He’s not exactly one to embrace the conventional – he used to work at a sex shop – but the establishment sure is willing to embrace him. Derwin, the man behind Gold Panda, has garnered accolades from the likes of Pitchfork and NME for his remixes and EPs; but all this praise leaves him slightly nonplussed.

‘It feels weird that I’ve had such a good response, such good press’, he says, comfortably ensconced in a black leather armchair. ‘I feel like there might be a point where it’ll turn around and collapse. The good thing is that a hobby has become a career, a job that I can do and enjoy and not have to worry about wearing a suit or going to work’.
Derwin is indeed highly preoccupied with his work-wear. With his skinny jeans, ubiquitous indie t-shirt and requisite trucker cap, he blends right into the crowds at Washington D.C.’s notoriously indie club The Black Cat, where I meet him. But it hasn’t always been this comfortable for the DJ.

A few years ago, Derwin spontaneously left his home in Essex, selling his entire record collection, to study Japanese at the School of African and Oriental Studies in London. ‘I was pretty obsessed with Japanese stuff’, he explains. ‘At the same time, I was thinking, ‘Aww, I’ve gotta work, I’ve gotta buy a house’. So I tried to get a job in a bank, something using Japanese. So I’d come back from an interview, wearing a suit and shoes and I’d just put my shoes in the bin and be, like, ‘What the fuck am I doing? I’m not interested in any of these jobs’. I just gave up looking, basically.’

Derwin’s, who only began making music in 2008, is a rookie. He got his start remixing bands like Simian Mobile Disco and Bloc Party, but with the encouragement of Wichita Records, he moved onto producing original material. The BBC included Gold Panda in its longlist for the ‘Sound of 2010’; when I bring this up, however, it only elicits a generous murmur of ‘whatever’s from the man. In fact, Derwin’s subsequent assertion that his music is more along the lines of ‘the sound of 1998 or something’ is telling: Gold Panda just doesn’t really care about the boundaries of time.

Lucky Shiner, his recent debut album, proves his point. Its thrillingly eclectic sources of inspiration – we can hear the zither’s whine, the shaman’s wail, and the taxi’s whiz – are broken down and reassembled into perfectly melodious compositions. They’re anything but 2010. But the album is also a highly personal one. The crescendo of the jingle-jangle in ‘You’ and the svelte sense of urgency thrumming in ‘Snow & Taxis’ hint at the complexity of the man inside his shell of music.

For a start, he hates performing and tends to dislike his own material. ‘I think I’m pretty far behind a lot of people’, he confessed. ‘I’ve listened to a lot of other electronic music and I think, ‘Why am I making this basic, stupid music when people are creating more interesting, intelligent stuff?’. People like Mount Kimbie, they’re really great… I just feel like maybe my music is a bit childish compared to what I listen to’.

His thoughts on branding are similarly disenchanted: “Someone mentioned recently, ‘If you want to make a living out of [Gold Panda] you should get a brand going’: ‘Gold Panda’ this, ‘Gold Panda’ that… I suppose that’s a part of it, it’s a business, but I don’t know if I’m really into that. I mean, it seems like things are just going well for me anyway. It’s just like Gold Panda is this thing that people can enjoy. It doesn’t have to be a brand”.

So what’s the key to his success? ‘Luck,’ he says. The establishment begs to differ.

The OUDS elections last year were a flurry of controversy that culminated with the OxStu drama columnist declaring that he was ‘watching OUDS burn’. Of course, the only people who don’t find thesps clique-y are thesps themselves, so much of the drama had to do with petty student politics. But, at the forefront, was a classic battle of the sexes.

It turns out that while most people interested in drama are aspiring actresses reading English, most of the parts available are for aspiring actors reading PPE. This is a familiar phenomenon in both student and professional drama, and the result in Oxford is lots of talented actresses scrounging for bit parts while less inspiring male actors carry away roles like Hamlet and whoever all those boys were in Stoppard’s Invention of Love.

Next week the OUDS battle of the sexes is being staged yet again. The Burton Taylor is proffering the first student production of Enda Walsh’s The New Electric Ballroom, the story of three sisters perpetually caught reliving a shared sexual encounter from their adolescence.

The Playhouse, on the other hand, is boasts Peter Schaffer’s tale of Peruvian pillage and plunder in The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Royal Hunt’s script offers a staggering two parts for women (non-speaking) and twenty one for men, whilst The New Electric Ballroom has three female parts to its solitary male role.

Royal Hunt director Charlotte Beynon speaks of the pressure she felt when bidding for a Playhouse slot with a show of nearly all men: ‘A lot of people told me that OUDS would not want to fund it because it was mostly men’. At the time, OUDS was considering bringing in a ‘gender officer’ to require all funded shows provide an equal number of parts to men and women.

But in a play about Pizarro’s interactions with Spanish soldiers and Inca warriors, it would have perhaps taken away from the historical accuracy if Incan warriors were played by a flock of eighteen-year-old girls. That said, Beynon ended up finding a way to cast 8 women and 15 men in her show – though this partly made a virtue of necessity as Beynon had dozens of women auditioning for the play and only a handful of men.

Meanwhile, Phoebe Éclair-Powell, director of The New Electric Ballroom, says that the gender themes in Walsh’s play did attract her to the work, as it is a play about ‘what it is to be on the cusp of womanhood’. But far from being just a ‘woman’s play’, Éclair-Powell fell in love with ‘the dark humour, great visuals and desperate storytelling’ such that she contacted the playwright directly and negotiated the first ever student performance of the work.

Despite the wildly different themes and male to female ratios in these two 3rd week productions, both Beynon and Éclair-Powell agree that gender and casting is tricky in the world of Oxford drama. Beynon asserts that an official gender officer or policy ‘isn’t the job of the OUDS’.

Éclair-Powell agrees, saying ‘I don’t think they should enforce it but I think there should be more awareness about the choice of OUDS shows in general. We are students and should be tackling plays that allow for greater balance of gender roles before we are catapulted into a world where the chance to do this becomes limited’. Beynon similarly suggests a better role for the OUDS in ‘promoting awareness of plays that have a better balance in gender’.

Ultimately, these two female directors stand together in promoting the importance of artistic integrity over that of gender equality and suggesting that, really, the plays themselves are to blame.

As a former Cherwell editor once famously remarked, ‘Oh hi French Cinema, maybe you’d be interested in using tripods and dialogue in future?’

It’s a sentiment we can all identify with. When you hear, ‘Maybe not a French film tonight,’ it is almost always code for, ‘Please don’t make me sit through two hours of people smoking at a cafe, occasionally saying something meaningful about life and then suddenly having vigorous sex.’ The Auteur theory, the Nouvelle Vague, existentialism – these are all interesting concepts, but not necessarily ones the audience wants to grapple with over popcorn. However, contrary to popular belief, a film can be very intelligent and very French, but still easy to watch and hugely enjoyable.

Director and writer Francis Veber teams his ingenious plots with first class comic performances to make winning French farces. He is still, perhaps, best known for his 1998 release Dîner de Cons (The Dinner Game), a perfect comedy about intellectual snobs who compete to bring the biggest idiot they can find to dinner. If you have seen Dinner for Schmucks, the recent American remake, try to erase this from your mind before giving Veber a go. The American release has been criticised for softening the satire of the class system and using the idea simply as a pretext for getting a bunch of comic actors to act up in a posh dining room, utterly failing to capture the intelligent wit of the original.

Veber has been likened to a modern Molière and perhaps his films are what you would expect from more traditional French theatre, with their intricate plotting and ridiculous situations. The brilliant 1978 farce, La Cage aux Folles, for which Veber co-wrote the screenplay, also originated in the theatre and is, after Amélie, the second highest grossing French film of all time in the U.S.

Another Veber film that’s worth a look is Le Placard (The Closet), a comedy about a man who pretends to be gay to keep his job at a rubber factory. Such a premise could so easily descend into puerile jokes and uncomfortable stereotypes under less skilful direction, but you can trust Veber to see the whole thing through with subtlety, sense and a lot of wit. It helps, of course, that the film contains two of France’s most talented actors, Gérard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil, who both have a real knack for comedy. Depardieu has starred in everything from Molière’s Tartuffe to the Asterisk and Obelisk films, and makes the recent release Mammuth enjoyable despite a vague and anticlimactic storyline. Daniel Auteuil, though less well known in Britain, is equally versatile. He is in his element in the understated satirical comedy from 2006, Mon Meilleur Ami, directed by Patrick Leconte, where he plays a successful but aloof Parisian who has to find himself a best friend in ten days to win an argument.

So next time you feel like a laugh, it may be worth braving the subtitles; you may find there’s more invention and wit in many French films to more than make up for any existential chain-smoking and louche sexual deviancy.

At a time when the world of animation is slowly but surely becoming saturated with CGI and computer-based media, A Town Called Panic is a welcome coolant for a rapidly over-heating genre. In fact, it’s not just animation but modern cinema as a whole that desperately needs to come up for air: computer animation is suffocating a film’s originality and compromising its integrity for the sake of a superficial sensory cinematic experience. A Town Called Panic marks the reintroduction of stop-motion animation to the market as a testament to raw ingenuity; and what a good time to do so.

With the unprecedented popularity and veneration of the indie, arthouse and ‘alternative’ film scene, it has become difficult for filmmakers the world over to permeate the market with something ‘original’: essentially, creating something experimental and ‘never before seen’ is something that has been rendered impossible. However, just when we thought it couldn’t be done, the team behind A Town Called Panic steps up to the mark. Their feature-length animated tale based on a cult Belgium animated television series of the same name follows three toys – Cowboy, Indian and Horse – who, on their way to reclaim the stolen walls of their house, stumble across the centre of the earth, arctic tundra, and an aquatic parallel world.

However, such incidents do not seem to come as a surprise to our three plasticine protagonists. Ordinarily, they reside peacefully in an undisturbed countryside town nestled in undulating hills and surrounded by vast expanses of luscious green grass (more plasticine, that is). At first glance, this could very well be the setting for an offshoot episode of Pingu. However, we soon begin to notice that their habitat is nothing less than a world of the absurd, complete with a horse with a driving licence and conversational farm animals.
It is the juxtaposition of this infantile backdrop and French fantasy that gives the film that something that becomes immediately apparent; at its first British screening it was introduced as ‘nothing you’ve ever seen before’. I steadily realised that its success as a film is due to the contrast between its visual simplicity and the creative maturity of its plot, script and characters, with the latter portrayed by evocatively nostalgic children’s toys of the kind that were replaced at the turn of the millennium by their digital counterparts. Then, contrast this with the film’s first-class rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack.

In fact, the contradictions just keep on coming: the equine-suited house, opinionated pigs, a next-day delivery of a billion bricks, a waterless under-water house, the centre of the earth a minute down the road and Arctic plains through a trap door.

However, as simple as it may seem at first, the film was by no means simple to make. Their stop-motion animation took 1500 plastic toys and 260 days of production requiring over 200 clones of each single character. On screen, Belgian directors Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar make this painstakingly complex technique look casual, effortless and as spontaneous as childsplay.

Known commercially as Pic Pic André in honour of the central characters of their first animated project, Aubier and Patar both have an impressive fifteen year back-catalogue of internationally renowned animation. Over these years they have successfully tamed and honed their style into something unpredictable and thoroughly unique: a killer combination. Even for French cinema, the pair remain unparalleled in their individuality: even the triumphant animated 2003 hit animation Belleville Rendezvous looks almost generic beside Aubier and Patar’s visionary cinema.

Begrudgingly I admit, however, that A Town Called Panic is not going to be a blockbuster of any measurable magnitude. However, it would be a shame if the film remained a secret, and it is worth tracking down during its brief cinema run. Ignored by the Oscars and shunned by the Red Carpet, it is left only to its loyal fans to sing its praises and revel in cinematic history.

Cinema is a show’, Dreyfus muses, ‘and the goal for cinema, like theatre, is to show a story that will make you think. I don’t believe in the militant cinema that would change our lives – I don’t think that’s the way our lives can be changed.’

Jean-Claude Dreyfus is a pioneering veteran of French film: a master of the capricious and quirky. He is best known to you and me for his performances in Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement (2004), Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke (2001), The City of Lost Children (1995) and Delicatessen (1991) both directed by the formidable, sacrosanct and thoroughly avant-garde duo of Caro-Jeunet. Hence, it is from his credentials alone that I trust him to be my way into the enigmatic world of French film.

For the French film fan looking from the outside in, French cinema seems intangible, unparalleled and irreplicable. When Dreyfus agreed to meet me, I was eager to extract from him the magic formula that is owned and patented by French directors and that makes French films so, well, French. It seems to me almost like a closely guarded secret recipe handed down from generation to generation. Intriguingly, though, I soon learnt that their unique style is far more accessible to the British film plebeian that it may first seem. ‘I feel that both French and English films are similar’ says Dreyfus, ‘I feel that cinema is essentially just one entity and is the same everywhere’. In one fell swoop, he had completely thwarted my understanding and even appreciation of the French film genre. There was more: ‘French film might be a little more psychological and it certainly tells an interesting story, but equally there are many English films that are really very similar to French cinema. In fact, I really don’t find a lot of differences between the two.’

It’s easy to get the impression that French cinema stands apart from the rest, and its cinematic tradition is not replicated anywhere else. However, it was the recent televised follow-up episodes of Shane Meadows seminal masterpiece This is England ’86 that made me realise just what Dreyfus was getting at. Meadows’ style is slow-paced, gritty, hard-hitting in the same way as Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy or Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long. What is it, then, that is rendering British films unmistakeably French? Consider the above-mentioned Jeunet-Caro film, The City of Lost Children. Swap the honeyed timbre of the French accent for a blunt British one and right in front of you is a typical Terry Gilliam: something similar to his Brazil or Twelve Monkeys. Meadows and Gilliam: two ‘Best of British’ directors (we’ve adopted the latter as our own) displaying emblematic French cinematic devices. Once you strip back all the ‘Frenchities’ (smoky cafés, poodles, baguettes), the integral style of the two countries’ films is pretty much the same: bold, often brash, and always beautiful.

As such similar media, they therefore face similar problems ahead. With the collapse of the UK Film Council and the French Film industry new project funding deficit, the future of young Franco-British directors is in serious jeopardy: ‘We’ve got young directors and they desperately need to find the finance to achieve their goals. It’s about giving them the chance to do so. I’m afraid that without funding, some potentially incredible films will not have the power to exist.’
As both countries struggle together, instead of feeling thoroughly abandoned by my almost illicit passion for French film, I’m sensing a renewed cross-channel relationship: a partnership in cinematic crime. We both strive to create daring and daunting films, unfazed by a need to please the masses and instead content with setting an individual’s thoughts, story lines and imagery into motion: ‘you need to trust the film director, he knows his films, he knows what he wants to do and he’s got everything in his head to make his film successful and thoroughly individual’. It seems as though French and British films are united front against blanket blockbusters. Dreyfus agrees; ‘if watch a film that I find truly moving, that would overwhelm me, perhaps it would enable my heart to beat a little longer – that’s what you get from our type of film’. Even though it transpires that the illustrious illusion of the French film industry is not so elusive, Dreyfus has opened my eyes to the close and irrefutable cinematic connection to our garlicky neighbours. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, utterly brilliant that beneath their mod film façade the French still share our taste in film. Perhaps a collaboration, Dreyfus?

Are you fed up with dreaming spires? If central Oxford’s architecture no longer appeals, you could do worse than visit Modern Art Oxford’s two new shows, each concerned with the spaces we live in. There’s not a gargoyle-adorned roof in sight.

Simon and Tom Bloor’s installation, ‘Hit and Miss’, takes its title from a kind of timber fencing used in post-war British housing developments. The artists have constructed a small maze of these fences outside the gallery’s St. Ebbes entrance, along with seating, tall lights and the occasional potted plant. The fencing is opaque, save for narrow slats which allow visibility only from certain angles, which meant that as I wove my way through these fragmented walls I kept half-glimpsing other people behind them, or catching a sentence of someone else’s conversation. The voyeuristic nature of the yard’s layout seems at odds with the cheerful punters chatting within its bays.

The yard also has a bleached appearance: the fencing is a stark white in contrast to the deep red brick of the gallery walls, and sections have been sprayed with bits of neon yellow and purple.
Add to this the old exhibition posters which the Bloors have re-appropriated to their own show, and the yard becomes an amalgam of exhibition space, suburban backwater and public park. The whole effect is bewildering, perhaps replicating the confused designs of Britain’s quick, low-cost architectural projects after WW2. Bits of fencing become a comment on the way we house ourselves.
Materials also seem linked to social comment in Manfred Pernice’s exhibition in the Upper Galleries. The first room you walk into contains his ‘Sonderausstellung’: an assortment of plastic surfaces, unpainted chipboard and loose carpeting which house a particular domestic space. Pernice describes the installation as ‘an exhibition within an exhibition’, and the mock-interior certainly heightens the way we look at the objects collected inside it. The crucial thing is how absolutely bland these objects are: a radio shaped like a can of Coke plays mindless pop music; a couple of tiled cubes are stacked against a wall; a child’s model road set is littered with paper cups.

There is no sense of a uniform ‘design’ like something out of an interiors magazine: these objects sit together simply as the accumulated detritus of living. It’s easy to think that this brash hodgepodge of a room is nothing like our own, comfortingly familiar homes – but all Pernice has done is taken a fairly average living space and stripped it of the people and memories which would normally be there.

Really, Pernice seems to be saying, we all live in nothing more than spaces which gain and lose the objects that accompany our existence.
The focal point of the exhibition is the installation in the Upper Gallery. A circular platform stands in the centre of the room, covered with light, split into sections which mimic rooms in a home. The walls of each section are covered with sketches, newspaper clippings and photographs of chance patterns in an urban landscape. The artist has seemingly included all the preparatory material for this installation within the installation itself: as a viewer, you see a process rather than a finished piece.

This installation continues the uncoordinated objects and dull colours of the rest of the work in the show, save for a final twist (quite literally).

As you walk round the back of the platform, a spiral staircase at its centre is revealed. It’s a self-assembly job of plastic components and wobbles unreassuringly as you walk it – but when you reach the final stair, you are suddenly alone in the beautiful high ceiling space of the gallery.

Everything seems quiet and light: it is a powerful moment of relief from the cycle of banal objects which fills the exhibition.

Don’t mention Polio. It’s the dirty word on the empty streets and playgrounds of Weequahic, Newark. The fathers and brothers and eldest sons are on the battlefields of occupied France in the summer of 1944, and the Keep Calm And Carry On mentality is having to deal with the outbreak of an illness that puts the under-15s at just as much risk. So don’t mention any of it – try not to think about it.
This is the strategy of the classically manly, Don-Draper-esque Bucky Cantor, the only man in the suburb, and surrogate father to the children who use the playground he watches over. He works out. He throws javelin. All the kids want to grow up into his broad chest and wide shoulders. He referees baseball games, stops the boys from getting in the way of girls playing jump rope, takes them to the malt shop to escape the midday sun, tries to stop them drinking out of each others soda bottles, and definitely, definitely, doesn’t say anything about- well, you know.

The theme of Philip Roth’s Nemesis is power and responsibility – what is power, what do we do with it, what can we do with it, what can’t we do with it, why does this scare us, what does that make us? The titles of the books in the series tell a story. Everyman. Indignation. The Humbling. Nemesis. Personal battles, personal motivations, personal defeat. It’s the war novel for the war at home. The same fear, the same resilience, the same inadequacy against something bigger than you, tougher than you, something that’s killing the people around you, and that you don’t know how to stop.

So the scale of the book matches the scale of the conflict. A single summer, a single problem, a single man. A community of a few dozen Jews, their lives structured around their 2.5 kid families, in a section of a suburb small enough for quarantine to be the whispered eventual outcome. The threat is ever-present, inescapable, and stifling.

Everyone is afraid. They’re afraid for the children. The outbreak is targeting the sort-of-young – those on the cusp of adolescence and about to be forced to grow up more quickly than any 12 year old should have to.

Bucky’s here because he knows, clearly, what he should do, what he thinks he has to do. He’s here, in Weequahig, fighting a disease that nobody understands, where his broad chest and wide shoulders can’t do anything. His best efforts are trying to keep the kids outside and active, and even this he isn’t sure is a good thing, and not just helping the outbreak continue. The parents lose their faith in him over time, and the numbers dwindle until there’s barely enough to field teams for baseball games anymore. It’s the unwinnable fight. And Bucky has to try not to think about the sweetheart safe in the countryside, about how easy it would be to quit and leave, how the draft can’t touch him, how nobody could stop him from walking away, from leaving the sick and the dying and the soon-to-be-dead in these suburban trenches.

This deliberation forms the spiritual body of the novel. 240 pages, with German autobahns for margins, so there isn’t much room for anything else except his contemplation. It’s a meditation. The archetype of the hero and the shadow of responsibility. I can’t remember the last time I read anything that didn’t involve vampires or boy wizards wherea protagonist actually acted completely selflessly with confidence, but the ideal is still out there. It’s the ideal he has to, at least, be seen to embody, for the sake of those depending on him, regardless of how he feels inside.

Is it selfish to walk away from a fight you can’t win? Is it selfish not to want to watch children get sick and paralyzed when they shouldn’t even be dealing with this in the first place? The parents get by propped up by the twin crutches of God and Family – things that Bucky finds it impossible to fall back on. All he has is responsibility, and the gut feeling that somehow, though he can’t sign on himself, Weequahic has become his personal France.

Time, Gentlemen. So. It’s good – great even. A serious consideration of the burden of responsibility in a fight you don’t stand a chance of winning maybe isn’t the best thing to pick up if you feel as pessimistic about Finals as I do. On the other hand, maybe it is. The closing chapters tie a ribbon around the themes and messages, providing more than enough to think about. But then – £16 for 240 pages. The rest of the series is available in paperback. Which might be what you’d call a more sound investment. And actually, novellas that feel like the book equivalent of 2-act plays are a decent format for the Oxford lifestyle. Perfect for a Sunday afternoon before the week of work. Go on. Be a man. Read him.