Golden Door | Blind Light

Canteen culture: Golden Door

Golden Door
directed by Emanuele Crialese
film on general release

This exquisite French Italian co-production is one of the best films this year.

It follows the fortunes a Sicilian peasant family emigrating to the US at the turn of the 20th century – and their encounter with a mysterious Englishwoman, Lucy, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg.

The film starts in an enchanted but poverty stricken Sicily, moves on to the trauma of the transatlantic voyage, before ending in the bizarre and sinister bureaucracy of Ellis Island in New York.

Golden Door’s dreamlike composition and languorous pace have confused some reviewers. Don’t let them put you off seeing this gorgeous and politically pointed film.

Jiben Kumar

Blind Light
by Antony Gormley
exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London
until 19 August

Thirty life size castings of a man gaze from inner London rooftops. Three hundred hollow concrete posts in a gallery represent the 300 inhabitants of a Swedish town. You can easily hide or become lost among them.

In a glass room filled with dry ice, you can barely see two feet in front of you. Advised not to enter if you are of a nervous disposition, you feel calm, or anxious, or powerful – or perhaps none of these.

This is the world of Antony Gormley, whose exhibition Blind Light runs at the Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank until 19 August this year.

Gormley’s work is focused on the body – but unusually for a sculptor, he is barely interested in what the body looks like. Instead he aims to “deal with the body the other way round, from the inside”, exploring the body as “a place rather than an object”.

But Gormley’s world is also a social world of relationships, built environments and urban spaces. This is an exhibition that challenges us about how we live and how we might live.

Paul Burnham

» www.southbankcentre.co.uk/gormley

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