alchemy, commissioned to celebrate the centenary of Nomura Holdings, was inspired by the beehives atop the Japanese financial company’s London offices. In his programme note, the composer expressed his intention to evoke rather than illustrate, yet it was hard to ignore the orchestral buzz that underpinned much of this engaging 10-minute work. Quivering strings and a shimmer of vibraphones opened proceedings with striking instrumental gestures trailing off in flickering diminuendos. Pappano and the LSO brought a commendable clarity to Fujikura’s intricately interwoven lines, contrasting the music’s romantic outward sweep with its apian inner restlessness. Intention to evoke rather than illustrate… Dai Fujikura with Antonio Pappano at the UK premiere of his Amber Alchemy.

Cinema halls – or dream palaces, as they’re affectionately called – offer a retreat into the realm of make-believe, and everyday drudgery is left at the door. Though set within a single-screen theatre in the Argentinian city of Córdoba, Ramiro Sonzini and Ezequiel Salinas’s hypnotic film invokes a more porous relationship between the screen and its audience. Here, the messiness of life beguilingly sneaks into this domain of fantasies, blurring the borders between public and private spaces. While the luminous black-and-white cinematography lends a dreamy fuzziness to the images, the narrative concerns are grounded in thorny economic realities. A film projectionist at his local cinema called Pelu (Octavio Bertone) is reassigned to the post of a night watchman due to budget cuts at the city hall. The cinema soon becomes his literal refuge: he moves out of his cramped rented flat and secretly takes up occupation at his workplace. He then welcomes a horde of other outsiders, including his unemployed roommate, an ageing drifter and a sex worker who livestreams her erotic shows from the cinema.

“Everyone in America – at least as far as I knew – was a Zionist,” recalls Benjamin Moser, “especially but not only if you were Jewish.” A Pulitzer-winning biographer of Susan Sontag, he remembers being brought up short in his 20s, when a friend described Israel as “a bunch of foreigners who had no business in the Middle East” and Zionism as a “terrible mistake”. Moser, who recently turned 50, admits: “I was not even aware that Zionism was controversial.” The shift in perspective culminated in a visit to the occupied territories in 2016, during which he found “the reality of the occupation of Palestine … deranging”. His new book includes 12 portraits of Jewish figures who have opposed Zionism, a movement formed in the late 19th century to advocate for the creation of a homeland for Jewish people in Palestine. It is contentious to oppose Zionism today, but Moser wants contemporary Jewish activists to “feel less alone” by showing that debates about Zionism were once mainstream in Jewish communal life.