Showing posts with label James Stewart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Stewart. Show all posts

Sunday, 28 December 2014

Revisiting City of Angels (1998) after The Matrix (1999) (and Drive (2011))

This is a review / exploration of City of Angels (1998)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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28 December

This is a review / exploration of City of Angels (1998) (re-watched on DVD)




Appearing just before The Matrix (1999), City of Angels (1998) somehow inhabits a benign version of its city of also black-costumed guardians : there, Morpheus, Trinity, and Neo enter it from their reality, based in a submarine-like craft*, beyond The Matrix itself** – and are effectively (in the sense of an immune system) infections that Agents Smith, Brown and others (the guardians of that system) seek to locate and destroy. In City of Angels, Seth, unseen with his fellows, is a guardian of the angel variety (hence Los Angeles).

However, the idea of being watched over might not yet be counter to the spirit of enjoyment that is willing to entertain the framing-story of Capra’s now-classic It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), with Clarence (Henry Travers) ‘getting his wings’ (against a divine backdrop) through the saving of George Bailey and family (James Stewart, Donna Reed (Mary Bailey) and Thomas Mitchell (Uncle Billy)). It’s A Wonderful Life supposedly was a failure on its release, but is part of Christmas for many***. After the opening sequence, the God perspective, which is present throughout Meg Ryan’s (Dr Rice’s) involvement with Seth (Nicolas Cage), is downplayed in, and into, some moments of comedy (or fun).

Even so, when we have George, surveying the world that there would have been without him – a befuddled, slow-to-comprehend George**** (partly under the influence of cheap booze) – the mood, of course, is dismal, stark, chilling. And, for some, seeing how George has been put upon, disappointed, and ended up making sacrifices is too much to be balanced by how the film eventually closes : cruel vignette after vignette that show the optimism and hope of youth turned to 'service' and 'duty'*****.


Which brings us back to the angels, and whether contemplating them is a help to us : Messenger (Dennis Franz) and Cassiel (Andre Braugher) are the ones whom we come to know (alongside, and in relation to, Seth). Some of us, in a God-empty universe, might revolt at the notion that, in a lapse of attention, an air-traffic controller could, by the unfelt touch of an invisible angel, be brought back down to ground (pun not intended, but still included) – from thoughts of domestic matters to a flight on his screen that he has overlooked.

For some have to rejoice instead in asserting a post-Nietzschean world – preferring that to what are viewed as the empty comforts of religion (and ignoring the force of logic in Pascal’s Wager ?). In this film, Maggie Rice is seen, seeking to be rationalistic about the world and mortality (and even talking to herself, trying to get herself to believe it), but hurting with the fact of ‘losing’ her patient (Mr Balford) on the operating-table – whom Seth was, in parallel, tasked with taking to eternal realms.

Only a little licence that Maggie should take it so personally, because cardiac surgeons may well be bound, at times, both to examine themselves for what they may have done wrong, and to feel solely responsible for battling against death. Seth says that he has been struck by how hard Maggie fights, and believes that she could see him, ready to take Mr Balford away. From there on, and with Messenger’s help, their appreciation of the realities of their positions occupies the bulk of the film, with Seth (as does Neo) needing to test his powers to find out who he is.

It is a film infused by the theology and iconography of Milton in Paradise Lost, and, if considered in the context of the Matrix trilogy as a whole, it also ends with reconciliation, telling a story of loss and love : Seth, who had not even been heeding his own needs, ends up affirming the positive that there is in life by plunging into the sea, as Messenger earlier showed him how…

The New Testament’s First Letter of Peter seems to speak of the curiosity of the angels in desiring to know what will happen to mankind, and there is the same sense of the angels Seth and Cassiel, existing on the outside of their own experience – sitting together, as buddies, high above the city (on a sign or a statue), and marvelling at the nature and order of things :

Wonder not then, what God for you saw good
If I refuse not, but convert, as you,
To proper substance; time may come when men
With Angels may participate, and find
No inconvenient Diet, nor too light Fare:
And from these corporal nutriments perhaps
Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit
Improv'd by tract of time, and wingd ascend
Ethereal, as wee, or may at choice
Here or in Heav'nly Paradises dwell;
If ye be found obedient, and retain
Unalterably firm his love entire
Whose progenie you are. Mean while enjoy
Your fill what happiness this happie state
Can comprehend, incapable of more.


(John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book V)



End-notes

* Thankfully, the Nebuchadnezzar is not a yellow craft.

** Unlike The Wachowskis’ machine-city, where the only outside (at least in the first part of the trilogy) is that of the rebels’ quasi-submarine, the final section of City of Angels takes us beyond LA (and even Drive (2011), with its similarly impressive noctilucent cityscapes, has a brief interlude of respite).

*** Though there are interesting, lesser-known alternatives such as The Bishop’s Wife (1947) (Cary Grant, Loretta Young, David Niven), or even Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) (Judy Garland).

**** One is almost reminded of Macduff, feelingly denying the acceptance that all my pretty chickens and their dam have been lost.

***** Pot o’ Gold (1941) (later known as The Golden Hour) has Stewart as a character (Jimmy Haskel) who seems to move in the opposite direction from the battles with Potter (Lionel Barrymore) that embroil George Bailey :

Jimmy gives up the happy, but parlous, mayhem of the music shop that he runs to go to work for his music-hating uncle, Charley Haskel (a CJ decades before that of David Nobbs’ Perrin). Music then becomes the symbol around which the warm-hearted unite, and which the bigoted CJ despises (largely to comic effect, as when he is obliged to try to sing by Jimmy’s former cell-mates, and ends up – thanks to Charles Winninger’s skill – amusingly hoarse).






In a plot that makes no / few pretensions to hang together (except through music, and centred for no very obvious reason on Ma McCorkle’s orderly yet anarchic boarding-house), Pot o’ Gold still revolves entertainingly around chucking a rotten tomato, gratuitous off-screen violence, proud lovers, and just as stubborn neighbours…



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 21 December 2013

Supporting the garlic-eaters - or declining a Faustian pact

This is a Christmas review of It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

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21 December (updated 22 December ; Tweets added, Christmas Day 2015)

This is a Christmas review of It's a Wonderful Life (1946)



When George Bailey (James Stewart) kisses his wife Mary (Donna Reed) on their wedding night, he murmurs (more to himself than to her) ‘Wonderful, wonderful’. He has something then that he loses – or, rather, loses sight of.

Their location at that moment is bizarre in its real sense, and almost, also in its real sense, surreal¹, for they had planned a honeymoon without much thought for the future. But it symbolizes some things, such as courage in adversity and less love in a garret maybe than riches in heaven.

As has been said, George loses sight of the self who found all this, which initially seemed so ramshackle, made whole and complete by Mary’s love and care for him. He faces what seems an impossible position, and his enemy Potter (who started as if to remedy George’s uncle’s mistake, before seeing the capital for him in it (the palpable miserly wickedness embodied by Lionel Barrymore)) threatens him with penalties from a position of power : George ends up abusing the forgetful / easily distracted Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell), and, not believing that anyone can help, gets frustrated with Mary and the children, showing only tenderness for Zuzu [one is reminded of Louis Malle’s Zazie], in bed with a temperature

He has lost hope. What happens, when he seeks to drown his sorrows makes matters worse, and causes him despairingly to recall Potter’s words of derisory rejection, thinking that his value is in being dead, not alive. In one version of the Gospel story, distraught at what he has done, Judas throws the thirty pieces of silver down when they will not be accepted back from him and they are used to buy The Potter’s Field (which is the name of where George builds his homes, but which is where the graveyard is in what Clarence shows him, a Bedford Falls without George, where the place is then called Pottersville ?); in another, Judas hangs himself, so suicide, choosing death over continued life (which some try to harmonize as his doing one and then the other).

Clarence Ardbody (that seems to be his name, and he is charmingly brought to us by Henry Travers) is George’s guardian angel, and he leaves George, after what he has shown him – but only when George chooses to embrace life again, after seeing a world where he is the nobody that he has allowed himself to believe that he is. There he is someone whom no one, not even Mary, knows and is even frightened of, and who is the witness of how differently things could have been.

The conception of this film, starting with prayers for George, Clarence’s appointment, and seeing how George became who and where he is, avoids the easy solution that Clarence should simply tell George how Potter kept back the crucial money that he decided not to return. The film has George choose life, after Clarence’s ruse (used again by Luc Besson in Angel-A (2005)) diverts him from his own plight to – where his heart is as a man – someone else’s, but only after he comes to value himself and the life that he has.

Meanwhile, aside from those prayers, Mary has been addressing the problem that gave rise to his disaffection and, although she did not know it, led him to the brink. He was going to choose water : water had been where, saving his brother from drowning, he lost hearing in his left ear, and into which, in a sort of sacramental baptism, envious hands contrive for Mary and George to fall. Water was falling from the sky and into the new home that Mary had contrived for George and her, and, of course, in the snow of Christmas Eve, it is there in frozen form. That is just an observation, but, those who believe that the other three classical elements will be there when water is found can, of course, excavate…

A criticism that could be levelled at the pacing of the film, which is why do we spend so much time with George in the world where he does not exist before he understands. Actually, because it builds up to him being rejected by the woman whom he still thinks of as his wife (and whose status Clarence has been a little unwilling to give), it takes that for the message that his mother only runs Ma Bailey’s Boarding-House because he is not around to sink in – George has both drunk a lot, before meeting Clarence, and had a double after, and the film symbolically represents how difficult, with a person in deep depression, it is for the truth of his or her worth to permeate and unfreeze that numbness of being dislocated from the world.

As the lyrics of Talking Heads’ song² Once in a Lifetime go, seeming to see a dislocation, from the opposite pole of psychosis :

You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house
You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife


In the world that he sought to leave, George had lost contact with the things and people who mattered to him, burdened by not knowing what to do; in the world that Clarence shows him, he is able to seek out what should be familiar, and keeps trying, ending with Mary. It is only when, under danger of gunfire, that he has gone back to where he started that he can value what he had before and ask for it to be restored – before, it might as well have been in a vault as behind a veil, for he could break through neither to it.

As a portrayal of depression, it demonstrates the truth that one cannot ‘snap out of it, ‘count one’s blessings’ or ‘pull oneself together’, and also, with Clarence’s inscription in Tom Sawyer (some significance in that choice of book, one would warrant), of the value of true friends. But the film works without entering into those considerations, just better if one sees what is slow to change in George.

And perhaps one has to consider the force, in Potter, that George has been fighting, whose Pottersville is debauched and gaudy when (in Clarence’s other world) there had been no one to stop him making it that way : on his desk, seen most clearly when the offer is being made that is too good to be true, is a skull, a bell in a triangular arch, but also an apparatus for heating something over a flame in a spoon that would not be out of place in the drug-laden realm of shooting-up in Trainspotting (1996)³.

In different ways, Potter, desiring domination in a no more rational way than Iago wishes Othello’s destruction, is stood up to by George’s courage and self-sacrifice : by riding the effects of the run on the bank, opposing Potter (and getting the vote) when he moves that the Building & Loan be wound up, and by rejecting a cushy offer for himself. Probably far-fetched that they are parallels to the temptations in the wilderness, but George does give up, respectively, (along with Mary) their honeymoon, his cherished plans of travel⁴, and a life of benefit for himself by going over to Potter…

James Stewart has humour (some of it at the inquisitiveness of Annie, the servant), warmth, and frustration at what he has to give up for what he believes in, even if he does put his foot in it by calling it ‘a crummy little office’ (or some such) to his father : that characteristic quality to Stewart’s voice fits hand in glove with the sort of astonished pleading with people to know who he is. Barrymore, even when he is slow to see his final winning hand against George, brings a smouldering, disgusted malevolence to the role of Potter.

And, when soaked from the swimming-pool trick played on them, George has walked Mary back home in borrowed clothes, Donna Reed and Stewart have a delightful awkwardness to them, so that he does not quite dare kiss her properly when she dares to offer her hand, and then both are spooked by him being urged to kiss her (one almost feels that, by not doing what is suggested, he is trying to avoid his own destiny, and cheat history...). And he has to be snatched away, without that kiss (or, acting against form, trying to exploit her being robeless in the hydrangea bush) on this very night, because of his father’s health. Pain prolonged, and hope deferred, but bringing a life together that they want to lead – though threatened by the opportunistic Potter and George’s despair.


Happy Christmas !



Post-script

One can also find, given that the film was made in 1946, a Hitler figure in Potter : George's father appeased him by putting him on the Board of the Building & Loan ; George fought his offer to Building & Loan customers with Mary's and his honeymoon fund ; Potter offered an alliance to George ; and rejected Potter takes the opportunity to turn the weapons of law and order on him.


End-notes

¹ The ruins where Edward Scissorhands is found spring to mind.

² By David Byrne, Christopher Frantz, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison, and Brian Eno.

³ Seen more obviously, though fleetingly, is a bronze bust of Napoleon Bonaparte near the window in Potter's office.






⁴ He is a sort of Marius (in Daniel Auteuil's film this year of the same name), with a sense of Wanderlust.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Wednesday, 25 September 2013

Drowning the piglets

This is a Festival review of Upstream Color (2013)

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25 September

This is a Festival review of Upstream Color (2013)

* Contains spoilers *


We agreed that it was well made (as, at any rate, we did about The Taste of Money (2012)), and @mob61uk assented to my assertion that Amy Seimetz was excellent (as Kris).

I then propounded that, as many a film does, it treats of mental ill-health - here, the appearance that Kris had a breakdown and lost her job is belied by seeing how she had been deliberately infected, thereby rendered incapable of independent thought, and had been manipulated to cause her to obtain multiple amounts of credit, and use the equity in her home, on the pretext that she was finding the ransom for her kidnapped mother.

The financial excess, the wild behaviour, would easily have landed her with the diagnosis of bipolar disorder and with the two chunky tubs of tablets that she puts on the table in front of Jeff when first they get to talk properly, saving them, as she puts it, 3 to 4 weeks. He does not quite understand what it might matter, what the implications might be, but does not seem put off.

One level on which the film works is a bit like that of Contagion (2011), of tracing the infection back to its root, and, thereby, of validating the experience of Kris (and others), even down to the pigs. Or The Matrix (1999) - when Neo is first captured by Agent Smith and, with the help of two other Agents, a literal, living bug is put into Neo's body, getting it out is as wrenchingly disgusting as when the deceiver makes Kris vomit. Not the only similarity, because there is feeling, when Jeff is directing Kris through the building at work to where the car is, of Cypher or others directing, say, Trinity to an exit, and of the same sense that the real feels unreal.

Back further, we have such touchstones of <i>Madness in Movies</i> as Cary Grant (as Roger Thornhill) being framed in <i>North by Northwest</i> (1959) (so everyone else seems mad, and he to them, for not believing him), likewise exploiting James Stewart's weakness as Scottie in <i>Vertigo</i> (1958), or, on the other hand, Stewart being credited by a psychiatric Ingrid Bergman in <i>Spellbound</i>, or Sean Connery (Mark Rutland) looking out the psychological basis of Marnie's (Tippi Hedren's) behaviour, because he loves and believes in her.

In Upstream Color (2013), Jeff is an Ingrid or Sean to Kris. They wear each other's identical ring, and there is more than a chemistry between them, because, through each other, they can trace the pig-farmer, and, just as he seems able to project himself into places and to observe people unseen, so Kris sees him, and looks right through him.

I think that this is really a tremendous piece of work by Shane Carruth of writing, directing, producing and starring in this provocative exploration of the nature of reality, and I can see myself hoping to watch it again very soon.




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

Made in Maida Vale

This is a review of Dial M for Murder (1954)

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2 August

This is a review of Dial M for Murder (1954)

* Contains spoilers *

Maybe it's the 3-D of Dial M for Murder (1954), but the use of stock footage of the Queen Mary (arriving) in port, and the street in Maida Vale where Ray Milland (Tony Wendice) and Grace Kelly (Margot, his wife) live, seemed relatively clunky to me, unused as I am to much 3-D : I was certainly glad that the camera did not pan more than a few times, because I really did not find it a pleasant experience¹.

I mention these aspects because they do not typify the film as it proceeds, which is almost exclusively confined to an interior - a bit as is Rear Window (1954)². It is therefore no surprise to know that this chamber work was adapted by Frederick Knott from his play, and to see how the character that Milland brings to the role is a malignant presence that dominates the modest flat in and through his manipulation of Swann (Anthony Dawson), Margot, and Chief Inspector Hubbard (John Williams).

This makes for an obsessive, almost incestuous, film. I thought that I remembered it from boyhood t.v. - as so often, such memories are unreliable*** (itself a theme of the film), but, whatever I imagined, I recalled that knotted tension when a bungled plot is twisted to serve equal ends, waiting with anxiety for it crumble, and despairing at justice when it does not.

Thinking afterwards, I am convinced that Tony must have been a strategic opponent at tennis, maybe a chess-player, and that he knows how to force errors to his advantage. However, on reflection, I do not believe that - as it appears - he wholly originates his rescue on the hoof, but rather had thought through other significant moves.

And yet, if he were a tragic hero, Tony has the flaw of relying too much on his assumptions about the world in each eventuality - that his watch will not fail him, that the phone-booth will be unoccupied, that Swann will follow his instructions exactly... Lady Luck, as they say, plays right into his hands, though, when the utter weakness of his intention that Swann should have been thought to enter through the French window is exposed by the forensics.

Of course, the galling thing, which is where Hitchcock and Knott earn their reward, is that he deserves to fail for having failed to think things through, and our smouldering resentment turns to hatred when Margot stands condemned, effectively alone. We expect things of Mark as a crime writer, and he appears to disappoint, despite the fact that a few things that did not seem to work were evident to me⁴ (they were not envisaged by the nonetheless clever script, with the maverick streak given to Hubbard).

Partly because Tony has to steer her to her peril, at which he shows himself a master when Margot will not relinquish her latch-key (and we can but guess at the behaviour of which she complained to Mark (Robert Cummings) and which led to their affair), Kelly cannot shine, but must be relatively weak and cowed, and she sobs an incoherent account of things to her indifferent husband (already working out his moves). Plus this was only the 1950s, which is why the affair is considered in a bad light according to the public standards of the day - and why a husband can speak for a woman perfectly capable of speaking for herself and put the police off questioning her till the morning.

Interestingly, though, there is nothing shown to suggest that Tony specifies the manner in which he will have Swann do the murder that blackmailing him has commissioned, which could have failed in ways less capable of remedy : a knife, a gun with a silencer, for example. (Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958) shows another operation of failure, and it would be interesting to know how, if at all, Hitchcock influenced him.)

The brutality of the intended and actual methods of death is surely not unintended, with the chosen method of the assassin, and (for Hitchcock) the Freudian significance of the emasculating scissors - the discomfort of 3-D glasses was worth it just for the moment when Kelly's arm seems to extend beyond the end of the desk and into the auditorium, but otherwise it awkwardly tended to bring into a sharp foreground intervening objects (a row of bottles, at one point). That said, the consequence (as was that of moving a bed into the living-room) was stressing the cramped accommodation, and, with it, the extent to which Tony wanted money to be able to live better.

Whatever the reality of the criminal process in that decade, a trial is concluded in a small compass of time, symbolized by a judge's talking head, and even an appeal. Again, we wonder at what Mark is doing, but need not do so much longer, with his sharp confrontation of Tony of what he could do to save Margot. Since this is a film, and not real life, we can be left in doubt what Mark suspects in saying all this, and, more miraculously (when eventually we realize it), we have Hubbard trying the pieces in a different configuration in the background.

Hitchcock's judgement of the suspense, in collaboration with that of his screenwriter, is masterly throughout, but especially in the closing reel : apart from the drama between Margot and her assailant, with Tony holding on the line (not having, I would gather, pressed Button B), the drama is all in objects, where they are, and in words. And yet it does not ring too ill of a play put on the screen, because the limitations of the physical space add to the palpability of what is happening.

The ending itself, where Kelly can finally be cut off the rein with a wonderful speech that describes exactly the disabling and desert place that is deep depression (whereas what Mark says to her about a breakdown, as if a positive thing, rings strangely in our ears), takes us almost to the so-said wire, with Hubbard narrating Tony's puzzlement, and a closing cunning and curiosity that is his doom.

Tony, however, is remorseless, only offering the victims, with their shredded nerves and with his bravado, a drink. Hubbard, who was only playfully offered one, plays with his moustache : Milland and he really have had the scope to shine in this work, with, certainly, Swann a bit like a rabbit caught in the head-lamps, and perhaps also, though they have their moments late, Kelly and Cummings.

As has been observed, the plotting is not perfect, but Milland is beautifully hateful, and Hubbard delightfully his nemesis, taking due offence at the manners of people who do not take his hat and coat from him, and possibly seeking, if only for that reason, to worst his foe, by fair means and foul.

For this reason, I cannot quite agree with TAKE ONE's reviewer that this is 'an enjoyable, if unexceptional, entertainment' : in fairness, since I am quoting that phrase out of context, I suppose that it must depend what one's scale is, and whether one has a scale for Hitchcock that 'sets the bar high', because Dial M is probably not, as he says, the masterpiece that it was proclaimed to the world to be.



End-notes

¹ Presumably where all this talk of nausea and 48 frames per second comes from...

² Same year, same actress, and, in Milland, an actor not unlike, in appearance, James Stewart from that other film. It was one of five that were taken off release and only resurfaced in the 1980s, but nothing suggests that Stewart could have brought the smooth venom and malice of Milland to Tony.

³ Perhaps the image of the relays operating at the telephone exchange caused me to confuse this film with one where the mode of operation of that technology is crucial to the detection of the identity of a culprit.

⁴ Spoiler alert :

(1) When Tony steals Margot's handbag to obtain the undestroyed letter, it is quite clear that whoever had taken it could have had any number of latch-keys cut - all that we have to answer this point, and therefore to establish the number of keys, is Margot's plaintive insistence that she got the key back, which is no assurance when the bag was not restored to her for a fortnight. What prudent person would not have ensured that the lock was changed (after all, she definitely knows that the bag contained something with her address on it), and how and why did Tony and she manage with only one key between them in the interim ?

(2) Tony sends Margot ransom-notes that ask for £50. It is unclear what Margot entrusts to Mark at the opening, other than the notes, but there might be evidence in the form of her unclaimed letter when she goes to the premises in Brixton (it is also uncertain how she would have proved herself the sender). Even if not so, she might be able to show that the putative blackmailer took no interest in securing his reward (in his account of events, I do not recall that Tony offered his accomplice a reason, but the film requires a high level of concentration not to miss anything).

(3) In any event, a blackmailer who does not ask for £1,000 straightaway, and only seeks £50 - how does one explain asking so little in the first place, as the ransom-notes would show ?

(4) If Margot has a motive in faking an attempt on her life to cover up, what is it in taking Swann's in the first place ? If she intends it and wishes to silence him, she leaves the troublesome letter on his person, and, if not, in what circumstances does a man end up with a pair of scissors in his back and falling on them ?


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Saturday, 22 September 2012

Vertiginous Hitch

This is a Festival review of Vertigo (1958)

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22 September

This is a Festival review of Vertigo (1958)

* Contains spoilers *

When the Jimmy Stewart / Alfred Hitchcock collaborations that had been quickly taken out of circulation were released again in the mid-1980s, I went to see two or three, certainly Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958). I remember not being much struck by either, the former because I found its device - as it assuredly is meant to be - so limiting, the latter because I just did not get it, and the suddenness with which some films from that era ended, with the words 'THE END' and the studio logo coming up, did not help.

Yesterday, watching Vertigo for the first time since then, I found myself coming at it with the eye of someone who loved Chinatown (1974), and found much that links the two, including a way of viewing that had me questioning who was the client and what had Stewart John 'Scottie' Ferguson been engaged to do and why. The key scene, for this way of thinking, was not at Gavin Elster's office, but the next one, at Ernie's, and questioning for whose benefit it was that Scottie was there, in terms of who was identifying whom.

Thereafter, having postulated that Scottie was the one to be seen by Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak), it was easy enough to see him being led a dance, even to the extent of her, more than once, taking a parking-space that left him pulling in where no space existed. When she threw herself into San Francisco Bay, she then did so knowing that Scottie was there. (How all this connects with the foundation novel, D'Entre les Morts, I do not know, but research may tell me without having to look it out.)

In the meantime, it is the way of thinking that relates to Chinatown that interests me. Both films have secrets, a crime, someone pretending to be someone else and in whom a third someone should not fall in love, and all end with the death of that someone. In Vertigo, the private investigator (or PI) as a means to an end not known to him is hardly new*, but we are immersed in his pursuit such that we can be blinded to the fact that he has been blinded and bought a story.


To be continued


End-notes

* In a way it goes all the way at least back to Jonah, with texts such as Sir Gawain, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and G. K. Chesterton's The Man who was Thursday in between.


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Monday, 14 May 2012

The motto of Cambridge Drawing Society

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15 May 2012

It would be much funnier to have a Drawling Society, where you could hear a good Jimmy Stewart or even Tom Hanks (as a modern-style Drawler), but we have what we have.

A few things puzzle me about its recent publicity material:

* It begins by saying 'Art Exhibition / At the Guildhall / Cambridge Drawing Society / 1882 - 2008', but I cannot construe the dates, which appear to suggest that the Society has been disbanded several years earlier: overleaf, we are told, no more helpfully, that members 'are proud to maintain the century-long tradition of annual exhibitions in Cambridge'*

* The motto of the Society (at the top of that side) is given as Nulla dies sine linea

* Even if one could misconstrue dies as in apposition to lives**, not as a Latin word that is probably best known from Carpe diem (a phrase re-energed by that otherwise regrettable vehicle for the largely regrettable Robin Williams), it is clear enough what it means

* So to render it Draw a line every day oddly turns it into an instruction, when the Latin is clearly a statement, and, to my mind wrongly, focuses attention on the act of drawing, whereas the sentiment is one about time and of maintaining a habit, day to day, and one has to infer that line is to be made***

* The flyer directs us to Apelles, quoting a story about him that, maybe, I searched long enough to find, but hiding behind pictures in his shop-window to hear comments from passers-by, amongst the many anecdotes and accounts of him and his great technical skill (as no work of his survives the intervening 23 centuries (and we do not know definitely, except by reference to his having been said to be at the court of Philip of Macedon, when he lived), does not seem the best to have chosen to illustrate the motto****

* It seems that Pliny who is the so-called Elder is a major source for knowledge and appreciation of the abilities of Apelles, since we cannot see them displayed in any work: writing around the time of Christ, he would have spoken Latin, but I doubt that the motto, if authentic, would have been in anything other than Greek originally (Apelles is said to have been from the Greek island of Kos)

* It, too, expands the text, but what the Wikipedia® entry gives as a translation is, all in all, more accurate: Not a day without a line drawn


You never know, it could also apply to blog postings!



End-notes

* Actually, for what it is worth, I overlooked this comment: The first public exhibition took place in 1906 in the old Guildhall.

** As one teacher of English was said to have done with the Beckettt title Malone Dies.

*** The Wikipedia® entry goes into detail about a cobbler, one of whose comments (about how a shoe had been painted) Apelles heeded and remedied the mistakes, but whose subsequent comment about a leg earnt him a rude and surprising rebuff from the hidden painter.

**** Not least not to introduce, as if in a non-sequitur, the observation that visitors can write comments in a book, and vote for their favourite picture


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