News

Isaac Julien's seven-screen installation, which features Franco as an art adviser, revolves around the flow of capital – the unseen director of all our lives

• Watch a trailer for Playtime here

The city rears up around us, lit windows against the night, the corporate buildings blocking the sky. In an all-white empty office, a hedge-fund manager plays a lonesome trumpet. A skittering drum kicks in, adding an urgent pulse. The pulse is money: capital at work. Ranks of computers and servers churn the numbers in a sub-basement world where the capital flows.

In an auction room, prices are spiralling. Actor James Franco, playing an art adviser, explains how art has become a hedge against money's instability. The price of art has nothing to do with the art itself. In another scene, auctioneer Simon de Pury explains the exponential rise of the art market since the 2008 financial crash. Superstitious, he always...

To mark the final weeks of MoMA’s presentation of Isaac Julien’s ongoing Ten Thousand Waves (an installation we alerted you a number of times last year), the Department of Film presents a survey of Julien’s film works, including shorts and features from the 1980s to the present. Emerging in the neigboring club cultures of funk, disco, and soul; leftist political activism; and collectivism in British independent filmmaking, Julien made his first films as a student at Central Saint Martins. Through his films, Julien charted new representations of a self—black, gay, and British—that was largely excluded from the cultural climate of the 1980s, heralding what came to be known as...

The film-maker and installation artist on bridging the gap between art and cinema, and what he learned from the Baader-Meinhof gang

What first drew you to making art?

Punk. When I was about 15, I made friends with some hippies who lived close to the estate where I grew up. One of them turned out to be Astrid Proll (1), although I didn't know it at the time as she had a pseudonym. They taught me about art and photography. I discovered punk, situationism (2), and the connection between art and politics. I never looked back.

What was your big breakthrough?

Attending Central St Martin's, then a sort of Oxbridge of art schools. Also, being funded by Channel 4 to create the Sankofa Film and Video Collective (3), and making the film Looking for Langston (4).

Have you considered becoming a more mainstream film director?

I viewed myself as that when I made Young Soul Rebels...

The Guardian's season of British cult classics continues with a double helping of youth pop culture set in London in the 60s and 70s

Reading on mobile? Click here to view

This week is pop culture week in our British cult classics series – well, sort of. Our double bill is a pair of films that turn fresh eyes on two different London youth tribes of the 60s and 70s: the black street soul of Notting Hill is celebrated in Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels, while the white working class suedehead world of Stratford is the focus of Barney Platts-Mills's Bronco Bullfrog. The former was a flagship production of the BFI Production Board, costing around £1.7m in 1990; Bronco was a rough-and-ready £18,000 shoot in 1970, taking off from Joan Littlewood's youth theatre workshops. But both show equal affection for their subjects, and from this distance are each a fantastically revealing...