Showing posts with label Mark Cousins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Cousins. Show all posts

Friday 8 April 2016

Only the idle rest during war-time (work in progress)

This is an accreting appreciation of Ivan's Childhood (1962)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


8 April


This is an accreting appreciation of Ivan's Childhood (1962)




Film references :

* A Beautiful Mind (2001)

* A Story of Children and Film (2013) - sic : importantly, it should not be thought of as ‘History’...

* Bugsy Malone (1976)

* The Night of The Hunter (1955)

* The White Ribbon (2009)


[...]





[...]




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

Monday 21 September 2015

An engaging festival, which becomes ever more cinematic ! [under construction]

More views of or before Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


21 September

Without scope, this year, for any of 2014's elaborate planning, this posting will end up recording what happened, and when, with links to reviews (to come, when Tweets do not suffice... [meanwhile, 2014's posting is, bit by bit, being cannibalized])


As ever, there is a code, which is :

A Abandoned Walked out partway through

AA Wished to abandon But, against better judgement, could not (or did not) leave partway through

B Blog There is a posting about the film on the blog, to which the link takes one (although it may not be a review)

C Catalan preview A film from the Camera Catalonia strand, reviewed ahead of and for the Festival

M Missed Planned (or had tickets) to see, but had to skip

O Take One Published on line as a guest review

P Partly watched A clash with an earlier (or later) film prevented seeing it as a whole

Q Q&A Hosted a Q&A after the screening

R Recorded Recorded the Q&A after the screening

S Seen The opposite of Missed

T Twitter Tweeted about the film
Thursday 3 September

(0) 3.30 C M El camí més llarg per tornar a casa (The Long Way Home) (2014) : Screen 3 (85 mins) Somehow, the slow, quiet opening was not best suited to Silver Screen viewers, asking if they were in the right film...

(1) 6.00 S T The Clearstream Affair (L'enquête) (2014) : Screen 2 (110 mins)



Then again (no endorsement, as the TAKE ONE exegesis is, as yet, unread) :



(2) 9.00 S T Irrational Man (2015) (96 mins)


Friday 4 September

(3) 3.30 S T Atomic : Living in dread and promise (2015) plus Q&A with Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) : Screen 2 (72 mins)



(3½) 6.30 S One Night in Hell (2014) / Brian May 3-D Rarities) (2015) : Screen A (The Light) (7 / 94 mins)

(4½) 9.00 S T Pasolini (2014) : Screen 1 (85 mins)









(5½) 11.00 S T The Chelsea Hotel (1981) : Screen 2 (55 mins)




Saturday 5 September

(6½) 4.30 S T Neil Brand's Keaton for Kids : Steamboat Bill Jnr (1928) (plus Keaton excerpts) : Screen 1 (70 / 120 mins)

(7) 6.30 S A Confession (2015) (from Secrets programme) (ShortFusion) plus Q&A : Screen 3 (9 / 80 mins)

Interview conducted for TAKE ONE with director Petros Silvestros and producer Murray Woodfield

(8) 10.00 S T TridentFest : Screen 1 (allegedly 90 mins)

Interviews conducted for TAKE ONE with Project Trident (@ProjectTrident) film-makers Andrzej Sosnowski (@Dr_Zej) and Carl Peck (@UntilDayBreaks), Ryd Cook (@RydCook), Simon Panrucker (@spanrucker), Christian Lapidge (@CJLapidge), and Sammy Patterson


Sunday 6 September

(8½) 6.00 A The Wind (1928) (with accompaniment from Stephen Horne) (Sjöström) : Emmanuel (Queen's Building) (78 mins)

Sadly, despite a late start to the day's viewing, the preceding late night soon induced a headache that needed an urgent remedy one that could not remotely have withstood the tumult, such as was judged even from waiting outside the lecture-theatre, that multi-instrumentalist Stephen Horne whipped up

9.30 C R Born (2014) (Camera Catalonia) : Screen 3 (102 mins)

6.30 B S Under Milk Wood plus Q&A (1971) (Dylan Thomas 100) : Screen 1 (88 mins)

9.00 B S Before I Go to Sleep plus Q&A (2014) : Screen 1 (92 mins)


Tuesday 2 September

1.00 M M : Screen 1 (1931) (117 mins)

3.30 S Last Call (2013) : Screen 2 (91 mins)

6.00 S How I Came to Hate Maths (Comment j'ai détesté les maths) (2013) : Emmanuel (110 mins)

8.30 B S Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy (2013) : Emmanuel (127 mins)


Wednesday 3 September

1.30 B S Iranian (2014) : Screen 1 (105 mins)

4.00 AA Eastern Boys (2013) : Screen 1 (128 mins)

6.30 B x 2 S Stations of the Cross (and further thoughts on a second viewing) (Kreuzweg) (2014) (German) : Screen 2 (104 mins)

9.00 C S Tasting Menu (plus a riposte to TAKE ONE's reviewer) (2013) (Camera Catalonia) : Screen 2 (85 mins)

11.00 M Short Fusion : Life Lessons : Screen 2 (79 mins)


Thursday 4 September (a day for not sticking to the plan at all !)

11.00 M Night will Fall (2014) : Screen 1 (75 mins)

1.30 M Le Jour se Lève (Daybreak) (1939) : Screen 1 (93 mins)

As to be on general release, substituted by rewatching :
2.30 B x 2 S Stations of the Cross (and further thoughts on a second viewing) (Kreuzweg) (2014) (German) : Screen 2 (104 mins)


4.00 P German Short Films (German) : Screen 1 (~70 mins) (all 2013) Will have to miss the end to get to Still the Enemy Within (2014)...

6.00 M Still the Enemy Within (2014) : St Philip's Church (112 mins)
Instead rewatched :
6.00 B S Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy (2013) (Festival link) : Emmanuel (127 mins)

8.30 M Under the Lantern (1928) (Lamprecht) : St Philip's Church (129 mins)
Stay for this - or head to Festival Central for...
9.00 M We Are Many (2014) : Screen 1 (104 mins)


Friday 5 September

1.00 B C S We All Want What's Best for Her (Tots volem el millor per a ella) (2013) plus write-up of Q&A (now with photos) (Camera Catalonia) : Screen 1 (105 mins)

Just time to interview Mar Coll (director and co-writer of We All Want What's Best for Her- write-up to come...) before :
4.00 S People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag) (Lamprecht) : Emmanuel (73 mins)

5.00 P Energized : Screen 1 (91 mins) Sadly, needing to miss the start of which...

7.50 C S Son of Cain (Fill de Caín) (2013) (plus write-up of Q&A) (Camera Catalonia) : Screen 2 (90 mins)

10.30 M The Mad Magician (Retro 3-D) : Screen 2 (72 mins)


Saturday 6 September

1.00 M Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (Lamprecht) : Screen 3 (74 mins)


Missed to interview - and take punting - Jesús Monllaó, director of Son of Cain (Fill de Caín)


2.30 B S Fiction (Ficció) (Camera Catalonia) : Screen 3 (107 mins)

5.00 AA B Amour Fou : Screen 1 (96 mins)

7.30 B S Tony Benn : Will and Testament : Screen 1 (running-time not advised)

Not likely to finish in time for (as was indeed so)...

9.00 M West (Lagerfeuer) (German) : Screen 2 (102 mins)


Sunday 7 September

1.00 C S Othello (Otel.lo) (Camera Catalonia) : Screen 2 (69 mins)


The next film was missed, because of lunch and then completing an interview with Hammudi Al-Rahmoun Font, director of Otel.lo (with the kind assistance, as translator, of Cristina Roures)

4.00 M A Poem in Exile (Camera Catalonia) : Emmanuel (77 mins)


5.30 M Set Fire to the Stars (Dylan Thomas 100) : Screen 1 (90 mins)



For the sceptical, there is evidence of that punting-trip, with star pupil Hammudi

8.00 A The Grandmaster (which turned out to be Surprise Film 1) : Screen 1 (?? mins)





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

Thursday 3 September 2015

Domestic, without bliss : Dialogues with despair and distraction

This is a review of The Long Way Home (2014) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2015)

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


2 September


This is a pre-Festival review of El camí més llarg per tornar a casa (The Long Way Home) (2014) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2015)

For those who found Locke (2013) relatively pretentious (and unnecessarily grounded in and by its central conceit), El camí més llarg per tornar a casa (The Long Way Home) (2014) may cure (or else kill) : hardly limiting himself to the niceties of the grades of concrete, Tom Hardy’s paper-thin character on a mission as Locke can, as the embodiment of empirical thinking at the wheel, grate through his seemingly having an explanatory plaster for everything (if maybe not for those who esteem the contrary presentation of a grand, value-based gesture that uproots everything).





Important referents here are as follows :

* The Out of Towners (1970) not as a tour de force for Jack Lemmon (though the film is one), or for its comedy, but for its relentless reliance on What can go wrong, going wrong [it almost has the existential joy, in pessimism, of Beckettt’s two mimes called Act Without Words [I or II] (Acte sans paroles [I ou II])]

* From there, a little look back to George Bailey, in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

* Sprinkle some Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) in After Hours (1985), and some significant allusions to Paddy Considine’s re-working of Peter Mullan, in Ken Loach / Paul Laverty’s My Name is Joe (1998) in Tyrannosaur (2011) [but one need not do more than acknowledge what Miranda July was poorly trying to do with Paw-Paw [~3,800 page-views for this posting] in The Future (2011)…]


* Principally, however, what Borja Espinosa gives us (leading in the role of Joel Reguera) is a more nuanced take on what rock bottom is like than even Marion Cotillard’s very impressive performance in Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit) (2014)


Unlike the Dardennes brothers’ film, this is one where little is explained (in Two Days, One Night, it is essential to the film that we understand what is facing Cotillard’s Sandra : as, also, witness how her character is urged Tu existes, Sandra !), and as if we are invisibly there, in the room, as Joel wakes, is in the car (whose music is our soundtrack), or in various locations such as a café, its toilet, or bits of waste or track-side land right from the opening, we are used to the camera tunnelling into the shot, and to blurrings [form as shape], or blackenings [darkness visible], which distort our perception, and then are reversed, or enhanced [light as pattern] :

In Locke, it is as if it is de rigueur for us to have the perception of everything as contingent packets of sense-data, thrust home by the pixellated, out-of-focus lamps, and the reflections, that we do not avoid seeing : is the distinction that El camí més llarg per tornar a casa (The Long Way Home) wants us to look at them, or into Joel’s beard (at fifty-seven minutes in), and just be with, and in, the camera-image ?


Another type of connection is, then, with the domesticity of a reflective, observational film such as Mohammad-Ali Talebi’s Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj) (1998) (or The White Balloon (Badkonake sefid) (1995), both promoted by Mark Cousins’ (@markcousinsfilm’s) A Story of Children and Film (2013)), except that, again, the nature of the film needs us to grasp ‘the story’ (even if those of Talebi's films are at a level that, to some, might appear artless, or inconsequential).

Unlike C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed (which, via Nigel Hawthorne on stage, became Anthony Hopkins and Debora Winger in Shadowlands (1993)), or our observing Cotillard’s Sandra, that observation is neither central to El camí, nor peripheral to it, it just is : if we were at an uncomfortable remove from Frances Ha, we would probably have related better to Blue Jasmine (2013) [the link is to 'Who is Woody Allen in Blue Jasmine ?' (with >7,200 page-views)], but El camí is located further still in a direction beyond Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s Frances, where we just need to be with Joel (Borja Espinosa), not pathologize his experience (or him) :



[Mainstream] cinema can, too often, want to sensationalize such experiences (as in the image above), but director Sergi Pérez* just wants us to be with Joel where he is**, and not judge him in relation to seeing him with Elvis*** (or ??)…


End-notes

* As with Tots els camins de Déu (All The Ways of God) (2014), also in this year's Cambridge Film Festival’s Camera Catalonia.

** Those in the film seem not to be able to do so (or, maybe, do not wish to, or do not know how to), but typically make / repeat self-interested demands to know more, ‘out of concern’, which we can recognize as the express message behind saying, not without accusation, that it has been Four days without knowing anything about you.

*** The name also reminds us of Aureli in La Nit Que Va Morir L’Elvis (The Night Elvis Died) (2010) ?





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

Friday 31 July 2015

Passing the salt : Sharing the vision of Sebastião Salgado

This is a review of The Salt of the Earth (2014)

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


31 July

This is a review of The Salt of the Earth (2014)



For The Salt of the Earth (2014) (#TheSaltOfTheEarth : the official web-site is TheSaltOfTheEarth-Film.com), it was a real pleasure, for a change, to be in Screen 2 at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse (the intermediate size of screen)). Even more so to be able to see Sebastião Salgado’s photographic images, projected on a screen of this size, and appreciate their quality.

A recommendation from Jordi Torrent (@nycjordi) as well as this one from Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) had ensured that one would have to make time to see Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado’s (his son’s) film :




Yet seeing Salgado’s photography (as one can judge that Cousins must partly be saying) was only a fraction of the experience, for, in his gentle words of commentary, in clear, beautiful French, there was a double pleasure for the ear : both to understand what he had seen (and how, with his camera, he had been able to let us see it), and to hear the poetry that was such an element of his description. In fact, it was hardly mere description, which might have added but a little, but an immensely enriching illumination of his artistic vision, which brought us into experiencing his work more deeply :

Whether, with Wenders, leafing through loose prints (or unbound pages from his books of photographic collections), or speaking as they were shown full size on the screen, Salgado feels like a kindly but serious relative, earnestly talking us through the time that he spent with the people whom they show, so that we can relate to them (or, in later work, to broader scenes) : there is compassion in the way in which he helps us understand his work, from the individual histories of those dying* (or dead) in Sahel (19841986) to those Trying their luck in the combined wonder and horror of a Brazilian gold-mine (his first allusion to Dante’s Inferno** ?), in a country where coffins are for rent. (We see a body simply lying at the bottom of a grave.)






One could not have imagined that there would be such power to be had in hearing Salgado as we looked at his photographs, and it is at the centre of what gives the film its strength (alongside voice-overs, of a more explanatory nature, from Wenders and Juliano Salgado), and makes it a living creature : not for the first time, one likens it to the afternoon at CRASSH in Cambridge (@CRASSHlive, The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities), when we had the unknown factor of Murray Perahia, talking The Doric String Quartet (@doric_quartet) through playing the Cavatina of Beeethoven’s Strinq Quartet in B Flat Major, Op. 130, and where we found 1 + 4 = > > 5 to be true.

Only a little eerily (because not aiming at the uncanny, but rather causing us to hesitate as to whether we were really seeing this), it is in commenting on the place by the church in Brazil (where, other than coffins being for rent, many items are on sale) that, for the first time, Salgado’s face appeared to emerge from an image : face and image had, of course, been graded as to texture and tone to match, so that he appeared within it, and it was a telling effect sparingly used to show how he had participated in the life that he has photographed.


Likewise, of course, and worthily of a film about Salgado’s photography and life, the cinematography (by Hugo Barbier, and Juliano Selgado) is excellent. Not that (and one would not want it to be) it is mimetic of the former, except as to its quality, if only for this simple reason, which Salgado gives right at the beginning of the film, when he is being observed, sitting at the top of a high point in his native Brazil, looking out, and taking photographs :

The premise (too little realized, and of which he reminds us) that, because especially at this level of artistry one is drawing with light (the exact meaning of the word ‘photography’), a number of photographers, put in front of the same scene, would produce several different ways of picturing it.




At the risk of seeming to say too much more about the how, rather than the what, one must mention Laurent Petitgand’s music, which, as one would expect from such a film, is subtle and is fully assimilated into the work itself : at first, what sounded like cello and quiet pulsing from an electric guitar, and then, when Salgado is with the Yali people of Papua New Guinea (in 2011), there is also a little percussion, and a hint of piano.

Then, at a tender moment***, when father (Sebastião) is leaning on son (Juliano) to be steady to try to get some shots of walruses (as the latter accompanies the former to come closer to his life and work), gentle xylophone****. Throughout, the scoring is absorbed / integrated into the film as a whole (with its employment of aspects of sound-design, with distorted chimes, echo, metallic timbres).


As to Wenders and Salgado, the film begins where the former began knowing about the latter, with the scale of those shots from the gold-mine (one of which was what Wender first saw**), and with Salgado telling us about this place, and us seeing him in Brazil, and then on location in Papua New Guinea, candidly photographing people who, amidst what appears to be their celebration / ceremony, look at images of themselves on the screen of his camera. Using photographic portraits, Wenders takes us through Salgado’s early life, student times*****, move to Paris with Lélia, and their decisive choice for him to leave his background in economics (and a post with The World Bank) and devote himself to professional photography, a career that has brought us significant titles, of which the principal ones are :

[The] Other Americas (19771984)

Sahel : The End of the Road (19841986)

Workers (19861991)

Exodus (Migrations) (19931999)

Genesis (20042013)


At the same time as following, in sequence, the making of these publications (the last two titles belong, respectively, to the second and third lives / planets / movies to which Mark Cousins refers (in his Tweet above)), we have Lélia, supporting Sebastião’s work, and bringing up their sons Juliano and Rodrigo a far cry from the dramatic notion that a recent film wants to bring us of a photographer of world events / situations (an unfavourable memory of which was evoked by some stages of his career : better points of connection can be found in In A Better World (Hævnen) (2010) and [at least in portraying civil war / genocide] Half of a Yellow Sun (2013))) :




Whether telling us about the courtoisie of gorillas, and how they will welcome one (if one respects their terms), or of a dead cicada, being incorporated into a tree, Salgado is always making observation about the world.

However, about mankind (and following Workers (subtitled Archaeology of the Industrial Age)), he says (from seeing what happens in the former (supposedly civilized) Yugoslavia) We are extremely violent : indeed, his final experiences in Rwanda (having seen previously how Hell was taking the place of Paradise) led him to see it as the edge of darkness (and to retire from taking images of this aspect of the world).

(At an earlier time, perhaps, he had been able to take heart, travelling 300 to 400 miles on the back of a truck (from Sahel ?), in two men, friends, who were pretending that it was a Sunday afternoon. Yet, as an economist who could see how governments were starving the people whom he saw, he knew early that their suffering was not un problème de portage.)




In passing, where the film ends has already been alluded to*****. In talking about Salgado’s time with the Yali people, it has likewise been mentioned that they looked at his images (not seeing a sinister taking of their souls), and he later says, about taking a photographic portrait : the subject makes an offer to you, to take a glimpse of that person’s life.

In putting Salgado, talking (or silent, reflecting), on the screen, Wenders breaks with ‘the industry standard’ of how to shoot an interview, and puts him right in the centre of the frame. Salgado is offering us a glimpse of him, and, by being filmed in this setting / lighting******, Wenders / Juliano Salgado and the crew graciously accept his offer.


End-notes

* Often, we are informed, as a result of cholera, from the massive weakening caused by diarrhoea (and the resultant dehydration) and then being susceptible to other infections.

** And a photograph from where was his first point of connection with Wenders, when he bought a print of it, and then another, which hauntingly hangs over his desk, of a woman (the fourth image on this web-page).

*** One is reminded of some of Sokurov’s films, such as Father and Son (2003) (and Mother and Son (1997)).

**** Later in the film (but chronologically earlier, as it is in Kuwait in 1991), with Salgado’s compulsion to spend time alongside fire-fighters from Calgary and partly, as he tells us, damage his hearing from the sheer sound the volume of the soundtrack, and its presence, are necessarily greater. (Translated, Salgado calls this scene, with around five hundred oil-wells that had been set on fire when Saddam Hussein's forces withdrew, A giant stage, the size of the planet.) Further on, there is glockenspiel, but cello (sometimes with tremolo, and also using echo) is a mainstay of Petitgand's score.

***** We hear what Salgado’s father, calling him Tiao, says about his son when younger, and we see where the family farm is, and what has happened to it, as soil erosion has been caused by farming the land with cattle, leading to a lack of plant-life to hold back the flow of water. (Later, we see the relevance, with the founding of the Instituto Terra, and the planting of more than two million indigenous trees.)

****** In the hide, before father and son drowsily succumb to sleep (and after the polar bear has frightened away the walruses), Salgado says, about the bear on the endless shingle, that it does not make 'a well-framed photo', because there is no action, anything. The set-up for filming Salgado's face precisely makes it a well-framed image, respectful of him : who he is, and what he does.




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

Sunday 2 November 2014

An Education revisited - or Why did they include that on the DVD ?

This is a follow-up piece to a review of An  Education (2009)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


2 November (updated 4 November)

This is a follow-up piece to a review of An  Education (2009)

* Contains spoilers *

The advice is always to hand in your working, as well as your answers, at the end of Maths exams* (probably applicable to those in Physics, too).

We get to see the film-makers’ working (having been shown it by distributor E1 Entertainment) on the DVD of An Education (2009), which was, as it were, ‘educational’ – but only in how not to tell a story (or how to undermine the story that you have just had the likes of Mulligan, Molina and Pike tell on the disc).

In this case, it is less that one bothered to film these false steps (i.e. the deleted scenes) in this BBC Films’ production, or even scripted them in the first place : for one should be in little doubt that, when Sam Mendes says (on Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3blog’s) Night Waves (now re-labelled as Free Thinking – @BBCFreeThinking)) that another ending for American Beauty (1999) tempted him, there probably was one.

Yet, even if it was not, at the time of the original VHS release, generally the fashion to put ‘Bonus Features’ or ‘Extras’ at the end of the video-tape, one may wager that Mendes would not have allowed that other ending (if it had survived) anywhere near the DVD re-release (in July 2006) – quite sufficient that he should mention it on air some six years later…

More than any of this, it was just the misjudgement embodied in including this material as a ‘Bonus Feature’, as if it ‘might interest’ the viewer who had just watched An Education – although, almost necessarily, this critique is from the viewpoint of having seen the film as released, and treating that assemblage of scenes as having ascendancy over those that were wholly rejected (or which here appear in a different, usually longer, form).

That said, maybe one can already program modern DVD-players to add in or cut out scenes, so that one has (and can store the settings for) the viewer’s cut at will, an idea with which – in connection with an unfinished version of this posting – Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) was horrified quite a few months back at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) (when he brought A History of Children and Film (2013)) !

Even so, there is barely anything here that one would have wanted to keep, albeit some are decisions that would easily not get made until editing – too much time with the school-friends has been wisely relegated, because Jenny’s (Carey Mulligan’s) interaction with them there either adds nothing to the whole, or overstates what we already know / infer : when they are in the window of the café, one asks ‘What do you do all day, Lady Muck ?’, to which one of the answers is ‘Helping to look at some flats’. Or when the three meet for a post-mortem on Jenny’s romance, and, again, we learn what was better not mentioned, but passed over - or guessed at.


Yet the possibility that we probably least want to see filmed is that of David being ahead of Jenny at the end of the street in Oxford as she cycles with a male friend** – and, when she has asked the friend to wait and approaches David on foot (please see transcript, below), his seeking to make her accept his apology / explanation, and inviting her to resume a relationship with him (as if she is likely to agree, even in principle) :

On one level, the scene wants at once both to impart the fact that David has been in prison (You probably know I’ve been away), and to suggest that it is realistic that he would already be at liberty during Jenny’s time at university : Jenny tells him that she knows, because of a piece in the local paper that her mother sent to her, that he asked for 190 other offences to be taken into consideration : One hundred and ninety ! You must have ‘liberated’ most of the antiques in The Home Counties !

To be able to credit this scene, we would have to believe – as, for good reason, Jenny no longer does, having met David’s shocked wife Sarah (played by Sally Hawkins in a quick scene*, who was shocked at Jenny’s age) – that she, out of the others (of whom Sarah makes Jenny and us aware), has been special to David (Peter Sarsgaard).

Which is what the film has us believe only so far, then chips away at it, first with his convenient lying (about visiting C. S. Lewis), and his morals in ‘liberating’ an old map, and managing to justify himself to Jenny afterwards in terms of mere pragmatism (that he cannot buy her drinks, etc., otherwise).

As a closing moment, this request (whose refusal the deleted scene shows him simply accepting) asks too much of us, i.e. that David should really have cared about Jenny, for him to be making this approach, this speech – although it is consistent with what he says to Danny (Dominic Cooper) at Walthamstow, when he has been challenged about his intentions : to look at Jenny, and see that she is different.


Even if it happened in Lynn Barber’s memoir, on which Nick Hornby based the screenplay (and which might now be worth checking…), we are better off not having David appear in Oxford, or our hearing what happened to him. Not to make a better ending, but because it seems consistent with the scene with David’s wife Sarah Goldman, which, in the film is shorter (and without a child in a pram, or Jenny listening to everything that Sarah has to say), but carries the same meaning :

David’s involvement with other women (at least one of whom, even in the included version of the scene, he has made pregnant : You’re not in the family way ? – that’s happened before) has clearly enough been a repeating pattern of offering himself as available, when he is not, but not (as Sarah views it, again in that longer scene) being able to go through with it, because he loves his children**. (As Sarah says, answering her own question about whether Jenny knew about the house, child and her, They never do.)

For the film as made, with Jenny’s voiceover about getting to Oxford (and having had to make out to a boy who wanted to take her to Paris that she had not been), physically - though not necessarily emotionally - distances us from what she has gone through : even the closing shot does not retain the splendour or triumph implicit in a crane-shot, and then drawing out, but just slowly backs up to a wide shot and a blackout (as against a slow fade, after a significantly long hold).


The original memoir would, one imagines, have been in the first person. However, in the film, Jenny has not been at much distance from her own story before, or outside it, and has only been seen telling it to others in the fairly immediate moment – or, indeed, trying to avoid doing so, after finding the letters in the glove compartment***, and having required David to take her parents and her straight back home :

At this point, and despite being unfairly urged Don't be like this (which echoes his words Please don't be unkind in the deleted closing scene - please see below), she had put him on the spot with When were you going to tell me ?, and seems to take at face value when he replies Soon… it just never seemed like the right time. He tries to divert onto the good times, to justify asserting I can get a divorce – everything will turn out for the best. The truth, though, is that he drives off, when she requires him to speak to her parents and his wife.

The effect of giving Jenny a voiceover implies exactly the opposite of having her meet David, an accommodation with a past about which she feels very differently from when he tried to manipulate her with it there : Which, in this alternative world that we are shown, she has to express to David, who conveniently obliges by turning tail, and she goes back to her life in Oxford.

For this version to be on the DVD, David’s approach to Jenny has to be plausible and worth showing, neither of which it is, when he seems to invest no real energy in convincing a woman who now can have no reason to listen to him, let alone believe him – and David has always been seen to talk around the people whom he knew that he could persuade, because he knew how, not that he thought his powers to be unfailing.


Characterization of the first twelve deleted scenes

1. After Mulligan has whispered to Sarsgaard ‘That was scandalous’, regarding his manipulation of Molina’s mood and morality (approval that suggests a greater level of complicity / endorsement), closing business with his putting his hat over her eyes.

2. Pike and Mulligan, clearly having swapped hats, and the former initially lying on the bonnet of the car, and casually (as her character is) being quite candid about how little there is to do in the places where Sarsgaard and Cooper (Danny) stop.

3. A kiss in what initially looks like a railway compartment, but, as we draw back, is a private booth (where one can hear the 45 of one’s choice).

4, 5. Mulligan and her school chums caught smoking (when they thought themselves out of view around a corner), and then brought before Thompson – ‘Not surprised to see you’ (to Mulligan).

6. Curling around the café, in a pan, to the picture-window where Mulligan and co. are sitting. After she has put one of them right that the literature question that she is looking at asks for two examples (and the light quip from one friend that the other is excused, for being ‘rubbish at maths’), they turn to asking her about her (post-school) life : ‘What do you do all day anyway, Lady Muck ?’, to which Mulligan answers (not altogether convincingly) : Um (Pause.) I’ve been… trying on dresses, helping to look at some flats – I’ve been reading a lot, too.

7. In through the door of the kitchen, where Mulligan is being tutored, by Colman (her mother) in how to make afternoon tea, and we realize that Sarsgaard is there : he is asked, again, where the flat is, and eventually answers Down near Russell Square – two minutes’ walk from the Underground.

After Mulligan jokes about putting the tea-cosy on her head, Colman leaves. When questioned about where he is living now, Sarsgaard, after saying that he has only stayed there a couple of nights, states – when pressed – that Mulligan must think him very odd (You do seem to float around…), but I live at home […] – just [with] my mother, my father’s dead […].

8, 9. Inconsequential scenes, with Colman at the foot of the stairs (That’s what David sees, lots of nice places / You won’t be bored, you know – he’s not boring.), and outside the house, Sarsgaard kissing Mulligan, and sweeping her off her feet.

10. Extended scene with Hawkins (after No, don’t tell me… Good God, you’re a child !, and just before the moment when Mulligan walks away), where a longer speech from Hawkins catches her :

You didn’t know about any of this, presumably – no, they never do. Did he ask you to marry him ? Yes, of course he did. You’re not ‘in the family way’, are you, because that’s happened before ? […] (Brings out pram.) […] That’s why he never goes through with anything – he does love them. […] He’s four months old […] Perhaps you can remember a night, four months ago, when my husband seemed… a little distracted. […]

11. By the river / weir, distractedly smoking, then throwing the cigarette-packet away into the water.

12. Mulligan with her friends, around a table at the back of the café (where she had been waiting for them) – I’m sure my uncle knows someone who could kill him, if that would helpThere was lots I didn’t tell you, plus a moment of attempted profundity : That’s the thing about our lives, isn’t it – it’s so easy to fall asleep, when there’s nothing to keep you awake….



(Transcript of the last deleted scene


13. Mulligan cycling, Sarsgaard in distance, and, as is revealed in a wide, tracking-shot, the Bridge of Sighs in the near background. Concentrating, though, on the dialogue (rather than the shots) – and what a quantity of dialogue for a scene that was not used (the whole sequence is 3 minutes 25 seconds) !

Mulligan : Good God !

Sarsgaard : Hello, Jenny.

Mulligan : What are you doing here ?

Sarsgaard : Uh (Pause.) I came to see you.

Mulligan : I think, in this case, ‘Better never, than late’.

Sarsgaard : Please don’t be unkind. (Pause.) You probably know (Pause.) Um… I’ve been away. (Pause, nodding.) So, I couldn’t come before—

Mulligan : Yes, my mother sent me a piece from the local paper. You asked for 190 other offences to be taken into consideration. One hundred and ninety ! You must have ‘liberated’ most of the antiques in The Home Counties !

Sarsgaard : I wanted to make a clean start, for a new beginning – (Slight pause.) together. (Pause.
) I came to tell you… I’m going to speak to my wife about a divorce.

Mulligan : Don’t you understand what you did ?

Sarsgaard : Jenny, I do, I really do, and I know that… my behaviour… must’ve… been – confusing. (Pause.) Um. (Pause.) We never sat down and had a chat about it all, the ‘why’s and the ‘wherefore’s – that can wait. (Slight pause.) The important thing (Pause.) is – (Pause.) you’re still my Minnie Mouse (Pause.) – and… (Pause.) I love you. (Long Pause. She looks across at her friend, waiting.) And we had fun, you know you had fun.

Mulligan : (Long pause.) Yes, I had fun. (Long pause.) But I had fun with the wrong person. (Pause.) And at all the wrong times, and I can’t ever get those times back. (Pause.) But I’ve got my own life back now. (Pause.) Look, David – I’m at (With a boast.
) Oxford.

Sarsgaard : (Snorts.)



End-notes

* Not surprisingly, in reviewing How I Came to Hate Maths (Comment j’ai détesté les maths), Mark Liversidge (@MoveEvangelist) remarks as much.

** Admittedly, this argument conveniently uses the content of one deleted scene to prove that another deleted scene has no merit, but the upset to Jenny in finding out that David is married is, in its own terms, so great that, having gone further and met his wife, she is likely to believe that he has taken her for a ride.

*** In truth, there is no clear reason why she looks in there or now, and not only now, but not before.




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

Saturday 26 April 2014

Forty-eight, going on fifteen

This is a review of A Story of Children and Film (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


26 April (updated 28 April)


This is a review of A Story of Children and Film (2013)

Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) came to Cambridge with his film A Story of Children and Film (2013) (@ChildrenandFilm), which he told us that he had not been intending to make after – as he described it – six years making, and two years editing, The Story of Film : An Odyssey (2011).

The film was here both in its own right, and to introduce a series of films – The Cinema of Childhood – that has been curated by Cousins and by Filmhouse (@Filmhouse) (which was sourced with the assistance of Neil McGlone (@NeilMcGFilm)) and which has been showing since at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) (of which there are reviews here of Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene i Verden) (1949) and Bag of Rice) (Kiseye Berendj) (1998)).

Cousins had previously been at The Arts for the showing of the last part of Odyssey (which had been screened in full in preceding weeks), and of his new film What is This Thing Called Love ? (2012), and had been an agreeable and interesting guest.

This time, as well as eloquently introducing Children and Film and explaining how it had come about and how personal its genesis had been, Cousins was not making special pleading for the way in which he had constructed the film* : he had simply realized, in looking at the filming that he had done (in his home and with the camera in a static position) of his nephew and niece, that the patterns of behaviour that they showed, as they got used to the camera and, together and singly, played, gave him a way of being reminded of the roles for children in the best films that feature them, rather than those that impose an adulthood on a child before its time :

As he suggests at http://dogwoof.com/childrenandfilm/filmmaker, Cousins contrasted the sweet perfection of Shirley Temple (Curly Top (1935)) with the young girl who puts on a family entertainment with Esther (Judy Garland) in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), and who is allowed to make mistakes and be out of key, as, of course, many a child would.

At the same time, Cousins is not singling out St. Louis as a film that we would necessarily go to, but wants to introduce us to examples from all around the world from Senegal to Sweden, and also reminds us to look again at others that we may already know, such as Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), and even Spielberg’s E.T. : The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).




Punctuated by returning to the Cousins’ flat for more development of what is happening with the relatives on screen, but looking first, by paying a homage to where Vincent Van Gogh lived in Provence at the end of his life, at the world that the painter created in his work as he interpreted his surroundings, Cousins wants to remind us that making a film is projecting a visual and aural view of the world (and the poetic element in what he said to us was patent). Those views, and real life in Cousins’ home, do provide a contrast and a structure – if we can take them on their own terms, and accept, when he tells us, that he did consider other structures to this film, rather than using the original one, but found that nothing worked as well.

Children and Film, though it has a shorter running-time and is a very different type of film, is as demanding of us as Slavoj Žižek is of us in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), because Cousins does not slacken his pace or his use of terms to describe the camera’s movement or position, and ideally one needs to see the film several times over to take in all that he is not only saying at any one point, but to absorb the action in the clips, and the information such as the film’s name, translation and where and when made.

An excellent reason to order the DVD from Dogwoof (@dogwoof) (available from 28 April), but, in the meantime, the list of films featured can be found here :


http://dogwoof.com/childrenandfilm/about.


The film was also reviewed here by Amanda Randall (@amandarandall5) for TAKE ONE (@TakeOneCFF) at Cambridge Film Festival in 2013


To correct an omission


Those who know Cousins' camera-work will be well aware that he is a skilled cinematographer, but the quality of the images, their framing and composition, when he had travelled on to the Isle of Skye is beautiful : a real treat where it comes, because what has gone before has been the footage captured in the flat and clips from his chosen films, even if the opening, which seems a while away now, had been in Provence. (Whether he had linearly been contemplating the possible significance as a frame for this film of his niece and nephew at play, and had developed detailed ideas by the time of his time on Skye, really does not matter, for, in a sense, this is a story just as even any memory that we have is, a way of telling to the world what happened.)


End-notes

* Cousins had the large sheet on which he had worked out the connections between films with him, which those daring enough to approach afterwards were able to see close to.




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