Tilda Swinton as Katie Cox in In Burn After Reading (2008)

Focus Features / Universal Pictures

The movie world has always had its extremists, the practitioners who, while others breeze through their careers reaping the rewards of stardom, will sweat and toil and do strange things in the name of cinema. Stanley Kubrick amassed an actual library of books on Napoleon for a film he was never destined to make. Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski wrestled an actual steamship over an actual Amazonian hill, for Fitzcarraldo, rather than replicate the scene on a stage set. Daniel Day-Lewis broke ribs, and skinned animals in the wild, to satisfy his method.

Unsurprisingly, it’s usually men who, to paraphrase Herzog, feel compelled “do battle” on cinema’s front lines. But there are exceptions, a notable one being the English actress Tilda Swinton. In 1995, for instance, she spent a week in a glass case at London’s Serpentine Gallery, as a live art tribute to the director Derek Jarman. Last year, she decided to pull a 37-ton cinema-lorry around the Scottish Highlands, in order to screen films – including a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo —— in towns bereft of movie theatres.

These feats may not match Kinski’s steamship-wrestling (it turns out the lorry was driven more than it was pulled). But, unlike those mentioned above, who fight for the cause like soldiers, or suffer like martyrs, Swinton’s exertions seem to derive from a sense of fun and an overwhelming joy in her profession.

The daughter of a British major-general, Swinton has described herself as a film geek who never expected to end up in front of a camera: her place was on this side of the screen, in the dark, with the rest of us. Her success as an actor has allowed her to fulfil all manner of cinephile dreams.

“I choose film-makers and not parts,” she once said —— and her choices have been astute: Jarman, Sally Potter, Spike Jonze, Jim Jarmusch, Bela Tarr, the Coen brothers and David Fincher, to name but a few.

Since 2000, when she did The Beach for Danny Boyle, she has skipped from Lilliputian arthouse productions (Tarr’s The Man From London, Erick Zonca’s Julia) to Hollywood Brobdingnags (the Narnia series, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). A supporting role in Michael Clayton, as an icy, fragile general counsel, won her an Oscar.

Yet you get a sense that the enrichment she seeks from her work is more artistic than financial or egotistical, and that she prefers to spread cinematic wealth rather than hoard it. In 2008, the year before her lorry-pulling exercise, she converted a Scottish bingo hall into a movie theatre to host a film festival, the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema Of Dreams. She heads a foundation that gives classic films to children when they reach the age of 8½.

Who else but Swinton could have played the lead in the film version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, about an androgynous young nobleman who evolves, seamlessly, into womanhood? Her striking red hair and elfin features (almost always referred to by journalists as “androgynous”) made her perfect for the part, and later attracted the attentions of Dutch designers Viktor & Rolf, who put her on the catwalk at one of their shows and turned all the other models into Tilda clones. And Ryan McGinley, who recently had her running through forests and climbing Scottish ruins in a little black dress, as part of a campaign for Pringle.

You may think of her as impeccably British, but her latest role required her to speak Italian throughout with a Russian accent —— no small feat when you consider how hopeless the Brits are with foreign languages.

She plays the Russian wife of a wealthy Milanese industrialist in the wonderful Italian family epic I Am Love. The film contains a love scene, an extraordinary one, in which Swinton’s Emma Recchi delights in the sensual world outside the confines of Milan —— not just in physical pleasure but also in the sights and sounds of nature surrounding her. It’s stunningly shot and scored —— a lavish cinematic feast for the viewer. For Swinton, it’s one more ululation in the song of joy that is her life in cinema.

Edward Aczel

Showandtelluk.com

Edward Aczel is a schlubby 42-year-old account manager with a regional English marketing company who moonlights as a stand-up comedian. He has shaggy hair and a permanently hangdog expression and an expanding waistline. But don’t be fooled. When it comes to killing the joke, Aczel is a veritable Dirty Harry on the mic.

At the beginning of his latest show, at London’s Soho Theatre, he whips out his .44 Magnum, or I should say Magic Marker, and proceeds to list, on a large flip-chart, the humorous topics he’ll be grappling with in the hour to come. These include the credit crunch, climate change, and war. (The show is called “Edward Aczel Explains All The World’s Problems… Then Solves Them”. Spoiler: He does no such thing.)

Aczel breaks all the basic stand-up rules. He warns us that the show won’t be particularly well-crafted, let alone entertaining. He reels off a series of jokes with all the gusto of a lecturer at a tax-accounting seminar, and defuses them by pointing out what’s meant to be funny about each one. Instead of wooing us with punchlines, he lets his gags trail off, mumbles apologetically, and stares morosely at his feet. When all else fails, he recourses to his flip-chart and represents, in graph form, the downward trajectory of his performance.

The punchline here is that Aczel is actually funny. The act of putting the joke out of its misery, or failing to, becomes the joke itself. The sheer hopelessness of his routine is what makes it so appealing (and has prompted one excitable reviewer to dub him “Britain’s greatest entertainer”).

Aczel is a practitioner of what’s known as “anti-comedy”. The term is a recent one. Other examples include American comedians Neil Hamburger and Tim Heidecker, and the twitchy Dutch genius Hans Teeuwen. You could apply the term to TV sitcoms such as The Office that mix pain and awfulness and despair into our belly laughs. But anti-comedy has always been with us, in some form or other. We detect strains of it in Tommy Cooper, Andy Kaufman, Peter Cook, and anyone else who ever capitalized on that on-edge feeling you get when a joke is being badly told. (For a vintage example, check out Cook’s little-known “Sven from Swiss Cottage” series of prank calls he made to London talk-radio station LBC in the late Eighties.)

The term “anti-comedy” is unsatisfactory, because comedy still prevails and the audience, provided it is sympathetic to the peculiarities of the contract, still gets its yuks. The emphasis shifts: instead of focusing on the bulls-eye, we laugh at how far short of the target the comedian’s arrow falls. Paradoxically, it is the inadequacy of conventional comedy that is often exposed in these shortfalls: the laziness of accepted devices and structures, not to mention the complacency of audiences willing to laugh along with them.

In certain isolated cases, however, the “anti-comedy” label seems entirely apt. The joke may die when Aczel tells it, but it is reborn in a different context and we nurture it with our laughter. Kim Noble, another Englishman creating a stir on the UK stand-up circuit, doesn’t just annihilate the gag: he tortures it first, then dismembers it and hands you the bloodied remains. You don’t leave a Kim Noble show with a dreamy smile on your face. Rather, you get out of there as fast as possible and try to convince yourself it never happened.

“Has Kim Noble Exploited His Mental Illness to Create One of the Most Shocking Stand-up Shows Ever?”, one British broadsheet asked recently as Noble unleashed his latest work on London audiences, and the hyperbole of the headline was almost justified. Kim Noble Must Die (which also played at the Soho Theatre and is now on tour in the UK) is probably the most disturbing hour I have ever spent in a performance space of any sort.

Sumach Ecks is, by his own admission, a volatile man. In one of the very few interviews with him available online, he talks about road rage and facing off against 50 drunk marines who jeered “Bin Laden” at him on a San Diego street. He channels his aggressive energy into Bikram yoga (“I sweat out a lot of these demons I have in me”) and making very short pieces of music in very short periods of time. His nom de guerre, Gonjasufi, signals clear Eastern influences, though he looks more Lee “Scratch” Perry than Osama Bin Laden. His terrific new album, A Sufi and a Killer – 20 sublimated outbursts in 53 minutes – is out March 9th on Warp Records.

Musicians tend to start out rough and hone their craft until the edges have been smoothed away. Ecks, a feature on the LA hip hop scene since the Nineties (and a member of the respected Masters of the Universe crew), has graduated in the opposite direction. The music he self-released early last decade had a hint of the new record’s dusty, brokedown feel but the ruined howl that makes Gonjasufi such a compelling presence was still unformed.

Writing about Tom Waits, another musician who has roughened nicely with age, the critic Daniel Durchholz described his voice as sounding “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car”. You could come up with a similar formulation for Ecks’ vocal chords, involving shaman smoke and searing desert heat. His voice is weathered and cracked and sometimes brutish – the sort of growl that might run YOU over with a car given half a chance – but, on tracks such as “She’s Gone”, it hits that Waitsian sweet spot where the bestial becomes beautiful, even vulnerable.

The tension between volatility and vulnerability runs throughout the album, and you can hear it dramatized on “Sheep”, which sums up its predator/prey interplay in the chorus: “I wish I was a sheep/ Instead of a lion/ Cause then I wouldn’t have to eat/ Animals that are dyin’”.

That song gambols along with beguiling dreaminess for the first three minutes (an epic stretch by Gonjasufi standards), until the percussion mounts up and Ecks reveals the basic instincts beneath the cosmic empathy: “I’m a lion, babe/ Feeding of the sheep that graze/ Off the leafs and blades/ I wouldn’t have it any other way”.

Aside from the yoga and the ameliorated growl, the development in Gonjasufi’s sound seems related to his teaming-up, circa 2005, with hirsute LA producer-and-DJ the Gaslamp Killer, who introduced him to fellow Californian beatmakers Mainframe and Flying Lotus (who in turn hooked him up with the UK-based Warp label). All three producers worked on this album, and they have strewn it with sitars, dervish chants, fuzzy guitar freakouts, psychedelic breakdowns, molassesized hip hop beats and even, on “Candylane”, some sleek disco activity.

According to Ecks, he would receive beats from his collaborators, knock together some lyrics on the spot and usually polish off a track in less than an hour. Then he’d spend the bulk of his time distressing it in the mix with beat-up old analog equipment. The smokehouse stage, as it were.

What results is hazed in stylus crackle, and soaked in reverb, and the levels are all askew, but in context it seems entirely right. It is the sound of a man sweating out his demons and trying to contain, within a yogic frame of mind, the urge to throw rocks at cars. It is the sound of the lion endeavoring not to eat the lamb, and occasionally failing in that endeavor. It is the most thrilling release of the year so far.

Chilly Gonzales takes the stage at the Pigalle Club, a Forties-style dinner and cabaret spot in London’s West End (circular tables, low ceilings, regular intervals of green velvet), and assumes his place at the piano. He is wearing a brown knee-length silk robe with matching trousers and a pair of generously cushioned slippers. His hands are encased in pristine white gloves. With shadowy deep-set eyes and slicked back hair, he is the very image of the brooding piano maestro.

He eases into a medley of slow, spare classical pieces. The music starts off somber and restrained, but his fingers move with such fluidity that they can’t resist adding little flourishes here and there. The embellishments begin to mount up. What opened with an air of great solemnity is now becoming increasingly comical. Now he’s playing a blues standard with one hand, a blur of white hammering away at the lower octaves.

He wraps it up and turns to confront his audience. “Hi, I’m Chilly Gonzales. If you don’t know me, I’m a Grammy-nominated producer.” This is true. He continues: “I hold the Guinness world record for longest continuous piano concert at 27 hours.” This is also true. “I’ve got a lot of famous friends.” He pauses for effect, then performs a modest raise of the shoulders. “In France, where I live, they call me un génie musicale.”

In 2004, Gonzales, who is neither French nor Hispanic but Canadian and whose real name is Jason Beck, released Solo Piano, an album of concise minimalist classical numbers in the vein of Erik Satie which gave substance to the génie musicale claim. Those who came to know Gonzales through that album – his best-selling by some margin – would have been shocked to learn that the author of those beautiful, delicate pieces had previously made, among other things, a gleefully profane lo-fi rap record called The Entertainist.

It’s not entirely surprising that a musician who rolls out his “unfuckwithable resume” at the beginning of a show, and makes unabashed reference to his musical genius at every opportunity, should dabble with rap. Rapping is, after all, the art of the inflated brag. The Sugarhill Gang were extolling their globally-endorsed sexual prowess and enviable motoring options as hip-hop drew its first breath, and given the amount of hot air that’s been blown over 4/4 beats since then, it’s no wonder the ice caps are melting.

Gonzales embraces the spirit of boastfulness on The Entertainist and its more lavishly produced follow-up, Presidential Suite, although in Gonzoworld the line between brag and self-skewering gag is always porous. Yes, he may be “the greatest entertainer of the year”, but he is also “the worst MC” who gets “more pussy than a priest”. He is “the prankster Frank Sinatra”, a “combination of Joe Stalin and Woody Allen”, whom you may address as “Fuckeye” or “the one-eyed Jew”. Or “Chilly Chaplin”. Or “Santa Klaus Kinski”, because he spent a few years living in Berlin.

“I am the worst MC” is at once a villainous sneer and an admission that Gonzales’ rapping abilities circa 2000 left something to be desired. In fact, as he demonstrates during tonight’s show, Gonzales is a pretty good rapper – stylistically derivative perhaps, but deft, playful and always entertaining. He spouts vast jets of nonsense in his rhymes but somehow manages to be more upfront than any other rapper you’d care to name.

Musicians rarely speak about, let alone lyricize, the shallow calculations that often underscore big career decisions, yet here is Gonzales on why he left Canada for Berlin: “I still remember when it first occurred to me./ Fuck it, I’m gonna move to Germany./ I don’t speak German, screw it/ But hey! I’m Jewish/ And I need a new press angle and that should do it.”

These kinds of outrageous proclamations make listening to Gonzales, or attending one of his shows, enormously fun. His almost pathological frankness presents an interesting challenge, however, when it comes to interviewing the guy. Any criticism you’d level at him has already been anticipated, and slyly underlined, in his music, or on other platforms. When he released Soft Power, his paean to Seventies soft-rock, in 2008, he posted a video online in which a Mercury label honcho begs him to take singing lessons to soften his harsh Montrealer tones. In the clip he circulated to promote his London dates, Gonzales tells a buffoonish interviewer, also played by Jason Beck, that although he “owns” France, he remains an underdog in England, adding: “I’m not a young man anymore. This could be my last chance.”

So why all the second-guessing?