Saw something very interesting yesterday. A friend gave me a couple of older episodes of a show running on the French-German culture channel
Arte. It's called
Durch die Nacht mit … (Into the Night with … ). Two artists (actors, painters, poets, singers …) who have usually never met before, meet in a city one of them is connected to but which is fresh for the other. They drive with a limo from location to location for a whole night, do what they wanna do, eat, drink, talk about whatever they want. There's no script apart from the places the host artist decided to invite the other to. All the talk is completely natural. The cameras are filming every second of it. Photography is of very high quality. Often "experimental" talent is invited as guest director. Always interesting to watch, because everybody is given so much time that you can clearly tell when they're acting and when they're natural. Language is usually original with subtitles, often English if at least one doesn't speak German.
What makes this so interesting is the risk involved. Both artist cannot know if they'll connect with the other one. It's possible they're stuck for 12 hours with somebody who bores them.
I've seen 2 episodes:
1. Painter / artist Joe Coleman & actress Asia Argento meet in New York. Guest director: splatter movie director Jörg Buttgereit. Superb stuff. Maybe Coleman painted one serial killer too many.
Argento is also weird, interesting and interested in a lot of strange things. And she drinks a lot.
Buttgereit knows his craft. Intersting pictures of a lot of strange things. Talks are mostly about nonsense. And death and related stuff. The highlight is their visit at David Blaine's (think Copperfield) house. Blaine plans a project in which he spends 3 days with three hungry lions. He wants ot feed the lions. Coleman suggests the ultimate artistry in this context would be to bite out a piece of his own flesh and feed it to the lions.
Good job by all three of them.
2. Iconic actor Dolph Lundgren and German actor Ralph Herforth (TV tough guy, often cops or gangsters. Solid actor with above average physical presence.) meet in Stockholm. Dolph shows Ralph his old Karate gym. They work out, then have a 5 course menu and apparently a different wine for each course. They meet a young designer with a lot of creative ideas. Talk is quite serious. They're chatting about why both no longer want to live in the US, AIDS, the Irak war, their job as actors, holidays on caribian islands. Interesting stuff and nothing acted. Lundgren is actually quite an intelligent guy. Well educated, down to earth. And he was European champion in full contact Karate.