Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

Byzantium: the chosen ones from a visceral civilisation

In Rimini there is a small square – the Piazza Ferrari. Here you can buy ice-creams, mooch under the linden trees, and peer down at 1,400-year-old Byzantine corpses. Excavations have just finished at the Surgeon’s House, discovered in 1989 when the piazza was being reland-scaped. Laid out on Gothic mosaics are the skeletons of a Christian community. The graves have been roughly gouged out of the tesserae, the bones are protected by crude roofing tiles. The Christians died during the turf wars of

Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir shows the destructive beauty of war

In the mid1980s, just after Ari Folman had left the Israeli Army, he set off on a round-the-world backpacking adventure. Two weeks into his trip of a lifetime, Folman realised that travelling wasn’t for him, so he holed up in a Southeast Asian guest house where, for a year, he consumed the stories of fellow guests and turned them into his own fictional adventures to be sent home in letters to friends. Repetition has worn the rough edges off this anecdote, which Folman tells to illu

Art brings touch of the Tate to Kabul in show of defiance to Taleban

London’s Bankside art complex and Kabul could not be farther apart in cultural terms. The Taleban banned all depictions of the human form during its rule, destroyed ancient works of art and blew up music shops. But a former curator at Tate Modern yesterday took a step across the cultural chasm with the first contemporary art exhibition in Afghanistan. The show opened as a surreal oasis of calm and culture in a tense and jittery city. Bodyguards followed many of the dipl

Posters fit for Black History Month

In 1999 I was watching a TV programme about the start of the first millennium, which looked at how different cultures had contributed to human civilisation in the last 2,000 years. I noticed the programme said little or nothing about how Africa or people of African descent had contributed to the human story. The programme had chosen to start with the world at the time of Jesus and had even shown one of the wise men as being black. So I asked: how is it that at the first millennium A

William Holman Hunt exhibition in the UK

A new exhibition of the work of William Holman Hunt, organised by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the first show of the artist's work in Britain for almost 40 years, opens at Manchester Art Gallery today. Some of the paintings will be old friends if you live in the city, where several of the artist's paintings have hung for many years. The Light of the World (Christ with a Lantern Knocking on a Door) is there, not far from The Scapegoat (sin-heavy ruminant with Dead Sea, purple mount

Solved: mystery of The Ugly Duchess - and the Da Vinci connection

She is one of the most popular paintings in the National Gallery, whose rather unfortunate looks inspired illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. But one question has always puzzled: did the poor lady really look like this? Today the Guardian can reveal that she did and was suffering from an exceptionally rare form of Paget's disease - an abnormality of the metabolism that enlarges and deforms the bones. The portrait, An Old Woman, painted b

James Bond golden gun stolen from Elstree Studios

Police were called to the Hertfordshire studios at Friday lunchtime to investigate the theft of the prop, believed to be worth £80,000. The Man With The Golden Gun, which also starred Swedish star Britt Ekland as Bond's lover Mary Goodnight, was Moore's second outing as 007. Christopher Lee played his enemy, Scaramanga, a three-nippled assassin who only ever needed one golden bullet fired from his golden gun to kill his target. In the film Scaramanga played

The music stars they tried to ban

A Liverpool music historian slipped into the world of sex, God, drugs and executions to unearth the BBC committee, which banned songs. David Charters reports WELL, we are all blessed with special gifts and it is our duty to make the most of them.For example, a few eggheads made their name by shredding the atom, others have dedicated themselves to helping the blind to see, while some eager chaps scuffed their wellies on the moon’s surface. All deserve their place in hist

Oliver Stone George W Bush biopic rushed to cinemas before US election

Oliver Stone's long-awaited biopic of George W Bush is to be released next week, rushed to the cinema just 19 days before voters go to the polls in the 2008 US presidential election. The $30 million (£17.2 million) film has been rushed out - production only began in May - and given Stone's track record for politically-charged fare and support for Barack Obama, much has been made of whether it will influence the outcome of next month's poll. But with the first reviews in

Rubens masterpiece, The Apotheosis of James I, is saved for the UK

A Rubens masterpiece of supreme importance to Britain's heritage has been saved from going to owners abroad, with the help of The Times. Literally hours before a deadline was set to expire, the Tate announced today that it had found £6 million to acquire the work, The Apotheosis of James I, by one of the greatest painters in Western art, created at the height of his powers. The Times first revealed in January the need to save it, and Stephen Deuchar, Tate Britain's dire

Picasso exhibition creates 'a cancer' in the Louvre, claim Paris elite

The 'Picasso and the masters' exhibition, which has cost nearly £3.4 million and contains 200 paintings, opened in Paris this week and sets the Spanish painter alongside classical artists like Goya, Velazquez and Delacroix. It was commissioned by Louvre president Henri Loyrette, who wanted to boost the museum's popularity with the general public. But the move has upset some members of the Paris arts scene who have accused organisers of dumbing-down to attract the pleb

Celebrating its 100th anniversary: the London tube roundel

The London Transport roundel is one of the earliest, best, most familiar and enduring of all corporate logos. It's been around in one guise or another for exactly 100 years ago this autumn, when the various privately owned Underground railway companies decided to merge their identities for the convenience of the millions of passengers who travelled on their trains every day. The first roundel logo, known as the "bullseye" or "target", consisted of a solid red dis

Historian says Beatles were just capitalists, and not youth heroes

John Lennon controversially declared they were bigger than Jesus, and the levels of fan hysteria and devotion they engendered made them synonymous with the youth culture of the swinging 60s. But a Cambridge University historian today argues that the Beatles were not heroes of the counter-culture but capitalists who cynically exploited youth culture for commercial gain. David Fowler claims: "They did about as much to represent the interests of the nation's young people as the Spice Girls did

Classic Willows story turns 100

A competition to write a modern Wind in the Willows has been launched to mark the 100th anniversary of Kenneth Grahame's classic book. Grahame's riverbank tale of Toad, Mole, Ratty and Badger became a huge hit when it was published on 8 October 1908. A museum in Oxfordshire wants to see how the characters would cope with 21st century living. Paul Mainds, of Henley's River & Rowing Museum said, it was a chance for Wind in The Willows fans to get creat

Secret artist of Great War is unmasked in new book

A British artist who risked his life to draw intricate sketches of enemy front lines during the First World War was finally unmasked yesterday more than 30 years after his death. Len Smith, a sapper and espionage expert with the Royal Engineers Special Branch, would hide in no man's land for days on end, sketching enemy positions with remarkable accuracy. Now a book of Sapper Smith's drawings has been released to the public. Armed with little more than a set of coloured penci

Rubens masterpiece, The Apotheosis of James I, is saved for the UK

A Rubens masterpiece of supreme importance to Britain’s heritage has been saved from going to owners abroad, with the help of The Times. Literally hours before a deadline was set to expire, the Tate announced today that it had found £6 million to acquire the work, The Apotheosis of James I, by one of the greatest painters in Western art, created at the height of his powers. The Times first revealed in January the need to save it, and Stephen Deuchar, Tate Britain’s di

Funeral parlour resurrected as modern art HQ aims to refresh lifeless Paris scene

It is a vast, disused funeral parlour once known as the "factory of grief", where all Paris's coffins were once made and black horse and carts were parked as the starting point for every Parisian's final journey. Politicians are now hoping the capital's temple of death will inject some life into the city's ailing modern arts scene. The former state funeral parlour at 104 rue d'Aubervilliers in north-east Paris will reopen this weekend after being transformed

From £200 wine jug to £3m masterpiece

A medieval ewer valued at £200 after being mistaken for a French claret jug fetched more than £3m yesterday after it was identified as a rare Islamic work. The 1,000-year-old crystal ewer from the Fatimid royal treasury in Egypt, decorated with cheetahs and link chains, is one of only seven such vessels known to have survived. Dating back to the late 10th or early 11th centuries, it was carved from flawless rock crystal, which is as hard as toughened steel. Christie's,

China state TV to air 50-part Bruce Lee biography

Lee became a chest-thumping source of nationalistic pride to Chinese around the world with his characters who defended the Chinese against oppressors in a series of movies in the early 1970s. But his influence wasn't felt immediately in China, which was then a closed communist country. Lee's films started surfacing in China on video in the 1980s — years after his death in 1973 from swelling of the brain. China's official China Central Television hopes to fill the void

Revisionism on a grand scale: Two sweeping historical epics are nominated for the European Film Awards

This week Euro File is kicking off a series of irregular columns on the European Film Awards, taking place in Copenhagen on 6 December. I will be watching the features that are nominated for the People's Choice award – you can vote for your favourite here - as they are meant to represent the best of today's European cinema. And my God what an eclectic bunch it is. Among the twelve nominees we have a Spanish horror thriller about a TV report going terribly wrong, a German drama about