Sheffield - God's own City ~ Michael Palin at The Crucible

This is a review of Monty Python : The Meaning of Live (2014)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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17 June

This is a review of a special screening of Monty Python : The Meaning of Live (2014) at Sheffield Documentary Festival, at The Crucible Theatre (@crucibletheatre), on Wednesday 10 June at 6.30 p.m., followed by a Q&A (hosted by Josie Long (@JosieLong)) with Holly Gilliam, James Rogan and Michael Palin

Josie Long and Michael Palin

Yes, a very welcoming home for @sheffdocfest ! Super film to see in the @crucibletheatre, too. https://t.co/358hTz8rcK

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 10, 2015

A real treat to be in the front row at @crucibletheatre for Monty Python : The Meaning of Live (2014), so a good place to start writing...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 11, 2015

Holly Gilliam’s (Terry Gilliam’s daughter’s) impulse to get a camera into the script-reading for Monty Python (Almost) Live was absolutely right, and, as we heard, that was the impetus for this film – itself documenting a show that was largely and pragmatically put on to meet the legal costs of the members of Monty Python being sued over some rights issue* (it sounded as though they might have been badly advised about defending the court action, maybe by Cleese’s classic barrister Archie Leach, from A Fish Called Wanda (1988) ?).

The approach gave us all that we wanted, including :

* A sense, as the title turned out to imply, of Python on stage, ranging from the celebrated Amnesty International gigs to Monty Python Live at The Hollywood Bowl (1982) (a title that, we learnt, was meant to stir feelings of the incongruous)

* The related interactions and tensions in and between those tallied both by One Down, Five to Go, and in Graham Chapman’s lifetime (to which Python’s memory the film was dedicated)

* The thrills and spills of the ten-night run at that venue that was allegedly so worthless, as The Millennium Dome, that HM Government disposed of it for a pound

* Thoughts about what comedy is and how it works, from Eric Idle seeing it as algebra (not an art), and needing to change one of the terms to get a laugh, to John Cleese’s having had to fight back, over decades, what sounded like rage that people laughed before he had done anything that he thought merited it**

* Michael Palin, dressed as a smart Sheffield woman of his mother’s generation for the ad hoc purpose of a filler (to comply with the limitations of ‘the watershed’ in public-service broadcasting, which it then proceeded to ridicule) : Eric Idle’s script, as interpreted by Palin and creatively imagined by improvisation, clarifying that when she said that she did not have one, she meant a television (not a cunt), or vice versa

* Confirmation that it had been, as it always seemed, Eric Idle’s creation (though directed by Terry Gilliam)


* Laughter again, deep and liberating, at the excerpts from Monty Python (Almost) Live and its staging :

** The candour before, after and during the O2 show (including feigned and real irritation at being filmed)

** The archive material from the show, from live performance and elsewhere : good choice, well placed

** The best of what was recorded during the 10-night show and its rehearsal, including seeing it change, and hearing – in the film, and in the Q&A – about corpsing / timing and their place in creating something fresh

** On this latter point, the very real pleasure of seeing Palin and Cleese in operation together

Holly Gilliam, James Rogan, Josie Long, and Michael Palin

As to the Q&A, one enthusiast closed the proceedings by declaring The Fish-Slapping Dance, which Palin said had been submitted for a comedy version of Eurovision (never repeated ?), the best thing that the Pythons had done : a few seconds, and the fifteen-foot fall into the dock below, had been worth it ! (Yes, it always brings a laugh, but hardly the best thing that they did ?) This enthusiast asked about Palin’s not only knowing his own part, but everyone else’s : yes, he had learnt it early on to feel comfortable with it, and then able to elaborate variations on it.

Story-telling, albeit implicit, is even more important in documentaries than features : as Roger Graef effortlessly showed at @sheffdocfest

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 11, 2015

To that impulse to get a camera to document what happened, much is owed, in this skilful snapshot of the surviving Pythons by Roger Graef (who, sadly, did not attend, because he felt unwell) and James Rogan :

The great @rogergraef very much missed as his Python film closes @sheffdocfest. But what a great film, Roger. Get well soon.

— Alexander Graham (@alexwtw) June 10, 2015

Seen at Sheffield : Doc/Fest films with full reviews


End-notes

* Having established the point, by comment from a Python or three, the film wisely moved on : we did not feel that we needed to know more.

** Cleese also thought that sketches such as The Dead Parrot had not always been appreciated in the t.v. series, but had acquired a popularity through (recordings of) the live versions / iterations :

My favorite @montypython sketch with @JohnCleese & Michael Palin has to be The Parrot Sketch http://t.co/hI0RaxfZZZ

— Richie Smith (@F1Richie) June 18, 2015

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

Don’t play hide and seek with reality !*

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9 March

This is a review of a special screening (from 35mm) at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse), Cambridge, of Ken Loach’s Hidden Agenda (1990), as presented as part of the series ‘Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories Season’ (http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org) by the University of Cambridge’s CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities)

The invited guests of CRASSH’s own Hugo Drochon, historian Tony Craig and film producer David Hickman, introduced the film and usefully put it in its political and cinematic context. That said, the film was made a quarter of a century ago, and what we might know now (assuming that Sinclair is right that there is a consensus) about the truth of claims that there was a Tory smear campaign against Harold Wilson may not have been available at the time of this film (and in 1998 – please see the title cited, below) – or not easily to director Ken Loach (or Jim Allen – please see below). (Hickman stated, both before and following the screening, that he thinks that Loach did believe the story about a smear.)  

Besides which, although Loach has close relationships with his writers, Jim Allen is solely credited with producing the script (i.e. not as a co-writer with Loach) : if, therefore, it were germane that talk in the film of a Wilson plot does not accord with the evidence that we have (for it may not be germane, if this is a fiction - please see below), Allen as well as Loach must presumably have ‘bought into’ that notion at the time, even if only enough to make it a part of the skeleton on which the piece is built.

And, historically verifiable accounts apart, the basic message remains : rubbishing others and their reputations can and has been used throughout history by those seeking power (or seeking it for others, e.g. from the US operations with various regimes in Central America to Julius Caesar and Ralph Fiennes' film Coriolanus (2011) (as based on Shakespeare)), irrespective of what are asserted as laudable reasons for so doing.

In other words, the film need not just revolve in its own world, but can be a paradigm for how power is sought, gained and held. This is probably what Loach means in his description of the film (quoted interviewed by Graham Fuller as part of the favoured Faber & Faber series on this blog, Loach on Loach**) :

I guess it’s best described as a fiction inspired by fact

Earlier, Loach talks to Fuller, the book’s editor, about the film’s critical reception, saying that :

You hope some of these notions [sc. about what British forces or public servants have done] linger with people in the audience, but in terms of public debate it’s very difficult to get anything started. One of the ongoing frustrations of film-making is that you try to put out a set of ideas or a piece of evidence in front of an audience, while being as gripping and as entertaining as you can, but critics never deal with the substance or follow up on the questions you’re asking in a film.

Is this why you regard most film criticism as decadent ?

I think so, yes. The critics will examine the brush strokes, but they won’t stand back and see the content of the painting. I don’t know why that is.

[Ibid., pp. 82–83]

Paradigm or not as the film may be intended to be, it is, as Hickman pointed out, beautifully lit, using available light – not strictly so, as he explained afterwards, but as near to it as could be, and a model that, he observed, has been taken over by Hollywood in the interim. (Regarding watching the print, Hickman observed how different the scene looks when Harris is partly in darkness, and then comes into the light, with which the DVD version does not compare.) In the introduction to the chapter in which he deals with, amongst other films, Hidden Agenda, Fuller explains where the film and Loach’s collaborations fit in with his career to date :

Following the critically acclaimed and appropriately controversial Hidden Agenda (1990), their [sc. Loach and Allen’s] initial film collaboration, they went on to make Raining Stones (1993) and Land and Freedom(1995).

[…] The third factor [in ‘this not unextraordinary renaissance’]*** was the teaming of Loach and Barry Ackroyd, who has photographed all of Loach’s features since Riff-Raff and has brought to them the kind of uncompromising visual rawness that had been lacking from Loach’s films in the Looks and Smiles era. Ackroyd’s cinematography restored to Loach’s and his writers’ world its aesthetic integrity. […]

[Ibid., pp. 78–79]

To contemporary viewers, Brian Cox and Maurice Roëves may be very familiar faces****, from which we can take some comfort in this sinister scenario, and both seem just right for their roles (supported, in the former case, by John Benfield (as Maxwell)) – even physically, Cox has the solidity to be a high-ranking policeman (which we believe will translate into moral and intellectual weightedness), Roëves the wiriness that fits a man on the run. The triangle of principals is completed by Frances McDormand, who shows singular self-determination and sheer spunk as Ingrid Jessner, the woman whose partner, with Harris, is at the (apparent) centre of matters. Unknown to her, and to Kerridge and Maxwell, everything about them has been researched, and they are less the investigators (she with a civil liberties group to which her partner and she belong, he to the police force) than the investigated.

We have high hopes, almost alongside Loach, that Kerridge will do the job with which he has been entrusted, and not worry about putting a few noses out of joint, as we see him happily doing for much of the film. The nub of the film is to lead us to understand how limited his room for manoeuvre is, hence the relevance to a season about conspiracy and the theories that postulate its existence : it is a moot point whether all who infer 'hands at work behind the scenes', and hence a hidden agenda, embrace the terms ‘conspiracy [theorists / theory]’ to describe themselves and what they believe happened or is happening, or whether it is a term of abuse***** from those who dismiss both theories and theorists. Not always from a position of power, such as that from which the film’s Sir Robert Neil (Bernard Archard) and Alec Nevin (Patrick Kavanagh) address Kerridge, but usually with derision.

As the film’s tension builds from that point, one wonders whether it is going to end, for Ingrid, as for a young-seeming Meryl Streep in Silkwood (1983) – or for Harris… In the event, one is reminded of those shocking moments in other depictions when the ground has, stealthily and step by step, been taken out from someone... until the teetering denouement is, because of the physics of gravity, an inevitability – for want of a better analogy, a demise of the kind that David Carradine (as Bill), in Kill Bill Volume 2 (2004), is unaware of facing.

Loach and Allen tell their story with care, and are, for example, content to show us Harris amongst the vividness and noise of the Orange Order parades, but without telling us till later who he is, because they trust that we will recall him and his behaviour. Kerridge and Ingrid are both intended to invoke our sympathies as seeking the truth, although they take different paths and end up diverging (which, of course, only adds to the drama).

This is a film that looks very good cinematically, and still has much to say, Sinclair’s objections as to its historicity apart (it is a document, of a sort, of its own time, however we judge Loach’s politics and where they have him lean) – both emotionally and as to how the world works. As to what Allen and he sought to weave together, perhaps the final word should be left to Loach (continuing the short quotation above) :

It’s very close in the depiction of the murders that were carried out by the RUC and in the corrupting effect of the British presence in Northern Ireland, but the whole issue of fact or fiction gets quite tricky at this point, and I’m not sure we solved it altogether satisfactorily – or the attempt to weave together the Stalker elements with the conspiracy against Wilson.

[Ibid., p. 84]

End-notes

* As Kerridge (Brian Cox) is told, before he is ultimately manipulated into accepting the reality propounded by the film’s conspirators (rather than exposing the reality behind it) : for, as they candidly tell him, they did what they did, it cannot be undone, and they did it – and still think it – ‘for the best’. (The old Machiavellian-style ends over means argument…)

** London, 1998, p. 84.

*** The second being sympathetic producers Rebecca O’Brien and Sally Hibbin.

**** Cox, for example, from Menenius in Fiennes’ Coriolanus (2011) (as well as the voice of disembodied and recreated Alan Watts in Her (2013)), and Roëves from the Chief Inspector in Brighton Rock (2010) (or even Colonel Munro in The Last of the Mohicans (1992)).

***** Radio 3 (@BBCRadio3) has renamed its late-night arts programme Free Thinking, but there were times when to be called a freethinker was meant in a wholly derogatory way.


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

Fiennes as Coriolanus - a touch of Anthony Hopkins?

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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8 February

* Contains spoilers *

I did like the conception of where this film geographically and historically placed Rome and Antium, and I missed noticing who the person credited with screenwriting is, but which I now know was Ralph Fiennes' co-producer, John Logan. Those credits also made me aware that Fiennes had directed.

Leaving aside this notional carve-up between director and screenwriter as to who crafts what we see, since Logan and Fiennes were clearly in this together up to the hilt - a bit, maybe, like Aufidius and Martius - I really did feel that using news reporting (with a wonderful cameo and lovely verse-delivery by Jon Snow) and a modern setting didn't harm Shakespeare at all. He, like Bach, is a pretty tough bird, and, if it's done with love, it'll - probably - work.

As to this play, over the years I have engaged with it a few times, and - as I have remarked elsewhere - caught a young(ish) Toby Stephens in the role under the RSC at Stratford. Slippery though it is, I probably haven't locked horns with it since - and there is, which may have drawn Fiennes / Logan to it, a quality of otherness about the play, and about its title character, that is more like the so-called late Beethoven string quartets, if King Lear is a sort of Winterreise of the soul.

And yet, there, there is a connection, because I was struck, this time, how like Cordelia Coriolanus is: in Lear because, loosely quoting, Cordelia will not heave her heart into her mouth, the division of the kingdom proceeds, but proceeds all wrong, because Lear - who should know how much she loves him - is vain enough to want her to say so before everybody. An impossible stand-off, just as, with Coriolanus, his refusal to demean himself to fawn before the people leads to his banishment and joining with the Volscian forces against Rome. (So Cordelia and her husband's forces against those of Goneril and Reagan under their husbands.)

As with all of Shakespeare, he had his sources for this story (and I want to research them), but it was, with Lear, a given of his source that Cordelia cannot speak to secure her 'more opulent' share (I quote from memory) - it is not 'will not', but cannot: she is almost literally choked by the hypocrisy of his sisters in this absurd set-piece that Lear has arranged for her to fail at, though, if he looked into his heart, he would know that she loves him best.

All of this is so close to unlocking Coriolanus, and yet so far. It is not so much his mother's crazy upbinging - what happened to his father? it may be in the full text - as this constitutional inability to pander to people, to represent what is not as what is. Tragic weakness if you like, but he cannot do it, any more than Cordelia can, and he - for all his warlike strategy - plays straight into the hands of his enemies in politics (with both a big and small 'p').

As to whether Fiennes, with his deliberately - it seemed - restrained affect for the soldier when not in the height of battle (urging his men on to bloody, noble and glorious victory), but in the first key scene, before the grain stores, where she speaks so chillingly calmly to the mob - has caught the right note, others may judge differently. For me, though, there was too much a sinister air of Hannibal Lecter, or of Fiennes' recent role as Lord Voldemort, in that rather inward reading of the verse - beautiful, but too much with psycopathic undertones, which I honestly do not believe are there in the original.

Yes, Martius is a man torn in his allegiances, but who looks, most of all, to valour and honour (his mother's incalcation), not to killing or the thirst for blood for their own sake (however much we are reminded, again vividly in this film, of the opening scenes of Macbeth, and of Macbeth himself as some bloody slaughtering priest, blind to his own safety in service of his king and is foes - Macbeth, too, has a heart and conscience, and has to be mightily persuaded by his wife to kill Duncan, and that under their own roof).

So, I felt, that Fiennes' overlayering of an awkward man, ill at ease with social situations, with the icy qualities of speaking up to the other side in a stand-off and keeping his calm when an exlosive utterance of the lines could have been just as possible, just did not gel, except in the psycopathic personality, which I do not think is that of the real Coriolanus. He struggles to do what he believes in, consistent with his own limitations, but has only the awareness of what to do on the battlefield, not on the political field of human life.

Too much has been said about Fiennes' characterization, and something should be said of that of Gerard Butler as Aufidius, whose character's role has to run only the gamut from admiration to hatred to (in this version) a clearly homoerotic compassion for Coriolanus to envy and revenge, but which he ran nicely and smoothly enough, giving Fiennes the space to do what he needed to flesh out his notion of his own figure. Ultimately, nothing falls by that doubt about whether Fiennes has pitched Coriolanus the man right, and much could have been weaker if Butler, Brian Cox (Menenius), and James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson (as tribunes Sicinius and Brutus) had not been so reliably strong.

They gave the film the space to live, but the real honour must go to Redgrave for the half-mad Volumnia, who has had a part in making her son what he is - a man whose passions and whose dignity she can only half understand, but ultimately call on.


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