Seeing is just a kind of brightness (work in progress)

This is a review (still in progress) of I am Belfast (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
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23 April [Shakespeare Fuss Day¹]

This is a review (still in progress) of I am Belfast (2015)

Don't soften the story !

-> Probably the same people to whom one has to prove that Mia Farrow was not married to him, etc.#WhereasWagnerWasAPerfectHumanBeing...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 22, 2016

One might ask what these Tweets have to do with the latest release from Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) – yet, as one watched I am Belfast (2015), one had likewise been unconsciously asking what a character played by Gena Rowlands [Marion Post, in Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988)] had to do with the world of the troubles, or of the land of 'The Six Counties'… (In fact, it was Helena Bereen whom we saw - and not, of course, Gena Rowlands.)

Gena Rowlands (as Marion Post) in Another Woman (1988)

In @iambelfast, one was getting... :

* Girl Chewing Gum (1976)

* Another Woman (1988) - Gena as Marion

* @CamPicturehouse's popcorn kiosk

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 23, 2016

Selected film references :

* A Story of Children and Film (2013) [Mark C.]

* Atomic (2015) [Mark C.]

* Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj) (1998)

* Girl Chewing Gum (1976)

* The Nine Muses (2010)

* What is This Film Called Love ? (2012) [Mark C.]


In fact, it was Helena Bereen whom we saw - and not, of course, Gena Rowlands. After the film, at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse), others disagreed [perhaps @mob61uk @amandarandall5] that Bereen’s being visually, as well as vocally, present to us had been a distraction : it was asserted that she had humanized scenes or situations that Cousins showed to us. Well, of course, it may easily be the case that she was meant to do so. However, the question remained whether her being seen to be present / her presence actually did that (or wholly did so) :

One principal point of contrast is with both seeing Cousins himself in What is This Film Called Love ? (2012), and, in A Story of Children and Film (2013), in his having more than impliedly been there in the film (since he is wielding / setting the camera for his niece and nephew). (In Atomic (2015), we almost certainly do not hear from his voice at all - it is all left to that clipped tone (subtly subverted) of the typical public-information film, or to three title-cards.)

Essentially, in all three earlier cases, the issue was of framing / structuring / telling a story – how it is done, and what follows from it – be it that of [in what is, of course, a crude shorthand of how each film is set out / up] :

* Taking in Mexico City as if through Eisenstein’s eyes / experience (Love)

* Framing, using Cousins’ family footage, his chosen narrative about Children and Film

* Handling being commissioned to make a film with the theme Atomic by a division into Paradise / Paradise Lost / Paradise Regained



[...]


Girl Chewing Gum (1976) is relevant, and so referenced, because Cousins does as the narrator there does – drawing attention, as in other places (please see below), to the constructed and artificial nature of cinematic images (and everything to do with how they are created and curated) : as John Smith before him, Cousins causes to be narrated to us³ what is just out of frame, ready for it to appear to have been predicted (as if, magically, the world outside what the camera sees is unknown – probably (as with Smith) after the fact, or perhaps by design). A visual, aural and structural allusion, although there are myriad others, to the world of film :



[...]



End-notes

¹ As evidenced by this exchange of Tweets :

Don't understand what Shakespeare's on about sometimes? Don't worry - neither does anyone else #HBDShax #Shax400 https://t.co/XC5QABlwia

— UGA English Dept (@UGAEnglish) April 23, 2016

One just gets a PhD in what he meant / must have meant, @UGAEnglish ? https://t.co/Bl67axOQha

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 23, 2016

Aye, there's the rub - even the pros can't figure it out. Guess, yes; know for sure, nope. https://t.co/J4Xo6RDESH

— UGA English Dept (@UGAEnglish) April 23, 2016

² Not, that is, in a naturalistic (or magical-realist) context – the screen-stage of Dogville (1999), for example, perfectly well alienates (Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt) at the same time as fuelling the imagination. (Which is an approach discussed with Hammudi al-Rahmoun Font, the director of Otel.lo (Othello) (2012), in connection with his film during interviews at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 [@camfilmfest / #CamFF] for TAKE ONE (@TakeOneCinema).)

³ Alike in Cousins’ voice, or in that of Belfast / Bereen, since – as we know, but conveniently [tell ourselves that we] forget – her part was scripted by him (as was his), and all this has but the appearance of a spontaneous encounter and its ensuing dialogue…


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

Only the idle rest during war-time (work in progress)

This is an accreting appreciation of Ivan's Childhood (1962)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 April

This is an accreting appreciation of Ivan's Childhood (1962)

Andrei Tarkovsky was born to-day 1932

With the @bfi retrospective, Ivan's Childhood at @CamPicturehouse earlier - beautiful cinematic work

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 4, 2016

Film references :

* A Beautiful Mind (2001)

* A Story of Children and Film (2013) - sic : importantly, it should not be thought of as ‘History’...

* Bugsy Malone (1976)

* The Night of The Hunter (1955)

* The White Ribbon (2009)


[...]

Conflict, and conflict as in war, are not below the surface in the films that drove Andrei Tarkovsky - 9½ when The Siege of Leningrad began.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 4, 2016

[...]


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

Forty-eight, going on fifteen

This is a review of A Story of Children and Film (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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26 April (updated 28 April)

This is a review of A Story of Children and Film (2013)

Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) came to Cambridge with his film A Story of Children and Film (2013) (@ChildrenandFilm), which he told us that he had not been intending to make after – as he described it – six years making, and two years editing, The Story of Film : An Odyssey (2011).

The film was here both in its own right, and to introduce a series of films – The Cinema of Childhood – that has been curated by Cousins and by Filmhouse (@Filmhouse) (which was sourced with the assistance of Neil McGlone (@NeilMcGFilm)) and which has been showing since at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) (of which there are reviews here of Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene i Verden) (1949) and Bag of Rice) (Kiseye Berendj) (1998)).

Cousins had previously been at The Arts for the showing of the last part of Odyssey (which had been screened in full in preceding weeks), and of his new film What is This Thing Called Love ? (2012), and had been an agreeable and interesting guest.

This time, as well as eloquently introducing Children and Film and explaining how it had come about and how personal its genesis had been, Cousins was not making special pleading for the way in which he had constructed the film* : he had simply realized, in looking at the filming that he had done (in his home and with the camera in a static position) of his nephew and niece, that the patterns of behaviour that they showed, as they got used to the camera and, together and singly, played, gave him a way of being reminded of the roles for children in the best films that feature them, rather than those that impose an adulthood on a child before its time :

As he suggests at http://dogwoof.com/childrenandfilm/filmmaker, Cousins contrasted the sweet perfection of Shirley Temple (Curly Top (1935)) with the young girl who puts on a family entertainment with Esther (Judy Garland) in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), and who is allowed to make mistakes and be out of key, as, of course, many a child would.

At the same time, Cousins is not singling out St. Louis as a film that we would necessarily go to, but wants to introduce us to examples from all around the world from Senegal to Sweden, and also reminds us to look again at others that we may already know, such as Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), and even Spielberg’s E.T. : The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).

Punctuated by returning to the Cousins’ flat for more development of what is happening with the relatives on screen, but looking first, by paying a homage to where Vincent Van Gogh lived in Provence at the end of his life, at the world that the painter created in his work as he interpreted his surroundings, Cousins wants to remind us that making a film is projecting a visual and aural view of the world (and the poetic element in what he said to us was patent). Those views, and real life in Cousins’ home, do provide a contrast and a structure – if we can take them on their own terms, and accept, when he tells us, that he did consider other structures to this film, rather than using the original one, but found that nothing worked as well.

Children and Film, though it has a shorter running-time and is a very different type of film, is as demanding of us as Slavoj Žižek is of us in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), because Cousins does not slacken his pace or his use of terms to describe the camera’s movement or position, and ideally one needs to see the film several times over to take in all that he is not only saying at any one point, but to absorb the action in the clips, and the information such as the film’s name, translation and where and when made.

An excellent reason to order the DVD from Dogwoof (@dogwoof) (available from 28 April), but, in the meantime, the list of films featured can be found here :


http://dogwoof.com/childrenandfilm/about.


The film was also reviewed here by Amanda Randall (@amandarandall5) for TAKE ONE (@TakeOneCFF) at Cambridge Film Festival in 2013


To correct an omission

Those who know Cousins' camera-work will be well aware that he is a skilled cinematographer, but the quality of the images, their framing and composition, when he had travelled on to the Isle of Skye is beautiful : a real treat where it comes, because what has gone before has been the footage captured in the flat and clips from his chosen films, even if the opening, which seems a while away now, had been in Provence. (Whether he had linearly been contemplating the possible significance as a frame for this film of his niece and nephew at play, and had developed detailed ideas by the time of his time on Skye, really does not matter, for, in a sense, this is a story just as even any memory that we have is, a way of telling to the world what happened.)


End-notes

* Cousins had the large sheet on which he had worked out the connections between films with him, which those daring enough to approach afterwards were able to see close to.


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

I want to go to the park

This is a review of Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj) (1998)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

Easter Monday

* Contains spoilers *

This is a review of Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj) (1998)

It was shown as part of the series The Cinema of Childhood (please visit the web-site at cinemaofchildhood.com for more information), which is presented by Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) and Filmhouse (@Filmhouse), and is introduced by Mark Cousins' film A Story of Children and Film (2013) (with Neil McGlone (@NeilMcGFilm)). At a special screening at The Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse), its director, Mohammad-Ali Talebi, was present to introduce the film and answer questions in a session hosted by Toby Miller (@tobytram) from FM 105’s Bums on Seats (@Bums_on_Seats)

In A Story of Children and Film (2013), Mark Cousins has held up director Mohammad-Ali Talebi’s film Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj) (1998) as an example of a child actor being allowed to be like a child, and, in Tweeting about the film, Cousins has called it ‘a tonic’ and ‘one of the best things that you could do with 80 mins’.

If u r in Cambridge England + r feeling sad, go see Bag of Rice. @picturehouses at 3.20 2day. It'll make u feel better abt the world. Joy .
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) April 13, 2014

Rice establishes a mood that does not seem prone to abate, so we are genuinely uplifted when it does : a world of cynicism, complaint and grumbling, not just within the home, seems left behind. We had heard, in the words that Talebi (through his interpreter) gave by way of introduction, that the film was set just after the end of Iran’s war with Iraq (which ended in August 1988, after nearly eight years). Maybe, however, since Iran had become an Islamic Republic following the revolution (in 1979), and the deposition of the Shah, we expected that people might be less materialistic and not so quick to find fault.

Then again, these are people who have had to cope with years of war, and, apart from having the fact of continued rationing at its centre, the film has scenes that show us how fearful people are of losing a job or spending too much money. There is, to an extent, a sense of neighbourliness in queuing together for bread fresh from the oven, but tensions and frustrations quickly become apparent. However, criticizing or even obviously commenting on the extent to which the revolution had had an impact on everyday people’s lives does not seem to be part of Talebi’s purpose.

In the question-and-answer session, Talebi was asked whether, in a film that takes a good look at human nature, and seems to incorporate spiritual wisdom (such as sharing each other’s load), there had been a deliberate reference to Louis Malle’s Zazie. In fact, although Talebi says that he likes Malle’s films, he has not seen Zazie dans le métro (1960), and will seek it out when he gets home. Others, too, had said to him that they find a spiritual message in his films, and, although he is not saying that it is not there, it had not been his intention to put one there.

That said, he told us that one of the first things that he did on arriving in Cambridge had been to go into a Catholic church, and that watching people waiting to receive the sacrament had moved him to tears. Nonetheless, in a long and revealing answer to this question, he said that he relates more to the notion of humanity without a religious dimension. Once the observational part of the film gives way to adventure, a summary of what happens would not seem capable of filling the remaining minutes.

For the strength of the film is not in an elaborate plot, but in simplicity, and in the genuineness of the central performances from Jairan Abadzade (Jairan) and Masume Eskandari. We were told that, even so, some devices elicited Abadzade’s performance, such as giving her a toy for much of a day and then denying it to her, and that Eskandari’s polite assurances that she was happy with how the shooting was going were belied by being able to catch her, on a microphone, cursing how things were being handled. (In the screenplay, this insincerity is mirrored by her complaining to herself that Jairan talks so much, and attempting to hurry away to avoid being with her (the latter of which Jairan is aware, and remarks on it to her).)

The principal scene that first moves us is when another’s actions, after all that has been gone through to procure forty-five kilos of rice and get them onto the bus home, threaten to be fatal – until all on the bus play their part to save the day. A description in such broad terms does not permit for feeling either what happens or the scope for the film’s development, but the root lies in the interactions between child and adult, and in the former having the vision and faith for things to happen.

All of which ends in the richness of preparing a meal, and of involving those who live nearby – in a positive sense of community, sharing food with them, which makes the effort of getting the rice back redemptive and worthwhile.


Rice was screened with Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene I Verden) (1949) (which is reviewed here, and was shown first)


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

Clash of the trams

This is a review of Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene i Verden) (1949)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

Easter Sunday

This is a review of Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene i Verden) (1949)

It was shown as part of the series The Cinema of Childhood (please visit the web-site at cinemaofchildhood.com for more information), which is presented by Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) and Filmhouse (@Filmhouse) and introduced by Mark Cousins' film A Story of Children and Film (2013) (with Neil McGlone (@NeilMcGFilm))

* Contains spoilers *

Adapted from Jens Sigsgaard’s text* by director Astrid Henning-Jensen (whose young son Lars played Palle), Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene i Verden) (1949) might have struggled to stretch to a feature, but perhaps it feels cramped in a run-time of twenty minutes. It is not that the conceits and concepts which the film handles are uninteresting, but they feel a little hurried, and therefore undigested : for example, Palle amusingly despises bank-notes as ‘bits of paper’ – which he throws to the wind – and favours the physicality of coins.

We recognize the childish preference for glistering things (although many a child will happily play post office, which is a good grounding in the bureaucracy of paperwork). However, it does not really ring true that, even at his age, Palle is unaware that the right denomination of note is worth many coins. (Perhaps we just excuse that as dream logic, just as it is dream logic that the choice between coins and notes exists at all, because they are conveniently to hand together on the counter.)

In any case, having liberated the coins from a bank that, as everywhere else, is deserted, he still thinks that he needs to pay for what he wants. However, no one comes to the counter to take his coin in the toy-shop – although it is all the same whether he leaves it on the counter or not, he takes the toy and it. It is only later that he realizes that carrying a literal load of heavy coins is pointless, and divests himself of them.

In the toy-shop, a huge Donald Duck had been dwarfing the figure that he takes, which again appeals to the notion that a child’s choice of what to play with may not be obvious (allegedly, often the box that it came in), and so a surprise to us. Not that we see Palle play with the toy, but instead we see him pass a ball to a footballing statue, and then be dismayed that it does not – as we half wonder if it might – take part in the game. Absent from their beds or anywhere else where Palle’s family lives, this is the closest that we come to any representation of mankind, other than Palle himself.

What we know is that, whether he crashes tram no. 8 into no. 2 or re-enacts Voyage dans la Lune (1902), no harm will befall him – as long as he stays away from his curious way of making what is translated as ‘porridge’. When he drives the tram, we of course allow that he somehow knows how to do so straight off (but his technical facility does not immediately translate to handling an aeroplane).

Most of the time, when he is speaking, Palle’s words are heard, but his mouth is not uttering them, which distances us even further from this delightfully deserted depiction of Copenhagen (?), which appears to have been caught that way by filming shortly after sunrise, and that quality of light intensifies our feeling of unreality (if also of the dread of the post-atomic age, with cities, to the extent that they had not been destroyed, rendered uninhabitable). Whether Palle is a real child, or already a stereotypical portrayal of childhood, remains to be considered, but he is the medium of addressing all sorts of issues about what it is to be alive, such as what makes for novelty, and what makes us miss what we know.

Some might want to say that the umbrella that features at the end of the adventure, by still being around**, but broken, shows that it was real. However, it is an element in the adventure that is not intrinsic to the world entered, but just a convenient device to return from it. Nothing precludes it from having been broken early, and brought into play by the guilty rumination of the dream.

Maybe one could see the Home Alone films as one successor to Palle, if not necessarily a worthy one, and with the likelihood that, in comics or other drawn media, the idea of one person exploring a desolate city has been fully explored…


Palle was screened with Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj) (1998) (which is reviewed here, and was shown second)


End-notes

* Which, in Estonia, was turned into an animated short, Peetrikese unenägu (1958).

** As with the blossoms in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

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