Showing posts with label Francine Stock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Francine Stock. Show all posts

Saturday 12 January 2013

Gala with a glitch

This is a Gala review of Underground (1928), screened in NFT1 at the BFI

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


10 January

This is a Gala review of Underground (1928), screened in NFT1 at the BFI

Confession : I am not very practised (or confident) with how to view silent film :

* self-perpetuating lack of exposure to the field

* which means that my lip-reading* never gets better

* and disinclines me to make the effort to choose silent


For I find the concentration needed even greater than for a poorly subtitled film, where there is the anxious race to read and make sense of captions before the next ones come up (and, necessarily, the one in hand disappears).

None of this deterred me from this gala screening:


It had all the elements : a Q&A (and hosted by Francine Stock, to boot); the buzz of a first night at the BFI; in Underground, the restoration, by the BFI, of a film 85 years old; the involvement of silent-film musical interpreter Neil Brand, not as accompanying musician this time, but as composer of the score; and the tie-in with the 150th anniversary of the tube, with a film that almost made a character of its tunnels, staff, trains.

It brought out all sorts, from the train enthusiasts (there was one on the panel, with a looping presentation of stills) to, as it were, the silent crowd, and, of course, film buffs in general (into the latter two categories of which Brand and Stock** fitted, as did Bryony Dixon (curator at the BFI) and ?? Ben Thompson ?? (from the team of restorers)).

However, there were only two drawbacks, the minor one that, with a panel of four, each of whom had to be given a say, there was only time for five (it may have been four) audience questions, and the major hitch, which had Brand leaping from his seat and disappearing within minutes, which was that the soundtrack was no longer in synch with the projection (which, apparently, it had been earlier).

So, for example, an urchin playing on some sort of whistle was heard before he was seen. As Brand had, of course, carefully scored each moment of the 84 minutes, it was immensely distressing for him (hence his sudden exit to voice his concern), but it seemed from the apology at the end from the BFI’s director that there had been a lack of confidence that stopping the film would have allowed the problem to be remedied***.

I asked for a complementary ticket to allow me to see it as it should have been, because, although there was no doubt of the power and skill of the scoring (and of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s performance****), the concentration involved in hearing a soundtrack that did not match the visuals compounded my interpretative impairment.
That apart, it was a grand evening, and I was pleased to be able to talk briefly to Neil Brand again and offer my congratulations (and commiserations). This is why :



I had heard Brand talking to Sean Rafferty last year, on Radio 3’s late-afternoon programme In Tune (one could equally say early-evening, as I choose not to say ‘drive-time’), and was very interested both in what he had to say about the film’s dynamics, and to hear not only some of the music, but also how it had been composed. So I knew that Anthony Asquith, son of the prime minister of that name, had been the art director, I knew a skeletal amount about what the film dealt with, and I had heard Brand’s palpable enthusiasm for this commission.

I knew, therefore, that I wanted to see it, and, when I saw Brand at the Silent Film Festival (I only managed to see one film, though, where he had been playing with Mark Kermode’s band The Dodge Brothers) and then at Festival Central, I learnt that all the attention was focused on a likely release timed with the tube anniversary.

This film – including in its original sense - is terrific, and there is no doubt that the patient work of restoration, of composing the score, and of recording and tracking it has been an excellent use of resources. I want only to say enough about it that is consistent with leaving it to unfold to a new viewer, but showing what there is to be appreciated.

My Tweet will have alerted to the scheming and self-centredness of Othello, but (in no particular order) there is also, as Bryony Dixon put it, a love quadrilateral, a fight and other moments of tension, shots of trains and escalators in and around Waterloo tube-station, a magnificent chase, and a picture of the metropolis and a romantic trip to (as a member of the audience asserted, since no one knew) Hampstead Heath. What more could one want... ?


End-notes

* It is a useful adjunct to indistinct speech, as a clue (or cue) to what is being uttered, but a different proposition, I find, with no speech sounds. A film of this kind has few inter-titles (have they always been called that?), and for me, used as I am to the dialogue driving many a scene, there’s a frustration at not knowing what is said.

** Aurally, it has the ring of a partnership, warehousing, maybe, designer goods.

*** When I talked, at a later date, to Cambridge Film Festival director Tony Jones, he was confident both as to the nature of the problem, and how the technology caused would have made it not capable of easy remedy : he also seemed to know, but lost me in the detail of the technicality, how it should have been done, and so would not have been beyond repair on the spot.

**** Brand provided information about how the recording from a live performance at a screening last year, once the audience noise had been taken off, had to be intermixed with taping from that event’s rehearsal. Here, too, there had been a technical issue, because the frame-speed of the projection when the two had been recorded differed !


Sunday 5 February 2012

Philip French rides (roughshod) again! - A summary

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


6 February

For those in a hurry, a digest of the main points of that posting (Philip French rides (roughshod) again!):


* Philip French claims that Francine Stock has 'borrowed' from Martin Scorsese a description of her book In Glorious Technicolor as 'a personal journey'


* This is not only ludicrous, because there is nothing distinctive about that phrase (it is arguably just a cliché), but it only appears on the dust-jacket, describing Stock and her book in the third person


* Much of what he does quote is from the book's five-page Prologue (hardly the most important thing about it), but he also comes up with a quotation of around thirty words, which, if it appears anywhere, would naturally appear there, but does not


* Nonetheless, after giving a fleeting idea of what the book is, French goes on to use the phrase and quotation to say why the book is not 'personal' (Stock does not assert that it will be - in that sense), the choice of films is not 'idiosyncratic' (it is never claimed that it is - quite the opposite, if one reads the Prologue properly), and why Stephen Hughes (who contributed to the book, though French claims that he is a co-author, for which there is no evidence) and Stock have not done something new at all


* By way of a close, French delights in a typo in his proof copy (doubtful whether he looked at the published book before publishing his piece?) - 'photagonist' for 'protagonist' - and, because of it, forgives Stock for something else from the dust-jacket, which he fails to put in context in a six-page section about fashion, which is in part of a chapter about Annie Hall (1977)


Can there be true joy in reviewing something that you haven't read (or watched) properly?**



End-notes

* Because of a typo?! Does Stock, then, moonlight as a typesetter?

** Certainly not in reading the review!


Saturday 4 February 2012

Philip French rides (roughshod) again!

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


5 February

Not for the first time (By way of apology for never reviewing Sarah's Key (2)), I find Philip French's reviewing not just perverse, but wilfully at odds with the nature of the matter about which he is meant to be informing me. In the case that I shall go on to discuss, I think that it is, actually, just plain laziness.

In his review of In Glorious Technicolor, the book that Francine Stock brought out last year, in The Guardian, French takes much time in seven paragraphs not talking about the book at all (or, at any rate, telling us where Stock and her collaborator Stephen Hughes, both on The Film Programme (on Radio 4), and on the idea for the book and its content, are wrong to think that their book is needed):

* Paragraph 1 - Responses to films from Gorky and Kipling - both affected by, and writing about, films

* Paragraph 2 - Reminding us first, perhaps unnecessarily (and maybe even in a snobbish way!), that Stock is 'a former BBC TV current affairs reporter' (well, yes, but she left Newsnight in 1993, and people such as Paxman and she were by no means just reporters), French sets out his stall about what he thinks the book to be, and brings in Hughes*, before a quotation of more than thirty words** - this paragraph is where, as I will go on to say, French misses what Stock says that the book is

* Paragraph 3 - An exposition of the structure of the book (after French seems to have taken trouble to pin down another connection (this time in the Prologue), that of the evacuation of a cinema during Stock seeing Chinatown (1974), to the Guildford pub bombings, whereas Stock just mentions, to give necessary context, that she was sixteen when there was a bomb in 'an adjacent pub' (Prologue, p. 3), French has seemingly gone overdrive on being detective) - Stock takes three key films per decade for ten decades (and French cannot help reminding us, in comparison, how many films he has seen: 'a total of 30 pictures, the number shown nowadays in an average month to the London critics', but surely not pulling rank?)***

* Paragraphs 4 and 5 - An opening statement that Stock and Hughes are wrong, but nothing more about the book, just two paragraphs about what others have thought and written (surely not showing off learning, though!)

* Paragraph 6 - A continuation of this digression halfway down this paragraph eventually brings us back to the book, or, rather, how it appears and what is shown on the dust-jacket****), and some anecdote that Stock appears to have related about being at a screening of Avatar with James Cameron***** (although, flicking through the section under that title, I could not find it ('2000s Turning Inwards' , pp. 304 - 311))

* Paragraph 7 - A closing paragraph (complete with a terminal joke about the proof copy - how 'protagonist' became 'photagonist', but, to French's disappointment, was corrected, as it redeemed this: 'Stock does, however, repeat the canard that Clark Gable had a catastrophic effect on the underwear industry during the depression, when he appeared without a vest in It Happened One Night******), which otherwise imparts a little damning with faint praise:

Still, there is much to enjoy in this book, and nuggets of information on recent cinematic developments to be mined.

This, along with the following, is all that French wants to say that is positive:

[... D]iscursive discussions of her three chosen films, which are never less than intelligent, though rarely more than perfunctory until the last couple of decades

'Never less than intelligent' - what is that? Irony?


Right at the outset, French had tried to pin on Stock 'borrowing the title from Martin Scorsese's film centenary documentary and book, "a personal journey"', but, as ever (never judge a book by its cover, I mean dust-jacket), he is ascribing to her what does not appear in the book itself.

Even if there were anything distinctive (which there is not) about the phrase that he means, he is quoting from the inside front of the dust-jacket again:

In this fascinating, entertaining and illuminating book Francine Stock takes us on a personal journey through a glorious century of cinema, showing in vivid detail how film both reflects and makes our world.

A 'personal journey' with which French beats her is not even Stock's claim. Yes, she does say 'This book is an attempt to record snatches of the conversation that has been taking place between us and film for the past hundred years. It is also a very personal contribution to that discussion', and she does also say 'The reason for taking this idiosyncratic journey through a century of film is precisely to provoke argument and further exploration' (both from Prologue, p. 5), but that is nothing to do with Scorsese.

French, who too much limits himself to the contents of this Prologue, when not studying the design and wording of the dust-jacket (matters that, rather naively, he imputes to Stock), wants to say (in his third paragraph) 'In the event, it is not a deeply personal book' (before being personal and delving into where and when Stock saw Chinatown, as mentioned above), and 'And there is little that is idiosyncratic about her choice of films'. So he missed the paragraph above, where she wrote:

This book is neither a comprehensive history of cinema nor an attempt to extend the sometimes daunting territory of film studies. [...] The films selected here may not necessarily be the best of their kind or even personal favourites, although many are. Rather, they are films that exert a particular power [...]


So, no claim that the choice of film was idiosyncratic, no claim that this was a personal journey, and a supposed review that spends at least half of our time in reading it in talking about what French thinks that the book should have been. Others must judge how much he actually read, but he's certainly pretty familiar with that dust-jacket and the book's five-page Prologue at least...


For those whose attention span isn't up to Dickensian convolution*******, here is a summary of the above...


End-notes

* Whom he says is 'named as co-author on the title page but not on the cover', whereas the copy that I have, a first edition (not a proof copy), quite clearly states 'with Stephen Hughes' under Stock's name and in a type-size, even if the words already were not, that is inconsistent with an acknowledgement of co-authorship (and which is not claimed in the usual assertion on the imprint-page).

** The quotation is 'We had both searched without much luck for writing on the way cinema intersects with what you might distinguish separately as life: to us it seemed an endlessly fascinating and important aspect of cinema's history'.

Except that those exact words do not seem to appear in the book, unless I am mistaken, but rather 'How could something as patently artificial as film seem so real? We all know that what we see on a screen is not real and yet we experience it so intensely that it provokes a physical response. Might there be particular effects on our behaviour - both public and private? Ways in which we had become indoctrinated by this most seductive medium? Researching for a series on film some years ago, we hunted in vain for a book that tackled these ideas' (Prologue, p. 4).

*** However, she talks about much else, because the two-column index runs to fifteen pages, and talks about other films and their actors, directors, cinematographers and the like in relation to them.

**** With the issue of Hughes being co-author, French was talking about 'the cover', but he has now found the right word.

***** With what accuracy I do not know, French asserts that 'There are more references to James Cameron than to any other moviemaker'. (In the index, The Terminator (1984), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009) are all referenced, but only the last of these has its own titled section.)

****** Whether French took that point of criticism just from the inside front of the dust-jacket is open to question (and how a typo, for which Stock would have no responsibility, could make up for the offence to French's sensibilities is unclear), because it appears in context, in the section on Annie Hall (1977), in paragraphs about fashion and films ('1970s Just when you thought it was safe...', pp. 223 - 227).

******* In other words, a reference to the posting Young 'lack attention for Dickens' (according to Yahoo! News).