Showing posts with label Max Frisch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Max Frisch. Show all posts

Tuesday, 2 November 2021

TENET (2020) Reloaded : Is Nolan's film a full-on Blakeian prophecy - so impenetrable that we miss the light between the trees ?

TENET (2020) Reloaded : Is Nolan's film a full-on, so impenetrable, Blakeian prophecy... ?

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

2 November

TENET (2020) Reloaded : Is Nolan's film a full-on Blakeian prophecy - so impenetrable that we miss the light between the trees ?


















































Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 10 May 2014

From the archive : The Language of Insults

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

11 May

The Language of Insults


Let’s abuse each other !

Waiting for Godot, Act I


If – God forbid ! – I were to wish to express the notion that the Prime Minister is a bad man, motivated by self-interest, how might I say it to Cameron’s face ?

I can’t emphatically say the natural You’re evil !, because the first syllable, with its diphthong, is hard to control at any volume when making sure that the message is abrupt and clear, so I might resort to three sharp, distinct jabs, You are evil !, and then add to it, making You are selfish and evil ! (or vice versa).

But how cowed by this will #Shameron feel, because he can just brush off the adjectives, knowing that he is a pure and noble breed* ?
Think of when you are in the car, or cycling, or on the pavement, and someone else using the road does something stupid. You might serenely and calmly turn your countenance to the fact that you have had – as the case might be – to brake suddenly, softly murmur How stupid…, and resume your assumed walk through life with the Buddha.

More likely, I suggest, is that you will react differently, and not resort to our earlier formulation, You are stupid !, at all, but to the You stupid x !, where – probably depending on the level of your non-Buddha-restrained frustration, indignation or even anger – x might be man, woman, etc.**, sod, bastard, twat, prick, and so on***.

At this point, it is worth noticing that many adjectives that, according to this pattern, occupy the place of our own ‘stupid’ are bisyllabic, such as ruddy, bleeding, bloody, sodding, fucking, useless, hopeless, etc., and can therefore be rattled through and over : they have their weight, but mainly as a qualification to our chosen engine of conveying our message, e.g. You priceless fucker / shite / wanker. (One can, of course, say (probably if relevant) You bald git !, and there is, in great, fat, dumb, proud, crass, etc., a whole battery of monosyllables, but the stronger qualifying words seem, again, to be polysyllabic.)

OK, so what is this exercise – even if some may find it fascinating – of considering condemning Cameron all about ? Well, I want to look at the words of insult that some of the bloggers on mental-health regard as taboo because, they say, they stigmatize those with mental-health issues. For example the terms lunatic, psycho, mad, crazy, loopy, demented, and psychotic.

If someone gets called a ‘fucking psycho’, that is one extreme, and it may constitute any number of things from a drunken mate approving a reckless act of violence to, say, the critical characterization of a risky piece of driving. (For we use words in context, and, in the first example, this may be part of the mythology of the mates’ behaviour, and so not be understood anything other than positively.)

There is a stage further, though, such as in the arena of taunting, or of threatening – or even administering – violence to a person who is known (or believed****) to have a mental-health condition. That reinforces a message that, if beautified, goes along the lines We don’t like you – or want you around – because of who you are, what you do, and what it means for you to be here, where you are not welcome.

However, I believe that some words have been denuded of any real malice, unless they are deliberately used offensively : I would suggest that, with enough energy, being called a pretty table-leg could, if anyone wanted to say it, be invested with and convey disregard, disdain, and disgust .
Or take this, from Soda Pictures’ booklet for New British Cinema Quarterly (where Eryl Phillips talks about making – planning to make – Gospel of Us, a three-day theatrical event to tell Christ’s Passion in and around Port Talbot) :

The ambition of the piece was bordering on madness – to attempt a film of it all was either a mid-life crisis or just lunatic

At least two of the words or phrases ‘mid-life crisis’, ‘madness’ and ‘lunatic’ explicitly suggest poor judgement through mental ill-health, but does that, in itself, make it insulting as such to those with that experience ? I’d draw the line in favour of those things being OK, whereas to have written this would be different, I suggest :

The ambition of the piece was bordering on demented – to attempt a film of it all was either a psychotic episode or sectionable

The insult, there, is to belittle psychosis (by likening it to feelings of alienation from one’s life, which usually fall far short of needing even medication), to draw the vague word ‘demented’ (usually meant to signify dangerous violence, and attributed in the popular imagination and vocabulary to mental-health conditions) into the mêlée of meaning, and to cheapen the real and highly threatening and frightening matter of being sectioned by mentioning it in the context of a film that would be hard to make...


End-notes

* In Paul Weller’s words ('David Watts').

** Or, as my father was wont to say, ‘individual’.

*** Enterprising individuals** might learn a whole string of them, or play a sort of melody, on a scale of them, in increasing and receding severity, such as :
man shit jerk sod cunt drip bum twat .

**** A sort of guilt by association or mistake, as in Max Frisch’s Andorra.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday, 27 March 2014

That was big of you - oh no, it was bigamy !

This is a review of An Education (2009) (seen on DVD)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

27 March

This is a review of An Education (2009) (seen on DVD)

* Contains spoilers *



Biedermann und die Brandstifter, not least through its Epilogue, implies that what we have seen is a slice from a cyclical pattern. In the scene with Sally Hawkins, we learn that Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is just the last in a line, yet what makes no sense is why (a) the former tolerates this behaviour, (b) Danny (Dominic Cooper) seems to react in private to David (Peter Sarsgaard) as if this is the first time that this has happened, and (c) why the letters that Jenny finds would be in the glove compartment (unless - although such a notion does not accord with what we see - she is meant to find them).

Maybe all that is in Lynn Barber's 'memoir' (and adopted by Nick Hornby in writing the screenplay), but it does not make for credibility that Jenny is (excuse the rhyme !) one of many, and so of less importance (to David), and more of a victim. (Where the resonance with the Epilogue of the Frisch is strongest is when parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) and daughter blame each other, as responsible for what happened.)



As for the two or three longish scenes with Emma Thompson as the head, whether, in 1961, even an intelligent pupil such as Jenny would realistically have been permitted (by such head) to speak to her as Jenny does seems doubtful - Jenny may be spirited, spurred by David's attentions, but figures in authority have never taken to those whom they are dressing down or warning 'talking back', whereas this one seems to take it on the chin (if reserving only the power to reject when ignored).

Otherwise, it is a nice enough tale of duplicity and hopes only postponed, not dashed*, and it does not hang around, at 96 minutes, in the way that a more recent would-be morality story does. However, it tries to end with the rather trite message of I was wiser for what happened as if it is some profundity, not a cliché : by contrast, Frisch's play is Ein Lehrstück ohne Lehre, which is broadly a lesson without teaching, and, in common with Haneke's films, one is not directed what to think about, or how to interpret, what one sees and hears.





Fair enough to nominate Mulligan for an Academy Award for best actress, but best film or best adapted screenplay ??

There is now a follow-up piece about what favours the so-called 'Bonus Features' on the DVD did the film...


Or this review, from Time Out's Dave Calhoun, makes for interesting reading...


End-notes

* Maybe it feels a little like My Week with Marilyn (2011) - important to the young person at the time, but one gets over it ? (Each film has a (different) Williams, too...)




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