More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
25 September 2011
* Contains spoilers *
To say a little more, enough to tease (as the film often does), about mirror-images, there is a scene that shows Stephen and his friend Victoria after they have tumbled to the ground in a sort of chase of and with themselves.
As with something that happens later, which may (as Stephen's cousin Conrad first claims, and later appears unsure about it) - or may not - have been an accident, and which literally ties in with this moment, there is an embodiment of a skein, of the film's title's 'tangle of threads' (or the potential for it). It's a game, but there's bondage, the shackling that Joyce McKinney asserts was a sort of chosen cure, a sort of healing, in Tabloid, and with it there's the breathlessness associated with the other activity, there's the arbitrary rule-making that the game has to be played one way (counter-clockwise), an approach that can form rigid habits and stronger disciplines, not always for one's - or anyone else's - good in life (as with Stephen's father's former friend Richard?).
So the mirror-image, of the game being played transposed into a clockwise motion, can be imagined - as can any other action involving Victoria and Stephen - happening, but it offends against the street being declared to be one way. (Not too far off from thinking again of Rutherford, of thinking how the characters in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen revolve, dance, around each other like particles in a simple atom...)
And the transposed image, the left / right flip? Set aside whether the falling down together, linked, was (as with Conrad's accident) deliberate - although it had to seem so, or not ambiguously so, for us: when we see Stephen and Victoria on the ground, from the waist up, side by side, they are, first of all, in that order, left to right. The picture (taken by the cinematographer, but not one that otherwise existed for Stephen to see (directly)), when he calls it to mind later, becomes Victoria and Stephen, she now on the left.
(It is nearly summoned again, but we do not actually see it, are just so reminded of it that, as a ghost of a view, we could almost swear that its image is on our retina at that point, because we know it - or think that we know it - by then.)
So these are the hints of Alice, these are the suggestions that, in a world as like ours as the one that she first sees in Looking-Glass House, things may be subtly different, actually harmful: as The Annotated Alice observes, with Martin Gardner talking about left- and right-handed molecules (which are identical but for being mirror-images of each other), milk would not be safe for Alice or her cat to drink in the world beyond the looking-glass. Matter and anti-matter? It goes on...
Where would we be without the imagination of Ant Neely (the film's writer) or of Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (really Lewis Carroll, or vice versa)? The poorer for it, I think.
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Showing posts with label Conrad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conrad. Show all posts
Sunday, 25 September 2011
Wednesday, 21 September 2011
Unlimited dimensions
More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
22 September
What a brilliantly entertaining evening!
I had deliberately not decided between getting a ticket for Wild Side at 11.00 (in the 'Tartan' strand) or The Disposable Film Festival at 10.45 (in the 'Shorts' (short films) strand), because I might not be able to go to either - and I couldn't, because of compelling matters elsewhere (and ineptly lacking the capacity to bi-locate).
In Screen 2, B8 (more to the front and the centre than I would normally have chosen, because of the sheer popularity evident when I came to buy a ticket for Cambridge film Dimensions) was my seat, where, when waiting for the show to start (which turned out to be director Sloane U'Ren and writer / composer Ant Neely plus almost all of the cast briefly at the front) I got into an interesting conversation with my neighbour about the film and what science might be the basis of what happened.
The film itself was well worth waiting for, and unlike anything else so far in the Festival - picking things out as they occur to me, it had humour (my neighbour and I turned out to have the same sense of humour), stunning visual effects with the titles, a brilliant riverside setting, a script that really kept you guessing about a number of important matters, a type of Faustian pact, a multi-dimensional love interest, boffins and their marvellously whimsical contraptions, and a water-feature that drew all the main characters into its domain.
Oh, I could go on, and mention a splendid tree (not sure what kind) that was another focus, the recreation of the gentility of the twentieth century after the Great War, and a glimpse of Cambridge academic life. However, not only don't I want to give anything away, but those things really say nothing that addresses what the film is about.
Forget the science (wonderfully presented though it is), forget what may already have been public about this film or its budget or how it was made (though those things are facts): this is a film about longing, many people's longing, and for different things, and how that longing affects this brief span that (however long we do live) we are allotted - whether we are longing what we can't have, or doesn't belong to us, or won't do us any good.
It is very well done indeed, and it will have you choked and affected by seeing unfold what holds us back or spurs us on, what makes us who we are or gives us the scope to be something else. If you can guess where the title's 'tangle of threads' will take you, then well sleuthed, and perhaps you were hunting clues!
Later, events took me to the bar with important cast and crew, and I had a chance beforehand to speak to Olivia Llewellyn in a little detail concerning what made this shoot different and the type of thing that she would want to repeat: it was not, as I thought, that what is conventional in the big studios seemed impersonal as such, but that this was different and that there had been a luxury, say, of being with the other protagonists and to build up more of a bond with them off the set. Before that was questions and answers, led by someone not known to me.
Talking to Ant afterwards, neither of us was sure why this person had wanted to talk about the science so much, as if anyone would expect, say, Matt Smith, as Doctor Who, to be questioned about the physics of the TARDIS (but the Doctor always offers people a jelly baby instead or reveses the polarity with the sonic screwdriver), but he did. When things were opened up to the floor, I had my hand straight up, and jumped in with a question about the children whom we see become adults and whether we can see the former in the latter, and it was nice afterwards to have some appreciation for it from those with Ant, Sloane and me in the bar.
I'm not even sure whether it was bizarre, although I have mentioned the notion of longing and what it entails, but, after other audience-led questions, not only was the question put to Ant and Sloane asked whether there was anything that they would have done diferently, but everyone at the front was asked what question they had expected to be asked and what their answer would have been. Perhaps an answer might have combined those two approaches: we would have had a different person leading the session, and can we have a time-machine to go back and put that right?
What I want to do, though, is to take a trip into the future, and see this film get the coverage and exposure that all those who have worked so hard on it deserve. Maybe, in the meantime, I'll see whether I can look at my schedule to establish the possibilities for revisiting this enchanting world, given that (the screening on Thursday 22nd has also sold out), there is now a third on Saturday 24th at 5.00...
(And, of course, getting back late, after staying around carousing until Festival central's ability to let us stay longer finally disappeared, and then making these jottings, was all made possible, consistent with an early bed-time, just by learning the lessons of this film!)
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
22 September
What a brilliantly entertaining evening!
I had deliberately not decided between getting a ticket for Wild Side at 11.00 (in the 'Tartan' strand) or The Disposable Film Festival at 10.45 (in the 'Shorts' (short films) strand), because I might not be able to go to either - and I couldn't, because of compelling matters elsewhere (and ineptly lacking the capacity to bi-locate).
In Screen 2, B8 (more to the front and the centre than I would normally have chosen, because of the sheer popularity evident when I came to buy a ticket for Cambridge film Dimensions) was my seat, where, when waiting for the show to start (which turned out to be director Sloane U'Ren and writer / composer Ant Neely plus almost all of the cast briefly at the front) I got into an interesting conversation with my neighbour about the film and what science might be the basis of what happened.
The film itself was well worth waiting for, and unlike anything else so far in the Festival - picking things out as they occur to me, it had humour (my neighbour and I turned out to have the same sense of humour), stunning visual effects with the titles, a brilliant riverside setting, a script that really kept you guessing about a number of important matters, a type of Faustian pact, a multi-dimensional love interest, boffins and their marvellously whimsical contraptions, and a water-feature that drew all the main characters into its domain.
Oh, I could go on, and mention a splendid tree (not sure what kind) that was another focus, the recreation of the gentility of the twentieth century after the Great War, and a glimpse of Cambridge academic life. However, not only don't I want to give anything away, but those things really say nothing that addresses what the film is about.
Forget the science (wonderfully presented though it is), forget what may already have been public about this film or its budget or how it was made (though those things are facts): this is a film about longing, many people's longing, and for different things, and how that longing affects this brief span that (however long we do live) we are allotted - whether we are longing what we can't have, or doesn't belong to us, or won't do us any good.
It is very well done indeed, and it will have you choked and affected by seeing unfold what holds us back or spurs us on, what makes us who we are or gives us the scope to be something else. If you can guess where the title's 'tangle of threads' will take you, then well sleuthed, and perhaps you were hunting clues!
Later, events took me to the bar with important cast and crew, and I had a chance beforehand to speak to Olivia Llewellyn in a little detail concerning what made this shoot different and the type of thing that she would want to repeat: it was not, as I thought, that what is conventional in the big studios seemed impersonal as such, but that this was different and that there had been a luxury, say, of being with the other protagonists and to build up more of a bond with them off the set. Before that was questions and answers, led by someone not known to me.
Talking to Ant afterwards, neither of us was sure why this person had wanted to talk about the science so much, as if anyone would expect, say, Matt Smith, as Doctor Who, to be questioned about the physics of the TARDIS (but the Doctor always offers people a jelly baby instead or reveses the polarity with the sonic screwdriver), but he did. When things were opened up to the floor, I had my hand straight up, and jumped in with a question about the children whom we see become adults and whether we can see the former in the latter, and it was nice afterwards to have some appreciation for it from those with Ant, Sloane and me in the bar.
I'm not even sure whether it was bizarre, although I have mentioned the notion of longing and what it entails, but, after other audience-led questions, not only was the question put to Ant and Sloane asked whether there was anything that they would have done diferently, but everyone at the front was asked what question they had expected to be asked and what their answer would have been. Perhaps an answer might have combined those two approaches: we would have had a different person leading the session, and can we have a time-machine to go back and put that right?
What I want to do, though, is to take a trip into the future, and see this film get the coverage and exposure that all those who have worked so hard on it deserve. Maybe, in the meantime, I'll see whether I can look at my schedule to establish the possibilities for revisiting this enchanting world, given that (the screening on Thursday 22nd has also sold out), there is now a third on Saturday 24th at 5.00...
(And, of course, getting back late, after staying around carousing until Festival central's ability to let us stay longer finally disappeared, and then making these jottings, was all made possible, consistent with an early bed-time, just by learning the lessons of this film!)
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
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