Our Editor-in-Chief Charles Finch introduces our latest issue.
I can hear you. I can smell and feel you. I see you, completely, in looking into your eyes. Even in my dreams, I can taste, feel, and touch you. I exist because I feel.
We talk so easily about our senses, and mostly we take them for granted unless we lose one of them even temporarily. And then, pretty quickly, life isn’t quite as full, quite as vivid… quite as fun. Making sense of our senses is, in itself, a complex task, as it often feels that we are not quite able to fully make use of these mercurial powers of ours. It’s why superhero movies are remotely tangible in our imaginations. If we could also just “tap in” to our brain power better, we could go and buy a cape and save the planet too.
Incidentally, the cerebral “sense” is still something completely untapped. What senses do we have, and don’t know we have? A sixth sense that inhabits us but isn’t specific, and perhaps even a seventh sense that can save your life, and certainly has mine. That’s the sense, by the way, that makes your skin crawl or the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when danger is lurking. Listen well to that sense…as it exists.
This issue investigates and celebrates multidisciplinary art and the five senses by selecting a group of films and artists deeply in tune with their feelings, and connected to their senses more so than most. It is a subject with a hugely broad canvas, particularly in relation to art. Infinite examples from the dawn of time could be included in this context, from the cave drawing of the Neolithic period, to the Moai monolithic heads of Easter Island.
THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER (1989)
Sight and sound are clearly the most user friendly senses when it comes to cinema, music, and fine art—other than sculpture. We see: we understand through colour and form and instinct, or gene memory. Or we hear, and those sensual vibrations or sound waves enchant, entertain, provoke, or move us. Combined sight and sound in cinema are particularly powerful and intoxicating, as we illustrate here with some of the films we have chosen. But how do we show smell or touch in film or art? That’s a more complex question, and not even possible in the hands of a master like Ingmar Bergman, though we have chosen him in this issue because he comes close. Bergman’s canvas, and the craftsmanship of the storytelling, brings us into another reality; a kaleidoscope of feeling that frees our senses.
It is here that lies perhaps a divine moment of revelation for all of us: the cinema of magic. Something we cannot easily explain happens when we watch Bergman films. A feeling, or feelings, that are not explainable—they are truly celestial. Carl Jung, when he talks of faith, says he just “knows” he believes; that there isn’t a rationale. It is a sense he is describing, and he offers up the idea that faith itself is really a part of the human condition, existing within us from before birth.
I was driving in the Tuscan heat recently to see the sculptor Emily Young. She was introduced to me by my friend Jonathan Green, the art dealer who knows that I admire her work. I find the rawness of the faces she carves out of stone immensely powerful. We will soon have her in the magazine, and then we can properly discover her work and world together.
Driving in the wicked August heat, far up into the Tuscan hills, is a chore especially, as that day I was feeling deeply summered out. Finished with the plates of pasta; the house guests, and mostly the heat. Never finished with the mozzarella, though…
“Driving in the wicked August heat, far up into the Tuscan hills, is a chore especially, as that day I was feeling deeply summered out. Finished with the plates of pasta; the house guests, and mostly the heat. Never finished with the Mozzarella though….”
Charles Finch
It occurred to me, as I was dodging the mad Italian drivers and trying to stay on the road, that artists have this pull—these magical tentacles that reach out from wherever they are and lure us to them, to their worlds, to the calm of their studios, which are often places of beauty in themselves because they combine both “living” and the banality of domestic life with the act of creation. The artist’s studio is a living, breathing shrine, if you will, to the senses.
SOPHIA LOREN AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL CANNES FESTIVAL IN MAY 1958
Emily lives in a wonderful hidden monastery. We ate a little, drank a little, and talked a lot: about life, getting older, finding peace and such, and of course about beauty and her stones. I saw a small camp bed in Emily’s studio tucked away. I have seen the same in Marc Quinn’s and in Cy Twombly’s Gaeta studio, too. Sometimes, the passion of the work draws the artist late into the night and they work almost entranced until exhaustion. Hence the cot. That art in whatever form, and I include cooking in the pages, as Francis Mallmann is certainly an artist both with his culinary skill, but also with his other creations—his homes and restaurants, and the creative impact he has had on Garzón, Uruguay, where he lives—that all the senses are intertwined in creativity is indisputable.
Included too in these pages is a profile of the wordsmith filmmaker Bruce Robinson, responsible for Withnail and I, and a glimpse into his process. I have known Bruce for many years, and he remains an inspiration through his films, and for his life hidden in the vale of Herefordshire. The interview was written by my deputy editor Chris Cotonou—a young J D Salinger in the making—who is brilliant at capturing Bruce, as are the photographs by Laurence Hills.
We also talk to film director Martin Brest, who takes us through his film Scent of a Woman. Marty made some of the best films of the 1980s and 90s and I don’t believe has garnered anywhere near the recognition he deserves for the complexity of his storytelling. Al Pacino shares his insight too.
The painter Rose Wylie took our motley crew on a picnic and shared her personal and colourful journey, and her beautiful sensual work. Celebrated later in life for her vibrant paintings and visceral sensual colours, Rose embodies the purest of artistic lives.
Kitty Grady and Anna Pierce, with the photographer Macy Stewart, travelled to Ireland to meet the Kneecap lads and the film director Rich Peppiatt, who sought the band out to make a vibrant film of their journey.
Fatima Khan, our creative director, and Luke Georgiades, our features writer, travelled to Los Angeles to meet Sean Baker and Mikey Madison, who are hot as hell after their Palme d’Or triumph at Cannes for the winning film Anora. Max Montgomery brings them to life with his terrific photo spread.
Also within these pages we offer you a first glimpse of Audrey Diwan and Noémie Merlant’s much anticipated re-imagining of Emmanuelle. There is more, too—much more for you to discover on what I hope will be a sensual journey. We even get to interview the maestro Rick Rubin at his secret Tuscan festival.
Tell your friends,
Charles Finch
