Poem by Tweet : What did FK mean by FB ?

Poem by Tweet : What did FK mean by FB ?

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

28 October

Poem by Tweet : What did FK mean by FB ?

To fb :

Please
Don't fb
Or try changing
To try to please me

x

PS Even down to the usual utter schlock of 'I am proud to announce', if or when a change has actually been forced on someone... pic.twitter.com/PkT2uECgQk

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 28, 2021

They had some thoughts, too :https://t.co/o2CmIwz5e9 https://t.co/07bSAWMG9m pic.twitter.com/5ilheC5Qyp

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 29, 2021

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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.


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

For World Mental Health Day 2015 : Where, in me, is Kafka’s Josef K. ?

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

10 October, World Mental Health Day

A personal vision of trying to relate to the experience of breakdown / psychiatric challenge in the form of ongoing existential / spiritual self-examination

This is not [meant to be], on #WMHD2015, @THEAGENTAPSLEY talking about others as if about the self (or vice versa)*.

Rather, it is more in the nature of a confession, of trying to be honest and open about what breakdown, and admission under section (circa 21 April 1996), deep down meant and felt like, and still does, just now – when the feeling of how I act, and have acted, hypocritically can be keen, as here :

-> Then I don't *recall* Kafka's The Trial, how Josef K. simultaneously creates and tries to worm out of his own ill-doing, but see I'm K.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 10, 2015

I *am* K., but I easily luxuriate in the other K. - K.'s uncle sent him / me to Huld, the advocate, but we're more interested in Leni/ sex.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 10, 2015

If needed, here is a paragraph from Wikipedia®'s summary of the plot of The Trial**, by way of partial context for those Tweets :

K. is visited by his uncle, who was K.'s guardian. The uncle seems distressed by K.'s predicament. At first sympathetic, he becomes concerned that K. is underestimating the seriousness of the case. The uncle introduces K. to a lawyer, who is attended by Leni, a nurse, who K.'s uncle suspects is the advocate's mistress. During the discussion it becomes clear how different this process is from regular legal proceedings: guilt is assumed, the bureaucracy running it is vast with many levels, and everything is secret, from the charge, to the rules of the court, to the authority behind the courts – even the identity of the judges at the higher levels. The attorney tells him that he can prepare a brief for K., but since the charge is unknown and the rules are unknown, it is difficult work. It also never may be read, but is still very important. The lawyer says that his most important task is to deal with powerful court officials behind the scenes. As they talk, the lawyer reveals that the Chief Clerk of the Court has been sitting hidden in the darkness of a corner. The Chief Clerk emerges to join the conversation, but K. is called away by Leni, who takes him to the next room, where she offers to help him and seduces him. They have a sexual encounter. Afterwards K. meets his uncle outside, who is angry, claiming that K.'s lack of respect has hurt K.'s case.


NB Looking back, in that way, to sectioning in 1996 (and again in January 1997), there is no intention to suggest that anyone else does feel, or ought to feel, twinges of conscience that are tied up with their experience of mental-health issues or services.

However, for me, conscience / awareness of feeling a fraud seem in the midst of what happened then, now, and everywhere in between.

If I see a spiritual or existential dimension in my own issues of mental health, it is for me to see – or, more likely, pretend to myself that I am aware of it, when largely I keep it well hidden (at least from myself) : it is all in relation to wanting to work out my paranoia, and why I can, so easily, find accusation in comments, words and texts (mainly from memory, though also in recollected things that people said or wrote, and what they meant / whether they really meant xyz)…


Coda :

And remembering may be, for some, to do with learning not to forget... ? :

Do we assume that short-term memory degenerates with age ? : If you left things at the post office at 19, you did learn to remind yourself.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 10, 2015

End-notes

* As one of Beckettt’s authorial voices says somewhere (in The Unnamable, or is it Company ?), When I say ‘I’, and – having addressed the question whatever / whoever ‘I’ is (and he digresses, as I do, in the fashion of Laurence Sterne’s principal narrator, Tristram Shandy) – he goes on to say just that : when saying ‘I’, he does not intend to talk about someone else (as if it were he).

(Molloy, too, certainly mentions that he may lapse into talking of himself as if of another.)

** Kafka wrote the (incomplete) novel in German, entitled Der Prozeß.


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Who fêtes Gravity, not this masterpiece ?

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

12 January

A rating and review of All is Lost (2013)

99 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 16 / M : 16 / P : 16 / F : 17

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel
9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)

Less Homer than Beckettt, more Job than Ulysses



We may not formally know until before the closing credits, but Robert Redford in All is Lost (2013) is Our Man : in this, the film is deliberately not specific, because we know more the name of the yacht, the Virginia Jane, than that of its captain.

We see him as a resourceful man, but only after, and from eight days before, the note whose text we hear him read¹ – otherwise, he is a man of few words (and there is anyway no one to talk to, when his Mayday calls come to an abrupt end< because he is not the sort of person who verbalizes the solution that he is seeking to each of his problems. The consequence is that we have to watch him quite closely, because all in what he is doing may be a clue to his reasoning, whereas, if we do not concentrate in that way (and it isdemanding), all may be lost for construing the film – why is he fashioning that piece of wood, or deploying the life-raft ?

Contrast this with the parallel¹ drama of Gravity (2013), and space, unlike the ocean, scarcely seems silent at all, with Bullock who, when not trying to copy Houston in, is narrating her situation and despair, or even acting under the remote instruction of Clooney. Some want (rather pointlessly, as this is fiction, and may even be parable) to say that Redford should never have been there or not so ill equipped – maybe Redford is too silent and strong, but, in relief, she just seems even more unengagingly neurotic to have been let into space. (People want to read beyond the ikon and the other religious symbols displayed and infer some meta-narrative of heaven and earth, rebirth, or God knows what, but it is will hidden.)

Not Gravy - or whatever that film lacking 'it' is - though, @dimensionsmovie @guardian ! #GravityIsGravy
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2014

Redford is where he is (although he geographically is not, and the quality of the light seemed to give this away), and that is just a given – why, when in this modern era, or for what reason, are at best alluded to in his note (whose text we cannot refer to). Compared with the technical failures of depiction that can be levelled at Gravity, I believe that those of All is Lost are slight unless one is of a sea-going disposition, and have scant bearing : Our Man could have been lowered onto the vessel by angels mid-ocean for all that I care whether he should be where and how he is.

If these criticisms of All is Lost (2013) (http://t.co/PGOBy7mJWY) mattered, Gravity (2013) would be ruled out of awards hands down !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 10, 2014

I say this, because I am happy (‘happy’ is not the right word – I am actively engaged in wishing) to see what I am shown and not seek explanation as to why it is foolhardy or unlikely, because it is what it is. For it is not as if Redford’s character is the last one on earth who should not be where he is, or there how he is, as rescuers the world over will testify, whereas Gravity just sidesteps the question of whether Bullock’s character could not have been better trained and / or have better absorbed the right training and attitude in adversity, rookie or no – would someone who panicks so much ever be taken on by NASA as an astronaut?

Continuing the contrast, the same test of plausibility must be levelled at each situation and character : even if Our Man should not be where he is and how he is, he could have chosen his own destiny and simply set out, whereas Ryan Stone (Bullock) had to satisfy others that she had the right skills and the nerve to fly a mission. In my view, there is no chance that she would not have been weeded out an early stage.

She subsists on the level of standing for all of us, a sort of Everyperson. However, this is not an Assumption of The Blessed Virgin, so that she can intercede for all of us, but a bumbling person with a neurotic core, and the plot-line depends on the presence of weaknesses that would not be there. All is Lost shows a man reasoning his way through what faces him, and not without being disheartened unto death : no one else appears to be to blame for where we find him, though we all find ourselves in life somewhere from which prior circumstances and decisions (ours and / or those of others) brought us there…

Our Man may or may not represent us, but we identify with him (unless we are aggrieved seafarers who berate him as suggested), and it is the inhuman dumping / falling of a container, just as we duly see these behemoths not notice him, that, if not exactly creating his problems, compounds them. Is he a righteous man like Job and what happens him being given over to be tested ? Maybe, but we do not feel that he is a special man, given over to ill to see whether he curses God.

What befalls him also evokes Homer’s Odyssey (and in one of the themes of Alex Ebert’s music we have The Sirens brought to life, when he thinks of giving into alcohol and before he seems to become beset by them proper), but I think that the closer parallel is with Beckettt’s Job-like figure in his mime Act Without Words I, who is temptingly offered water that he cannot drink, shade that is withdrawn (Jonah 4 : 6 – 8 ?), and the like.

Finally, the male figure, despite being prodded to continue with further temptations with the game, just withdraws. Famously, Beckettt’s trilogy of novels** almost has as its motto the closing words of the third, You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and the spirit of perseverance, though it ebbs and flows, is there in the resilience of Our Man’s responses to his situation. Towards the end, it is as if there is the same desire, which is somewhere in Kafka’s writing****, just to lie down in the snow, regardless of the risk and fall asleep.

As to Redford, it is only the white sideburns that discredit the idea that he is younger than 77, and all power to him, if he is rightly reported as being seen doing himself what his character did – the intense close-ups show him lined, but he is still every inch a star, and with commanding presence and conviction in his work. The arc of Our Man’s experience has those qualities brought to it, so that we cannot rest, scarcely drawing breath, whilst what faces him remains in the balance : No film, for me, has been (no real pun intended) as immersive as this one since Cell 211 (2009) at Cambridge Film Festival in 2010.


End-notes

¹ Spoiler alert - from IMDb, this is the text of the note :

13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry... I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you knew this. In each of your ways. And I am sorry. All is lost here... except for soul and body... that is, what's left of them... and a half-day's ration. It's inexcusable really, I know that now. How it could have taken this long to admit that I'm not sure... but it did. I fought 'til the end, I'm not sure what this worth, but know that I did. I have always hoped for more for you all... I will miss you. I'm sorry.

² It is far lesser, despite its 11 nomination for BAFTA awards to this film’s one (for Sound)… - told this, a friend pithily opined Then they are shitheads.

As if I didn't know that #BAFTA nominations are stupid, All is Lost (2013) only gets one - for Sound !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 9, 2014

³ Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable.

**** Also suggested in the texts of Müller that Schubert set for Winterreise (which has been badly translated as A Winter’s Journey) : with Winterreise, as with this film, one has the feeling that the degradations of the physical journey are parallel manifestations of a disintegration of the soul or psyche.



If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

The cage door was shut ?

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

9 October (seen at Cineworld, Cambridge)

I suppose it is honesty, but what documentary about a writer, predicated on one of the last interviews in his life, is left ending with this exchange :

What do you think of the universe ?

What a ridiculous question !


The question came hard on the heels of ones that established that life after death or reincarnation are what Paul Bowles, the subject of The Cage Door is Always Open (2012), called ‘intellectual toys’. This phrase was not picked up on, whereas some might see such beliefs as superstitions and not intellectual at all – again, Bowles is allowed to say something and not be challenged on it, just as, if Daniel Young meant anything by his universe question, he might at least have defended it.

So far so good. Each of the three sections is prefaced by a shot of a page from Bowles’ most famous novel, The Sheltering Sky, in each case a division of the book with a quotation. The quotation and / or the name of each section might mean something to Young in organizing his material, but I was left not understanding his taxonomy, nor why he includes animations that are not unlike Gilliam’s style and encompassing (it seemed) elements of Bowles’ life, but rushes them past the eye so that the experience is largely subliminal.

In interview, Bernardo Bertolucci calls The Sheltering Sky a poem in prose, each page filled with the venom of Bowles, which he wanted to distil into the film, but he was keen to stress that it is ‘not a psychological film, not a pyschological novel’ : They go into the desert and disappear for ever, these were his words.

Other figures such as Truman Capote, though there is no one like him for his bitchiness (or the huge cat that roamed his lap), gave the information about Bowles’ life, marriage, sexuality, writing and drug-taking, but, as said, arranged under the headings of his most famous book (including a quotation from Kafka), in a way that seemed largely arbitrary.

The documentary seemed to have been a long time in the making since Bowles’ death in 1999, when we were told that the impetus to make it had been reading The Sheltering Sky, contacting Bowles, and being offered the interview with which this review began. What is clear is that the writers of The Beat Generation flocked to him, for some of the same reasons that made him like North Africa, but he had been there first, and they learnt from him. Whether the film conveys much sense of Bowles’ literary legacy is open to discussion.


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

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

This is a Festival review of Aufzug (2012) (A long overdue review)

This is a Festival review of Aufzug (2012)

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

14 December

This is a Festival review of Aufzug (2012)

The review was started at the time of the Festival, and not finished (and approved by the film's director) that long afterwards, but I have kept failing to put it on here :

In Emily Kuhnke’s short film Der Aufzug (2012), the lift to which the title refers is not so much everything’s setting as an ever-present character, eavesdropping – even when the lift-boy feigns not to – on what people’s words and actions portend. It is the eccentric sort of lift that would have delighted Franz Kafka – who gave us other lifts at the Hotel Occidental in his novel Der Verschollene – and which he might have imagined.

Unlike, though, Kafka’s Karl Rossmann, our lift-boy is not slow to take everything in or to pretend to be part of the furniture, and he does not always need to be told where to take his passengers (we might infer that they are not all strangers, even if they may believe in their anonymity).

The script, by Billy MacKinnon (whom I know from Hideous Kinky (1998), but also Brilliantlove (2010) (on which he was script editor, and which came to Cambridge Film Festival)) is a fairly sparse one, but it covers a lot of ground, and the way that it has been realized, sparing us a lift-door, allows us to concentrate on the lift, who is in it, and occasionally the whirring and clicking mechanism – a contrast with the simplicity of the fore-and-back lever that is used to engage it.

We are no more meant to wonder at how it works or why it is as it is than we are at the era, which could be the 1930s or 70s, because the characters are dressed, and almost behave in, a style reminiscent of painters such as Otto Dix or, probably more likely, Max Beckmann, and their stylization hints at a signification beyond their own individual character.

Nothing is wasted in the direction, and there are no unnecessary pauses, so twelve minutes seem quite intense, and, although the lift-boy seems unconcerned about being relieved, there is the pent-up sense of a trap (He claims to have inferred the external world correlating with what has appeared in his conveyance (but he might just be showing off to the other boy – or he may have read too much Hume).)

Kuhnke makes us glad to see outside, but whether it is Fasching, Wahnsinn or alien invasion is open to interpretation...


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

Scorsese directed, not dissected

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

17 November

on his bday, a thought onScorsese: he's unique yet NYNY is like Cukor,TaxiD is like Wenders,RagingB is like Welles,Mean Sts is like Pasolini
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) November 17, 2012

@markcousinsfilm And After Hours is like Kafka meets Woody Allen...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 17, 2012

If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

Damaging or harming?

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

10 October

The other day, when I heard that someone was reported to have harmed a painting by Mark Rothko, it did sound quite right - maybe one can harm the natural world, so there is no need for a living creature, capable of being harmed, but would one's first choice for damage to an artwork be that it had been harmed?

The person accused of the act, which he denies was criminal damage, was mentioned on the news again, his name one of many with which Ian Skelly had difficulties to-night. This time the man was said to have damaged the Rothko, which gives rise to this stupid thought :

Could a piece of art be damaged, but not harmed, if the damage were done in the right way? For, what if the damage actually, objectively (in art-critical terms), improved the piece, and, maybe, the living artist approved of it : no point, then, in restoring the work to how it had been before.

Actually, although I do not think that history claims that the fracturing to Duchamp's so-called Large Glass was deliberate, it was a ready-made that he adopted (i.e. rather than making the thing over again from new). But, of course, what Richard Hamilton did in the 60s was to make a re-creation of the work, and, not least as he could not have got the glass to fracture in the same way, it resembles its pre-facture appearance.

Hamilton's piece is on display at Tate Modern, and I take issue with the fact that the label does not draw attention to the fact that the original, some 40 years younger, is in Philadelphia or some such. That said, Duchamp approved what Hamilton had done (and, probably, Hamilton had his agreement before setting out), and I think that he went further, which was to say that, by signing it, it stood for the original for all purposes. My issue? You would only know that, if you knew it, and, if a friend, who had seen the original, asked you what you thought of the cracked glass, you would shake your head, not remembering any.

Finally, on this and as to Francis Bacon, the same Tate advised that he was such a keen reviser of his work that it had had to refuse permission for him to borrow key canvases from its holding : it knew very well that what Bacon would have returned would have been different works from what had been borrowed! If the works were in Gerhart Richter's private collection, no one would deny his right to the practice of overpainting earlier works, but might question his judgement, if not artistic integrity (which is abundant from the film Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011)).

If Bacon had broken into the Tate, with the assistance of one of his lovers, and worked on some canvases, would be have harmed them, by causing them to appear differently from the image in the catalogue and what people would expect to see if they wished to view what Turnage called Three Screaming Popes? Or would he have damaged them, but without harming them - and who knows what glories the Tate presented us from seeing to surpass what we have?

In the extreme case of Van Gogh, we might wish to say that his artistic legacy was not safe with him - but do we have a right, as an inheritance gives us, to remember someone for works that he would have destroyed. And so into, sadly, the moral debate about Max Brod and Franz Kafka, which I generally find rather sterile.


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

What satisfaction does a good - or better - novel give?

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

11 March

Of course, start by defining your terms - is On Chesil Beach (which Philip French probably thinks is a palaeontology manual) a novel or a novella? Maybe, just maybe, it depends - in part - on what the author calls it.

That said, I have a lovely red pepper sitting in my kitchen (well, it's on top of a mug), but, if I called it a novel, I doubt that anyone would approach it as one, but rather with a knife and / or some cheese, mushrooms and breadcrumbs.

So, peppers and McEwan (or even McEwan's lager) apart, you are reading this book, and a bit as if it's a lover keep wanting to spend time with it, and its takes you not quite where you wanted, but where you were content to be taken (because of the dialogue, the descriptions, the ideas, the characters...), right to the final word.

Is that better than when, as with Das Schloss (The Castle), that novel of Kafka's allegedly snatched from the fire to which he had mentally consigned it, there is no ending, as he did not finish it (although I think that it is Max Brod, the man who refused to destroy it and other works, who reports that Kafka had something in mind, and says what it is)?

Probably a pig to read it to that point - in whichever of numerous editions / translations comes one's way - not knowing, but would one, say, with Gogol's Dead Souls curse God and Man on finishing what we have and learning that there is no more, because - if we believe the story - the wrong MS, that of the reworked later part, was thrown into the fire?

Do things have to be wrapped up by the author, if he or she can, so that we can put the book down with a sigh of satisfaction, or can we declare, as I do with The Medusa Frequency and Angelica's Grotto, that the books are still great, even if it is clear enough - as debated elsewhere - that the books terminate with what, in musical terms, is a final cadence, but one that, for its formally ending, nonetheless smacks of an ending to be done with it as none other promoted itself in the mind of Russell Hoban.

And then, with that idea of an end to a symphonty* or like, we steer dangerously close - and so pull back, pretending that we touched the leg by mistake - to the labours left unfinished of Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler and the like (not to mention Fartov and Belcher).


End-notes

* I'm keeping that in, and I shall write to Peter Maxwell Davies, urging him to abandon the symphonic form (he's written at least four, after all), and compose a Symphonty instead!


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here