More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 October
* Contains spoilers *
I will always make time to try to see a Hitchcock - as, broadly, with any film - in the cinema.
Often enough, it is a restoration, and the BFI has done a fair bit of that recently with his early films. There may be one screening (or a limited number), but one can usually hope to make it.
However, when the strand at this year's Cambridge Film Festival put on twelve films in the only eleven days that it ran*, there were inevitably going to have to be compromises, if trying to do all of them did not become an aim in itself, dictating that one could not see nearly as much of others' work. I therefore chose to limit myself to three (although, if domestic arrangements had permitted, I would happily have made an excuse to reacquaint myself with North by Northwest (1959)).
Vertigo (1958), I have already found time to talk about separately here, which leaves Blackmail (1929) and Marnie (1964), very different times, as we needed to be treated to piano accompaniment to the former. (Sadly, the festival web-site does not credit the pianist for his superb work, but I am able to name John Sweeney, because I have spotted his name in the programme (where I least expected it).)
I think that there may be similarities and preoccupations that I can identify, and, straightaway, is the fact that Hitchock is drawn to making the woman the criminal wrongdoer in all three films (whatever others may have done, it is her guilt and whether she can escape from it that is our point of attention): is Hitchcock giving us, deep down, what we want, or what he really wants (they may be the same thing)?
The contrast is with the Cary Grant figure, not just in NBNW, who is often enough a spy or a policeman (although, in the named film, he has to choose his allegiance, once he has worked out what is going on). I am just guessing, when I should really find out, that Hitchcock may have become influenced by, and even have experienced, the world of psychoanalysis that was so prevalent. Whether or not be believed in it, a film such as Marnie typifies the embodiment in Hollywood cinema of Freudian or sub-Freudian thinking and beliefs, for we are shown a young woman both shaped by her past and with recollections, which she cannot understand for herself, of what that past really means.
The scenes where Marnie ('Tippi' Hedren) relates to her mother (Diane Baker) - or, rather, doesn't relate to her mother, except on the most basic, human level - are almost too painful to watch: there is a torn, broken relationship, although the ties are there. The unfolding of the film tells us what really happened, why Marnie experiences what she does, and the forgetting that is usual in these films is here exposed by Sean Connery's dogged detrmination (as Mark Ruland) to find out the truth, because of the woman whom he loves. Revelation, redemption, renewal is almost the pattern.
In her book In Glorious Technicolor, Francine Stock considers, whether or not it was any more than cinematic convention, this prevalent presentation of one startling breakthrough in recollection or insight that will change everything (itself a sort of version of the American dream of anyone 'making it', and going from rags to riches, by suggesting that the transformation could be so strightforward and simple), which dominated this type of psychiatric or psychological film for a long time: the pattern, as she expounds it, is clearly there in Spellbound (1945), with, there, a male suspected of murder (Gregory Peck) and Ingrid Bergman as the psychiatrist who achieves the breakthrough.
Unlike the women in Blackmail, Vertigo, and Marnie, Peck's character is accused of wrongdoing, but is not ultimately guilty of it. Turning to the first of those, Anny Ondra (as Alice White) has left clues of what she did in self-defence, and they dog her for much of the film. When seemingly free of them, what Hitchcock clevely does is pull the rug from under us that there had been a common understanding, with her policeman boyfriend (John Longden), as to what was being covered up. It is too late, but what, maybe we wonder, will become of them, and what did he think that he was hushing up?
End-notes
* Not to be critical, but this was more of a season than a strand, and I do wonder whether there might be scope for bringing some of them back together so that those who, like I, wanted to see films that may never appear can see some new ones, some maybe not so new.
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Showing posts with label In Glorious Technicolor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label In Glorious Technicolor. Show all posts
Sunday 28 October 2012
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!
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(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!
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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).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(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).
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