Screen or stage

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 October

BFI :

'You travel, not just physically, but mentally as an actor in this business' - Viggo Mortensen #LFF
— BFI (@BFI) October 20, 2012

The Agent Apsley :

@bfi I still think, whatever screen actors say, that there's another journey on stage all the time, rather than capturing one performance...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 20, 2012

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Die Blechtrommel

This piece is about the BFI's work on The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) (1979)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

3 December (25 August 2015, Twitter-names added, etc.)

This piece is about the BFI's work on The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) (1979)

Those who read BFI's (@BFI's) Sight & Sound magazine (@SightSoundmag) will know that some work has been done, but not when it will come to fruition, on The Tin Drum.

Not a director's cut as such, because what was released (at around 140 mins) in 1979 was edited to that length by Volker Schlöndorff to suit the needs of distributors at the time (otherwise he might as well not have made it), but this new release (at 163 mins) will give the piece a chance to talk a little more freely.

As well as 'snippets archive footage', there are new scenes: one where Oskar is being read a story, and an orgy ensues, complete with 'scantily dressed nuns and grand duchesses; another has Oskar rebelling against the Nazis; a third, a Holocaust survivor, arriving in bombed-out Danzig, and trying to introduce, although they are dead his wife and six children.

When it is in cinemas, or just on DVD, I do not know... - the article only mentions Blu-ray and a release in January, with the original version.


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Days of Heaven

6 September

This 'new digital restoration' from the British Film Institute of a title from 1978 is what the Arts Picturehouse, the BFI and the festival are all about : the opportunity to see something that is only just being premiered or has otherwise not been easily obtainable.

The feature itself was, for me, a bit like a fairy tale - it appears, although not accurately in terms of any correlation between what the images show us and what the voiceover seems (or seeks) to tells us about the underlying situation, to be the narration of a 12-year-old girl, but, for my mind, not nearly as cleverly as in the case of the narrator of Haneke's The White Ribbon.

Richard Gere & Brooke Adams Days of Heaven (1978) pic.twitter.com/IynS09DaUD
— Mademoiselle Cinéma. (@BelleDeJour15) December 2, 2014

The person with whom I watched it - and the lobby card, issued with a still (not, as I recall, a scene from the film as screened), bears this view out - commented that there were people in rags posed against the stunning landscape in neat array, and even the rags were beautifully done. Maybe that is part of the fairly tale, the mystification and magification of the (to my mind) somewhat unlikely series of events that unfolds:

If it hadn't come first, one could have sworn that Days of Heaven was playing with the theme of Indecent Proposal - as it is, given that Demi Moore in the latter film bears what I would say is more than a passing resemblance to Brooke Adams (playing Abby), I wonder whether there was a tribute being paid, and, if so, how many spotted it at the time. Certainly, as to the result of these interactions (on the world and the characters), one thinks inevitably of Exodus (if that isn't the young girl's wishful thinking of vengeance, stirred up by some religious teaching to which she makes reference), or even Genesis and the garden of Eden, but, with what one source states is a quotation from Leviticus.

Maybe, maybe not, and with the Bonnie and Clyde tone of part of the close of the film, one isn't exactly encouraged to dwell on it, or, with that strand, how Abby seemingly ends up unscathed and able just to disappear from sight (unless, again, as a fairy-tale fictionalizing, where actions don't necessarily have consequences).

What did, though, for me give the greatest reward, other than the photography of wide skies, are the minute depictions of nature (locusts, otters (?), pheasants, and so on), which are interspersed with (what one would assume is) the main action, and which, with the adept editing, give it richness and texture, and, even, a hint of heaven.


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