This is a response to Further Beyond (2016) and a Q&A with Christine Molloy
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21 February
This is a response to Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s Further Beyond (2016), which screened at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, on Tuesday 7 February 2017, and was followed by a Q&A with the former (uncorrected proof)
The review
At the conclusion of the Q&A (to which we return below), Christine Molloy was asked about Barry Lyndon (1975) – Further Beyond (2016) had itself alluded to director Stanley Kubrick, in a perhaps wry anecdote about location-scouting for the duel at the start of Barry Lyndon. (Specifically, the question was about the use of the narrator (Michael Hordern) as a reference for Further Beyond.)
It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled ; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.
Apart from this levelling remark, Barry Lyndon leaves a measure of uncertainty, with Hordern’s voice-over veiling, near the end of the film, what is known about Redmond Barry after the counter-balancing duel that causes him to lose a leg : Kubrick has deliberately had us follow Barry / him for most of three hours (but, all along, not without quite a little irony in the tone and content of the narration), only to have – as Barry’s leg is – our knowledge curtailed. (For Thackeray’s novelistic purposes, maybe one could believe [until looking at the text... please see below¹, and the Epilogue⁴] that he also had more interest in the first place – and that more anti-Irish feeling was to be maintained or generated ? – by just telling certain aspects of the story of this real-life character (taken from Andrew Robinson Stoney, an Anglo-Irish rake and fortune-hunter).)
In cinematic terms, however, it is as though Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy had pursued Kubrick’s trail from this point onwards, where he had it go cold, in making a film that deals with the earlier parts of their subject Ambrosio O’Higgins’ life, in that they are most drawn to that about which they (or anyone) know least, and making that its matter…
In the English translation of his novel Molloy (written in French, and co-translated by Samuel Beckettt with Patrick Bowles), the second part, narrated by Jacques Moran, begins with – what literary critic Hugh Kenner classifies as – two declarative sentences. At the very close of the book, those sentences are quoted, before its final two sentences calmly put both into the past tense, and (truncating the second) negate them both :
Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
Even for those who know the novel (with all its evasions and qualifications), and that it is leading up to this denial, the effect remains profound, disquieting.
With Further Beyond, unlike Beckettt’s provisionality with consequences (or even Kubrick's), we are perhaps more in the territory of Laurence Sterne, in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, where we should know that we are being spun a story to amuse us, but which, taken for a serious account, might vex and infuriate – for example, by having us accord, to a squiggle on the page, a description of the movement of a stick wielded by Corporal Trim.
The directors may not have intended us to be so casual about the just as real-life Ambrosio O’Higgins (just as Thackeray, in Stoney, had his original material). However, in a way, what might the cumulative effect be of repeatedly being told, at various points, what the film ‘would have shown’ next, and of interjections such as It can be a real pain in the arse, all of this !, and could it not leave one – rather than in a Becketttian state of provisional, creative uncertainty – not knowing whether to believe any of the story of Ambrosio (or that of Helen, co-told with his³) ?
If so, might we be, despite ourselves, largely indifferent whether any of it - a field in Meath, or what we are told is [the townland of] Ballynary, Co. Sligo - is true or not... ?
Interlude
As Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768) might have observed, the attempt to do justice to five or six enquiries - and Christine Molloy's response to them - in a write-up of the Q&A had, on advice, in fact struck a false tone : since it had failed in its own terms, it has now been omitted.
@THEAGENTAPSLEY Shame you ended up adopting a position of indifference with regard to FURTHER BEYOND. Ah well. But at least you took a punt.
— Desperate Optimists (@DesOpProduction) March 12, 2017
Epilogue
Should the first part of this write-up seem harsh, what we are talking about is not the quality of the film-making, or the subject (Helen and Ambrosio’s real stories) : rather, it is a matter of trying to assess, in the assembly and presentation of the material, what directorial judgements have been made, and – for good or ill – to what effect.
With regard to the deliberate uncertainties and doubts employed in Barry Lyndon (or in Beckettt’s novel Molloy) (please see above), they do seem more finely balanced. In Michael Hordern’s words or tone, Kubrick is hinting, amongst other aspects of the film, at the question of reliability of the edifice that is / is behind con-artist Redmond Barry’s life⁴, and it is all done so as to enrich and nourish our appreciation of the nature of what telling a story essentially always is, of putting things a certain way – in a certain light.
In a way, happy though we may be with it, Kubrick’s version of the conclusion of Barry’s life⁴ has him slip away into the unknown (rather than, before a return to England, and Barry’s capture and imprisonment, doing so at that point, as in Thackeray’s novel (with whatever relation it has to the real case of Stoney (please see above)). Whereas, although Thackeray’s novel has no doubt whatever about Barry’s final years, demise, or even cause of death, this is not the stuff of films, and so Lawlor and Molloy have sought to make Further Beyond in full knowledge of that spirit. Others, in watching the film, may not have doubted so much what they were being told that they renounced the enterprise…
Other reviewers
Finally, two reviews are linked via the film’s web-page on IMDb (@IMDb) :
That by Tony Tracy [also called ‘Tom’ ?], for Film Ireland, seems to end up in the same place as this posting’s Epilogue (above), by saying [what is quoted is from the beginning of the long last paragraph, and represents two-thirds of it – the review runs to around 1,500 words] :
I’ve included all this detail to communicate that the film is dense and complex, both in its construction and ideas. But while both these individuals are fascinating in their own way and while the film is full of stimulating intellectual digressions (with reference to Barthes, Bachelard, Sontag, Benjamin and others) I was not entirely convinced that bringing them together illuminates the other or the larger themes the film is reaching for. While there is an outline of each narrative ‘journey’ and while there is speculation as to their thoughts, Ambrose and Helen feel like rather strained projections than real people. (Perhaps there was a more solid basis for their thoughts than was revealed). The film ends with the suggestion to ‘make a start’ and while that is in keeping with the tentativeness of the film’s overall approach, it proves deeply frustrating from the perspective of story or even thesis. With so much called into question through form, narration or tone, the film leaves us with little to dwell on or hold onto. And yet, it would not be fair to summarily dismiss it: in its formal experimentation, its memorable characters and its thinking out loud about making cinematic history (particularly of the ‘great man’ variety), it represents an ambitious and engaging intervention about an often deeply clichéd genre.
The review as a whole, which is detailed and thoughtful, is worth reading, since, for example, the writer argues for it to be seen as an essay film (not a documentary as such), and sheds light both on who Helen is, and on aspects of Ambrosio’s life, which we are not allowed to know : Meeting an expert historian in Santiago, they (but not the audience) hear details of Ambrosia’s complex, adventurer life. (I later look it up online and it is fascinating but largely occluded in the film).
By contrast, for The Irish Times, a review by Donald Clarke, its usual reviewer of films, is so brief – a tenth of the length, as with some of those short reviews in The Guardian, or The Observer - that it can be quoted in full [Clarke gave the film four stars out of five] :
We have learned to expect the oblique from Desperate Optimists. Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, the co-operative that goes by that name, do not disappoint – although they may occasionally frustrate – with this discursive meditation inspired by Ambrose O’Higgins, the Sligo man who became captain general of Chile in the 18th century. “Certain genres set the alarm bells ringing, and the biopic is one,” the script explains. Thus arrested, the film-makers set out, with Godardian awkwardness, to dismantle the machinery of their own nascent project. The voice-over artists introduce themselves and become involved in satellite plotlines. Robert Flaherty, Susan Sontag and Steven Soderbergh are brought into the conversation.
The film ponders its own dishonesty in presenting a composite location as a single property. Happily, there is enough wit and imagination on display to dispel the wrong (non-Brechtian) class of alienation. Thomas Sterne might have got on well with it. [Query : Does Clarke mean 'Thomas' Sterne, or is it possible that the review was dictated, and that this is an uncorrected mishearing of 'Laurence Sterne' ?]
End-notes :
¹ Compared with The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., Kubrick considerably simplifies the story : he has the return of Lord Bullingdon being at an earlier time in Barry’s life (and for other reasons), and so conflates the outcome of the duel (which, for dramatic purposes, Kubrick invents²) and negotiating an annuity with Barry on the basis that he leave England. (In Thackeray’s fact-based novel, the latter happens sooner, and quite differently (being in the company, and with the complicity, of Lady Lyndon), whereas Barry does not encounter Lord Bullingdon until he has been abroad and sneaked back into the country, and the end of Thackeray’s novel, and of Barry’s life, has quite a different tone.)
² Thackeray’s text gives us something quite other : For calling the honour of his mother in question, Lord Bullingdon assaulted his stepfather (living at Bath under the name of Mr. Jones), and administered to him a tremendous castigation in the Pump-Room. (The word ‘assault’ does not, of course, bear its common, modern meaning : the common law still technically calls this ‘battery’, and an assault the apprehension of a battery’s immediately being inflicted (whereas, with a fist pulled back, but not brought forward, it might not be : one would have an assault, but no battery).)
³ When being shown a railing that could be any railing, but being told ‘This one’, do we believe that any more ? Or, when Voice Over Artist 2 (Alan Howley) makes an aside to the effect about Helen not really being his mother, can we then still take her to be not another professional actor, but who she is said to be – candidly caught, on film, for a theatre project ?
⁴ Overall, the significant change that Kubrick brings to adapting Thackeray’s novel is not to have Barry tell his own story : whatever tone it sets in a book, Kubrick has a narrator, Hordern, and can do things that are quite other with that voice, external to the action. (Even if we only know what that action is, because of the voice, of course.)
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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