Too posh to answer the telephone ? [work in progress]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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8 May

Some comments [work in progress], following a screening and Q&A (as film-maker in residence at The University of Cambridge's Centre for Film and Screen), of Lucrecia Martel's La Ciénaga (The Swamp) (2001)

If a film-maker [Lucrecia Martel] sets out to make a film that defies some cinematic conventions, it seems to be odd to want to know if the Q 'Could Chekhov have made it ?' is a compliment

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 8, 2018

Although it was not meant equivocally, it seems ironic for a writer / director who deals in ambiguity / opacity in La Ciénaga (The Swamp) (2001) to want to know if the comparison is meant kindly - if then evading it largely, by saying that Chekhov's work wasn't set in Argentina ? https://t.co/4eptbvEH9x

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 9, 2018

Anton Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard, had sprung to mind.

Yet who necessarily wants a film released in 2001 to be likened to a play written 98 years earlier ?

Not if, now, one is laying store by innovation - even in a film that stays internally consistent and linear ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 9, 2018

[...]


'You were all drunk'



Film-references :

* Babel (2006)

* Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

* Drevo (The Tree) (2014)

* Unrelated (2007)


[...]



It has been firmly postulated to be a feature of Andrei Tarkovksy's work that where, say, one sees Fire, the remaining Four Elements (of Earth, Water, and Air) can be found contiguously, but which is a pattern that one might otherwise overlook. In La Ciénaga, whether or not one can seek out the others in proximity (or they are simply pervasively present), one could impose - with some slight 'fudges' - an order on various recurrences to make a new Four Elements :

* Mud

* Blood [+ red wine]

* Water / ice / glass*

* Air


[...]


End-notes :

* Or 'Glass' could be an element in its own right, and substitute for 'Air' - though the latter is palpably there, as when


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

Why would one want to wait for a film's end-credits ? (work in progress)

Reasons to stay until the film's end-credits have rolled

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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23 January

Reasons for even those who are not intending / supposed to review a film to stay until the end-credits have rolled

As a guest at BAFTA last year, one was told by the inviting member of BAFTA (@BAFTA) that it is forbidden to do anything else – of which prohibition there indeed appeared to be highly persuasive evidence, even in a packed evening screening of The Martian (2015).

Despite the disruption, usual elsewhere, of almost everyone else trying to leave, and not infrequently doing so noisily and clumsily (as if their lives depended on not staying for two or three minutes longer¹ - which then means that one must often shuffle into the aisle to let them out and so that one can best see what is visible on the screen around people's heads), there is a rationale behind staying until the credits are through. [Effectively, this is a companion-piece to some comments, made about what people often enough do during a film, when also writing about The Tree (Drevo) (2014).]


The elements of that rationale are given here, in no particular order, and to justify, Milton like², this approach to those who - since they are in the majority - clearly do not appreciate them (or who may even, if one has not watched a film with them before, think that they have grounds for teasing about such ‘a quaint practice’) :


1. Seeing archive material that amplifies what the film showed (whether or not its story, or just its setting, was factually based), e.g. as shown within the credits for The Railway Man (2013), or what is best called The Harbour Bar (El Cafè de la Marina) (2014)

2. To hear reprised principal elements of the score, which acts as a summation of what one heard en route, and so of what one saw at each point, and is rarely unrewarding (despite people milling past) - particularly worthwhile, say, with that of films such as The Matrix (1999)

3. Occasionally, there is extra footage of another kind (whether right at the end of the credits, or inserted in the sequence), and which often gives some new dimension (depending on the film) : maybe just a final laugh [not recalling with certainty, but one suspects so – and of an insightful nature – for Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip (2010) and / or The Trip to Italy (2014)], or even a different take on the film and what it meant, of which The Great Beauty (2013) (La grande bellezza / #LaGrandeBellezza) is an excellent example, with both a long sequence along The River Tiber embedded in the credits³, and a reprise of the score (please see point 2, above)

4. An important closing track, not used in the film, but just played over part of the credits, and (if one were there to hear it…) actually the aural equivalent of footage in the credits (please see point 3, above) in making part of the feel of the film as a whole : probably so with Hope Springs (2012), and almost always true of Woody Allen’s films, e.g. Stardust Memories (1980)

5. Of course, not everyone will be bothered about the pieces of music that are used (as against the original score⁴), but, if one is, it may be one’s only chance to find out easily what that song / piece was called, and / or who wrote / performed it, unless one buys the soundtrack or DVD, etc., because even IMDb (@IMDb) is, as noted previously, certainly not without its faults, and largely does not extend to giving complete music-credits (here is what it lists for Youth (2015), and here, despite the credits that one saw roll, it gives none for the person who translated the screenplay) - so one’s easiest way to confirm, say, the singer or the name of some song has gone, when one leaves the cinema-screen too early to read the answer

6. Or one might want to know where that building was, and whether the interior was from the same one as shown as its exterior : the first clue [assuming, again, that one does not try to set about the task after leaving the cinema (and, even with the DVD and a large t.v. screen, the credits can end up minuscule] is to see the members of different units, e.g. Italy Unit or France Unit. It does depend much on the choices made by the film itself what information it then gives about locations, and also where it is to be found, so one’s eyes need to be nimble, because the credits will not always state Filmed on location at xyz, but there may just be mention of the premises in a list of thanks (or special thanks)


[...]


End-notes

¹ Maybe people did not have respect for Macbeth (2015), and it must necessarily be taken for granted that they have little for those who choose to watch the credits (who also, willy-nilly, had to hear their curt pronouncements) : however, despite the very thoughtful atmosphere at the conclusion of the film, their desire to be out was just as strong as it must have been to be there, in the first place, in one of the first screenings in Screen 1 at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse).

² I.e. stated, early in Book I of Paradise Lost, Milton's aim to justifie the ways of God to men (on the question whether he did so, a writer in The Guardian (@guardian) dilated in 2011...).

³ In The Great Beauty (probably better thought of as Immense Beauty), the whole titles ran over the beauty and calm of Rome in the closing sequence, whereas, with writer / director Paolo Sorrentino’s new release, Youth (2015), it is just the main name-credits (through to and Jane Fonda, though we have flitted, for a while, to another venue by the time that her name appears). Then over the remaining end-credits, conventionally presented, an affecting reprise of David Lang’s ‘just (after song of songs)’ (which we do not hear in full (it runs to fifteen minutes), but Lang has, after his impressive contribution to the previous film, scored the film.

⁴ Whereas with, say, The Danish Girl (2015), one can very easily find out afterwards (if that theme is stil haunting) that Alexandre Desplat wrote the score and / or what other films he composed for : for one, it is there in the IMDb (@IMDb) listing for the film, and thence from Desplat’s entry.


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

This is less a review than a recommendation of The Tree (Drevo) (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

12 November

This is less a review than a recommendation of The Tree (Drevo) (2014)

For some, if a film is predicated on a situation that is full of tension , but largely unexplained (or is revealed, with the passage of time, only in small pieces, but not totally), it is then provocative of questions, asked noisily of their companion(s), such as ‘Why is he doing that ?’ or ‘What is happening now ?’.

Fortunately, for watching The Tree (Drevo) (2014), the screen was devoid of those obviously desirous of additional information : for it is hardly good, to that inherent tension, when viewers of that kind stray into a film that was never meant for them, and, to meet their need to know things and what it all means, feel entitled to make such enquiries (heard). (Or is it just that, fearing that they have overlooked the obvious, they unfairly credit those whom they are sitting with having gleaned what they did not gather – usually doing in a way that cannot be easily ignored, and all the while overlooking that it is the film’s character itself denying us all, and that the film-makers choose to withhold the wider context to what detail we may see ?)


In this case, the film opens very quietly, in a place that we do not maybe straightaway construe as being enclosed, but as on the edge of a sandy road in a quiet location : in shots that are jumbled as to their angle or content, we see the ground, white-washed walls, and an androgynous child on a bicycle, with tassles as seeming adornments, and in fairly aimless perambulation on it.

But it proves not be such an open space (or – though it is actually unimportant whether this is so – maybe it was, and evoked earlier times, which have been subsumed by the present experience ?). And there is a piece of symbolism – which may also literally equate with the central givens of the film – in the child discovering, and burying, a dead bird in the yard. Already we have a sense of the concerns that we will be handling.

Possibly, that to which those miss giving full attention, when puzzling over what they learn from the unfolding of what is shown, and trying to make sense of it (in cultural, religious, or other terms), is that the three central characters (the youngest being protected from it by his mother and brother*) themselves also do not know what sense to make of it – it just seems to have become an unavoidable fact of their lives. They have tried, but they cannot easily live in that knowledge of that fact, and they do seek ways to subvert its application. This is precisely where the beauty of this brilliant piece of film-making lies, irrespective of seeing it as allegorical or symbolic (in recalling the film’s ending, one is reminded of the changed mood at the end of Kafka’s short story Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis).


For once, one cannot easily disagree with how IMDb (@IMDb) describes the film, in one sentence :

The Tree is a chamber piece drama that vivisects family values, almost like in ancient tragedies determined by doom.


End-notes

* The otherwise undivided sections of the film, of unequal length, were each headed by the name of one of the three.


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