Showing posts with label Hamlet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hamlet. Show all posts

Tuesday, 2 July 2019

Yes, amazingly did not see Reservoir Dogs (1992) at the time¹

Reservoir Dogs (1992) - so what was all the fuss about... ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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1 July

Reservoir Dogs (1992) - so what was all the fuss about... ?


On this showing, it is less clear what in it caused the clamour for QT, but the story goes that Tony Scott directed Tarantino's screenplay for True Romance (1993), because the latter only had the chance to make one of them, and he chose Dogs : #UCFF thinks Scott's film far superior











 Except for those who like painting in blood – actually, a slick of it (do we question that ?), or so that, we are to believe (or are we ?), it perfectly soaks into one or two white shirts, to leave them uniformly dyed (with no streaks or other colour-variation) – it may not be immediately clear what, after the opening scene in the restaurant / diner, Dogs newly offered audiences that did not routinely depend on shock for effect.


Maybe it is that, as heralded or betokened by that opening (which therefore acts as a kind of synthesis of the elements of blood and brain ?), Tarantino seeks to set up a kind of bi-polar opposition to all this bloody physicality : maybe we also see these considerations applying in Kill Bill : Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004) ?



For the life of the flesh is in the blood : and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls ~ Leviticus 17 : 11a [KJV]




Considered in this way, Tarantino's aim may be akin to the purpose of the phlegmatic ‘calm before the storm’ in films made by The Allies during World War II (or to promote their messages afterwards) – or even the mysterious (dis)quietude of the mise-en-scène of Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter² [1957] ?


There is, for example, the highly protective tenderness of Mr White (Harvey Keitel) towards Mr Orange (Tim Roth), or how the latter’s throaty shouting³ is in contrast to moments of quieter conversation (when, for example, Mr Pink (Steve Buscemi) arrives, and White and he go aside to talk). Yet too much else, as we wait around in this space for 'something to happen'⁴, feels located - as in Beckettt's fame-making play⁵ En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) - in an excessively heady mood, as if it were a text-book on epistemology, or on irrationality in decision-making⁴.




Lacking the cunning and panache of Pulp Fiction (1994), Dogs still clearly does what Tarantino wanted – making a statement [of intent] and / or his mark. However, in later films under his direction, he has much better handled issues that are important to him, such as that of trust and its basis, and, in scripting them, the role of flashback and how to use it innovatively, which we see him rather noisily and boisterously trying out here.




#UCFF has some other things to say here about Tarantino and Kill Bill : Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004)


Yeah, you made me feel
Shiny and new :






Whenever Tarantino imagines us thinking Reservoir Dogs set, on its release, the notoriety around Madonna in 1992 was not these initial hits (on which the breakfast club egotistically dilates), but the music-video (lesbian kiss, S&M, etc.) and lyrics - Put your hands all over my body ? - of 'Erotica' (and, that year also, the publication of Sex)




End-notes :

 ¹ The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) was preparing for Tarantino's Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (2019), all 2h 39mins of it, by reprising his film career.

² We should recall that part of the Zeitgeist, into which both films were feeding, was Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) – with the edginess of the situation of Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon. (A film that, amongst other names, also boasted Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey and Jonathan Pryce.)

³ Which, at least, seems verging on homo-eroticism ?


Apart from ‘Nice Guy’ Eddie (Chris Penn) in particular, so many of the characters present as very hoarse, gruff, or both, as if thereby asserting – beyond (reasonable) question – their hard-ball, masculine status ? So much of this guff about the lyrics of 'Like a Virgin', or Larry grabbing / confiscating Joe's pocket-book, is really just posturing about 'Who's got the biggest dick ?'...


⁴ At times, do the reasons for any of the Reservoir Dogs, notably Mr Pink (Steve Buscemi), to stay where they are and / or their irresolution about doing so seem as flimsy as those of the two principals in Godot (i.e. that they are waiting for Godot) ? :

 Vladimir : Well ? Shall we go ?

Estragon : Yes, let’s go.

They do not move.


Artistically, as learnt from cinema, Tarantino has an attraction to stand-offs (and Reservoir Dogs finally resolves with / in one), but he uses this one in a stylistic way, without resolving it : that does not work as an unresolved chord would in music, because he gives the impression of having started that which he cannot (plausibly) finish by scripting - unlike a killer chess-move, or maybe Buscemi taking the legs from under Keitel (though, in this still, all the energy is in and from Keitel's stance)


 ⁵ One of the two posthumous biographies of Beckettt is called Damned to Fame.




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 10 November 2018

Four #UCFF Tweets about Searching for Ingmar Bergman (2018)

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

 26 October
Four #UCFF Tweets about Searching for Ingmar Bergman
(Vermächtnis eines Jahrhundertgenies) (2018)








 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 19 May 2014

An edited review of Dennis Russell Davies conducting Pärt, Glass and Adams in Cambridge

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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19 May




At full strength, Basel Symphony Orchestra has fifty string-players. Cambridge Corn Exchange has had many a huge orchestra occupy its stage, but it has probably never before entertained a programme comprising works such as those by Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass and John Adams in its regular concert series, as it did on Sunday 27 April – and rarely under a conductor as distinguished in his field as Dennis Russell Davies.

Whatever the three composers featured may have in common (Pärt, at least, rejects the popular description of minimalism), there is assuredly more that makes each one distinctive, as this review hopes to show.



Arvo Pärt – These Words…

This short piece was composed at the end of the last decade, and apparently (according to the publishers) uses material from a Slavonic Prayer, as well as alluding to Hamlet. The reference is not made explicit, but, just before the scene with the play performed by the theatrical troupe, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius says to him I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet. These words are not mine. (Act 3, Scene 2).

With the connivance of the leader of the players, Hamlet had interpolated the text with material designed to bring out guilty behaviour in Claudius. Yet afterwards, when Hamlet confronts his mother Gertrude, she says O, speak to me no more! These words like daggers enter in my ears. No more, sweet Hamlet. (Act 3, Scene 4).

All of these works employ percussion in a persuasive way. In These Words…, it is triangle, xylophone (marimba ?), cymbals, drums, and bell-sounds (not obviously tubular-bells), and, with them, strings. After a beginning filled with suspense, Pärt sets out his thematic material in the percussion instruments, and then introduces the bell-notes, with a descending interval between them.

With, at times, an oriental feel to the writing, he moves between plucked and bowed strings, evoking a sense of eeriness in the ensemble, and returning to the contrasting bell-notes, letting the second one sing – and then a pause / silence in which it lingers as part of the music. So is a fade to almost nothing, after which, in the spirit of Pierre Boulez, he puts the xylophone / marimba into the texture, not as an interjection, but an inner statement.

We seem to be tracing a very slow, but clear, life-sign, with the music conforming to its own measure. The strings swell, then diminish – momentarily (no more than a bar or two), the material has a different rhythm, then it ends, again with the sound of the bell. An excellent choice to open the concert !


Here, it is essential that the gesture of sounding a bell is germane and has poise : Davies so works with orchestras that the atmosphere that Pärt is seeking is wholly present. Likewise, a large group of strings bows together, yet playing piano, with the density of the texture, but not the immediacy of the sound.



Philip Glass – Cello Concerto No. 2 (‘Naqoyqatsi’)

Four times, Philip Glass has worked with director Godfrey Reggio on a film (the latest being Visitors (2013)), and turned the score for the previous film, Naqoyqatsi (2002) into his seven-movement Cello Concerto No. 2, thus subtitled.

Davies has recorded the work with the same soloist, Matt Haimovitz, but conducting the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Its movements all have titles, which may be those of cues from the film’s score, but they are not always self explanatory.

The concert performance had a moment of additional drama in that, at around the end of the sixth movement, one of Haimovitz’s strings – under a lot of pressure – broke. With aplomb and a string from a fellow cellist to hand, he effected the repair there and then in front of us, whilst Davies stood guard over the mood of the piece…

As mentioned, percussion is important in these pieces, but Glass also writes for tam-tam, struck cymbals, wood-blocks, and snare-drum : as the percussionists were at the back, and largely standing, one had a perfect view of what they were adding to the sound, and how carefully. In addition, the concerto is scored for harp, bassoon, horns, and other brass.


1. Naqoyqatsi
Strings and ‘parping’ horns open the work, before the soloist enters with intense drums and cymbals, and weighty cellos / double-basses. Straightaway, Haimovitz demonstrated a lovely sound with the ensemble, his part encompassing a variety of moods, including yearning.

A feature is the shifting tonality, and a tutti section features tubular-bell, and thrilling modulations. Later, cellos alone, then with basses, bring what is almost a trademark of Glass’ music : with, for want of a better term, circle-sounds, he does not literally inscribe a circle with complementary pairs of descending triplets, but it feels like it. He ends the movement with low-register cellos, joined by basses, brass, and percussion.


2. Massman
The second movement had Haimovitz playing sharpened notes, a tremolo effect, and even, later, quarter-tones. The orchestra interjects tutti, but overall that it feels a little like a trudge. Glass then writes high for the cello, and, with percussion giving an oom-pah effect, he momentarily seems to parody Shokstakovich’s own ‘ironic’ parodies. High-energy tutti, rich in brass, herald ‘circle-sounds’ again – now with a slightly sickening feel to the solo part. Before Haimovitz ended, at the bottom of his register, we had a fleeting evocation of Viennese style.


3 – 5. New World / Intensive Times / Old World

Taking these movements together, as they feel linked, we find (3) that tam-tam beats lead to suggestive solo-writing, resembling a gypsy fiddler. Now resembling a solo cello with an orchestra behind him, Haimowitz evoked not only tuning the instrument and the Bach solo cello Suites, but also harmonics, slide-notes, and ghostly tremolos by the cello’s bridge. Next (4), prominent tutti passages, featuring wood-blocks and snare-drum, which leads to haunting brass-writing in its ‘peachy’ register, accompanied by struck cymbals.

The movement develops to vary between driving inevitability and harmonic uncertainty, but bedding down before the end. Finally, (5), as with New World, another opening with the soloist - high, aetherial lines, followed by harp chiming in with an emerging phrase by sounding a descending interval. Generally, the movement feels similar to New World, but instead exploiting a rising interval.


6. Point Blank
A bouncy, but sinister, theme opens the movement, coarsened by a rasp from the brass. Yet it develops by seeming to pitch a descending minor third against a rising major third (?) from the soloist, with lurking snare-drum rhythms. After tutti sections, Haimowitz had writing that demanded intense slurring and sawing. Adamsian ‘Circle-sounds’ follow, but are undercut by descending, sneering brass and strings. Though the cello reaches out, it simultaneously feels constrained by brass and percussion, and ends meditating on one note.


7. The Vivid Unknown (when the broken string was being replaced, described by Davies as ‘the epilogue’)
The movement opens with a very expansive theme for solo cello, which, whilst it generally strives upwards, moves downwards. Cellos and basses contribute ‘circle-sounds’ as the cello has a vivid outpouring, only brought back to earth by the violins’ purity. The bassoon, there in the general texture, makes a weighty contribution, which gives way to more solo material. The bassoons then contributed, with a rising interval (a third ?), and, on beats from the tam-tam – in conjunction, with the other percussion ¬– the concerto came to an end.


The concerto’s origins may mean that the movements are necessarily more delineated than, say, in the work by John Adams after the interval : several began with the soloist introducing thematic material, or of a different character. Haimowitch gave a highly engaged performance. He had hesitated about premiering the work, but Glass had assured him that repeated matter could be varied according to context and his judgement.

All in all, with Pärt and Glass, a good first half, and one that introduced a post-modern approach to compositions that explore the dimensions of a small chosen realm in depth, but without much of the vividly atonal or even twelve-tone approaches that many composers of the last forty or fifty years have embraced.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday, 9 May 2014

From 11F2 to you : But the delivery service never makes a mistake

This is a review of The Lunchbox (Dabba) (2013)

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8 May

This is a review of The Lunchbox (Dabba) (2013)

A beautiful film about the things that we say, and transport of all kinds (e.g. by train, emotionally, and to convey), The Lunchbox > (Dabba) (2013) is prudently packed with metaphors, none of which are leant on, but which give great richness.

It is rightly said that Irrfan Khan (Saajan Fernandes) excels in this film, which he does by pacing, by small facial gestures, and by his sheer humanity, but so does Nimrat Kaur as Ila, with the central group of characters completed by Nawazuddin Siddiqui (Shaikh) and Yashvi Puneet Nagar (Yashvi). Other characters, we either never see (Auntie, played by Bharati Achrekar), or might as well not have (Nakul Vaid’s Rajeev) : Auntie, though invisible, proves more kindred than some.



The film, set in Mumbai, revolves around trains, but without ever being about them, except as passing social commentary on the Westernizing influence of, amongst various matters, commuting. It starts and ends with a train, pleasantly leaving us in the dark, right in the beginning, as to what we see, but later letting us sometimes be one step ahead of the game. The central medium of the lunchbox, carried far and wide, bears many an import : as blind Cupid, the happenstance that other modern styles of media (such as Twitter®) can give rise to*, as a barometer of the feelings and of interest and appreciation (Twitter® again, with fire-fights, or e-mail (also mentioned, but unseen)), and of what sharing is, whether of food with another (we see some highly contrasting contrasting meals) or via the delivery service.

Sending something of oneself to another place, and what life is and concerns itself best with, these are the matters that The Lunchbox devotes itself to**. Unafraid to look matters such as stagnation, ageing, death, suicide and the content of a lifespan in the face, the film sets them in relief against the revolutionizing potential for good in (being open to) change. Hopes and fears, encouraged or allayed by Auntie at first, transmute into the aspiration for a place elsewhere, which could be Bhutan, which is not shown (but maybe familiar from Michael Palin’s excellent series Himalaya).

En route, the façades that, if we are honest with ourselves, we all should know that we put up of withdrawing into our nutshell and becoming ‘the king of infinite space’ (Hamlet), or, equally, of embracing some new way without heed to its impact on ourselves and / or on others – taking a lover, ‘exploiting’ an opportunity, closing our heart. Clinging on to what we find that we have really been resenting or needlessly protecting is exemplified by the realization made by Ila’s mother, or by the little girl who shuts Fernandes out from what he can see (symbolically, too), whereas his sense of something good, right and different is palpable when we see him open the lunchbox, almost as if the aroma came to us alongside how fine the food looks.

Yes, it is partly what some like to call magical realism, with the delivery system that has been endorsed by Harvard Business School as the engine for change with a life of its own (despite the customer-service response from the local representative’s denials), but this is not the hackneyed topos of the mystique and draw of India that The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) depicts.

Instead, writer / director Ritesh Batra has fully absorbed the examples given by works such as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, and there is a seamless integration of medium and polymath message. Neither a rough ride, nor striving just to feel good, this film even gives us little flavours of themes such as those of The Double (2013) (in the government offices, devoid of technology, and of people seeking to get / hang on), and maybe even The Matrix (1999), in looking beyond the life that we take for life…

With camera-angles to wallow in and a controlled use of light, not to mention an insightful triptych mirror-scene, the film is as wonderfully put together as it is acted. Max Richter, in at the start with his score, is on very good form, and the result of this endeavour is a film that is moving and intelligent : it does not just entertain, but with the pretence of a big message of Small is beautiful (You’ve Got Mail (1998)), or needlessly and provocatively revel in the epistolary power to corrupt (in Christopher Hampton’s adaptation for Dangerous Liaisons (1988)), but engages with the questions that we may avoid even acknowledging as twentieth-century citizens.


End-notes

* Though the Comedy of Errors and Romeo and Juliet, more than 400 years ago and to name but two, both manage very well in rely on the potential for, respectively, fortuitous and calamitous (mis)communication…

** And it may not just be coincidence, for what it is worth, that Khan is part of Slumdog Millionaire (2008).

*** Almost racist in its suggestion of the primitivism of different ways, just as the very flawed Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) feels to be in its transplanted setting of the Catalonian capital for the original one of Los Angeles.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 3 August 2013

Only God forgives – so you’re dog-meat !

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3 August

* Contains spoilers *


I doubt that one can look for morality in this tale of Only God Forgives (2013), no more so, say, than in Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi, or Ford’s ’Tis Pity she’s a Whore – not to say that there are not motivations, codes of behaviour, because there are, and it is their inconsistency with each other that leads to conflict, death, slaughter.

Slaughter is the word for it, in its purest sense – despatching a beast with some ceremonial, even if not with the supposed aim of the abattoir to be humane about what is done in the service of butchery. In others’ responses, I detect an air of if not revulsion, then distaste, in wanting to relish this film, not so much as if it were a guilty pleasure as if it were immoral to say that one had watched it – might or would watch it again…


I am unsure about whether that is right, whether there is a moral issue, and find myself wondering whether director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011), which has more propulsion from Ryan Gosling than here (where he plays Julian), is so far away : are we rooting for Gosling’s character Driver because he seems ‘selflessly’ to be risking his own well-being, life, future to protect Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her family, whom he comes to know and then she turns out to have a soon-to-be ex-convict husband ? That excuses the violence, the brutality that, bidden, seem to erupt from Driver, because it is in the knight’s service of a lady ?

We really know little about Driver’s inner life, however he has existed with his underpaid garage job and bare dwellings, because he seems to have no needs other than looking at and knowing Los Angeles and using that in the thrill of his night job – of course, we approve of him, because our film head allows us to reckon that the burglaries / robberies are of a faceless kind where there is no real victim, or, if there is a victim, then Driver is only the driver, and we want him to do what his name says, and get away.

And morality ? Is it really any more present in Drive than in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) and Vol. 2 (2004), for, in a world where X is killing Y because of – or to avoid – the death of Z, we stand back, willing The Bride (Uma Thurman) on since she seems more sinned against than sinning. Whatever the history of revenge may be, and whether we choose to trace it back to Aeschylus or to Cain and Abel, the phrase an eye for an eye (and a tooth for a tooth is part of our culture :

Which is where we come to this film’s portentous-sounding title, which has the ring of being a Biblical / Shakespearean / classical text, but without identifiably* being one : do we watch the film, bearing in mind that there seems no evidence that anyone facing, as the case might be, severance, immolation or decapitation (a sort of one-armed bandit of death, if the ‘right’ line of three comes up), appears to be preparing to meet any sort of maker ? If we do, then I think that the issue of immorality disappears – no one here is seeking any sort of forgiveness, only a craven avoidance of death or other penalty.

But not quite everyone : when requested, the man who aided the failed ambush on the police in the eating-place / bar goes into a corner in the shadows and writes his excuse, which is read by Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), and then handed to one of his officers. We have no more notion than that of what the man has to say for himself, and there is then a moment of uncertainty until Chang acts – when he does so, the story moves on, and we do not know what effect, if any, ‘the excuse’ had… Except that, in this respect, the film is explicit about crime and punishment, so can we suppose that he received clemency (of some sort) ?

If by immorality it is not the downward spiral of retribution to which people object (which haunts A Midsummer Night’s Dream just as fully as it does the graphic bloodiness of Titus Andronicus, to which, to King Lear, and to the Sophoclean Theban trilogy of plays concerning Oedipus there is more than a shallow nod), but the tribal, self-appointed justice of the police through the offices of Chang, then I am at a loss to follow the argument or experience the feeling.

The echoes that I have mentioned are there, and I shall explore them at greater length in a separate posting, but musically, in tone, in plot, and in modes that essentially consist of stasis (fixed poses, unblinking gazes, etc.), slow motion (for example, slowly receding down or proceeding along corridors, as if of a maze) and sudden activity (Julian chasing Chang, Chang enacting vengeance, or Chang chasing the man whom he gives a Bob-and-Vic-type treatment) I was hugely put in mind of Enter the Void (2009).

As to music, I found it as unsubtle, because I was fully aware, say, that the only tension in the scene where Mai (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam) seems – if the scene happens in reality, not imagination – to be masturbating in from of Julian after tying his arms to a chair came from the chordal disharmony, which I mentally stripped away, and the visuals were devoid of it. Since, in these terms, the soundtrack was too much on the surface, too obvious, I could not help detaching it at other times, such as the early appearance of Kristin Scott Thomas as Crystal, Julian’s mother, and a moment that, better done, could have been laden with the significance that was sought. With Void, I could likewise not help being aware that the cinematic effect was largely created by an attempt to manipulate the viewer and create sensation that was lacking from the screen itself.

My recollection is of an over-indulgent sense of stasis in that film, connected largely with the use of drugs – as here, drug-induced crime leads to dislocation, mayhem, revenge, and I cannot claim, ever since Robert de Niro was shown stoned in Once Upon a Time in America (1984), to have found those under the influence a source of fascination, whether going ‘to meet the devil’ as Billy (Tom Burke) does, or sitting staring on a sofa. If either film sees itself as a meditation on death or the truths of life, it falls far short for me :

Void felt pretentious, and Only God feels too much like a mash-up to be more than pastiche, whether referencing (slightly) The Matrix (1999) and the film-world that influenced The Wachowskis in making it, or William Shakespeare’s bloodier moments, as well as the softer ones that we see in Julian, both in would-be revenger Hamlet, or in Macbeth, needing Lady Macbeth (equals Crystal ?) to stir him to the pitch where he can murder Duncan.

I believe that Only God is a step or two in the wrong direction from the impact of Drive, which impelled the viewer – this viewer found more in the naivety and yet, with it, un-guessed-at ferocity of Driver than in the sub-Freudian musings behind portraying Billy, Julian, Mai and Crystal.

Our film-maker may believe that he is using reflectiveness and moments of quiet to speak to us, but the techniques are so evident that, unless he intends an alienation to make us step back from the detail of the action and view it as a sort of ballet, as a sort of death-laden dance in the spirit of Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996), he simply fires up our critical faculties to unpick what plot there is and whether it hangs together. In that respect, a response very like that to Holy Motors (2012).


More to come


End-notes

* The Internet / Google does not help much here with a search, because it is laden with references to the film, but The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations does.


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Thursday, 17 May 2012

Twitter® is old hat*

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18 May

We keep reinventing the telegram, first with text-messages, and then with what is fondly thought of as a revolution in communications, this whole Twatter Splatter, where all these messages are generated to divert from the reality that, in just tens of years, it'll all be going on, if at all, with none of the same personnel.

But the truth is simply this: back in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare had to pitch every new idea for a play in the tweet form - give you it in just 140 characters.

The Bard could put over Hamlet like that, but Could you?**


End-notes

* But most of us haven't known, since the days of Laurence Sterne, that the term refers to the female genitals.

** Cousin Marmaduke and I have since taken up my own clannege (? = challenge?) with - I think - creditable attempts by each at a major Shakespeare tragedy on Twitter: by all means do what you like with us then, but find us there!


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Sunday, 11 March 2012

A voice from my past

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11 March

It was a surprise to hear Paul Guinery on Radio 3 this afternoon.

Not that he hasn’t been around as a presenter in recent months (unless my mind / memory is playing tricks), but because he was on the air, this time, as a guest of Sean Rafferty’s on In Tune, talking about his CD, Delius and his Circle. In conversation with Sean, Paul talked about composers of piano music such as Percy Grainger and E. J. Moeran, and engagingly played some of their pieces.

Apart from hearing Paul reading the news and announcing of late, I had not known of him in years. Although I do not know when he stopped being a regular voice on Radio 3, I do recall corresponding with him* in the late 1980s, when it was my joy to be able to listen to the radio through headphones when I was at work, which must have been around the time that, for their participation in Comic Relief, I received a photograph of all the presenters with red noses on (and even a rather suggestively placed one for the microphone).

The topic of our exchange of letters was the abolition of the feature Book of the Week, which was essentially a resource for when - one way or another - there were minutes to spare, and then the link person could dip into that week's book and read aloud (as well as at other scehduled times).

A serendipity about it was appealing (to me, at least, and I am sure that Paul said that he missed its passing), and it led to my reading several Books of the Week on the strength of what I heard read. In one case, it was a biography of Thomas More, whose Utopia I already knew (in translation, since I believe that it was written in Latin), and I was also familiar with several images, one famous, in the National Portrait Gallery. Sadly, the only thing that I take from that book is (and I quote from memory):

Every man thinketh that his own shit smells sweet



Equally, another Paul, Paul Griffiths, whom I knew as a writer of books about music (including his Concise History of Modern Music (for Thames & Hudson), turned up as a guest of Ian McMillan on The Verb, talking about his 'labour of love', Let Me Tell You, which had taken years to write (although short):

Taking, essentially, as some sort of principle the notion that less is more, and that, by restricting the means available, one can challenge oneself and produce wonders (which is under the umbrella of what Oulipo**, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, stands for), Paul limited himself to writing a novel about, broadly, Hamlet's story, but told from Ophelia's perspective, and only using the vocabulary of some 400 to 500 words that she has in all her lines in the Shakespeare play.

The result is powerful. Strange, too, but one soon loses the temptation to turn to the text of Hamlet and referee what this other Paul has done. When he talked about the endeavour on air, the inventiveness was patent, and he explained to his host Ian how, for example, the fact that Ophelia only uses the word 'father' (referring, of course, to Polonius) means that circumlocution is always involved in talking about Polonius' wife, Ophelia's mother, which he makes a feature of the book, and of Ophelia's (and Polonius') relations with her.

The words in Ophelia's vocabulary, though, have been used in any sense that they admit: so 'rue', from her famous garland, is not just a noun for a herb, but can appear as a verb, and that is only the simplest example of what has been done by Paul Griffiths in Let Me Tell You. If, as a reader, one knows the play reasonably well, one will be taken short from time to time at just how much has been done with such a small resource, and almost every chapter has a different feel to it, some of them, at the end (almost necessarily), being very dark.


End-notes

* Memory being what it is, and my cat having propelled a pile of papers from off the shelf in 'the office' in such a way that the letter was uppermost, I can now say that Donald Macleod was, in fact, my correspondent: in his letter, added to a standard one dated 31 March 1989, he informed me that the Controller of Radio 3, John Drummond, had objected to having a Book of the Week on the basis that readings from it, in odd gaps, did not relate to the surrounding programmes.

It seems that Donald missed Book of the Week, too, but that the idea of having readings from diaries was that they would relate to the date of broadcast. (True, but Drummond does not seem to have realized that such readings had no more necessary relevance to the programmes being broadcast that day than an abritrary book, and I cannot say how long such readings lasted.)


** Curiously, on the Wikipedia® web-page for Oulipo, the list of members as at 2011 bears this qualification: Note that Oulipo members are still considered members after their deaths.


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Monday, 23 January 2012

Eric Morecambe and the evils of e-mail (1)

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

23 January

In the days of love letters, being given them back was an unavoidable, physical demonstration of the desire for separation, of severance*.

Hard to think what the e-mail equivalent is (especially for those who have what I view as a mania for purging their inbox, and keep virtually nothing anyway, as they have already done it). Equally hard to conceive of what asking for something 'by return' means, as against with an item of correspondence received in the post.

Which brings us on to Eric, who, as a set-piece (turn, party-piece, trick, etc.), used to throw (or, maybe, feign to throw) something into the air, which he would then catch in the large, invariably brown, paper-bag - with a sort of 'plop', as the bag received it.


A metaphor, in our minds, for what (for it was magical in its way, every time)?:

* Capturing what can't otherwise be seen (cloud-chambers and particle-colliders)?

* Hans Christian Andersen and his little tale (lovingly told by the University of Southern Denmark)?

* Hamlet on the limits of Horatio's 'philosophy'?

* Or what about this: how can you see the tears shed when a letter was written and which smudged the ink, or the sweat of Beethoven's effort of composition, if it's, respectively, actually an e-mail or a page of a score, printed from an inbox or a web-page?


And the evils (which I am in no way laying at Eric's door)?

1. Well, how many times have you turned out to have imagined that you replied to an e-mail, when you must merely have run through, in your mind, what you would say, when you had the chance - and maybe even fondly hoped to jog your memory, by marking the message as 'unread'? Which is more real: Eric's stone (or whatever it is) or the imagined reply?

Contrast the entirely fictional reply with writing a letter (by hand, or typing it - and, if not using an actual typewriter, then printing it), signing it, addressing the envelope, sealing the letter inside, affixing a stamp (maybe having to buy one first, and wince at the price), and going to a postbox (maybe even having to find one first) where you post it - rather hard to have a false memory about all that, though, I will grant you, if the item cannot be posted (for want of a stamp, a postbox, or even the address), it can lurk in the car or a jacket pocket, where it was put in the hope of making it into the post some time soon...


2. Oh, and there's the over-hasty response (hard to be hasty with the process outlined above and do what some call 'fire-fighting'!);

3. There's sending your e-mail to the wrong person (and letters, too, can be switched, in error, between a pair of more of intended recipients);

4. Including to yourself, if you find a message of your own to which there has appeared no response (the other extreme - the message comes back straightaway and it's horrible, or you wait in vain for it), and, instead of pressing the 'forward' button, the 'reply' button is pressed, so it later shows up in your inbox, if you start some other task;

5. And those missing replies - did your message ever reach the addressee, or did his or hers not reach you (mimicking the post)?;

6. Unless you attach the intended document(s) at the time when you write about them, false memory is all too possible about that (but my 'send' function has the trick of spotting the words 'attach' or 'attachment', and prompts me as to whether I intended to send a message with no attachment) - but one can, just about, manage to post an empty envelope;

7. The attachment that you cannot open (either because it shows as one, but doesn't seem to be there, or because, say, it has a DOCX file-extension, and you don't have that version of WOrd) has, as far as I can see, no equivalent with the physical posting of a document;

8. Nor has pressing the button to send your message and then seeing a howler, which can't be corrected (although one can, for other reasons, have just posted something, and wish that one had long arms, or the postbox a backlog of letters, so that it can be retrieved);

9. Not everyone likes spam, but I find some of the gambits that the senders dream up to make me interested quite entertaining, and, for those who are prudish, junk mail has no equivalent;
10. Finally, back to missing messages, the one that 'gets delayed' and so you only see news of a good concert (or training course - whatever the event may be) when it is too late to do anything about it - or there is just so much in the inbox that, although it was there all along, it got overlooked.


QED


[Continued, in a way, at: http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.com/2012/02/eric-morecambe-and-evils-of-e-mail-2.html]



End-notes


* As Eric retorted in that crazy Egyptian skit (I think that it was Glenda Jackson as Cleopatra) to Ernie's question 'Have you got the scrolls?', 'No, I always walk like that!'.
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Sunday, 25 September 2011

Wakeful in an eternity of emptiness

This is a review of Sleeping Beauty (2011)

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

25 September

This is a review of Sleeping Beauty (2011)

When, in Sleeping Beauty, an elderly man with a white beard (whom we have seen before, and know that he is a pining widower) starts a story that is, frankly, of little real interest, but just an attempt (where others throughout the film may have failed) to be weighty, I nearly did decide to take my eyes off his face and just listen - in the hope, even, that sleep might come (of which Macbeth’s character speak so highly, if not Hamlet’s, likening death to it in ‘what dreams may come’, etc.).

Would that I had either given into that temptation or of making this film the fifth thing that I did not see through to the end in this Festival, because Sleepless in Seattle almost has more to say about life, and without being so needlessly portentous (maybe even, with the same crew, You’ve Got Mail). Whatever journey someone thought that this film was taking the viewer on was not, as far as I am concerned, worth the shoe-leather.

A series of things was presented that were probably intended to make one more feel uncomfortable (although the word ‘series’ might suggest a progression, or some intelligence behind aching voids of silence, slow fades, the blackness before the next scene, etc., which were like forces pulling in contrary directions) – oh, and some of them do, as certain forms of self-willed violence or appropriation almost always will, but, if they do, it might help if there were some basis for them.

I really do not think that the essential premise is tenable, when, whatever the poster might suggest, Emily Browning (as Lucy (Melissa?)) is no pre-Raphaelite beauty (except in terms of hair colour, but certainly not stature, poise or demeanour), makes a noisy job of pouring wine or a brusque one of offering brandy, and does not even seem – although a few books and papers are strewn around in a scene towards the end – very convincing as a student.

And as a student of what – is what we are shown in the lecture-room (analysis of a game of go, and some incomplete notation that is being chalked on the board earlier on) founded on some sort of notion of what games theory or the mathematics behind it is like?

Lucy’s motivation to do what she does is clear enough – she can, she wants to, and she needs money, although, rather slowly, she begins to wonder what she is doing. I begin to wonder what Clara is doing, too, if where she gives various men free rein, but with a fairly arbitrary (and irrelevant) restriction, really is her home – she is supposed to be running some sort of comprehensive ring of young women like Lucy, but that aspect quickly appears more or less forgotten about, I suspect, because she is really needed to bolster the lack of engagement and energy in the role (and playing) of Lucy, and so has to give her personal attention.

However, attention given to Lucy and Clara’s antics will not, I fear, be repaid.


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