Showing posts with label Neil White's blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Neil White's blog. Show all posts

Tuesday 9 April 2019

There are homecomings, and there are homecomings...

Some Tweets in response to Todos lo saben (Everybody Knows) (2018)

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


8 April


Some Tweets in response to Todos lo saben (Everybody Knows) (2018), as seen at Saffron Screen, Saffron Walden, on Monday 8 April 2019 at 8.00 p.m.









Epilogue :




Or, to give the closing words to @everyfilmneil, from the final sentences of his review (at www.everyfilm.co.uk) :

Farhadi has built a reputation through movies such as A Separation, The Salesman and my favourite of his films, The Past. Everybody Knows keeps up his tradition of keenly observed, tense drama. It helps that his most established cast to date are on great form.




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

Thursday 23 February 2017

I lost track, somewhere – what was real, what was performance

This is a response to Mica Levi's score for Jackie (2016) and its context in the film

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


22 February

This is a response to Mica Levi's score for Jackie (2016) and its context in the film


Right from the start of the film, Natalie Portman’s detail-rooted response, as Jackie Kennedy, to the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy – to losing him, and to what his assassination means, because he was also the 35th President of the United States of America – is prefigured and then accentuated by ‘a dying fall’ in Mica Levi’s score¹.


As we proceed with the elements of Levi’s sound-world and with Jackie (2016), they are multi-layered, with, for example, a cello-part that alludes to when Pablo Casals performed at The White House (as depicted), and, with some material, Levi sometimes seems to be subtly evoking the stateliness of many tributes in music to JFK² (if not the twelve-tone Elegy for J.F.K. (1964) that Stravinsky composed [Cathy Berberian, and three clarinet soloists from the Rome Philharmonic Orchestra, directed by Pierre Boulez, via YouTube] ?).





As mentioned, Neil White’s (@everyfilmneil’s) long-running cinema-blog [everyfilm.co.uk], where he sets himself the challenge every year of watching every film that has any release in the UK [starting from 1 January, Neil’s reviews number 87 at the time of writing], had very usefully set out what this film is, and so caused it to be listed to be watched :

Portman captures Jackie's essence in a film which is quite different to any which will be released this year. […]

It ought to be made clear that this is not a biopic of Jackie's life with JFK nor does it explore her further life and marriage to Aristotle Onassis.

Instead, it concentrates on the immediate aftermath of the assassination with occasional flashbacks to the shooting and a live TV programme in 1961 in which she revealed changes she had made to the White House.

Greta Gerwig (as Nancy Tuckerman)


Although Jackie is seen through the relative calm of being framed by a fictionalized newspaper interview³ (one of several ‘frames’ within the film, another of which also involves a significant conversation³), the scenes within its chosen strands speak of Jackie’s deep anxiety at the death of her husband, and at The White House, following her life with him there. As alluded to by Neil White, these are lives effectively lived out on t.v. : when Jackie Kennedy gives a tour of what Nancy Tuckerman (Greta Gerwig) suggests she call ‘the people’s house’, it is largely on her own, because it has been thought best for her husband only to join her at the end, and we see all the apparatus of the static and wheeled cameras that make this welcome possible, and, behind the illusion, Nancy mouthing reminders and encouragements to smile…


Director Pablo Larraín and director of photography Stéphane Fontaine have given the meeting with the journalist a very different ambience (with its peaceful location on the edge of water, at a named property in Massachusetts), so the times when we are with them cause other parts of the film – whose shooting-style and camera-movement make them feel highly tense and claustrophobic – more manageable⁴. For us, as much as for Jackie Kennedy : nonetheless, the cumulative effect of the motifs of Mica Levi’s music – and finally seeing the horror, near the end of the film, of being at John Kennedy’s side during the shooting – leave us unsettled.

The grief, the guilt and the anger at God, which we hear her ruminate and rage on in the moments with The Priest⁴ (John Hurt), are very much her own (could she have shielded her husband, and where was God in it all ?), and we have a very definite sense of place. Yet, in both of these ‘frames’, time seems deliberately elongated and a little unreal, and, when we end up at night-fall, it seems even more unworldly…

Jackie Kennedy with The Priest (John Hurt)


Maybe the anxiety, which in Jackie Kennedy has her mind concentrate on all that is specific (as a way of trying to cope with the reality of what has happened), is not being portrayed because she is different, or set apart from, our experience. The particularities of her hurt and pain apart, can we identify with moments as nonsensical as someone insisting that an autopsy has to take place, because it is ‘required by law’, but not being able – or not being willing – to say what an autopsy entails ?

Is anything familiar to us in that nightmarish moment of her rushing to the doors behind which the autopsy is taking place, only to be caught and turned back by Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) ?




End-notes :

¹ That straine agen, it had a dying fall.


Twelfth Night (Act I, Scene 1) [text from the First Folio]




² Though, necessarily, avoiding the obvious sound of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings [Leonard Bernstein conducts The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, via YouTube], which was broadcast over the television at the announcement of Kennedy’s death. (It was an arrangement that Barber had made, in the same year as his String Quartet, Op. 11 (1936), of its slow movement, and which had been heard when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death was announced, and on many public occasions since.)

We read in Wikipedia® :The Adagio for Strings was one of John F. Kennedy’s favorite pieces of music. Jackie Kennedy arranged a concert the Monday after his death with the National Symphony Orchestra and they played to an empty hall.


³ Neil White comments on this point in his review (please see main text, above), 'Director Pablo Larrain based the movie around an interview which Mrs Kennedy conducted with Life Magazine's Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. who is played by Billy Crudup but not named.' On the film's web-page on IMDb (@IMDb), Billy Crudup is generically credited as ‘The Journalist’, John Hurt as ‘The Priest’.

Jackie Kennedy with The Journalist (Billy Crudup)


⁴ Not the least of the ambiguity, with The Journalist (and The Priest ?), is what, of what we see Jackie Kennedy speak, she is actually saying to him, and what saying, but forbidding him to report (since she had said, at the outset, that she would be editing as they go) – but also the uncertainties between them all along, such as when she asks whether he is giving her career advice, or suggesting that she should hold a party at the house - or when she matter-of-factly tells him, I don’t smoke, so directly denying what we see her do.




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

Wednesday 20 July 2016

Starting with @PeterBradshaw1's @guardian 'review', some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)

Some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)

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


20 July

Starting with @PeterBradshaw1's @guardian 'review', some Tweets at and after Sheffield Doc / Fest about The Hard Stop (2016)














Next, engagement with the Every Film in 2016 review from Neil White (@everyfilmneil ~ http://everyfilmblog.blogspot.co.uk) :




More to come...




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

Monday 26 August 2013

Does one have to be a vegetarian to be a Morrissey fan... ?

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


27 August

A particular song in Morrissey 25 : Live, about Meat and complete with black-and-white images of creatures and carcasses*, might make you think so. For me, it was the least subtle moment of the night in almost all respects, whether lyrics, message, or even pointing a finger by naming KFC - or in the swoon that Morrissey affected afterwards on his knees.

It must have been affected, because there was a spot perfectly focused to illuminate his back, and spots mean lighting-rigs, and they mean rehearsing the lighting-changes, so he would have hit the mark placed on the stage as much the benefit of those who would see the filmed gig as those at the venue.

That quibble apart, there was much that was spontaneous and warm about this performance, recorded live at Hollywood High School (on 2 March 2013) - obviously not, again, when Morrissey ripped open a shirt that he must have intended to sacrifice (unlike the first two, which he had worn to go offstage and change, and which looked much nicer**) at crucial words about those whose physical appearance one despises, but that was momentary, and gave the fans a moment of nearly baying frenzy when he chucked it into the crowd at the front***.


I watched  with a friend, who could keep me abreast of where, before and after The Smiths, each number came from in Morrissey's recording history. (A couple from the second solo album both sounded heavily redolent of the earlier sound.) We probably also had three or so songs from before he went solo, and I was informed that one later song reflected what happened in litigation between band and former lead singer.

All of which is more than enough to give away the fact that I do not buy Morrissey's albums or go to his gigs, but that was no reason not to watch the cinematic release. (Those who read further afield on this blog will find that I talk about art, but one does not have to like an artist as such to talk about his or her work and try to understand it.)

As to being dramatic, it was clearly not - because of the size of the venue and the difference between the artists - going to compare with something like the video of Peter Gabriel's 'Secret World' tour, and it was really (apart from that mentioned) only the third in the running order that made a striking use of visual material. However, it all did the job of giving one some sense of what it might have been like to be there, and one got wonderfully close to the singing Morrissey.

He gave a strong performance, buttoned and unbuttoned his shirts as the mood took him, and was well supported by his band (one of whom, apparently, has been with him since he split off from The Smiths). How he would lash the stage so much, as he did earlier on, with a cordless microphone I do not know - maybe he stopped, maybe I became less conscious, because the first two songs definitely felt like openers, and then everything had more presence (not least with the way that the third item had been assembled for film).

Some of Morrissey's songs I might well look out and read, because, unlike the fans mouthing or singing alone, I do not know much of what he does, and it helped when I could lip-read from him : one, rightly enough and unobjectionably, told us that we all have a date with an undertaker that we cannot break. In addition, I was given a strong sense that any notion of ego about Morrissey is really a front, a view with which my friend agreed, and that the songs fairly often are sung by a persona, which it would be the grossest of simplifications to identify directly with him :

I initially formed that view by seeing how he gave a little bow to all the people whom we saw him giving handshakes to at the beginning, which seemed out of genuine respect. Expectation had been
built up by fans saying how they felt, seeing the empty auditorium, and the titles, and then we had him on stage, bedding down the act, and seeming to have no fear of reaching out to the audience, or of validating those who made it onto the stage by extending a hand to them : of course, we were all touched by his reception of the nine-year-old boy to whom he had spoken earlier being beside him.

Old cynic that I sometimes am, Morrissey's generosity of spirit warmed me - of course, it could have been a stunt for the boy to get to the stage and for Morrissey to hold him up by one arm for a while, but I had warmed to him by then, and I quite rejected the account of this show that has it that 'that the fella can sing but does he really have to wrap himself in a cloak of his own misery ?'.

No cloak, no misery that I could see - I did not recognize the Morrissey of (from memory) these words, and maybe they should not be divorced from what follows :

As the twelve-ton truck
Kills the both of us



For me, reflecting on one's mortality, on wanting to be authentic in one's own terms, and on what, rather than separating us, we have in common seems perfectly fine territory for a song-writer.


End-notes

* Then again, this made for a very filmic treatment of the footage from the stage, by overlaying it with images (or parts of them) from the screened projection, and so offset the relative banality of the rest (i.e. of equating killing and eating with murder).

** Belatedly, because I lost the link, I am reciprocating the kind link by @Notorious_QRG to this posting, in which words from this paragraph about the shirts were quoted - apologies !

I am still unsure whether Morrissey is rightly thought of as having an indissoluble ego, or whether the expressions that he had on stage are capable of having been misconstrued. Certainly, when he gave the audience the microphone and asked if they wanted to say something (and, even, to do so 'if they were hard enough'), there must have been a fair chance that they were fans and were going to be complimentary, but, just possibly, they could have chanted a lyric about tetanus injections for astrologers...

*** This latter gesture, too, I had been prepared for by the trailer.




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