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In what sounds like a scene from one of his legendary horror films, the head of  Nosferatu  director FW Murnau, who died in 1931, has been stolen from his family plot in a cemetery in Germany. The grave-robbing occurred in Stahnsdorf, about 12 miles south-west of central Berlin, according to  Variety . The graves of Murnau’s brothers were reportedly not disturbed. Wax residue is said to have been found near the grave, suggesting that candles had been lit, and a possible occult motive for the theft. Murnau was best known for the expressionist classic 1922 black-and-white vampire horror, later  remade by Werner Herzog . He also directed  Sunrise , which won several Oscars at the first-ever Academy awards. Murnau died in a car crash aged 42 in California and was buried in his native Germany . Der Spiegel reports that the cemetery overseers are considering whether to seal Murnau’s grave . They added that this is not the first time that it has been disturbed.

T he gallery is so tiny I think I've walked into somebody's front room. A 10-minute film plays on a loop. Weirded-out rock stars who look like Mick Jagger, or who are Mick Jagger, preen, strut and do their late-1960s satanic thing. White dots form a pyramid on a black background, naked boys lounge on a sofa, marines jump from a helicopter. There's a cat, a dog, an all-seeing Egyptian eye, people smoking dope out of a skull. A synthesiser makes an unbearable noise. There are no words, no story. Around the screen, in London's Sprüth Magers gallery, a bunch of 21st-century trendies and stoners are watching this film, called Invocation of My Demon Brother, in awe, their ages ranging from late teens to late 80s. Next door, hallucinogenic photographs eyeball you from the wall. You walk in, you walk out – and the show's all over in a flash. It can only mean one thing. Kenneth Anger is back in town. Anger is a Hollywood legend. He has created some of the most distur

Elenco e equipe técnica de "Os Guarda-Chuvas do Amor" (1964), de Jacques Demy

 A record number of people have registered to vote in the  Scottish independence  referendum, with 97% of the adult population now ready to take part in next week's vote. A total of 4,285,323 makes this the largest electorate the country has ever known for any election or referendum. The figure includes 118,640 voters who have registered in the last month alone, as well as 789,024 postal voters. It marks an increase of over 300,000 since the last Westminster election in 2012 and includes 16- and 17-year-olds who have had the vote extended to them for the first time. The unprecedented levels of registration suggest that predictions of a high turnout next Thursday – Alex Salmond has said that he expects 80% – will come to pass. Turnout in  Scotland  for the 2010 Westminster election was 63.8%, dipping to 50.4% the following year for elections to the Holyrood parliament. Much has been made in recent months of the so-called "missing million" – a term that descr

unday evening in Santa Fe and  Sam Shepard  and I are sitting at a downtown bar, drinking tequila and eating tacos. The light is low, the night warm and the conversation darts and dives while the bartender rattles the cocktail shaker and behind us the tables begin to fill. Already we have covered several pressing matters, including the merits of Chekhov ("I'm not crazy about him as a playwright… why are you going to bring a dead bird onstage?"), the qualities of greyhound piss ("like champagne" apparently), and the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis: "The way she turns into a bird! Unbelievable. You can't make that shit up." But now our conversation has turned to the subject of  True West , the play Shepard wrote in 1980,  now revived at the Tricycle theatre in London . Directed by Phillip Breen and starring Eugene O'Hare and Alex Ferns, the production first appeared at the Glasgow Citizens theatre last year,  earning much acclaim,  not least fr

Peter Bogdanovich arrives at the Venice premiere of She’s Funny Like That Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images The 71st Venice film festival might bill itself as a “festival of discovery” but it can still find some space for the lions of yesterday. Missing believed defunct, the veteran director Peter Bogdanovich rode into town like the ancient mariner. He arrived via water taxi, trailing clouds of glory. Few film-makers enjoyed such an early run of success as Bogdanovich, whose hit movies The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon established him as one of the leading lights of 1970s American cinema. Few, too, suffered such an ignominious fall from grace. “Looking back,

The IMF chief, Christine Lagarde, has been placed under formal investigation by French magistrates. Photograph: Gary Cameron/Reuters The head of the International Monetary Fund , Christine Lagarde , has been charged with "simple negligence" over her handling of a controversial €400m payout to French business tycoon Bernard Tapie when she was finance minister. Lagarde announced that she had been placed under investigation by a magistrate on Tuesday – the French equivalent of being charged in the UK – after being questioned for 15 hours at the court of justice in Paris, which deals with cases of alleged ministerial wrongdoing. But she told a reporter that she would not resign from her position: "I'm going back to work in Washington this afternoon," she said. The IMF chief insisted that she had not broken the law and would appeal. The case is an embarrassment for Lagarde, the IMF and France. Ju

Richard Dawkins responded to a woman querying a possible Down's syndrome pregnancy: 'Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.' Photograph: Murdo Macleod Richard Dawkins has apologised for the "feeding frenzy" triggered by his tweet claiming it would be immoral to carry on with a pregnancy if the mother knew the foetus had Down's syndrome . The geneticist's latest Twitter row broke out after he responded to another user who said she would be faced with "a real ethical dilemma" if she became pregnant with a baby with Down's syndrome. Dawkins tweeted: "Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice." In a fuller explanation on his website – entitled Abortion & Down Syndrome: Apology for Letting Slip the Dogs of Twitterwar – the author tried to set the record straight. He wrote: "To co

The most prestigious international tournament in chess , at which the world's top players compete alongside amateurs to win honours for their country, has ended on a sombre note after two players died suddenly within hours of each other, one while he was in the middle of a match. Hundreds of spectators attending the 41st Chess Olympiad in Tromsø, Norway , and countless others watching live TV coverage on Norway's state broadcaster, reacted with shock after Kurt Meier, 67, a Swiss-born member of the Seychelles team, collapsed on Thursday afternoon, during his final match of the marathon two-week contest. Despite immediate medical attention at the scene he died later in hospital. Hours later, a player from Uzbekistan who has not yet been named was found dead in his hotel room in central Tromsø. Norwegian police and the event's organisers said on Friday they were not treating the deaths as suspicious. "We regard these as tragic but natural deaths,&

The late Bacall's mature face, no less beautiful than her young one, looked like a road map of a life lived to the fullest When I sat down last year to list my icons for a chapter in my book about beauty , Lauren Bacall was the first to make the list. She was, until the very end, one of the most extraordinary beauties I have ever seen. Hers was a strong face. Proudly Jewish (she rubbished rumours of a nose job ), intelligent, handsome, sophisticated and elegant. She was never mimsy or cute. Her strong, thick brows were the kind that could bat off unwanted male attention with a faintly menacing arch. Her bones were exquisite, her mouth was wide, and full, and she possessed a glamour that was always womanly, never girlish, even when she was an ingenue of just 19. And that sexiness. Bacall had the sort of lethal femininity Elizabeth Taylor also possessed – tough, earthy, striking. Betty Joan Perske was born beautiful and handled her gift masterfully. Bacall (who was

      A nine-year-old boy in Florida has told how he fought off an alligator that bit into him as he swam at a popular lakefront park. At a news conference at Arnold Palmer hospital, James Barney told reporters he didn’t realise what was happening at first. “It really amazed me what happened. At first I thought someone was just playing with me and I didn’t know what happened. I reached down to go grab it and I felt its jaw I felt its teeth and I didn’t know what to do, so I immediately reacted and hit a couple of times, and then finally I had enough strength left to pry its jaw open a little,” he said. The incident happened at Lake Toho in St Cloud, Florida, near the popular tourist destination of Orlando. The surgeon who treated the boy said the alligator left about 30 marks from both claws and teeth, and a tooth had been left embedded in the boy’s skin. James wanted to keep it but said officials wouldn’t let him. “The tooth is pretty big. I wanted to keep it

For the next four years we will see the first world war as a succession of sepia images of young men marching off to the front. What those pictures won’t tell you about is the life that was going on back home – still less about an alternative culture that undermines the polarised, almost cliched ways in which we see the war. From 1914 to 1918, for instance, no fewer than 150 illegal nightclubs opened up in Soho alone, where chorus girls danced to black jazz bands, sustained by cocaine given to them by soldiers to whom it had been issued for medical purposes. At the most infamous club, the Cave of the Golden Calf in Heddon Street (a back street that would later feature on David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust cover ), futurist poets in goatee beards recited avant garde verse, and guests were greeted by a phallic sculpture designed by Eric Gill , to which they bowed in mock idolatry. When Wilfred Owen was on leave in London, he noted that the upper floor of the Piccadilly cafe in