Light, glass, dust : Aesychlus meets Strindberg in Chess of The Wind* (1976) (work in progress)

This is a response (work in progress) to Chess of The Wind** (1976), streamed during London Film Festival 2020

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

13 October

This is a first-blush response (work in progress) to Chess of The Wind (1976),
streamed during London Film Festival 2020**, in a 4K restoration, on BFI Player

Not, as one might have predicted from the title, a re-run of Victor Sjõstrõm, but equally not nearly as Bergmanesque as seeing people's comments in passing had led one to believe :

Yes, the finery was gorgeous, and the shots of the house*** are almost too exquisitely set up, but that is only to expose a contrasting brutality in self-interest and settling scores that smacks of ancient origins in works such as The Oresteia. Thematically, Bergman did employ such primal sources, but this film does not try to reproduce either his feel for doing so, or his look - if Bergman makes things appear staged and / or unrelaxed, he does so for other purposes.


Lady Aghdas, with her cat and acquired 'flail' (a miniature ball and chain), is perhaps a little too much like a Bond villain, and Shaban, one of her stepfather's adoptive sons, seems modelled on Marcel Proust (for looks), but this is a film where two or three major characters each have a held (i.e. deliberate) moment of looking straight to camera, so it would be unrealistic to try to construe the film-making as naturalism, or in any way an unknowing enterprise. Therefore, without explicitly saying that the figures depicted have archetypal qualities or might have populated Mt Olympus, there are folkloric or fairy-tale elements (such as of djinns or Bluebeard's castle), and Chess also has us flirt with the notion of Lady Macbeth's mental lability, or of Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, cracking under investigative pressure from Porphyry.


For some, a film such as this, and the finding of the negatives and making a 4K restoration, will be wonderful in their own terms ; for others, who think it good, it may stand more as an artefact of history, not in seeming 'dated' as such, but in pointing to the work of others who may have seen it in some degraded form (or just heard tell of it) in between, and to other cinemas (The Handmaiden (2016), for example, shares ground with it - as did, before it, The Wicker Man (1973) ?)



[...]



End-notes :

* Or The Chess-Game of The Wind ?

** An artefact of the streaming, on #UCFF's set-up, was to introduce a hiccup at what seemed one-second intervals (built-in thinking time, or an involuntary Verfremdungseffekt, for a reviewer ?) :

Unfortunately, using the @BFI Player demonstrated, yesterday and to-day*, that 'blasting brilliant new cinema into your front room' won't work effectively with #UCFF's set-up.

* Although not the latest cinema, but, respectively, Chess of The Wind (1976) and The Cheaters (1929).

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 14, 2020

*** Whose exterior we finally see properly at the end, before the camera lifts off, and pointedly surveys the sky-line, which is clearly contemporary to the film's being made. (Arguably, after a disappearance into the hinterground of a character in whose look A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) seems rooted, the shot could have been more effective with an elevation to take in the façade, but without the pan (less is more ?) ?)


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

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)

That is to say writer, director and critic Olivier Assayas, and, likewise, Stig Björkman, who has also written books of interviews with Bergman, Lars von Trier and - if one may still say so - Woody Allen [the last two published by @FaberBooks : https://t.co/NwNEFOgfj7]. pic.twitter.com/IJuC6WvwrC

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 11, 2018

* On account of all those elements of Macbeth and Hamlet, is von Trotta imputing to Block's prayer (after washing his face) the context of the 'my offence is rank' speech of Claudius ? :

'My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.'

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 27, 2018

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

When Bergman rejoices in opera's absurdities...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

18 December

The creatures in Bergman’s Magic Flute were the most delightful things I’ve seen in a long time. What a treat. #bfi 🐻 🐇 🦇 #needwalrusemoji

— Snowman Barraclough 🎄☃️ (@EssBarraclough) December 21, 2017

As one would expect from Bergman, no suggestiveness, allure, desire or sex in this moment, where a length of wood (or flute) floats freely from the open hands of two men as three eager young women with black cloaks and pronounced décolletage look on in pleasure.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 19, 2017

"Ingmar Bergman does Mozart with gusto."

As The Magic Flute serenades BFI Southbank, read @SightSoundmag's archival review https://t.co/nAHHND7oPg pic.twitter.com/NRGMFgBszk

— BFI (@BFI) March 17, 2018

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

Mysteries of Lisbon: The varieties of self-destruction

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

1 March

* Contains spoilers *

If I hadn't given the game away in the title, and you told me that you, as I did last night, went into a film for 6.40* and - including a 15-minute interval - did not come out until minutes before 11.30, I'd have asked if you had been watching the full version of Fanny and Alexander (1982).

Actually, not just because of the scale**, I had that film on my mind, and, in the interval between the parts, tried to engage one known from last year's Festival-going with that conceit. (Actually, I should have known better from having said, then, that I had taken my chance, when I could, to see The Seventh Seal on the big screen that it would not be a good thing to air it***.)

As with that earlier conversation, I was met with the notion that Bergman's films are chamber works (and so are just as perfectly seen at home), which The SS, waves pounding on the cliffs and beach, patently isn't. (And nor, for my money, is Fanny and Alexander, despite its domestic roots, but the suggestion was that the proper comparison was with The Forsyte Saga.)

Still, after the (welcome) interval, my belief that a debt is owed to Fanny and Alexander (its being set in a different century notwithstanding, and, really, nothing to do with what I felt that Bergman had demonstrated in that film) did not abate with continued viewing. As to the Galsworthy link, I do not see it myself, any more than I was really reminded of Buddenbrooks (2008) (of which I thought, as of a longer film, but then dismissed), because both are dynastic in a way that Mysteries of Lisbon truly is not.

What I did get put in mind of, momentarily, was The Leopard (1963) in the scenes of nobility in their finery, but, unlike in Visconti's film, I had the feeling that some extras in some scenes just did not move or look as if they belonged in their elaborate clothes, i.e. it seemed that they were not used either to the costumes, or to what those wearing them in that period would have done.

Mention was made, in the film (I forget where), of Ann Radcliffe, and (apart from its usefulness now) I still rue having been required to read her Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) - on the slender basis that it would inform Northanger Abbey. Sixty years later, Branco's novel, from which Mysteries of Lisbon derives, clearly took a cue from the title of Radcliffe's book.

However, although the film does yield answers, it casually replaces them with nearly as many mysteries (though some may be created by sheer fatigue in concentrating on a set of interconnecting stories for so long - as against two unrelated films of the same duration - and having to remember who everyone is): by contrast, the Austen text presents us with a world where, despite appearances to the contrary, an utterly rationalistic approach is capable of explaining everything, however spooky or sinister.

Not that Austen (in this and other books) is necessarily always meaning to show us what a nincompoop everyone but her narrator is, but one could be forgiven for thinking so. Father Dinis, for all that he delves into mysteries (as well as creating them), is, in this respect, more like Chesterton's Father Brown, having a healthy respect for others' capacity to set out to mystify him, but at the same time teasing out those things that can be caused to yield to the joint attack of persistence and intellect.

And I would be very interested to know, if I can look into the matter at some point, why I was so put in mind, by this Portuguese film, of the works of the late Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges (as well as struck by the beauty of at least two of the female members of the cast).


End-notes

* And still didn't manage to avoid these over-energized trailers that just leave you in the wrong state of mind to watch the film that you paid to see, let alone that incessant VW Ghostbusters [(1984)] mess about 'seeing films differently', as against seeing the same damn' thing every time!

** IMDb claims that FaA only clocks in at 188 mins, as compared to 266 mins for MoL, but I shall rummage for a better reckoning of its true intended length (even if a version may have been released at that duration of around three hours)...

Yes, according to the running times of the two DVDs on which it was released by Artificial Eye, it is 309 mins (i.e. 5 h, 9 mins).

*** It is almost a commonplace that Bergman is - is supposed to be - a director on the small scale, and thus that his films can conveniently be viewed from a DVD on a smaller screen: to me, that makes as little sense as suggesting that seeing / hearing / feeling string quartets played live adds nothing to one's appreciation, and that one might as well listen to one's favourite recording on CD instead.


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