Monday 17 December 2018

In four Tweets, a taste of Mike Leigh's Peterloo (2018)

In four Tweets, a taste of Mike Leigh's Peterloo (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


16 December

In four Tweets, a taste of Mike Leigh's Peterloo (2018)









Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 24 November 2018

Phronesis : Solos aren't really their thing

Reflections on hearing Phronesis in Cambridge (November 2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


24 November

Reflections on hearing Phronesis (@phronesismusic) at Cambridge International Jazz Festival 2018 – a gig at The Mumford Theatre, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge,
on Saturday 24 November 2018 at 7.30 p.m.

In the first set, the band gave us four numbers (or 'songs'), the third of which (Jasper Høiby, leader and bass-player, suggested) was from 2014 (and which had been heard played at The Stables in 2016), but they were all in such extended forms that one was almost aware of 'Four seasons in one day' (to quote Crowded House).

By which is meant, almost necessarily, that the instrumentalists are all 'playing the long game', painting 'a bigger picture', whereas the solo is most usually a period taken out of a shorter treatment of a song, which does not necessarily have or need an overarching feel in which such individualism, rather than the compact work of the trio, is going to feel out of place¹.

They will no sooner have excitingly stepped up into an energetic, faster gear² than drop down or away, and the trick in the hearing is, when it happens, to enjoy the acceleration into that movement, but accept that it is part of a whole, in that Phronesis perform songs that are fundamentally quite modular, or moody – or modular³.


However, it is something more loose than that¹, as if the structure of the song is modelling-clay that can be shaped by the interaction of the members of the trio as they go, by listening to each other, and also looking out for each other’s signals. The things that communicate themselves in this music at its height - which is already of an unbelievably and highly reliable special quality - are that everyone enjoys the others' playing, and a strong sense of freedom and of play, which can easily move between the very melodic and the strongly rhythmic.

We had tight and virtuosic drumming from Anton Eger (@AntonEger), as one will remember when the band were at Cambridge Jazz Festival in 2016, and saw the erect and observant Høiby (@jasperhoiby) centre stage, at times casting looks back and forth between Ivo Neame (@Ivoneame) on piano, and Eger. Harmonically, and in terms of the figurations and inflections that he can adeptly work with, Neame seems like a mirror to and for Eger, and Eger for Neame, with Høiby (using the bow more often than two years ago) in the role of using his playing and presence to mediate and direct, at the cross-roads of patterned communications, and gauging with Eger and Neame when to extend a section, when to move – which they always do so smoothly – to another passage, another facet, another feeling.


This is not jazz that is pretending to be clever. It just is clever, in the sense of being good and of quality, but does not even require of us to congratulate ourselves for being there to listen (or for listening to it). It takes us to places, maybe not real ones, in the band's sound-world, and, as the new album is called, perhaps tells us We Are All ?

With the three of them, deeply bowing at the front of the stage in The Mumford Theatre, who could doubt that they had given their all, and that we had truly been with them, in - and because of - the music !


End-notes :

¹ Another musical example, if in the world of what has been written out, might be where a chamber work is in movements, but - without a break - they are run together, such as Ravel's Sonata in A Minor (Op. Posth.) ?

² Colour coded by the principal lighting of the back, velveteen curtain, behind the band, as blue, red, and sub-marine green (the encore was purple, then red), the three songs of the second set all had this synergistic short moment, when the trio took off together, in tempo and intensity :

Perhaps we most immediately sense how alive their creativity is in this type of sound, but it is there to act as a contrast to much else that is going on in the song, such as when they are relishing a repetition or noodling with the possibilities of tossing a fragment around, yet almost without exception conveying the feeling of being both experimental and able to cope with the play-offs that they create, the interplay on which they thrive.


³ Which is not to say that they are blocks of material in, say, a Boulezian sense, where playing one determines whether one will or will not play another (e.g. his Piano Sonata No. 3), or, within a set of reels or jigs, where a group such as Lau might take a pre-arranged, short common rest - a little like the heart 'missing a bit, or a jump-cut in the cinema - and then directly juxtapose the tempo and rhythm of what went before with those of the new.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tuesday 13 November 2018

The #UCFF Tweets about Cargo (2017)

The #UCFF Tweets about Cargo (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


25 October


The #UCFF Tweets about Cargo (2017)




April McIntyre’s (@AprilMcIntyre’s) review for TAKE ONE is here








Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 10 November 2018

Four #UCFF Tweets about Searching for Ingmar Bergman (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


26 October

Four #UCFF Tweets about Searching for Ingmar Bergman
(
Vermächtnis eines Jahrhundertgenies) (2018)








Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Some #UCFF Tweets and a link about The man who killed Don Quixote (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


25 October


Some #UCFF Tweets and a link about The man who killed Don Quixote (2018)






More, by way of a comment, on Rosie Applin’s review for TAKE ONE (@TakeOneCinema)…





Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Friday 9 November 2018

Five #UCFF Tweets that start with More Human than Human (2018)

Five #UCFF Tweets that start with More Human than Human (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


30 October

Five #UCFF Tweets that start with More Human than Human (2018)









Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Two #UCFF Tweets about Rafiki (2018)

Two #UCFF Tweets about Rafiki (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


30 October

Two #UCFF Tweets about Rafiki (2018)









Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Three #UCFF Tweets about Colette (2018)

Three #UCFF Tweets about Colette (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


1 November

Three #UCFF Tweets about Colette (2018)








Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Wednesday 7 November 2018

Four #UCFF Tweets about The Silence of Others (2018)

Four #UCFF Tweets about The Silence of Others (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


31 October

Four #UCFF Tweets about The Silence of Others (2018)









Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Four #UCFF Tweets about Roma (2018), Surprise Film at Cambridge Film Festival 2018

Four #UCFF Tweets about Roma (2018), Surprise Film at Cambridge Film Festival 2018

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


2 November

Four #UCFF Tweets about Roma (2018), Surprise Film at Cambridge Film Festival 2018









Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Saturday 3 November 2018

Cambridge Film Festival 2018 : Seen by #UCFF at #CamFF

Cambridge Film Festival 2018 : Seen by #UCFF at #CamFF

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


2 November

Cambridge Film Festival 2018 : Seen by #UCFF at #CamFF


Day 1 ~ Thursday 25 October

(1) 4.45 - Cargo (2017) : Emmanuel (91 mins) - Catch one film before...

(2) 8.30 - Opening Film : The Man who killed Don Quixote : Screen 1 (132 mins + Q&A)


Day 2 ~ Friday 26 October
(Voi1 2*) 1.30 Fortuna (2018??) Arriving too late for the start, instead...

(3) 1.45 - For the Birds (2018) : Screen 2 (90 mins)

(4) 4.00 - Searching for Ingmar Bergman (Vermächtnis eines Jahrhundertgenies (2018) : Screen 1 (95 mins)

(5) 6.00 - Letter from Masanjia (2018) : Screen 2 (75 mins)

(6) 8.00 - Jean-François i el sentit de la vida (Jean-François and The Meaning of Life) (2018) : Screen 2 (90 mins + Q&A)

(7) 10.15 - The Seventh Seal (1957) : Screen 2 (96 mins)


Day 3 ~ Saturday 27 October

(Extracurricular 1) Punting with Leon ‘Letter from Masanjia’ Lee [who took to it like the duck of the simile, and quickly took the pole]

(8) 2.00 - Miss Dalí (2018) : Screen 1 (165 mins + Q&A)

(Void 2*) 5.15 - Marquis de Wavrin : From the Manor to the Jungle (Marquis de Wavrin : Du manoir à la jungle) (2017) : Screen 3 (85 mins)

(9 ?) 8.30 - The Blot (1921) : Emmanuel (93 mins)


Day 4 ~ Sunday 28 October

(Extracurricular 2) Punting with Ventura ‘Miss Dalí’ Pons [who took to the Cam straightaway - taking it in, visually and photographically]

(10) 2.0 - If…. (1968) : Screen 1 (111 mins + Q&A)

(11) 5.45 - Júlia ist (2017) : Screen 2 (96 mins)

(12) 9.15 - Nancy (2014) : Screen 3 (86 mins)


Day 5 ~ Monday 29 October

(12½) 12.45 - 3 Days in Quiberon (2013) : Screen 1 (115 mins)

Then, as it falters, instead...

(13½) 2.30 - Roobha (2018) : Screen 3 (91 mins + Q&A)

(14½) 7.15 - The Free Life (La vida lliure / A Life of Freedom) (2017) : Screen 2 (90 mins)

(15½) 8.45 - Gentlemen prefer Blondes (1953) : Screen 3 (91 mins)


Day 6 ~ Tuesday 30 October

(16) 12.00 - Visionary Landscapes : Snow (1963) + A Year along The Abandoned Road (1991) : Screen 1 (8 + 12 mins)

(16½) 1.00 - Burning (2014) : Screen 2 (148 mins)

Insufficiently interested, despite (extra) wine, to stay the course for so long,
so abandoned in favour of lunch, then…

(17½) 4.00 - The Archive (2018) + Feline (2018) : Screen 2 (12 + 78 mins + Q&A)

(18½) 6.20 - Rafiki (2018) : Screen 2 (82 mins)

(19½) 10.00 - More Human than Human (2018) : Screen 3 (79 mins)


Day 7 ~ Wednesday 31 October

(20½) 12.45 - The Silence of Others (2018) : Screen 1 (96 mins)

(21) 3.00 - Birds of Passage (2018) : Screen 1 (125 mins)

Too fatigued to continue with this one, so a break before re-watching…

(22) 6.00 - Roobha (2018) : Screen 2 (91 mins)

Missing the Q&A to catch the last hour of...

(22½) 7.30 - From Cairo to The Cloud : The World of Cairo Geniza (2018) : Screen 3 (92 mins)

(Void 3*) 9.45 - Gwendolyn (2017) : Screen 3 (85 mins)


Day 8 ~ Thursday 1 November

(23½) 10.30 - Malcolm is a Little Unwell : Screen 3 (introduction + 80 mins)

(24) 12.45 - From Cairo to The Cloud : The World of Cairo Geniza : Screen 1 (92 mins + Q&A)

Seeing the first thirty minutes, and then coming back for the Q&A...

(25) 3.00 - The Image Book : Screen 1 (84 mins)

(26) 5.00 - Colette : Screen 1 (111 mins)

(27) 8.00 - Closing Film : Monsters and Men (2018) : Screen 1 (96 mins)

(28) 10.00 - Surprise Film : Roma (2018) : Screen 1 (135 mins)


End-notes :

* I.e., by 'Void', there was no realistic prospect of watching the film, or of continuing to watch it to the end, with the resources of energy available...




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Wednesday 31 October 2018

In three Tweets, a response to Nancy (2018)

In three Tweets, a response to Nancy (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


31 October

In three Tweets, a response to Nancy (2018)








Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tuesday 30 October 2018

First-gig response [European premiere] to Roobha (2018*)

First-gig response [European premiere] to Roobha (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


First-gig response [European premiere] to Roobha (2018)

Caveat : Not absolutely everything in this film might be how, on a first viewing, one thought that it might have worked best – but it has so much going for it that, as they could or should say, those reservations fade into irrelevance in the face of so much that is daring, and bold, and strong.

And one needs to be all such things when the commonality that we could and really should have, as human-beings, with one another can or does dissolve and decay into judgement, hatred, and ostracism : this film is political, in the sense of showing what we are missing when we separate ourselves from others and deem them Other.


Preaching apart for seeing others apart from the prejudices that one – if one had a family – imbibed under its eaves, because one almost instinctively and disruptively hears the parental responses that ring in one’s ears, Roobha (2017??) is beautifully inventive and visually alert. Asked in the Q&A after the European premiere about the scene that is witnessed through a car windscreen, director Lenin ?? credited it to ??, his cinematographer, when it came to the shoot : alongside, for example, the permeable and impermeable membranes, and reflections / doubled images, with which the film is populated one gets a sense of the known but unspoken that Henrik Ibsen gave us on the stage, the truths that we dare not confront or confess until we have to, and the hardnesses in our hearts in extremis that, in some other extremity, can soften into love and acceptance.

This is meant as an appreciative and totally unspoilery reaction to the film : if you want to know what ‘it is about’, there are other accounts that will provide that. In conclusion, what one suggests that one might better look out for in terms of cinematic qualities is given in the Tweets that follow.


[...]




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Sunday 21 October 2018

Just as if the present penetrated the future, leaving behind a trace of anxiety¹

This is a Festival preview of Miss Dalí (2018) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


14 October

This is a Festival preview of Miss Dalí (2018) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2018)


The #CamFF synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here,
and it screens on Saturday 27 October [in Screen 1 at Festival Central] at 2.00 p.m.,
and also on Monday 29 October at 11.00 a.m. [in Screen 3 at Festival Central]


Salvador Dalí is not a trustworthy source of information about himself. From his adolescence he set out consciously to become a myth, and he continued to work at being Dalí even after he had achieved his goal. A vital stage in the process was his The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, written in French and published in English translation, for American consumption, in 1942, when he was thirty-eight.

Ian Gibson ~ The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí² [Introduction, opening sentences]


When, to a voice-over (from which the words that are used as a title to this preview have been quoted¹), the film opens with a slide-show of unpeopled bays, cliffs, the sea and waves, it has a disembodied quality to it that speaks, inter alia, of lives beyond these vistas : perhaps they seem hyper-real in their intensity, as if in canvases of Salvador Dalí, where we might wonder what time soft watches would tell ?


Alice sighed wearily. 'I think you might do something better with the time,' she said, 'than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.'

'If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, 'you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him.'³


The twentieth century was hardly the first time when big personalities were operating in the sphere of the creative media (since it had given us such towering egos as Benvenuto Cellini, Christopher Marlowe, Caravaggio, Samuel Johnson, Niccolò Pagannini, Richard Wagner, August Strindberg, Richard Strauss, etc., etc.), but how art was to develop then not only allowed, but also almost required, the person of the artist to be an important part of the art-work and its values : to be an artist called Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Andy Warhol, to name but three, made it de rigueur to venerate at The Shrine of The Personality Cult (or, rather, have others make votive offerings to approach one and / or on one's behalf).


In telling the story of Edie Sedgwick, Factory Girl (2006) may not, in search of a good premise for a film, be accurate with all of its claims about Warhol – which is not to say that he did not use / exploit people, but that it misrepresents what one can nowadays easily check :

Part of Ana María’s motivation, in 1949, in publishing Salvador Dalí vist per la seva germana was to correct assertions that would otherwise pass for truth. Imagine being Salvador Dalí's sister, and having happily posed for hours for your evidently highly talented brother, then, as his art developed (and Dalí, having learn to draw and paint figuratively, initially thought himself first an Impressionist, then a Cubist), finding that one has more in common with one’s father’s increasing sense of frustration with him - that is what Miss Dalí asks us to entertain.


Yet all the indications are that, although Ana María’s book also appeared in Spanish (and was translated into French), it has never appeared in an English-language edition, and Ian Gibson's seemingly unchallenged biography The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (quoted above) only gives a few pages to it. (Gibson spends longer on considering the various and inconsistent accounts by Dalí and Buñuel of how the screenplay for Un chien andalou (1929)⁴ came to be written.) Perhaps Ventura Pons' film will change that... ?

He loved to sign thousands of blank sheets for lithographs ~ Ana María

Whatever the exact status may be now of Mr Allen or his reputation, his Midnight in Paris (2011) was unjustly fêted, and To Rome with Love (2012), the following year, no more justly neglected, though both treat of visiting the past, and of regret : Midnight's literal vehicle takes Gil (Owen Wilson) back to such remarkable times, with remarkable people, as Miss Dalí treats of. Yet – except excused as Gil's fantasy wish-fulfilment that sees a disaffected Inez (Rachel McAdams) and him in Paris (i.e. if it is in his dream, what does it matter ?) – too many ways in which these writers and artists they have been visualized and / or portrayed in Allen's film grates not a little, such as the portrayal of Luis Buñuel or Dalí himself, as well as how, anachronistically, some of the men are dressed so informally⁵.


Director and co-writer Ventura Pons has already shown himself too savvy, with the multiple facets of how scenes play and re-play in El virus de la por (The Virus of Fear) (2015) [which screened during #CameraCatalonia in the following year], to be pegged solely to the view-point of Dalí’s sister Anna Maria [Ana María], who (later in life, and played by Siân Phillips) is the 'Miss Dalí' of the title. Which is to say that, although the ostensible work of the film is to tell it as she saw it (via the medium of her reminiscences when her friend Maggie visits, whom she knows from when she was at the University of Cambridge), it is not its purpose simply to endorse or validate Ana María Dalí’s account or perspective :

It's a good story, written by a cunning and brilliant man… - to distract curious fools ~ Maggie

It is Maggie (Claire Bloom) who is shown, as if in a very understanding confessional, to be validating how Ana María feels, and endorsing why she might have resentments that she does not feel able to forgive, for her sake - rather than for our benefit as such. As the film goes on to show us, it was the outrage of Ana María and her remaining family at Salvador's biased autobiography for his own selective purposes, The Secret Life (1942), that was sufficient reason for her to publish her riposte in Salvador Dalí vist per la seva germana (1949).

In other filmic terms, we might think how Mike Leigh, in Mr. Turner (2014), confounds the art-establishment tradition of nobilizing Turner as aristocratic (rather than demotic). In Miss Dalí, by contrast, we see Dalí becoming more haughty, as he cultivates strangeness, and cannot, as his family does not easily overlook distancing himself from his Catalan roots, and courting the Fascists against his Republican education...


When I die, I will be totally cured ~ Salvador Dalí


At root, Ventura Pons' film embodies a sister's abiding love and admiration for the brother with whom she had shared her early years :

But he is still Dalí. One of the greatest figures in twentieth-century painting. The art was greater than the man.


End-notes :

¹ As had been suspected, these words have been taken from Ana María Dalí’s writing, in Chapter IX of Salvador Dalí vist per la seva germana, where we read – in the French translation : Comme la proue coupe l’eau, le présent pénêtre dans l’avenir, en laissant une trace d’inquiétude.

Ana María Dalí ~ Salvador Dalí : vu par sa sœur, p. 99. Arthaud, France, 1961.


² Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1997.

³ This exchange, at The Mad Hatter's Tea-Party, is likewise quoted in the #UCFF preview for Jean-François i el sentit de la vida (Jean-François and The Meaning of Life) (2018) : ça va ici aussi !

⁴ When this image comes onto the screen, during footage from Un chien andalou (1929) that the film shows, some might want to turn away, for a few seconds, at this point…



⁵ In fact, one would far rather not be in Gil's company at all, but in that of the truly fantastical Drako Zarharzar (@DrakoZarharzar) in Toby Amies' highly effective personal portrait, The Man Whose Mind Exploded (2012), of a man who knew people such as Salvador Dalí, because he modelled for him.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Friday 19 October 2018

It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards ~ Søren Kierkegaard

This is a Festival preview of Jean-François and The Meaning of Life (2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


21 September

This is a Festival preview of Jean-François i el sentit de la vida (Jean-François and The Meaning of Life) (2018) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2018)


The #CamFF synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here,
and it screens on Friday 26 October [in Screen 2 at Festival Central] at 8.00 p.m.,
and also on Sunday 28 October at 2.30 p.m. [at The Light Cinema]


It becomes an author generally to divide a book, as it does a butcher to joint his meat, for such assistance is of great help to both the reader and the carver
Henry Fielding ~ Joseph Andrews² (Book II, Chapter I)


The right book, at the right time, can change a life - and what makes it 'right' is the person whom it is trying to seek out (who could be thirteen - or thirty-three) :
Therefore, if (despite the fact that hearing Kafka's 'Die Verwandlung', read some years earlier, had made no impact) it was a reading aloud of his 'In der Strafkolonie' (from the same collection), then this Franz Kafka of Prague (as a book-title styles him) was to become an essential travelling-companion in life, along with his three novels (all unfinished), diaries, stories, fragments of ideas, even a play, and those highly curious letters written to Felice Bauer¹ (the woman whom he barely knew, but, although she was very different from him, to whom he was engaged to be married, until he withdrew from it)...


Containing many surprising adventures which Joseph Andrews met with on the road, scarce credible to those who have never travelled in a stage-coach
Henry Fielding – ibid. [title to Book I, Chapter XII]

It is this elasticity of Time's perspective (and there are further thoughts about Time below), in our living and travelling with (unknown to anyone else) the author whom we know that we - and only we - have discovered for the first time, that Jean-François i el sentit de la vida (Jean-François and The Meaning of Life) (2018) celebrates : in this sense, our experience tells us that no one else read this book before, and so we have a personal right of audience with the writer, from which we obtain direct communication and insight.
Alice sighed wearily. 'I think you might do something better with the time,' she said, 'than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.'

'If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, 'you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him.'


It is natural, and not unhelpful, to think of Lea von Acken in the role of Maria in Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross) (2014) when first watching Jean-François : to give Jean-François his birth-name, Francesc Rubió is not French, but now must attend a school in France, and - as Maria does - is facing difficulties in fitting in.


In Kreuzweg, director Dietrich Brüggemann and his co-writer Anna Brüggemann's screenplay is very knowing, but also, as here, sympathetic to their subject without laying the film open to the charge that it is manipulative. The 'chapter' titles in Jean-François i el sentit de la vida - just as Kreuzweg is divided by the names of the Roman Catholic Stations of the Cross [the title Kreuzweg translates as 'The Way of the Cross'] - assist in giving a level of detachment.

A scene of roasting, very nicely adapted to the present taste and times
Henry Fielding – ibid. [title to Book II, Chapter VII]

Almost like musical punctuation - or mile-stones (for this film is as Picaresque as Henry Fielding's novels, quotations from whose Joseph Andrews we have already read above²) ? - there is likewise the use of Neo-Baroque and other musical interludes in Gerard Pastor's fully-composed score, which, along with their individual tone, and how they have been positioned in editing the film, deny us the leisure to be able to dwell overlong always on what we have just seen. (We may, if mid-eighteenth century novels appeal to us, find them what some nowadays may call 'page-turners', but the art of the writing is in what Fielding tells us in 'Of divisions in authors' (as quoted above, and below), and pertinent to the art of film-making.)

The musical pastiche / parody has all the poise and self-awareness of the self-proclaimed Auto Mechanics, seen here re-creating The Anatomy Lesson (1632) by Rembrandt


As cited above (and towards the close of this preview), in Joseph Andrews² the novelist Henry Fielding (1707–1754) has self-referentially devoted ‘Of divisions in authors’ (the first chapter of Book II) to the question why authors divide their novels into chapters. (Fielding is probably better known as the author of the much longer and raunchier novel Tom Jones (which was published seven years later.)


In the conduct of this matter, I say, Molly so well played her part, that Jones attributed the conquest entirely to himself, and considered the young woman as one who had yielded to the violent attacks of his passion. He likewise imputed her yielding to the ungovernable force of her love towards him ; and this the reader will allow to have been a very natural and probable supposition, as we have more than once mentioned the uncommon comeliness of his person : and, indeed, he was one of the handsomest young fellows in the world.³


Henry Fielding also overlapped with the last half-century of Johann Sebastian Bach’s life (1685–1750), in whose musical world the older composer Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) and Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767) were important figures : quite apart from anything else about the film, we hear in Gerard Pastor’s witty score pastiches of these and other composers of the time.


Since sundry details in the film, if we try to dwell on them, also defy us to be sure when exactly Portabella might have set his story, the musical dimension – along with the chapter-titles – would seem to be part of writer / director Sergi Portabella’s deliberate mechanism to evoke a multiplicity of other eras. All of these elements, maybe without our consciously realizing the fact, appear to have the disjunctive intent of adding an ironical or quizzical dimension to what we see⁴.

A very curious adventure, in which Mr. Adams gave a much greater instance of the honest simplicity of his heart, than of his experience in the ways of this world

Henry Fielding – ibid. [title to Book II, Chapter XVI]

Just as the disparate observations made in watching 'screeners' of these #CameraCatalonia films coalesce - one hopes - into a coherent whole in the process of writing previews such as this, so a film director's vision for how such elements as script, actors, hair and make-up, lighting, locations, cinematography, set-construction, etc., will come together is what causes Sergi Portabella to have Gerard Pastor write in the style of composers from the time of Fielding : one could swear, at one dramatic point, that one is hearing one of Bach's towering Orgelwerke.



Even if it is allegorically (though not just on the level of Golden Age thinking'), Midnight in Paris - as also referenced in the #UCFF preview for Miss Dali (2018) - suggests that one can be nostalgic about a time that was never one's own : Gil both desires to be a writer such as those whom he admires from Paris in the 1920s and so to have been there at that time (and accordingly - with no explanatory device⁵, and to this extent this is magical realism, finds himself able to be in Paris in the 1920s), where he meets and is captivated by Adriana (Marion Cotillard).

Which some readers will think too short and others too long
Henry Fielding – ibid. [title to Book III, Chapter VIII]

However, which is the film's thrust, it is ironic that Adriana ultimately no more wants to be in her era, the 1920s, than Gil in his... and just as he realizes that he insufficiently wishes to marry Inez, so he has to admit that he insufficiently wants to be with Adriana to go with her to the time of [Henri de] Toulouse-Lautrec. We may see that something of this order, though not reducible to or in these terms, is going on for and with our young hero in Jean-François, because of entering the orbit and world of Albert Camus.



One might also be put in mind of a number of other films, such as are referred to in this Tweet :



Thus, for example, one may discern that, as well as the closing scene of Kreuzweg, the very opening of this film somehow partly reminds of the early Woody Allen / Diane Keaton collaboration that is Love and Death (as does a note of whimsy in what turns out to be a score that comprises pastiches). In essence, the adventurous, implausible and unpredictable elements of Michel Gondry's Microbe et Gasoil (2015) [Surprise Film at Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest) that year] are here turned into chapters, whose titles may prove not to be any less equivocal than some of Fielding's in Joseph Andrews (or Tom Jones).

Of which you are desired to read no more than you like
Fielding ~ ibid. [title to Book IV, Chapter VI]


And few things can be as misleading (not to say mischievous and wayward ?) as the man who called himself Laurence Sterne, and, after creating the character in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767), called where he lived in North Yorkshire Shandy Hall (now a Sterne museum) - Sterne causes a black page to be printed, when his character Yorick dies, and leaves us a blank page so that we can conceive of our own description of a female character ! :


Arguably, Portabella imbues Jean-François and Jean-François with this spirit. And also with that of what Hemingway somewhere said (or wrote)⁶ :

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.



A volume without any such places of rest resembles the opening of wilds or seas, which tires the eye and fatigues the spirit when entered upon.
Henry Fielding ~ ibid. (Book II, Chapter I)



The #CamFF synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here,
and it screens on Friday 26 October [in Screen 2 at Festival Central] at 8.00 p.m.,
and also on Sunday 28 October at 2.30 p.m. [at The Light Cinema]


End-notes :

¹ Are Kafka’s Letters to Felice even real, we might ask – or is it an epistolary novel, written essentially as if only ‘his’ letters survive ? When we watch Miss Dalí (2018) [the #UCFF preview is under way], during this year’s Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival, There are highly equivalent matters on which we may find ourselves reflecting about, say, what did happen when Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí collaborated...

At any rate, they are certainly amongst those parts of The Kafka Myth that suggest that other people, especially Kafka’s father, did not ‘get’ him – whereas we do, So, Brief an den Vater [Letter to My Father] duly gets collected and published – almost certainly by Max Brod. (Maybe not wholly successfully, Alan Bennett seeks to examine some of these relations, and versions of them, in his ‘irreverent’ play Kafka’s Dick.)


² Joseph Andrews, as we call it, was published in 1742 : Fielding styles it 'The history of the adventures of Joseph Andrews, and his friend Mr. Abraham Adams. Written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote'.

Or - as expansively published in its first part in 1605, more than a century before Fielding's birth - in El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha of Miguel de Cervantes ? For example (from the Penguin Classics translation by J. M. Cohen) :

In which is related the device Sancho adopted to enchant the Lady Dulcinea, and other incidents as comical as they are true
[Second Part, Chapter X]


³ Quoted from Tom Jones, Book IV, Chapter 6.

⁴ On one level, Sergi Portabella is quietly asking us how much we ‘buy into’ / ‘invest in’ the knowing illusion that is cinema – although, of course, do we not remember arriving at the cinema, and that we had a ticket to present (which is our only proof of a right to occupy this seat, and see these projected images that we call a film) ?

As we find in Joseph Andrews, a chapter-title such as 'Of which you are desired to read no more than you like' [Book IV, Chapter VI] gives us what impulse to carry on reading regardless ? !


⁵ Such as is imperfectly invoked by Richard Curtis in About Time (2013)...

⁶ On this, there seems to be a consensus - so, in many ways, it is immaterial whether he did.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)