Processions

The Sultan’s elephant arrived in London to usher in the summer and a season of festivals. The creature was magnificent in every sense, from its sheer scale to the seen-to-be-believed skills of the twenty technicians/ puppeteers controlling its lithe, intricate movements. Unfortunately, the forced exoticism of the event felt a little fake even as the elephant was water-gunning the crowd into submission. The Brick Lane Festival is releasing an animal of its own into the wilds of Whitechapel making its habitat amongst the doorstep exoticism of Asian food stalls, music and dance. The Royal Bengal tiger will be similarly mechanised so don’t fear for your arses, ladies and gentlemen. In an inverted mirror of the natural world, in terms of what it would cost, the elephant could consume forty of these tigers. We want to look forward to this season to which other festival animals will be released: Film festivals could release owls or bats who are content to hang around in the dark, music festivals with kangaroos because of the relentless jumping up and down, and art festivals giving you giraffes craning their necks.

Two new additions within the CEN bestiary are ‘Cathode Ray Nipple’, a look at upcoming TV programmes, and ‘East of the World’, a look at the east-sides of cities around the world and how we are all not that different. Television has made its ground as the great predator of popular entertainment, staking out its territory globally with no-one safe from its mechanised surveillance – and whilst we are all in its clutches, it’s hard not to marvel even as it tears you apart – our reports from the heart of the beast warn you of the signs of danger even though we know a great many of you are already hooked right in. At CEN Magazine, however, we are a different type of hunter, bringing you the elusive qualities of the inhabitants of the east-end wherever they may be in the world; Turin is the first captured in our randomly thrown net.

The accepted king of the film festival jungle, the Cannes Film Festival will be underway in the later stages of May and will be introducing several new countries in its world cinema section, and goes to show the continuing respect France has for cinema as an art form. France being one of the few countries, globally, that enshrines the Director’s right to final cut within its legislation. You have to salute a country that legislates film ‘auteurship’ as a right for any director who gets his films made with French money, seeing as the idea of the ‘auteur’ first surfaced in the Cahiers Du Cinema critiques of Truffaut and Bazin during the fifties. Up until that point, the intellectual ownership of films was ascribed to the studios. The combination of the intellectual and the legislative in such a grandly artistic way is something that feels truly French and a good way forward for the rest of the world. Well done France, even though you can be a bit snooty at times.

One festival that we have not covered in this issue is the Bangladeshi Film Festival, which this year is celebrating 50 years of Bangladeshi film. Showing at the Genesis Cinema and the Rich Mix Centre, this is a real gem mainly for fighting off the malign juggernaut that is Bollywood cinema, which to many westerners has come to represent the entire oeuvre of Indian Sub-Continental film. This festival is particularly relevant because it is based in an area that has a high proportion of Bangladeshi residents. But it will have to fight its way through the menagerie of animated critters that are walking the streets as festival season stalks the summer.