When a director declares that Pasolini’s seminally gruelling Salo: 120 Days of Sodom provided his cinematic road to Damascus you

When a director declares that Pasolini’s seminally gruelling Salo: 120 Days of Sodom provided his cinematic road to Damascus, you know you’re in for a rough ride Funny Games is self-consciously tough going It could be called an example of sado-masochistic cinema. As Haneke put it: “This film is so unpleasant that you have to talk about it to rid yourself of it.” This made the director’s rather cursory responses to some of the more interesting questions disappointing. He was unwilling to consider any connection with the work of fellow Austrian Hermann Nitsch, the conceptual artist and founder of Viennese Actionism, whose work is currently showing in London.
“You shouldn’t confuse apples with pears, even if they both come from Austria” was Haneke’s unhelpful response. While he railed against the use of irony in the treatment of violence in the films of Quentin Tarantino, he went on to claim his film as being utterly ironic in its use of cinematic conventions. That begged the question about whether one film-maker’s form of irony, if presented as austere modernist moralising, is somehow better and more improving than another’s.Gordon Burn is a writer who has tracked psychopathic violence more closely than most. Author of the Peter Sutcliffe study, Somebody’s Mother, Somebody’s Son, and of a forthcoming book on Rosemary West, Burn came up with revealing anecdotal details about the cost to a writer of staring deep into horror. He told of how, in his notes, he found himself unable to refer to the Wests as Fred and Rose but abbreviated them to RW and FW.

He had to wrestle with calling Sutcliffe by his first name in his account. The details he had accumulated following the Wests had made him want to walk out of the screening of Haneke’s film.The question of personal proximity to violence and the place of the body in its representation was imaginatively explored by the novelist Jenny Diski. Reading an excerpt from her novel The Dream Mistress to a back projection of a corneal operation from the 1960s TV medical documentary Your Life in Their Hands, Diski launched into a charmingly casual but thought-provoking meditation on the body.Perhaps the most terrifying screening came in Diski’s judicious choice of the closing moments of Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. If Lewis Taylor is the British Marvin Gaye, as some have claimed, then Conner Reeves must be our Stevie Wonder and Lionel Richie rolled into one. Earthbound presents a blue-eyed soul singer of remarkable abilities, not least of which is a gift for writing songs which, like the closing track, “Ordinary People”, already sound like standards.

The results are sleekly impressive: “Riot in Brixton” captures the dark, fetid atmosphere of blaxploitation-era political soul perfectly, and there’s a blue streak running through tracks such as “Lovely” and “Blues Man” that gives Kwesi’s soul a tough but flexible undercarriage Recommended.. Another Brit-soul boy – albeit a transplanted Texan – making his debut, Kwesi Bonsu (Kwesi name, Kwesi guy) is rather more rootsy than Conner Reeves, though steeped in much the same early-Seventies soul influences. He’s good, too: parts of Testimony sound like Al Green doing Curtis Mayfield, than which it doesn’t get much better, really. Where Reeves focuses primarily on songs, Kwesi’s material grows more organically from grooves, with former Loose End Carl McIntosh and one- time Young Disciple Femi offering expert assistance.