Showing posts with label David Lynch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Lynch. Show all posts

Wednesday, 26 August 2020

My tenet is... : #UCFF's Predictions about Tenet (2020)

My tenet is... : #UCFF's Predictions about Tenet (2020)

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

26 August

My tenet is... : #UCFF's Predictions about Tenet (2020)













 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 22 March 2019

Com’era, dov’era : Claire Denis and L'intrus (2004)

This is a response to L’intrus (The Intruder) (2004)

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

This is a response to L’intrus (The Intruder) (2004)

Watching L'intrus (2004), one immediately has to ask who this intruder is¹ – in the opening titles, the word itself is introduced with visuals that connote suspicious questioning [personne qui s'introduit dans un lieu ou un groupe sans y être invitée] :

Although there are other candidates², one is a male who is inexplicably seen killed at night and, in daylight, his body concealed, whereas another – who, as the film proceeds, certainly seems to intrude – is the perpetrator of these actions. On this question and many others, the film's largely non-directive approach chooses not to give an answer. However, this style of presentation does not wholly leave viewers to make what they will of that which director Claire Denis and her co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau do show, because they still, at least, follow such conventions as signalling that the preceding sequence has been a dream³ by cutting to the sleeper (Louis), awakening in bed.

It is hardly uniquely true fact of Claire Denis' film that it leaves viewers to piece together what even the events consist in, let alone what they might signify, since a fairly arbitrary list of relevant film-references (i.e. a non-exhaustive one) would have to include the following (in order of date of release) :

* Mirror (1975) ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

* Eraserhead (1977) ~ David Lynch

* The Lost Highway (1997) ~ Lynch

* Mother and Son (1997) ~ Aleksandr Sokurov

* Code unknown (Code inconnu : Récit incomplet de divers voyages) (2000) ~ Michael Haneke


After the opening scenes², which serve to ‘leap-frog’ us to him, the film broadly follows Louis (played by Michel Subor), but, despite our seeing him engaged in his semi-naturist activities, and with his seeming delight in the company of his huskies, we cannot easily understand his living as he does, let alone why or for how long he has done so. In the film’s terms, he just is – depicted as he is, and how he is.

However, just as Denis does not always expressly delineate moving the location to another territory (or where it is – there are no captions, which in conventional films tell audiences ‘where they are’), so she does not leave more than partial clues as to matters such as : the passing of time (again, mainstream films often employ captions with the date and / or time) ; why we might be in that place now ; and what motivates the actions that we see. (As with the mise-en-scène, Louis Trebor is depicted in situ, and we derive any context in an incidental way.) Other continents are simply seen to be where Louis has travelled to, without the narrative contrivance of showing airport departure-boards as other films usually would (or planes taking off or landing), because that is all implicit in the change in what is in front of the camera.

Unlike in the case of Mirror, where Tarkovsky also has the same actor play mother and daughter, and so we must therefore concentrate to discern past from present, memory from scenes that have been imagined, Claire Denis may appear not to deviate significantly from time being seen in a linear way. Instead, in this film, time is rooted in the places to which Louis journeys - as a force from which the past emanates ? Yet, as part of Denis’ directorial telescoping of time, Louis has an operation without our knowing quite how, when or where, quite as if those things both do not matter and will not be allowed to matter to us – because we cannot ‘get behind’ what her fellow screenwriter and she choose to give to us in the artefact that is the film. Even so, Louis’ evident ill-health and a visit to the bank link us to his being away, and to the procedure, before all of which we had hardly heard speak.

We learn his desire for the future, and – in a scene with more dialogue than at any other point – of a ludicrous attempt to satisfy it, a moment that is not only a bizarre 'beauty parade', just between those holding it and taking part and us, but also a connection with the substitutionary universe of the early work of Yorgos Lanthimos. Louis seems satisfied with what happens, and we may accordingly surmise that he cannot be affected by what he does not know – we cannot escape the symbolism that we have seen the scars that the operation gave him now mirrored.


The film has a poetry to it, and there is a release of vibrant colour when a ship is launched, but there is nothing intrinsic to the film that still needs to be found : the act of creation is – engaging with it – in and through us. What would it be to search for greater meaning than this ? (Self-referentially, regardless of what Louis most wants, he almost certainly does not get what he decided that he was seeking.)

What Denis hints at is that, if it is seen as an observer, all life has a quality of mysteriousness – and therefore, perhaps, she suggests the fragmentary nature (or even obliquity) of what, even when we are actual participants, we understand of what is taking place ?


End-notes :

¹ With its title, a film can have us on edge, waiting to see how much (or little) relevance it will have to our interpreting what we will see / have seen : it may be pinned on when, at some telling moment, a character names the word or phrase (as, sensationally, in the closing line of Chinatown (1974)).

In Frances Ha (2012), it proves to be a quirky note that is sounded right at the end (in a visual joke) ; in Lady Bird (2017), it is what Christine insists on calling herself at high school (even if we might not unhelpfully delve into why, and think of the children’s rhyme) ; whereas Aquarius (2016) is named for the featured apartment-block, and its water symbolism.

² Is, for example, 'the intruder' the man whose vehicle has been waved through, on the other side, but who (indicated to stop once he has crossed) a much-congratulated sniffer-dog finds to have something hidden in a container of wipes ? (This man seems to play no further part in the film, but, later, other people are seen disappearing off, into the undergrowth and away from the headlights, during a drive along dark roads at night - are they intruders, too ?)

The customs officer who fêtes the sniffer-dog also proves not to be the film's concern, but is our link to what follows, after a slightly fetishistic sex-scene with her partner that centres on her uniform – might we not equally feel, at that moment, that it is we who intrude ?


³ Or, at the film’s outset (and after a medium shot of a border control), the national flags that we are shown establish that we are on the Swiss side.

Query : in the case of the last shot that we last see, which is followed by the closing credits (and so which cannot be announced in this way), can we even meaningfully ask whether is it 'real', or a dream / fantasy ?




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 12 January 2019

Is Billboards really a screenplay - and not a play-script ?

Is Billboards really a screenplay - and not a play-script ? [posting in development]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 January

Is Billboards really a screenplay - and not a play-script ? [posting in development]

 Those who think Seven Psychopaths (2012) a great film can delight in that opinion. However, after the $15m that was spent on it (so it is estimated (as reported on IMDb)), the bosses at investors such as CBS Films, Film4 and BFI may have been less sure : in the US, it just made back what it is thought to have cost.

 In that world, one could imagine Martin McDonagh, hawking pitches for a new film. He had tried a film that was very cinematic, and then had made this one, which dearly desired that some of Lynch had rubbed off on a tale of people who were not the people whom they seemed to be.

 Maybe the inspiration was to make visual what one would never try to show on stage, these billboards : in a play, everyone would be talking about them, but they would be an off-stage trio of elephants.

Yet, as soon as you have them in a film, and in its title, the film-goers will know without needing to think (or question) that they are significant*, and a fierce Frances McDormand, pictured with them, can then import a #MeToo message that makes it a winner.
To be continued


 * Missouri, and a made-up place there, being the other label on the tin : In Bruges, likewise, is going to be a film that is set in Bruges...



 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 5 October 2018

#UCFF Tweets about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

The #UCFF Tweets about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

5 October (updated 29 October)
The #UCFF Tweets about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)





 This Tweet is about the contrast between blonde Naomi Watts (as Betty / Diane Selwyn) and Laura Harring (playing Rita and Camilla Rhodes) in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) :








 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 20 August 2016

Some remarks about Mulholland Drive (2001) (and Mulholland Dr. (1999))

Some remarks about Mulholland Drive (2001) (and Mulholland Dr. (1999))

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

 19 August

Some remarks arising from a screening of Mulholland Drive (2001) at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, on Thursday 18 August at 9.00 p.m. (and about Mulholland Dr. (1999))


Nowadays, Nicolas Winding Refn¹ seems to want to go by the cypher above (which, one learns, one may not rightly call a monogram)...




However, is he, by curating some films that have influenced him, for participating Picturehouses (@picturehouses), showing that he is not a worthy heir to Igor Stravinsky... ?


Whoever’s work they really were (or were then thought to have been), it seems that Sergei Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to turn some libretti and scores that he had from Naples and London, and which had been attributed to Pergolesi, into a ballet for his Ballets Russes. Again, whoever’s music Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (1920) was then thought to have been (or based on – and, not surprisingly, it does not appear that Stravinsky said otherwise), it has been known for at least the last forty years to be his adaptive reworking / re-composition of those originals (as well as being considered the first work of what is usually called his neo-classical period).









The relevance of alluding to Stravinsky above lies in a sentiment that, it seems (and in mutated forms), has been ascribed to, or adopted by, many since before T. S. Eliot, but which is here quoted of Stravinsky :

 Igor Stravinsky said to me of his 'Three Songs by William Shakespeare', in which he epitomized his discovery of Webern’s music : ‘A good composer does not imitate ; he steals.’

Twentieth Century Music²



In fact, does NWR, commending films to us such as Mulholland Drive (2001) (which is arguably Lynch stealing from his own t.v. film and other antecedents), really just show that he has not dared to steal, only to imitate ?

In other words, is the faulty notion behind Nicolas Winding Refn Presents... this one ? That it is as if Stravinsky had not only done very little with the Pergolesi materials to re-embody them as his own, but had also, and without good reason, allowed those facts to be known before their time.

 Whereas Stravinsky himself was too good a self-publicist¹ for that, and, first allowed the Pergolesi name ‘to stick’ by arranging the work (in collaboration with Paul Kochanski) for violin and piano, publishing Suite d'après des thèmes, fragments et morceaux de Giambattista Pergolesi (1925)³...
Postlude :










End-notes

 ¹ Interviewed by Danny Leigh (@dannytheleigh) for The Guardian’s Film section (@guardianfilm), in Nicolas Winding Refn: 'I bring the singular, the narcissistic, the high art', NWR told Leigh – seemingly inconsequentially, as Leigh’s next paragraph is about meeting him next in London, a year later – about a young man whom he found bleeding nightmarishly in urban Los Angeles, and whom, along with another man (already there), he attempted to help, but the man died (and He had never seen anyone die before) :

 He told me this story a few weeks later, still in LA. I asked if he had felt emotional. ‘No,’ he said. Nothing ? ‘Strangely nothing.’ The next morning ? ‘Nuh-uh.’ He sipped juice through a straw. ‘But later,’ he said, ‘I was happy. Because I got a fucking great idea for a scene.’


² Twentieth Century Music : Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound, Peter Yates. Random House, New York (1967). Pantheon Books, p. 41.

³ Later, as well as an eight-movement Pulcinella Suite (revised in 1965), he produced arrangements, in collaboration with Gregor Piatigorsky and Samuel Dushkin, respectively, called Suite italienne for cello and piano (1932-1933) and violin and piano (1933).

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 10 April 2014

Sir, what are you doing in my house ?*

This is a review of Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) (2013)

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

10 April (updated 13 April)

This is a review of Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) (2013)




If Xavier Dolan had done so, then his work might not have been in vain (unless he had taken another stage-work, August : Osage County** (2013), as a starting-point – though, by contrast, Dolan fully succeeds in not making Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) feel like a play***)…

For, whatever the play by (Michel Marc Bouchard) may have been, Dolan tries to make Tom a sub-Lynchian piece with a horrific undertow, with a vibration set off with Gabriel Yared’s high-frequency string-writing (and the start of a composed soundtrack that seems intrusive to the point of perversity), piccolo even, when nothing is on the screen that gives rise to spookiness, as Tom, arriving at the farm, explores it on his own – cows in a stall, barns and machinery do not resonate with fear, unless, perhaps, they are frightening in their otherness****. However, if one looks at the synopsis on the film’s IMDb page, it claims that Tom is in the grip of grief and depression.

Maybe… Yet, contrary to many people’s belief that it is invisible (Mental ill-health is exactly like a broken leg !), it can be traced in look, posture, demeanour (as was just being written about yesterday in reviewing the superb film The Past (Le passé) (2013)), and Dolan shows no signs, except smiling inappropriately, and a certain clumsiness in conversational pleasantries – which comes across just as a somewhat implausible gaucheness, given that he says that he has a significant role in advertising (of course, that may be a lie).

Not unreasonable for him to be feeling as IMDb describes, but a film should stand for itself, and not rely on any external data to the viewer, and the only fitting account for how Tom appears is that it could be a form of psychotic depression. Clues abound that there is more to what we see than is evident, from a car on a poster with Real Deal as the caption, to the name of the bar (sadly not caught in French (which is in the plural), but something of the kind The Real Thing, to Tom’s hosts disappearing (as if they had never been there), with no sign that they had ever been there.


Suffice to say that, if the whole film is to be interpreted as delusion, induced by a massive natural high, then we are nowhere near the journey from and back to the office in After Hours (1985) (with its inspired dazzling ending, though not the first thoughts for it). We do not even have the resonance of Julianne Nicholson (Ivy), departing from the farm. No, it is then as with The Truman Show (1998) – a paranoid idea about the world blown up into a screenplay, whereas Tom has pretensions of being another Sunset Boulevard [or, originally, Blvd.] (1950) (although actually, if not in its exact scenario, it smacks of Pinter's The Homecoming, with its brooding awkwardness).

One skips to the end, because, with Tom in Tom, one really only cares about – and then relatively little, in fact – what happens to him, which brings us inevitably to the status of what we have seen happening. Is it the psychiatric equivalent of a very bad trip – a Funny Games (1997) without the consequences or implications – and then do we have any reason to be interested… ?


To come, when time and strength permit, a spoilery posting that deals with the rest of the plot, failing which...


End-notes

* A touch of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ – not really built upon in any obvious or coherent way, although Tom has such golden hair…

** Also set in a remote location in North America, and with some challenging family interactions, if of a different kind.

*** Spoiler alert Lee Marshall, at Screen Daily, agrees about the music, but comments instead about the adaptation :

Based on a stage play by Michel Marc Bouchard, who co-wrote the script with Dolan, Tom At The Farm betrays its origins in some overly pretty dialogue and a few scenes (like a tango dance in a barn) where you can practically read the stage directions.


**** Town Mouse and Country Mouse, maybe – given the contrasting setting at the end (apparently an amalgam) ?

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 17 March 2014

Cats are people (Kit Downes)

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

17 March

This is a review of a gig, given at Cambridge's Hidden Rooms for Cambridge Modern Jazz (@camjazz), by the Kit Downes Quintet


As we must have been told, in various ways, more than half-a-dozen times, this was / had been an acoustic gig – perhaps that truly is a rarity, or for Kit Downes at any rate, but it did feel like pushing a unique selling point (USP) to those who, by virtue of being there, had already bought. (Maybe the USP was being hit home for the benefit of those who might hear, from us, what they had missed… ?)




Personnel :

Kit Downes – upright piano

James Allsopp – B Flat and bass clarinets, tenor sax

Calum Gourlay – bass

James Maddren – drums

Lucy Railton – cello


Unlike some of Kit Downes’ other work, what he had written for the quintet* felt relatively composed – not in the sense of being tranquil (although some pieces definitely were), but less improvisatory (although not necessarily in the texture of his own contribution on piano). What it had was the familiar juxtaposition of moods within a piece that we know from Troyka (@Troykaband), where, as if in a set of Irish or Scottish tunes, there is a sudden, planned transition to the next section.

The first set opened with such a tranquil feel, as a way into the evening, and the ensemble was perfect, the notes of James Allsopp’s bass clarinet fitting perfectly within the scale of the harmony. The next, we were told (Downes gave the introductions, in his confident, avuncular way), had been inspired by Bill Frisell, and was a blues that built, with Allsopp, on B Flat clarinet, wailing, winding up the song**, but ultimately resolving in a quiet way, with plucked notes from Lucy Railton on cello. The third piece had an experimental feel, by now unlike the safety of the opener, with Allsopp giving us occasional blasts on his tenor sax, and with very loud unexpected knocks from James Maddren on drums.

The penultimate piece in the first set was a reflective number, in which Maddren had to keep up a complicated rhythm. Under the apparent calm of the surface, something was happening, and the piece imperceptibly built up, and then as quietly slipped away again. Ivan Hewitt’s description of Downes’ work seems apt : an engagingly slow-burn energy (The Sunday Telegraph). From B Flat, Allsopp returned to bass clarinet in a piece by bassist Gourlay called ‘Smoke’ (which he said, when Downes asked, had nothing to do with smoking), a somewhat sombre, syncopated melody, which was laced with sunnier intervals, and had a complicated theme in the upper voices.

In all of this, less mention than one might imagine of Downes himself, but he was there in all of it, setting the tempo / counting in, giving clear cues (for which Allsopp, in particular, looked expectantly), and keeping the currents under the progression at work, such that there was no doubting who was leading.

This group is an expanded form of the Kit Downes Trio, with Gourlay and Maddren (who, at the time of the release of their CD Quiet Tiger three years ago, had been playing together for six years). They are fellow graduates of the Royal Academy of Music (and Allsopp, another Academician (so is Lucy Railton), guested on the album). In fact, sometimes, what we heard did fall back on those three original players, with Railton and Allsopp patiently silent (but one would not necessarily have thought any more than we had the jazz standard of piano, bass and drums).

After the interval, the second set opened with a pair of pieces, ‘Boreal’ (from Tiger) and ‘Clowns After Dark’, the latter of which Downes explained, humorously at Allsopp’s expense, related to their early acquaintance, when Allsopp had arrived very late to a party (the other guests had gone) as a clown with a smudged appearance, whose efforts at making up might have been better performed at some other time. Another quiet opening, with Allsopp on bass clarinet, and then a jaunty number – as of a clown on the tiles ? – with a raucous solo from Allsopp.

Another pair of tunes followed, ‘Two Ones’ and ‘Bleydays’ (both from Downes’ album Light from Old Stars), the latter said to be a combined tribute to pianist Paul Bley and to t.v.’s Playdays… In the first, Railton’s cello had a keening quality to it, and as a whole the number felt like an air. Changing from Allsopp on clarinet to sax, Downes’ theme had the impression that we know from Thelonius Monk – which led some to the false interpretation that Monk did not know how to play – of music almost falling over itself in its rhythmic diversification. Rare for the gig, Downes had a solo, and then, when the others re-entered, the number ended softly with sax and drums.

The set closed with ‘Skip James’ (also from Tiger), which had the atmospheric mood of a blues, and in which Allsopp’s lower-register notes on bass clarinet fitted in beautifully with the gorgeous ensemble. Altogether, a very fine example of instrumentalists producing a sonorous whole, and some very varied effects.

When called up for an encore, Downes said that they did not often expect one, but decided, after hesitation, on ‘Owls’ – bite sized, he stressed. This is from Stars, and he said that it was in the spirit of David Lynch (the second film reference of the night). It may have been, but, with its nocturnal timbre (complete with owl calls from Maddren !), it also reminded a little of The Addams Family – although Downes predicted, regarding his choice, that it would send everyone off on a low, it was a very suitable end to the session.


End-notes

* Afterwards, Downes said that – which is the only place for him to start with a piece – everything had been with the quintet, and the skills of its players, in mind, e.g. James Allsopp’s great capacity to play in a free style, and Lucy Railton’s classical training : he is doing some gigs as a duo with her, and will be at Cheltenham (#cheltjazzfest).

** To quote the lyrics of a song on a solo album by Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 21 April 2012

Running down Eraserhead

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

12 March

Another special screening tonight - in a series (whose existence didn't quite pass me by, but nearly) about the depiction of monstrosity on screen - of David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) this time.

We had a bit of an introduction (which threatened to be a bit more of an introduction than I was happy with, but thankfully - as I infer - someone must have waved frantically from the back to cut short what was, as was admitted to us, a speech with the potential to go on all night), and then the film.

Philip Kiszely, who teaches at the University of Leeds (and also runs a publication about punk and post-punk) was our culprit, but he was to be forgiven for the even-handed way in which he conducted the discussion afterwards. His closing words of advice to those who had not seen Eraserhead before was to consider stopping eating the popcorn now, and that he would have wanted to take the seat nearest the door!

It was Screen 3, so the most intimate of the Arts Picturehouse's dark rooms at around 120 seats, but there was still a good attendance, at which Philip was - perhaps for effect - a little surprised, that people who had (he did a straw poll) not seen it before were still turning out to see Eraserhead after 35 years: did they know what they were letting themselves in for?

As a host, Philp was enthusiastic, giving us pointers in references to film noir and in how Lynch had put the film together piecemeal as funds permitted. He also said that Lynch had said very little about what his intentions in making <i>Eraserhead</i> had been, what meaning or message it had had for him, but that he had tantalizingly revealed that he had been reading The Bible at the time, and that one verse - which, of course, he did not specify - had been at the root of it all.

As I have said, he was also indulgent to the pure Freudian interpretation that, with contributions from some, was going later, where everything was a phallus, and Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) in fear of castration. So be it, but strange, as I remarked to Philip at the end, that Freud has so much less credit outside the worlds of film and literary theory, and certainly not in practice...


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