Showing posts with label Chaucer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chaucer. Show all posts

Tuesday 21 December 2021

Shiny : How to make one billion pounds sterling sound like a large amount of money !

Shiny : How to make one billion pounds sterling sound like a large amount of money !

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

Winter Solstice (21 December)

Shiny : How to make one billion pounds sterling sound like a large amount of money !








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

Wednesday 25 July 2018

I swear that there are cracks that weren’t there before ~ A review of Julia Bolden's Alternate Slices

This is a review of Twisted Willow Theatre in Julia Bolden's Alternate Slices

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 July

This is a first-night review of Julia Bolden's Alternate Slices, as performed by Twisted Willow Theatre at Corpus Playroom, St Edward’s Passage, Cambridge, on Tuesday 24 July at 7.45 p.m.


Julia Bolden's play Alternate Slices, which premiered this evening at Cambridge's cosy Corpus Playroom (@corpusplayroom), runs until Saturday 28 July.




Without saying so, Julia Bolden deliberately evokes a tennis-court, and umpire's chair :




Plays are fully as referential as films are expected (or wrongly uniquely imagined ?) to be¹, so Alternate Slices is suitably infused with other works of theatre, such as Michael Frayn’s masterly Copenhagen, Christopher Hampton’s Treats, Stoppard’s Arcadia or The Real Thing, or Ian Rickson's fascinating production(s) of Pinter's Betrayal and Old Times². [Which is to say that, with the last of these, #UCFF had 'to watch both ways'³, i.e. with KST (Kristin Scott Thomas) as Kate and Lia Williams as Anna, then vice versa].



Those predecessor plays are named, in case they help to understand what to expect of the scope and nature of Bolden's prescribed and circumscribed universe, and by no means to daunt, but encourage, the general reader by introducing them as and for company⁴ - since they are not quite bed-fellows (except in that limited sense of ‘Ishmael’ and Queequeg in Moby Dick).


Not precisely off duty, the cast (L to R)
Steven Kitson (Matt), Ashley Harris (Nick), Jenny Scudamore (Finola)


Still, one might ask, why all this cleverness (from #UCFF) ? Well, for one, because the play itself talks about post-graduate life, so that is the other-worldly realm to which Matt, Finola and Nick still partly relate (because drawn to academically), when not having to plan how to go about decorating (filling, rather than painting (or even papering) over, the cracks), or kite-surfing at Hunstanton : do they, as some will claim that the phrase has it, Live in their heads still, and not [in amongst] the physicality of the world... ?

The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika' (1994) ~ Martin Kippenberger


And yet, for example, although all three of Matt, Finola and Nick are very and almost equally talkative, superficially covering - when not spikily alluding to - their common hurts and gripes (passing hints of Sartre and Huis clos ?), does Matt riff a little on the more morbid / saturnine parts of Deeley in Old Times, and Nick on his ostensibly more gregarious Pinteresque cover-up for envy, menace, and unacknowledged fear / insecurity ?

The opening-page, in a MS original [the 'Ellesmere' MS], of the tale told by The Knight in Chaucer’s 'The Canterbury Tales' : A story that effectively begins with Palamon and Arcite, who are cousins as well as imprisoned knights, and when Palamon, waking early one day in May, sees Emelye, a princess, from their shared tower-cell…


Pinter's play, of course, is a man and two women³, and vying - as if it is a final battle - for whose relationship with whom is rooted in the least assailable memory, which Alternate Slices arguably may not (or may ?) be found to be... ?




Postlude :

Which is where, to be a first-night review that might be seen by a second-night audience (and the rule of thumb, of course, is that the teething problems of opening night have been [insert whatever continues the analogy / metaphor] and the show is even better, this attempt has to end...

Oh, you'd really like to see that extra bit⁵ that didn't find a place (in time), would you ?



End-notes :

¹ Those whose milieu is as much cinematic as theatrical may not only find possibilities here for a screenplay (as already mentioned, in passing, to Julia Bolden afterwards), but also such film-references useful as - in no particular order – Sliding Doors (1998), About Time (2013) [NB Richard Curtis cannot 'do' time-travel], Lola rennt (Run, Lola, Run) (1998) [the link is to the IMDb web-page for the film]...



² And maybe, momentarily, Beckettt's Play ?

³ Although playing it both ways, where KST was Kate half the time (and even on the throw of a coin, for some performances), brought out both what Lia Williams and she were bringing to each role, and how that made Rufus Sewell, in each of their equivalent Deeleys, necessarily different and so not static either, even at the level of how the stage-business was blocked.



⁴ Thinking as much of Sondheim’s Company, as Bekettt’s late prose masterpiece of the same name.

NB Embedded links (below) are for illustrative purposes only, and not paid or any promotion, endorsement or recommendation of goods and / or services referred to therein or thereby :


You might lay bets, handle cancelled bookings and make them available again, or work as an ethically sourced wedding-planner – but living with uncertainty is part of the territory ~ McLuhan (paraphrasing Barthes)






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

Sunday 24 August 2014

From the archive : Review of Cross-Channel + Discrepancy

This is a review of Ron Peck's micro-budget film Cross-Channel (2010)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


25 August

At Cambridge Film Festival 2010 (the 30th) (#CamFF), Ron Peck's micro-budget film Cross-Channel (2010) screened, preceded by the short film Discrepancy - this is @THEAGENTASPLEY's review (from the Festival web-site)

* Contains spoilers *

DISCREPANCY, the accompanying short to CROSS-CHANNEL, was an aural onslaught. The source (manifesto?) from the 1950s, if true, which the voiceover acknowledged was not much surprise - hectoring was much more in fashion, just as experimentally yoking it to disparate images and challenging viewers to object would have been at any time from the early twentieth century onwards.

Fair enough, the thesis was duly counterposed (and so modified) by antithesis, etc., but we agree with THE TRIP’s Steve that arthouse films are where it’s at, so does what this film separately said and did really constitute a discrepancy of interest? I doubt it.

CROSS-CHANNEL deliciously and almost provocatively relishes showing us, albeit not in the technically challenging audacity of a single take, the way out to the sea from Portsmouth, and we only cut between views with any greater frequency after this sequence. Maybe this is what the narrator likes looking at, and his commonplace feeling that the ship is all his (and hence that the two men who unwittingly attract his attention are a kind of intruding temptation to him), and so must possess it, is what he proceeds to try to do with them.

He wants to know what he cannot know by eavesdropping, although that seems perfectly successful (contrary to his claim that he could not catch everything over dinner), and so feels free to substitute his imaginings for being actively present to the person with whom he asserts a seven-year relationship and to spending time with whom he is supposed to be looking forward so keenly.

As I observed in the post-screening question session, this film reminded me of the t.v. series called [The] Canterbury Tales, and, because of that, of Chaucer’s own story-telling. With that feeling of reverence for the journey, which almost smacks of pilgrimage and of enjoying it as much as where it takes the traveller, one is led to the parallel feeling that the heart of the film is not so much what is told, as the telling itself.

Ron Peck made clear that he had felt, in this unseen narrator, a person whom he did not much like because of his ascriptions of bad motives to the two men, but there is also his total self-obsessed certainty that we want to know what he has to say. Here, the parallel with Chaucer is so relevant, because the more grotesque of his pilgrims are highly self-revelatory (through some sense of needing to tell the truth about themselves?), even though that ultimately condemns them out of their own mouths when they seek to charm us.

Where this film also wins is not so much in what we are shown the men pictured doing or talking about (because, perhaps, we do not quite share his fascination), but in its sure pacing. The narrator neatly delivers us back to dock in such exquisite detail that we need never wonder how what he keeps calling ‘vessels’ are brought alongside the quay with such grace and beauty.




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

Thursday 31 October 2013

Authentic calculation

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


31 October

Whatever anyone else was drooling over in teenage years, for me it was the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) catalogue, marvelling at these discs (they were LPs) of Anne-Sophie Mutter and Maurizio Pollini, and seeing recordings of Luciano Berio or Steve Reich, with their stylish covers (or boxes).

And there was the distinctive look of the Archiv series - made, I now realize, to resemble icons - and the notion of, say, baroque technique and practice, along with the names of the recording artists and the repertoire.

Even with a score, though, one can only notate so much (but, by studying performance, one can spot where what is usually played differs from scores, or the composer's MS), so to recreate, when bowing, what happened 150 years or more ago from reading written accounts is bound to involve an element of interpretation.

The risk of it all : ending up with authentic-performance groups that, because of using (reconstructions of) older instruments, with their differing construction, bows and mouthpieces, may sound much like each other, but not, maybe - for having abandoned modern instruments and technique - very much more like what the original audience heard.

We probably do not know in some cases, but we can gauge the riskiness of some wind-playing from how - compared with, for example, a modern trumpet or horn - the note sounds. Curious that, in a way, music played in this way should have turned its back on valves, whereas technology is always building on previous invention, and only discarding what no longer works.

Can I imagine someone not only being told that, by saying a wyfe was buxom, Chaucer did not mean comely, but obedient, but also trying to speak Middle English (as some will Latin) ? Can I imagine the exercise of someone carrying out recreated operations, limited to the surgical instruments and procedures of Lister's day ? Do I imagine that I would have a greater feel for how mathematics and engineering of the 1950s were perceived and practised, if I had to use a slide-rule... ?




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

Friday 5 July 2013

Enjoyment made cheap

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


6 July



Language is a funny old business – some effectively say that, for want of a better term for it, laissez-faire applies, and therefore that Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty was right :

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.


Leave aside what attitude, policy or belief the celebrated writer may have been typifying (or, as some would say, parodying), this utterance does state the liberal position concerning what words signify, that they change with Time, and that woe betide those who do not move with them (or with it).

Except, of course, that the corollary is that, if I read Troilus and Criseyde of Chaucer, I cannot very well expect him to mean these words as, untutored, I might construe them :

There nys nat oon kan war by other be


On the other side, there are those kindly and neutrally labelled as the linguistic purists, police or even fascists, who seek to preserve meanings.


Anyway, what about this ?

Check out our range of luxury vodkas*

Enjoy two Bombs for £5**


Since I am ancient, I remember the Bowie song where he is talking about boys checking each other out, a very self-conscious reference to another culture in expressing what men do all the time, whether at the bar or the urinal, because they are so desperately insecure that some of them cannot even urinate, if another man is there.

Now, we are urged all the time to check out the video by Z, and for no other reason than it is the latest Z video, and we are enjoined – almost unceasingly – to ‘enjoy’ every paltry damn’ thing, even a coffee and a Danish pastry for £3. Word gits such as I think that I would probably be more likely to enjoy the so-called combo for £2 – or that, if more wealthy, I would still enjoy it for £5…

Enjoy a glass of perfectly chilled South African bubbly on our exclusive terrace


Oh, I bloody ask you – is everything marketing, packaging, and generally turning that ear into a silk purse ? Are we really so bloody stupid as a species that we cannot sense when we are being manipulated into some bloody posture that says how fine and how much better we are because invited by these pathetic jingles and slogans ?

Does one become tempted (as marketingspeak has it), or think what crap is being dressed up as a snobby treat ?
For me, the turning-point was being told that I should Enjoy ! -not the meal, but some unspecified thing, or just generally ? Formally speaking, the verb was transitive, and I could not just ‘enjoy’ in the same way that I can ‘live’, where I can legitimately say I have lived here all my life, but, equally, I have lived a good life, with a direct object, if I so choose.
Do waiting or serving staff still say that ? I don’t know, but I can happily believe that the tendency / habit / fashion just died off.

My preferences apart, I am just interested by this word ‘enjoy’, which I take to be a misunderstanding of what the verb, and of what ‘enjoyment’, meant to other ages – not a casual and trite encouragement to eat and / or drink something*** :


1. ‘To take delight or pleasure in’ – now, there’s a challenge to mediocrity !
Can I really be delighted by that Danish pastry that they bought in by the dozen to serve with coffee ? – isn’t taking pleasure in something other than simply enjoying everything put before one ?


2. ‘To have the use or benefit of’ – a different sense that leads to


3. ‘To experience’, i.e. ‘to enjoy poor health’, which would seem to connote the opposite of meaning 1, if poor health can be enjoyed.


The verb comes to us from Old French enjoier (‘to give joy to’) or enjoïr (‘to enjoy’), via Middle English, and ultimately from Latin gaudēre - a word on which I have commented elsewhere…


The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology**** gives us an obsolete sense, from the fourteenth century, of ‘to be joyful’.

Then, in the fifteenth century, to possess or experience with joy’, and a reflexive meaning of ‘to enjoy oneself’ in the seventeenth century (following se (ré)jouir).

In between, the noun ‘enjoyment’ emerged, in the sixteenth century. We find it in Shakespeare, although sometimes tinged with meaning 2 (above) : quotations to come.


And now, when I am having ordinary meat and drink, am I really meant to enjoy it as such ? Easily save myself, then, £29.95 on a four-course lunch from a good restaurant…


Post-script

The word 'cheap', as in Cheapside, is all to do with buying and selling - the German word kaufen means 'to buy' (and Grimm's Law explains how one becomes the other).

So I say that enjoyment has been sold short...



End-notes

* What about Take a look at ? Doesn’t checking out happen at the supermarket till ?

** What about Get ? How do I know that I will enjoy them ?

*** I quote from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Eighth Edition (1990).

**** Edited by C. T Onions (1966).




Wednesday 15 May 2013

Experience, though noon auctoritee

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


15 May (Posted at Paddington Station) [re-edited 31 October 2021]

So Geoffrey Chaucer had the Wife of Bath say. Chaucer was a poet, but also a civil servant, diplomat, ambassador (Ambassador, you’re spoiling us !), and knew a bit about life, and Boccaccio, French dream-poetry, Latinate Christian (?) philosophy…

His Boke of the Duchess, so magical, mysterious, moving – this persona he developed of a slow-witted dreamer, a little resembling Dante’s of himself in the Commedia, but less knowing, more innocent, and so stumbling across the man whom we suppose to be the inconsolable John of Gaunt (a nearby golf-club is named after John), weeping over the death of Blaunche.

Does Chaucer tells us, in the guise of the Wife of Bath, that we keep making the same ‘mistakes’, falling in love with the same woman, with a dream of a woman, the scent (or ghost) of a woman¹ ? Probably, as he has so much to say that I don’t know why people don’t seem to read him more – how about Brush up your Chaucer – start quoting him now !, and, if I weren’t drawn to that story about the man in black, I’d go to his House of Fame :

We think, in this emotionally, mentally and financially impoverished world, that we know it all, with our smartphones, Internet², and high-frequency trading. I suspect that Chaucer knew more in the fourteenth century, if we just hear what the poet has to say about spin, smear, slander – forget The Prince, for this man really knew what power and repute / reputation are, and how they are won, lost, granted and revoked.

So, in what remains of May, I’m going back to these works, to witness Chaucer - as wordsmith - wrestle with sleep, meet a goddess all in white, overhear the birds pairing up, and, if I’m finally up to it, let him tell me how to use an astrolabe³…


End-notes

¹ Only a surprisingly dirty-minded person (such as one woman with whom I once worked…) would think, nay openly insist, that to be an obscene and crude film-title.

² I knew someone else who aspirated it – is it really, though, the Hindernet (the technological equivalent of Hindemith), full of Blind Alleys, Red Herrings, Love-on-a-Stick ?

³ The former colleague in the first end-note should heed : if you don’t know what an astrolabe is (or aspirating²), don’t make up some coarse idea !


Post-script :



Saturday 21 January 2012

Merry birthday ! (2)

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


21 January

Continued from Merry birthday ! (1)

I have looked out Sir Gawain, and, after it opens vividly with lines describing the sacked Troy¹, it goes on to some schoolboy history about how one of the heroes' descendants, after they had dispersed with Troy in ruins and cinders, went on to found Britain² (named after him, Brutus, grandson of Æneas) the key words being underlined in the text (which is in Middle English):


And fer over the French flod Felix Brutus
On many bonkkes full brode
Bretayn he settles with wynne,

Where werre and wrake and wonder
Bi sythes has wont therinne,
And oft bothe blysses and blunder
Ful skete has skyfted synne.


(lines 1319)


(All terribly hard to learn (and forgotten now), but, for my degree and in alleged proof that we could translate from Middle English, I had to be able to render in modern English any passage from Gawain's first Book, and from a specified Book from each of Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde no one knows who wrote Gawain, but it was then believed that it was the same poet who wrote Patience and Pearl (not to mention the snappily named Cleanness³, with all of which it appears in my edition.)

So, after the noble lineage of Britain's founder has been established, we go on, before the introduction of Arthur and his court at the end of the introduction, with a rather worrying couplet (lines 2122) unless you are a football thug that, and I spare presenting a chunk of the original just now, tell how bold men were bred there (fair enough so far), but who loved fighting (baret that lofden) and made mischief (tene that wroghten) in many a troubled time. (It's just a guess, as it's a long time ago that I looked at this, but I doubt that 'mischief' has quite the right ring for that phrase.)

We have men who brawl and cause trouble, and then we have Arthur, in all the nobility of his person and of his court (lines 2329). It is a time of marvels, and of stories long told with lel letteres loken (line 35), linked with true letters, as are the unmistakeable 'l' sounds of that phrase in this alliterative verse.

And then the story proper opens with these lines (in which I have highlighted the words that we can still easily recognize to-day, even if a line like the fifth might leave us cold apart from spotting that the knights are doing something 'full many times'):


This kyng lay at Camylot upon Krystmasse
With mony luflych
lorde, ledes of the best,
Rekenly of
the Rounde Table alle tho rich brether,
With rych revel oryght and rechles merthes.
They tournayed tulkes by tymes ful mony,
Justed ful jolilé thise gentyle knightes,
Sythen kayred
to the court, caroles to make.
For ther
the fest was ilyche ful fiften dayes,
With alle the mete and the mirthe that men couthe avyse[...]

(lines 3745)


If you have ever seen the Douglas Fairbanks' take on Robin Hood, as I did at the Film Festival in September (in the magnficent setting of The Great Hall of Trinity College and with Neil Brand's and his percussionist colleague's performance of his score for it for a solid two hours), then you may have a sense of the sort of tradition from which he got that notion of what the court of Richard I might have been like, with jousting and merry-making.

Which brings us on to this word 'mirth', which is there twice (once in a variant form) in this Christmas scene, with Christmas itself, it is to be noticed, not lasting twelve days, but fifteen. All that memorizing means that I had remembered something right, and the way that the word is used (certainly the second time) does suggest a richer meaning for the word than we have for it.

C. T. Onions, in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology that he edited (my copy is from 1966), tells us that the word is from Old English, and gives a meaning, for the 13th century, of 'joy, happiness OE; rejoicing, gaiety'. The word has, then, already started to divide between what the Sussex Carol means by it (the first meaning), and a usage in the 14th century, 'gaiety of mind; diversion, sport'.

I should check when Gawain is generally dated to, but have gone on longer than I intended that, and Onions referring me to what he says about the word 'merry', must wait for a later time. (Suffice to say that he gives an Old English sense (noted as obsolete) of 'pleasing, agreeable', and says that, in the phrase 'merry England', it was 'later apprehended as "joyous"'.)


End-notes

¹ The opening lines of Gawain:

Sithen the sege and the assaut was sesed at Troye,
The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes


(lines 12)


I seem to remember being told that it is thought that the choice of alliteration with the word 'brittened' is deliberately meant to anticipate, in sound, where the narrative is going next.


² A sop to the historians and others who claim that Britain was a political invention of the Acts of Union, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that willy nilly brought the Scots and then the Irish under the uneasy yoke of the English Parliament ?

³ Cleanliness is always said to be next to Godliness, but only in the [possessive adjective of the nationality to be spited] dictionary.