HAMM : When you inspected my paupers. Always on foot ? / CLOV : Sometimes on horse.*

This is an account of Horse Money (2014) plus Q&A with director Pedro Costa

More views of ‒ or before ‒ Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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23 September

* May contain spoilers *

This is an account of a special screening of Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro) (2014) plus Q&A with director Pedro Costa at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, on Tuesday 22 September 2015

Some people in the Q&A reported that they expected to have to re-watch the film to follow what was happening : they therefore seemed to assume that seeing Horse Money (2014) again would satisfy that ‘need’, not that it is overtly denying such attempts to do so, with its re-enactment of experiences that, because they are deemed not to be ‘normal’ (or even to be dangerous), are usually labelled as psychosis and lead to a diagnosis such as schizophrenia :

When members of Ventura’s family are en masse at the foot of his bed, and one even sits on it, it is likely that they are there for him, but not that they are otherwise present. And, when he is almost naked in subterranean depths of great and striking beauty, it is unlikely that he is literally there, but forever being brought back.


A Beautiful Mind (2001) had us credit John Nash’s world, even if it is perhaps shown to us a little fancifully, and ‒ because it is to make a Hollywood necessity of contrasting it with ‘the truth’ ‒ in such a way that we understand it to have been delusional. Horse Money does not make those concessions to our understanding, but it is implicit in what it does that to ask to follow what happened, on a second viewing, is to expect that Vitalina, in what she says to Ventura (or vice versa), is communicating solely on the ostensible level of her actual words, not that the meaning lies in the interplay, or that the exact interplay ‒ any more than the dialogue in a play by Pinter ‒ may never have happened.

Which is where a connection lies with the work of Jeff Wall, to whom, without disagreement (and with seeming acceptance), Pedro Costa was referred in the Q&A.

This is the obvious link between http://t.co/48ekO34bT0 and the photography of Jeff Wall, but there are others... pic.twitter.com/BsPsat7TlT

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 24, 2015

For those who had been at Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest), and with Ventura’s experience, Horse Money could have made unpleasant and uncomfortable viewing, as a reminder of sadder days of constraint and forced compliance, and of the perfunctoriness ‒ here reduced to a dull formula ‒ of some psychiatric interviews.

For @CamPicturehouse, @GandolfiLoreta hosted director Pedro Costa for a lively accretion of dialogues about the history and nature of cinema

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 23, 2015

Still, the film cannot well be taken literally (even if Pedro Costa wants to call his film a documentary ‒ so he replied to Loreta Gandolfi (@GandolfiLoreta), who was hosting the Q&A, and who had first, to her surprise, seen Horse Money at a documentary film festival), and that aspect, together with what is characterized in the following question (which was put to Costa), has the likely effect of achieving the worst of both worlds :

Is there a danger in having composed so many shots so beautifully that an already oblique set of experiences becomes over-stylized ?

In other words, for those who do not know this world, Horse Money may be impenetrable (and may just make them believe that they ‘missed something’, and will gain more on a second viewing), whereas, for those who do, it might seem at too much of a poetic remove to do more than remind them, in an artistic form, of their past, but without telling them anything that they did not know from their own hospitalization. This is what is suggested by asking whether it may achieve the worst of both worlds.

Rightly, @IFI_Dub, though more Becketttthan Costa ? In what one could tolerate, v. clear Moran / Hamm references ? https://t.co/3RzUqamnKI

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 19, 2015

As to starting to watch the film at Cambridge, and then finding the emotion too painful (even after obtaining ‘a stiff drink’) to watch beyond around thirty-five minutes, obviously one was able to prepare oneself better for Horse Money, and then take it for what it was ‒ moving from [assertions of] the destruction of family life and livelihood** to wider perspectives of post-industrial decline, the earlier part of which theme was referenced in these #CamFF Tweets :

-> Dinheirois amongst the list of dead and dying - as at the end of Moran's part of Beckettt's novel Molloy, or in his play Endgame ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 10, 2015

Pedro Costa clearly finds working with Ventura compelling (even seductive, for, in this connection, one is reminded of Calvet (2011)), and he told the audience how he talks to Ventura about his life and thoughts, but uses those conversations to ground his poetic approach to the text and, ultimately, to making the script with a film-crew of just three (of which he is one).

One has to agree that the ‘look’ of his film is, likewise, a clear reaction against so much film-making that is not cinematic ‒ and, of course, Costa is right in this (and in striving for a visual quality in his work), and that such films give scant regard to the history and early achievements of film. Whether, though, we find Ventura (despite all his perspective on life) a persuasive voice remains to be seen :

Some might find that distilling / channelling Ventura through Costa and back into Ventura may have made what we see and hear too rarefied ?***

End-notes

* Endgame, Samuel Beckettt, p. 15 : Faber & Faber, London, 1964.

** In recognition of the content of the Tweets that follow, Costa was presented with a copy of the Calder edition of Beckettt’s trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable).

-> The dead bees, hens, etc., or in Endgame : Is Mother Pegg's light on ? Light ! How could anyone's light be on ! Extinguished ! Etc.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 17, 2015

*** Even if (because ?) Costa says that he prefers Spinoza to Wittgenstein (he also said that he had slept in the latter's bed at Trinity)... ?


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

This is an hard saying; who can hear it ?¹

This is a pre-Festival review of Tots els camins de Déu (All The Ways of God) (2014)

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

16 August

This is the original pre-Festival review [ahead of what was published] of Tots els camins de Déu (All The Ways of God) (2014) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2015)

‘Now go, for one sole will is in us both,
Thou Leader, and thou Lord, and Master, thou.’
Thus said I to him ; and, when he had moved,

I entered on the deep and savage way.

Inferno², Canto II, 139–142

Two men in a forest does not sound as though it has significant filmic possibilities. [Sadly, in the case of Prince Avalanche (2013), one would be right (because one yearned for what makes The Odd Couple (1968) alive).]

A Catalan film for @camfilmfest will be amazing full size : its atmosphere, tension, uncertainty, and reminders of Beckettt, Dante, Borges !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 16, 2015

In the case of Tots els camins de Déu (All The Ways of God) (2014), though, one’s cultural resonance is not even with that play about which, in 1955, Philip Hope-Wallace thought himself drily observing that if about anything, [it] is ostensibly about two tramps who spend the two acts, two evenings long, under a tree on a bit of waste ground ‘waiting for Godot’. What it evokes more is Molloy, the two-character first part of the trilogy of Samuel Beckettt’s great mature novels (to which we return below), regarding which Beckettt described En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) : written as a relaxation from the rather awful³ prose I was writing at the time :

In our being with Judes (Marc García Coté) and Oriol Pla (Iu), we know, if not from the opening scene of the film (Jan Cornet’s sole appearance, with Coté), then from the quotation from The Bible that directly follows (Matthew 27 : 3–5), that, taking us from The Mount of Olives onwards, there is a scriptural grounding for what we see : as one will, it is exegesis, re-imagining, or re-interpretation of Judas, betraying Christ with a kiss for money, and how those pieces of silver weigh on him (in English, we refer to 'pieces of silver', because of the King James’ Version). (At times, they fascinate, horrify or even seem to reassure Judes (though he wanted to repel them), yet he also fears them being taken, so they give him care about losing them.) And, with cultures where there is a Spanish-speaking tradition, even if the language of the film is firmly Catalan, one is never far from Jorge Luis Borges – thinking, most immediately, of his daring short-story-cum-scholarly-paper from 1944, ‘Tres versiones de Judas’ (‘Three versions of Judas’) [the link here is to the Wikipedia® web-page for the story, and here to an English translation].

Not uniquely for him, Borges mixes fact and fabrication, bogusly ascribing quotations at the same time as presenting real ones (many a short story of his is headed with quoted words, such as ‘El milago secreto’ (‘The Secret Miracle’), citing The Koran). Yet there is also the level on which, not just through the transmission of thought down the centuries, different times merge and become confused in his canon : in ‘El milago secreto’, the miracle is the relativity of Time, where the writer Jaromir Hladík’s divine petition is answered by its stopping for one group of people, but not for him). So it is that, towards the end of the third of the learned footnotes to ‘Tres versiones de Judas’ (Borges, in – and in spite of – his academic poise and style, is always prompting us to consider How much is jest, and how much am I in earnest ?), we read the passage that probably connects Borges most to Tots els camins de Déu⁴ :

He [Erik Erfjord] writes that the crucifying of God has not ceased, for anything which has happened once in time is repeated ceaselessly through all eternity. Judas, now, continues to receive the pieces of silver ; he continues to hurl the pieces of silver in the temple ; he continues to knot the hangman's noose on the field of blood.


And the foot-note ends with a comment in parentheses : (Erfjord, to justify this affirmation, invokes the last chapter of the first volume of the Vindication of Eternity, by Jaromir Hladík.) Yes, Borges (through this [real or imagined] Erik Erfjord, is relying on the same Jaromir Hladík who, in ‘El milago secreto’, prayed for a miracle concerning Time, and was granted one…



Self-referentially, whether this work by Borges was per se known to, and prompted, director Gemma Ferraté and her co-writer Eduard Sola then becomes immaterial, because the patterns of ideas themselves, as of events, will be subject to circularity, repetitiousness, even recursivity… Regarding the place that their film partly inhabits, Judas, as Borges’ quoted words have it, ceaselessly through all eternity […] continues to hurl the pieces of silver in the temple. And, in the same way, the spirit of Dante is present here.

For, in his great Divina Commedìa, right at the start of Inferno (and within just the first of a further thirty-three Canti) his personified self, too, finds himself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost, meets Virgil, his guide through Inferno and Purgatorio (as far as Canto XXX), and learns that he will be enlightened as to God’s perspective on his and other human lives. In the title of the work, the word ‘Commedìa’ is better understood as a cosmological, rather than a comedic, view [even if Dante does, of course, also delight in settling scores with political and other opponents in what he presents (e.g. in Canto XXXIII)] :

‘Through me the way is to the city dolent ;
Through me the way is to eternal dole ;
Through me the way among the people lost.’

Inferno², Canto III, 1–3

Those who know their Dante will know that the most lost of all – not exactly an Orwellian All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others – are beheld in Canto XXXIV, in the three mouths of Cocytus. They are those who betrayed : Brutus, Cassius, and our own Judas Iscariot, so, in recursive terms, the film feels Dante-esque, and, by invoking Dante, leads us back to Judas ?

But also back to Beckettt, a talented linguist³, who relished Dante, and some of whose texts from the 1950s to the 1970s deliberately conjure up hellish place (or spaces, one even being called The Lost Ones¹ (Le Dépeupleur )), and whose two narrators, in his novel Molloy, are inextricably linked with each other [and with those of Malone Dies (Malone meurt) and The Unnamable (L’Innomable)] : Moran is sent to bring Molloy back, and Molloy has an other-worldly awareness that help is on its way. Both travel on foot (or end up travelling thus – both had bicycles at one point), if not, becoming more and more decrepit, crawling. Both have sinister encounters with others, en route, that feel close to the sometimes taut interplay between Judes and Iu, but there is also the more explicit co-dependency of Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) in Godot, although they do struggle with a desire for freedom / separation [as foreshadowed in Mercier et Camier].


In these terms, then, several dimensions away from the connotations of Prince Avalanche, and rather, in its cinematic resemblance, close both to the emotional darkness of the work of another Catalan director, Hammudi Al-Rahmoun Font, with Otel.lo (Othello) (2012), and to its intriguing approach to an established text. [Before Preti Taneja’s (@PretiTaneja’s) article appreciative of the film appeared in The Guardian (@guardian), Al-Rahmoun Font (@Al_RahmounFont) was interviewed at last year’s Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) (before, of course, having a punting lesson)].

Despite the physicality of Judes’ journeying⁵, this film is less like others such as How I Live Now (2013) and Lore (2012), though, where what we see Eddie and Lore, respectively, endure is part of what changes who they are when they get ‘home’ (but at least as big a part is reacting to what war does to them). Nor is it the Everyman-type temporal and scenic progress of Mick Travis in Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man ! (1973), but rather a voyage in the inner territory of the mind :

Nearly at the very end of the film, there is an exchange of dialogue, which the film, to begin with, makes us keep out of except to see it develop through gesture and body language. Then, when we are able to hear their utterances, we find that Judes and Iu have touched now on eschatological topics that have been present to our mind all along, and which a closing image, quoting Michelangelo, makes clear : Dante, Borges, Beckettt are all part of it, but there is also confirmation of how relevant, in some of the locations and the overall feel, all along has been the remarkable piece of film-making that is Hors Satan (2011).

‘Thee it behoves to take another road,’
Responded he, when he beheld me weeping,
‘If, from this savage place, thou wouldst escape […]’

Inferno**, Canto I, 91–93


The music of the film has been sparing and subtle [from two instrumentalists (Jens Neumaier / Maik Alemany) on guitars and keyboards (piano / synthesizers), and Sandrine Robillard on cello], but it is used to prevent us being in the early part of that conversation between Judes and Iu. At the start of the film, it only emerges, as snatches of sound that we catch at whether we have heard, and marking the first real point of contact between the men.

Previously, we have seen Judes, hesitating as to whether someone is really there behind him, and with long shots that linger until, from his point of view, maybe we see movement. At two other significant moments, which signal the place where a change of heart / mind then occurs, the kinds of motion are mirrored differently, first with a degree of energy by guitar and synthesizer, and, then with tentative elegiacism of keyboard arpeggios, against which the cello weaves its line. All in keeping with a film that is not so much meditative as contemplative – a reflection, as the literary parallels are, on life and its mysteries, and an encouragement to give due heed to the latter in evaluating the former.


Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him ; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord

Isaiah 55 : 7–8 (King James' Version)



End-notes

¹ John 6 : 60, in the King James’ Version, which both ends the section that began with 6 : 25 (at 6 : 44, No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day), and links with 6 : 61–71, which concludes with a parenthetical mention of ‘Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon’.

² The first part of Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedìa, in Longfellow’s translation.

³ Not least since Beckettt begrudged deriving recognition for his works from Godot, it is unlikely that he meant ‘awful’ to mean bad in the sense of ‘of poor quality’ (and maybe actually in that of full of awe) ? He may well have written these words originally in French, his preferred language (although he was Anglo-Irish), since he had a master’s degree in foreign languages from Trinity College, Dublin, where he had studied Dante. (In Beckettt’s early prose work More Pricks Than Kicks, one of the stories / sections is even called ‘Dante and the Lobster’.)

⁴ Though there is also the poem ‘Matthew XXVII : 9’.

⁵ In the passages of rough-going, we are right there (through use of a close microphone and hand-holding the camera without a stabilizer) with Marc García Coté’s breathing, and the ups, downs and stumbles of the way, whereas we are more steady, and at a distance, for some shots when he seeks repose.


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

The best of Sheffield Documentary Festival 2015 : in the John Akomfrah retrospective

This is a Festival review of The Nine Muses (2010)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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24 June

This is a Festival review of The Nine Muses (2010), screened at Sheffield Documentary Festival 2015, in a retrospective of Director John Akomfrah’s work,
on Monday 8 June at 12.00 p.m.

The Nine Muses (2010) was easily the best film seen at Sheffield Documentary Festival 2015 (@sheffdocfest), and, this Tweet, from the previous night, proved prophetic :

So far, two main approaches from @sheffdocfest films : a broadly chronological unfolding (sometimes in real time) and complementary strands.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 7, 2015

The film opens with large, beautiful vistas, as if of Scandinavian fjords, across which we slowly pan, left to right.

They are perfect, but we sense the coldness in their perfection – and, when we come nearer to and look at the land from a craft, it seems washed out in a grey, inhospitable way (perhaps an effect achieved by colour grading ?). So these views stir something in us already, which builds with the accretion of readings from classic sources such as various episodes from The Odyssey and the opening Cantos of Dante’s Inferno (from The Divine Comedy*) : quite likely, director John Akomfrah intended, with this vivid, unmistakable choice of a land of ice and snow, that we should already be reminded – have stirrings – of ancient lore, such as in the following passages, mentioning a land of winter (and an ideal realm, too) ?

HYPERBOREA was a fabulous realm of eternal spring located in the far north beyond the land of winter. Its people were a blessed, long-lived race free of war, hard toil, and the ravages of old age and disease.

[…] To the south the realm was guarded by the bitterly cold peaks of the near-impassable Rhipaion mountains. […] Directly to the south lay Pterophoros, a desolate, snow-covered land cursed by eternal winter.

From Land Hyperborea

From that first implication, visual images of snowbound land- and cityscapes, and aural images of journeys, deception, captivity and slavery – as Odysseus and others revolve patterns of voyage, shipwreck, and escape combine and complement each other, whilst thoughtfully chosen archive footage** establishes a freezing Britain. Also established, by a title, is the theme of the Muses***, though it is probably harder to keep in mind the film’s apparent Muse-by-Muse taxonomy (or even to be certain whether that scheme is seen through to the end ?).

On a first viewing, certainly, it seemed more convenient to allow the film’s mutually reinforcing elements to work, as it were, impressionistically. For, apart from the ‘purely visual’, one is quite occupied with texts that appear on title-cards (e.g. from Emily Dickinson****), readings (much from Samuel Beckettt’s novels****, with some repeated passages), and music (such as Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel). (Director John Akomfrah went on to direct The Stuart Hall Project (2013), similarly rich in content for a single viewing, and seeming longer than its 103 mins.)

Meanwhile, as the film develops, with the specially shot scenes juxtaposing their more nearby context in the natural, material world with a figure***** in a synthetic jacket (sometimes two figures – if so, in jackets of different colour), we hear words of dislocation and disassociation from Beckettt (or Finnegans Wake, 'The Song of Songs', or Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy), and maybe reflect on the appropriacy of needing to belong where one is :

Beckettt, brought up in the halfway world of being Anglo-Irish, and all too easily appropriated as an English writer (though he actually learnt his craft by writing in French, and came to translate his prose into English), and finding himself by meeting Joyce in Paris and exiling himself in France – starting with Watt, for some, the worlds that he found to express in his novels, and which Akomfrah has fittingly and adeptly alluded to here by quotation.

Retrospective screening of our acclaimed #TheNineMuses today at @sheffdocfest by the visionary John Akomfrah! pic.twitter.com/D41rXeBsyA

— Miikka Leskinen (@Miikka_Leskinen) June 8, 2015

Achieving potency by its layering of material, The Nine Muses (2010) easily laid down a challenge to other film-makers at Sheffield to think to their craft (and worryingly many in the screening did not seem drawn by this work and willing to stay for the duration) – a challenge not, if this is regarded in essay style, necessarily to work within this format, but to remind them :

Cinema, when it is at its strongest and best, is not grounded or rooted in only the visual (and with what is found to accompany it), but in being a total entity, and, in a different sphere, one might think of the conception and execution of Tarkovsky’s final piece of work :

@ICALondon One for the diary... Tarkovsky. Amazing film maker, and artist. The Sacrifice was the film he made once leaving Russia..one year

— Katherine Da Silva (@KathyDaSilva2) June 23, 2015

Seen at Sheffield : Doc/Fest films with full reviews


End-notes

* All were credited as being on Naxos Audiobooks.

** Sacrificing concern at any grainy quality (or other issue) to concentrate on content and significance of the imagery.

*** A title tells us that they are the nine female children of Mnemosyne (the Goddess of Memory), fathered by Zeus.

**** Also, T. S. Eliot ('The Journey of the Magi' ?), and e e cummings. With Beckettt, Molloy and The Unnamable are credited (though one could have sworn that Malone was there, too).

***** There are credits for wearers of a blue jacket, two yellow jackets (one of whom was Akomfrah), and two black jackets.


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

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

This is a review of Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès in Schubert’s Winterreise

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

This is a review of a performance at The Maltings, Snape, of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (Op. 89, D. 911) by Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès on the evening of Sunday 22 June 2014 in the 67th Aldeburgh Festival (@aldeburghmusic)

One might have imagined that the theatrical nature of to-night’s Winterreise at The Maltings, Snape, was Nicht für alle – but when Adès had sounded the final moment of calm, beyond bereftness, and had maintained long his final position on the keys (holding the reaction off), the vivid acclaim proved otherwise.

And seventy or more minutes had passed without seeming so, taking us to Der Leiermann quite, it might almost have felt, by surprise – could we really be at journey’s end already (wherever we actually were in time, that is)… ? Had we not been immersed, and begun to lose track of the number of song-settings by around the seventh – and why, anyway, was the figure of thirty-two floating around in the mind (or was that from The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 ?) ?

In ‘Gute Nacht’ (1*), right at the start of Wilhelm Müller’s sequence (though there were originally only twelve poems), there might have been some wonder at Bostridge’s extreme enunciation of clusters of letters at the ends of words such as gemacht / Nacht, and then, in reverse order, Nacht / gedacht**.

The initial impression was that maybe Bostridge had reacted to some criticism of his German by over-accentuation – but no, with further listening, diction in other places was more interior by far, not simply quieter, and, although (with the hall’s fine acoustic) it must have, seemed in danger of not reaching halfway up the side-stalls, let alone carrying to the back of the raked seating :

Something more complicated was going on with the voicing of this piece, which not only looked back to Bostridge’s recording with Julius Drake of ‘Erlkönig’ (D. 328) (on the EMI album Schubert Lieder*** in 1998), but also to his acclaimed appearances in so much Mozart, so much Britten, even as Caliban in Adès’ own much-lauded opera. (And, as Bostridge was in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, fitting to be reminded of a Director of Studies at Cambridge, who once expressed the belief that the separate characters in The Rape of Lucrece are different parts of one person – and the concomitantly repellent implication that Shakespeare had composed a fantasy of rape.)


Bostridge was bringing what amounted to a semi-staging to this late work of Schubert (hardly anything later than the year of death, and correcting the proofs of Part 2 of the song-cycle), but almost within the conventions of the concert-hall : done-up dark suit, single buttoned and almost a less-showy dinner-jacket, white shirt, but no tie for Adès or him.

Sometimes leaning on the curve of the Steinway grand as if this were cabaret (and sounding not a little Kurt Weillish), sometimes feeling like about to dive into it, under its lid (yet not as at a word-prompt, but as if his lost love and heart might be there), other times advancing upstage, at yet others writhing, contorted, and seeming to start disintegrating. Which, of course, is at the heart of Winterreise (after – and painfully leading on from – [Schubert’s setting of] Müller’s optimistic and enthusiastic Die schöne Müllerin (no sly self-reference there).

Or, more than two centuries later, at that of Beckettt in Molloy**** (and the other two novels of that trilogy, or even in the earlier work Mercier and Camier), though one was reminded most of that writer’s more famous and actually once cultured ‘men of the road’ in Vladimir and Estragon (affectionately, Didi and Gogo) : Could Bostridge possibly be seeing himself as a Vladimir, first of all seeing that special tree (‘Den Lindenbaum’ (5)), but with difficult feelings because of the mismatch with what is rooted in memory ?

That was the first really lyrical voicing, with Lieder-type gestures and tone, but it led, for example, to :

* ‘Wasserflut’ (6), with a massive, expressionistic stress on Haus (the ultimate word of the lyrics)

* Looking back on the town, as the departing man leaves it behind (‘Rückblick’ (8))

* The heart’s unfettered reaching out, in rapturous hope, when ein Posthorn klingt (in ‘Die Post’ (12)) – more clamorous lyricism

* The fixéd resignation / resolution (in ‘Der Wegweiser’ (20)) of :

eine Straße muß ich gehen,
die noch keiner ging zurück


Maybe at this point a different note set in – or perhaps as early as ‘Der greise Kopf’ (14)*****, contemplating the poet’s happy illusion of being old (because of frost on the hair). From then, diese Resie not seem to be demanding of Bostridge in the same way, and the slightly reeling and slurred Tom Waits down tone, contrasting with the defiant up voice that clearly and angrily states how the traveller has been treated, had evaporated – the feeling of ill-treatment had been early, starting with ‘Die Wetterfahne’ (2), and seeing Cressida-like inconstancy in the weather-vane signalling a change of direction (indicated by what is described as ‘[ein] Schild’, a crest or shield), and in the cynicism of the wind-changed beloved’s parents :

Was fragen sie nach meinen Schmerzen ?
Ihr Kind ist eine reiche Braut.


Yet this living so deeply with the role (no less than that, say, of Lear, where there is some respite) must have been at, and continued to be at, a price : at the end of Winterreise, when Adès and he went off, Bostridge seemed physically reduced from being already slim – though perhaps it was just the back view – and looked depleted, almost lamed.


Just one minor hesitation…

Yes, we can be plunged into this winter-world, but (especially if we do not know it, and struggle to follow the unremitting text in the concert-hall’s relative gloom) do we best find our emotional direction with Schubert’s work here ? Coming to the performance with our maybe hurried occupation of seats, our life outside the hall, brought into our seat ? – until, though, we relax into the offered music. No, we definitely would not have demanded more of Bostridge before Winterreise, but could we not have had a momentary taste of the composer just for piano, just to get us in his sound-world ?

As it was, it transpired that Adès, as accompanist, had read back into the early sections the spiky strangeness of the close, with his brought-out bass-figures and what seemed quirkily anachronistic stress, but could we have followed him better, and alone first, with a suitable Impromptu or two, to remind ourselves of the Schubert who after all strove, not least in Rosamunde (however fragmentarily his efforts usually survive, outside Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3’s) Schubert marathon, as ‘incidental music’), to be part of theatre ?

Or even Liszt transcriptions of some songs, to take us away from the text-based, score-based literalism with which we might have approached what, it turned out, was anything but a hide-bound Winterreise, but a dangerous encounter with the part-like nature of the self…


A review of the following night's marathon solo piano recital by Festival director Pierre-Laurent Aimard is now available here



End-notes

* The numbering denotes the positioning of the poems of the song-cycle (as against Müller’s sequence of poems).

** Not here, but later, is where sounds were almost launched at the front rows of the stalls, right below Bostridge : ab in ‘Gefrorne Tränen’ (3), and, probably next, überdeckt andausgestreckt in ‘Auf dem Flusse’ (7).


*** The initial recording, to which a Volume II was added (in the release in 2001).

**** ‘Rast’ (10) talks of sheltering in a charcoal-burner’s house, and there is such a person in Beckettt’s Molloy…

***** In the closing two lines, we have confirmation that this is a definite departure, eine Reise :

Wer glaubt’s ? under meiner ward es nicht
auf dieser ganzen Reise !


Also on Aldeburgh...

Ever-ambitious Aimard wows with authenticity

The Humphrey and Andy Show (Britten on Camera)


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

Mum says that I am a monster for chocolate

This is a review of How I Live Now (2013)

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

3 October

This is a review of How I Live Now (2013)

* May contain spoilers *

Piper (unclear why she is called that, but played, somewhat precociously, by Harley Bird) says the title words to this posting to Daisy* (Saiorse Ronan), who, rather clumsily / unconvincingly tries to reassure her that there is not a connection between her mother not being there and eating chocolate : as we may well know, in cases of a separation, children can look for an explanation and end up blaming themselves, finding a causal connection and a regret, e.g. If I hadn’t eaten chocolate, mum wouldn’t have gone. (Daisy probably blames herself for her own mother’s departure : her mother, we are told, loved this location, and we see a photo of her by a sundial, later seen atop a hill.)

Pure observational / empirical psychology. Later, Daisy talks about chocolate, too, saying what she thought she was doing by not eating it, but, much more than that, her depiction as a person with intrusive commands in her head, and who describes herself more than once as a curse, suggest that she may be meant to have (touches of) obsessive-compulsive disorder (better known as OCD). It is not merely that she is fastidious (calling the contents of the fridge ‘gross’, and claiming that cheese is ‘a lump of solidified cows’ mucus’), but that she believes that something dreadful will happen, if she does not do certain things, and we hear what is in her head, compelling her.

Certainly, Edmond (Eddie, played by George MacKay) knows that Daisy has an inner conflict, and seeks to encourage her that she does not have to do what she is telling herself, after he has toppled her, fully clothed, into the plashing current of the family watering-hole, and thereby makes a further connection with her**.

Shortly before, he has whispered the herd of cows away that puts Daisy off proceeding, and, when she clumsily climbs a gate with barbed wire on, heals her hand, magic elements no doubt from the novel, and which enliven a fairly inert story, which would otherwise be of type ‘upheaval plus making a dangerous journey to be with loved ones’***, e.g. The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Lord of the Rings : Return of the King (2003), etc.

Anyway, back at the OCD, we hear Daisy talking about the change in her way of thinking that she has found herself making during the course of the film, and we have long since seen her doing things that would have made the earlier Daisy squirm or scream. I doubt that this ‘progress’ is anything other than symbolic, although, with psychological treatment, people can learn to do things that would otherwise overwhelm them with disgust, but I do not know what it is meant to mean on a figurative level, as some may be confused by what she does and hears anyway

As, considered differently, a story about insurrection or war, there are brutal moments, such as the enforced ‘evacuation’ (though less harrowing, because of the sheer violence, than an equivalent scene in Sarah’s Key (2010), and later parts of the film leave one wondering, from the available evidence, what need there could have been for splitting up the family) and when Piper is under threat from two men, as well as sudden detonations and overflights of aircraft.

Such things apart, there is a fairly static presentation of military conflict by means of low-frequency notes in the score and shots of burnt-out cars or the debris of an airliner (although there is the failure to appreciate that a box of chocolates might not be so pristine that it even has a tag on it (a tag to play on Piper’s mind ?)). The strife, then, seems too staged, almost as if it might only be happening in Daisy’s mind…

That may be the answer to it. When we knew that Daisy was with the family for a summer, it all seemed a bit My Summer of Love (2004), and the representatives of (full) adulthood being largely absent in a rather Narnia way, until the trees shook (in Tarkovsky vein, or that of Looper (2012) maybe) and Something Happened (again, a bit Narnia). Fairport Convention performing Tam Lin, about a magical abduction, has already paved the way ?

If it is all symbolic, then the ending can be reinterpreted as seen from knowing the beginning, as the ending voice-over invites us to do. Probably a comparison with Beckettt’s novel Molloy is pretentious, but his fastidious character Moran makes a punishing journey (in more sense than one ?) and ends up transformed. Moran opened his part of the book with ‘It is midnight. It is raining’, and closes it with ‘It was not midnight. It was not raining’. (Here, maybe that means that the end condition does not differ much from the starting condition, and maybe Eddie is no more than another aspect of Daisy's own personality, as there are certainly touches of A Beautiful Mind (2001), suggesting as much.)

With this film, it is all (for good reason) reminiscent of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, too, with another dramatic transformation. That said, it is the words spoken over by Ronan that make one think that anything is significant, since the ‘journey home’ with Piper seems hare brained, succeeds against all the odds, and sees Daisy using excessive force and threats to protect her – unlike in Lore (2012), there is no great sense of something that needs to be done except in terms of telepathy and / or dream, or of Daisy being / becoming a different person because of what happens.

Coupled with the fact that the film, even at only 101 minutes, seems to drag, all of this makes me think that it will not do very well, as comments that I heard were that it was like Twilight, and at least they had had a free ticket…


End-notes

* Daisy is really Elizabeth, but has chosen this name for herself (although using both to introduce herself to her aunt) : not surprisingly, such renaming is not often unassociated with some turmoil about identity.

** Previously, she had declared, rather abruptly, that she did not fish, did not swim, but then decides to go along for the ride.

*** Of which, I take The Road to be another such.


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