A poem near Christmas

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

For Anne Sixsmith

When I say that singers of carols
(one carol, and a quick Figgy Pudding)
Woke me on the last Sunday of Advent –
Heaven sent,
You say that it’s my interpretation…
But it still did me good to believe it


When a beat police officer
(maybe ‘beat’ in some several senses)
Finds me on my last legs at Christmas –
In distress,
I say that it’s her interpretation…
To think me better off, locked in a cell


When, in Strasbourg or New York
(representing our global views, perhaps),
Hearers respond to what others say –
In good faith,
They view it not as interpretation…
That nation should thus speak unto nation


When, transported from Hebrew
(maybe Veni, veni Emmanuel),
We hear a special name for Christ –
At Advent,
Isaiah says what they shall call his name,
Which, being interpreted, is God with Us




© Copyright Belston Night Works 2014


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

We are two flowers in the same pot

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19 November

A rating and review for Cutie and The Boxer (2013)

96 = N : 15 / M : 16 / C1 : 17 / C2 : 16 / E : 16 / F : 16

N = narration / script

M = material / use of material

C1 = cinematography

C2 = cohesiveness

E = effects / music

F = feel


9 = mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)



The best documentary-makers know that audiences can be trusted to wait for whatever information / explanation comes (or for things to be left uncertain), and that they do not need all things spelt out : the art must be to stand back from one’s film, see it with another’s eyes, and imagine what would be understood by saying this, mentioning this here…

Early on, it just comes out of what Ushio and Noriko Shinohara are doing domestically that it is his birthday and he is 80, with individual cakes and candles. They are clearly Japanese, largely not talking in English except for emphasis, a good word, wit (but the subtitling is simply maintained as a constant), but we may not be aware (or may have read) that they are in New York.

That never needs to be conveyed as a statement (nor whether they have ever tried or wanted to live elsewhere in the States), although some excerpts from a documentary talk about Noriko arriving from Japan with support from her parents, and the early part of Ushio’s career. From where we see them, we come to conclude that it is their home, and many a feature film would benefit from allowing provisional beliefs to be made by their viewers.

Cases of artists – in the widest sense – married to other artists give us Mahler not letting Alma compose, Schumann cramping Clara’s career, and, in a friend’s life, a husband (they are now divorced) who thought himself a genius (as Ushio does), and that certain things did not merit him spending his time on them.

Here, we see the lives together of Noriko and Ushio, and their traumatized son Alex, with whom she became pregnant six months after arriving in New York from Tokyo – it seemed that, unlike the cat whom we see compliantly being washed, he just visited (or, if not, he must have been hiding, or dead drunk, earlier on). When she met Ushio, she was 19, he 41.

Now, the nature of female ageing typically being what it is, the age difference initially seems less apparent – also because he boxes paint onto canvas, with pads attached to gloves, and so seems very fit and energetic. Nothing is made of it as an explanation, but there is a beautifully tranquil, intense and bubble-laden scene where we see him swimming, and elsewhere we see his physique.

The film shows us two recent shows of Ushio’s, the first solo (we never hear whether anything sells, though the opening of the documentary has Noriko estimating that they need $1,000 and the money for the rent to keep afloat), the second jointly with Noriko, which is near the end. In between, there is questioning about (from Ushio) whether he should have an assistant, and (from Noriko) any assumption that she is his assistant, and that she helps him other than because she wants to. Then, in Noriko’s painted-in drawings, we see the emergence of the characters Bullie and Cutie.

To begin with, they tell Cutie Noriko’s own story, soon pregnant and having an alcoholic to contend with, and financial support stopping from her parents when they learn of the drug- and alcohol-informed parties. She works out, in the drawings, her feelings, one of which is that of having been delayed being able to be creative again in her own right for so long, because of the cares and concerns of motherhood. However, in the mural for the joint show, she turns them into less identifiable polar characters with more general desires and impulses.

None of this sums up this neatly put-together film (which, one has to trust, does explain the poster) : the integration of the earlier documentary, the closeness to the subjects, the doubt about whether Ushio’s work is strong or just gimmick (which seems displaced for a while by a visitor from The Guggenheim, and the possibility of buying one of his boxing-paintings, but he then only tells Noriko when she asks that they had decided to buy a work from another artist this year).

What cannot be denied is that, despite the frictions, it is Noriko who knows better than Ushio where a suitable painting is to show to the Guggenheim visitor, and who can also intervene to say that a work that seems of interest had actually been given by Ushio to someone else with a promise not to sell it. Seeing her reasserting herself (for she complains, largely unheard, not only that she is a chef to Ushio, but that he then crudely gobbles something down on which she has laboured) may be a by-product of this film, but, at any rate, it is good to see her valuing her artistic creation – and having others value it.


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

Weighed in the scales

This is a rating and review for The Human Scale (2012)

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16 November


This film was screened in a special session on Saturday 16 November 2013 at Aldeburgh Documentary Festival

A rating and review for The Human Scale (2012)

93 = N : 15 / M : 15 / C1 : 15 / C2 : 17 / E : 16 / F : 15

N = narration / script

M = material / use of material

C1 = cinematography

C2 = cohesiveness

E = effects / music

F = feel


9 = mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)



According to Aldeburgh Documentary Festival’s leaflet, the writer and director of The Human Scale (2012) is Anders Dalgaard, whereas IMDb's entry calls him Andreas. (I assume that he provided the voiceover in what the leaflet tells me was the English language version.)

This is a film about architect Jan Gehl’s view of cities, how they can be reinvigorated, and what those practising around the world under the Gehl brand bring to projects. Some might disagree (as members of the panel afterwards did - please see below) with what those participating are included saying about, for example, what went wrong with modernist approaches to architecture or the nature of the interventions made, but the documentary is a coherent account, with an excellent soundtrack by Kristian Eidnes Andersen, which struck just the right balance of being perceptible, but not too evident.

The film slows and speeds motion, tracks, and puts the camera in place to give us before-and-after views, but all in a harmonious way that does not interfere with clear presentation of the subject. In China, perhaps some stock footage of a very different picture-quality could have been avoided, before we get on to seeing how cities have developed, but this is a minor criticism.

The film begins with the various speakers just on camera, almost all of them saying nothing, and then they are introduced in their turn, after Gehl has said some words about what matters to him in his practice, as each has something to say. Structured around five utterances, which some of the corresponding sections lead up to and close with, the film takes us all over the globe, giving examples.

It was in Siena that Gehl and his wife began studying the way that people use spaces in cities, because he perceived Italy as being a good place for people to live in, and we are shown the central square in the city, and how the notion of commonality, which they had measures for, works there. In Copenhagen, interventions in the harbour area, which had just become a big car-park, and pedestrianizing the main thoroughfare and the city square, restored people spending time in these places.

In New York, despite the outspoken views of a New York cabbie that no one wanted to cycle, a network of cycle lanes has been installed, Broadway was closed to motor traffic, and Time Square turned into a public space where people could sit and relax : the pedestrians, who made up at least 90% of the traffic there, were no longer being ignored in favour of a small number of motorists.

Likewise, in a project in Melbourne, which the mayor (?) had noticed was dying over the decades, street-life was introduced at ground-floor level by making use of the alleyways between buildings that had just been viewed as functional ancillary space : we heard figures of how two restaurants in such locations had become hundreds. In China, the traditional low-rise dwellings, where shops were a short distance away and people could look out for each other, were contrasted with the tower-blocks of Chongqing.

In one part of the city, one of Gehl’s people had designed improvements to a pedestrian route to make it more pleasing and accessible to all. Although they were made, on a return visit six months later they were found to have been undone… An imponderable is what will happen to the earthquake-damaged centre of Christchurch, when national government took responsibility away from the city council (but at least accepted that buildings would be limited to seven storeys, which people had said that they wanted when a survey was carried out, where another Gehl consultant had been at work), and some remained unconvinced that all buildings in the sealed-off area affected, including the cathedral, needed to be pulled down, although it might be in commercial interests to do so.

The note of pessimism in the film’s final section (and which had been sounded earlier on) was not, however, shared by the members of the succeeding panel discussion. Marc Vlessing hosted it, and although it was largely unrelated to the film, Ricky Burdett, of those on the panel (the others were Roger Graef and Sir Michael Hopkins), made most attempt to comment on it, and was also the most lucid: he thought that the future of the city is more rosy and that environmental concerns can be overcome, and that the human gestures with which the documentary ended were on a different level from the nature of the problems that faces cities (although he clarified, when asked by one questioner, that he had not meant to belittle those things).

All staunchly defended garden cities, saying that no one had intended to create a horrible place in which to live, but, having seen squalor in the Gorbals in Poor Kids, I remain unsure that those who implemented such schemes (which are shown being torn down) do not have something to answer for : the health and sanitation issues that caused parts of Paris to be rebuilt with high-rise buildings may have raised shockingly low mortality rates, but mould, damp and being cut off from things do not, in turn, make for good physical or mental health.

Weakest member of the panel was definitely Sir Michael, who did not seem prepared to answer questions, either from Vlessing or the audience, and started many answers in several different ways before determining what he wanted to say. Asked to handle the question whether architects are artists or providing a service, he eventually said little more than it worked on numerous levels. A question about designing public space he also fudged, and it was for someone else to give examples of buildings that seem to have a space before them, but it does not function and is not inviting.

As to questions (or ideas), some of the ones from Vlessing (who is chief executive and founding director of a private developer of affordable housing) found little favour with his colleagues. Even to me, it seemed fanciful that architects are too tired out by the planning process to fight for public space, and some of his other thoughts about planning were dismissed.

Interesting though it was to hear the panel questioned, one had to be grateful to Burdett for seeking to bring in the film, since, otherwise, it felt as though one thesis was being advanced that the panel was choosing not to engage with – a film about matters maybe new to the audience, and not digesting it (let alone its filmic qualities) before moving on.


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

Too good to be true ?

This is a review of Frances Ha (2012)

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1 August

This is a review of Frances Ha (2012)

* Contains spoilers *

I had heard such positive noises about Frances Ha (2012) that I feared that I would be disappointed - and would squirm. But my worry was groundless, and I have nothing but praise for the film and for Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote it, as well as starring.

The script had all the urbanity of, say, Dianne Wiest as Holly and her friend and business partner April (played by Carrie Fisher) in Hannah and her Sisters (1986), and one likewise felt that, just as Woody Allen produces very good parts for himself (apart from giving himself the lion's share of the jokes), so Gerwig gauged her own nuances perfectly in the writing. (Allen gave her the part of Sally in To Rome with Love (2012), which, of course, does not surprise.)

The film is shot in monochrome, and uses a montage to give us quickly the breadth of the relationship between Frances and her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner). Coincidentally, and in no ways as a detraction from this film's originality and expressive power, I found myself reminded of those long-lost stories of another inhabitant of New York and her sister, from the t.v. series Rhoda : not pressing the similarities, but the quirkiness, the humanity, and the sense of being an individual.

Frances is gorgeously composed and shot, edited with style and precision, and the music is as it should be, so unobtrusive that, when one sees the list of what has been used, one is boggled not to have noticed so much of it, even well-known classical pieces. To prove the rule, two deliberately prominent tracks are David Bowie's 'Modern Love' and 'Every 1's a Winner' by Hot Chocolate, which feel just right, both in their exact context, and their emotional contribution.

So who is Frances exactly ? I shall say nothing about the film's title other than that one is kept waiting right to the end*, where we feel again the healthily pragmatic and impulsive part of Frances' character to the fore. Throughout, she is her own woman, and those who struggled with the role of Poppy in Mike Leigh's Happy-go-Lucky (2008), an excellent piece of work by Sally Hawkins, might be reminded of it.

If one took seriously what IMDb's headline statement had to say about Frances, one would think that she is simply a dreamer, which she is not : I do not believe that Poppy or Frances is an incurable optimist, but that they have a not infallible sense of others' hurts and susceptibilities, and live their lives trying to take account of them. (Unlike me before this film, Frances approaches things, and people, with expectancy.)

Sumner and Gerwig have to be singled out since, just as Poppy has her trusted flatmate in Zoe (Alexis Zegerman) for their own bohemian world, they are at the heart of the film (though a heart that beats at a distance when Sophie goes to Tokyo), but everyone seems well cast, and to give of their very best as part of the ensemble.

The film covers a lot of ground, and feels a lot like a portrait of Frances done with honesty and compassion : quite naturally, I believe that one feels for her, whether it is being let down about the Christmas show, or finding that a conversation with new room-mates Lev and Benji that she relied on about rent has been forgotten.

A key scene is the rather awkward dinner-party with friends of another room-mate, this time reluctant, where we learn a lot about where Frances stands in relation to others who are not of her kind - with Benji, she was able to communicate naturally, whereas these people seem unable to understand even when, metatextually, she drunkenly tries to explain what makes her able to get on with people.

Perhaps a bit of a loner, an outsider, she is still valued, and she sticks to her convictions. (In this connection, whatever dancer Gerwig may be, the film wisely limits what we see of her on her feet, choosing instead to show her nimbleness as she runs and twirls with ease along the streets of New York and of Paris, so that the status as dancer is established, but does not distract.)

In Poppy, one might have felt that her vibrant persona in the world was a response to something deeper. What we get to know of Frances, with her spontaneity and with a problematic way with money, makes a similar hint, not to be much dwelt on**, but noticed. What I take away is a special person, loving and caring (even for someone whom she does not know who is sad), and a bit of an outsider. If this is what Miranda July had in mind in The Future, I believe that she is way off, whereas Gerwig and the film's co-writer and director, Noah Baumbach, are spot on.


End-notes

* But there is a joke from A. A. Milne...

** Unless one's bedtime reading is informed by such things as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and it guides trying to understand a whole person : one would quickly rule out high-functioning autism, but ponder a mild form of bi-polar disorder, or even traits of borderline personality disorder, on which more here...

Also, I'm not sure that it's just not having the money that means that Sophie has a mobile on which she can get e-mail and Frances hasn't, or that Frances has a computer that she doubts will enable her to communicate with a distant Sophie as suggested. Even if she could, I don't see Frances spending on those things, because her priorities, her notions of relations, are different : Sophie makes an up-beat blog in Tokyo so that her mother will not worry, whereas, tellingly, Frances envisages her mother seeing the truth on her own blog and coping with it. (I forget the quotation, but the word 'depressed' / 'depressing' is used.)


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Gerhard Richter: Painting - less painting, than trying not to be disrupted painting

This is a Festival review of Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011)

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7 October

This is a Festival review of Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011)

* Contains spoilers *

Arshile Gorky’s wife reported, when he was still working in his New York studio, that she would see a canvas in one state, and, by the time that she awoke, it had been worked upon so much that it was largely unrecognizable. There are elements of this in what Gerhard Richter seeks to achieve in spite of the presence of those filming him at work, but that is the territory of this kind of work, and, really, it ought not to be too surprising (to which I shall return later).

Rather than wondering, rather pointlessly, whether Gorky would have allowed director Corinna Belz in when he was working, I can only profess admiration for Richter that, despite the fact that it was putting him off, he did not close down the access. That said, whether he would have welcomed – or, if given the choice, approved of – the temporal juxtaposition of how what he was working on looked at different moments, I do not know.

What I do know is that he loads the squeegee with paint, and then has to say that what he was about to do cannot be done then, because it will not succeed. Whatever Richter may ‘really’ be like, he gave the impression on camera of being a sensitive man, and he seemed unnerved that he had started preparing for something that was not possible, and which, one would like to think, he might not have done, if he had felt at ease. He did not, not when trying to work on his canvases.

Indeed, following on from that, if we invest an artist and his or her work with worth, then we have to leave him or her free to decide when a work is finished, and what is effective and what is not. And yet I am imagining that the moment when he white-washes over a grey composition may have left some who watched the film wishing that he had left it untouched: I can understand that, but I take the different view – that he created it, and he must be satisfied with it, if it is to bear his name.

His assistants, his wife, recognize the knife-edge on which the creative process is balanced at this stage, and say that, if they were to comment that they think that something is right as it stands, what they have said would be more likely to cause Richter to re-work it. Not out of perversity, I fully believe, but because, as the camera and crew do, the remark would interrupt and subvert the process.

Unlike artists who have their studios, and would, throughout history, delegate tasks to assistants, Richter’s was shown getting the paint ready, but the artist himself was even cleaning off his materials at the end of the session. He was, as he several times expressed in response to questioning (some of which was better and more artistically minded than other parts of it), clearly finding his way with the works, and we were told about how their current state had to stand up (as if to scrutiny, scrutiny of a most honest kind – and Richter believes in truth in painting) for several days: white-washing over was not something over which those in his entourage could regularly afford to be regretful.

As I say, the creation is the artist’s, and he or she is the one to find a way ahead. In the case, for example, of Joan Miró, he had the luxury of being able to re-work canvases decades later that were still in his possession, whereas the Tate refused, I think, Francis Bacon, access to some of his, because it did not want them – as it owned them – any different from how they were, and knew that that would be the result otherwise.

One observation, amongst many intelligent things that Richter said about his work (and it was also fascinating to see him about the business not only of planning out exhibition spaces in 1:50 scale, but to hear him pleading with photographers at the opening of a show who required just one more pose that they had so many shots already), was that a painting makes an assertion that does not bear much company: in the context of having to hang several pieces on each wall, and plan it all out, that seemed just as much a challenge as in the studio, with canvases making differing assertions in different ways about how they should work.

So the supremacy of each work’s voice, its statement, and, I would say, for the painter to decide what it is to say and when it is saying it. Then, for Richter, what he said that he valued was people adopting the attitude of those attending a gallery in New York, who would more freely, more honestly, say that they liked this group of paintings, but that the grey compositions were terrible. The point that he was making is he does not feel the polite comment that something is ‘interesting’, to which he is usually exposed, is that kind of genuine response.

As for me, I’m looking forward to spending time at the new exhibition at Tate Modern – and maybe to watching this film again there during the time that it is on.


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Painting makes you healthy

This is a Festival review of Calvet (2011)

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17 September

This is a Festival review of Calvet (2011)

* Contains spoilers *

It cannot have been a coincidence that Rembrandt Fecit 1669 (1977) was timed in such a way that it could be watched back to back with Dominic Allan's film Calvet (2011), about the French artist of the same name, who lives in and discovered his calling in Nicaragua.

(However, I do have to take issue with the account, in the brochure, of Calvet as 'hardly inspir[ing] sympathy' on account of being '[t]attoed, pierced and heavily-built' - he had no more than two earrings on each side, his tattoes were not unusual for a man with a military background (apart, perhaps, on the back of his neck), and, as someone who would have known about exercise regimes from it, he was not out of shape.)

Given that I nearly walked out thirty minutes into the film directed by Jos Stelling (as I did, later in the evening, with The Illusionist (1983), having decided to try one of his later films), I know which I have more to say about. I have just looked at the IMDB web-site, and cannot disagree with any of these comments: 'obviously the director is fascinated by his subject but little of this passion manages to reach the audience', and 'the actors bear a awesome resemblance with the painter, but up to a point who cares?'.

Likewise, with me, Stelling had my attention, but lost my interest, and the other positive comments (about the visuals and the use of an old mirror) were about things insufficient to retain it. I'd really just have happily spent a few minutes reading some paragraphs that set out the facts and events that were presented in the film, e.g. Rembrandt was drawn to artefacts of all kinds in auction-houses, and not being able to afford them - or the effect that acquiring them would have on his family and household - appeared not to concern him, when, in themselves, he could see value, beauty and quality in them.


Calvet was a different proposition. I do not profess to have heard of him, and although, of course, I wish him well showing in New York galleries, one should not get the value of his art out of proportion, for he is not the Rembrandt of his age. It is almost the opposite to that artist's story, because there were periods of his life when Rembrandt seemed to squander the opportunities both that were offered to him in his career and that his family and those who cared for him sought to give him for close and intimate relationships. Calvet acknowledges having thrown away similar chances, but, through painting, fought back against the highly nihilistic and self-indulgent and self-destructive view of life that he had grown into.


The documentary was sensitive, gave a strong sense of all the locations to which Calvet's story took it, and employed a sparing, and so effective, use of time-lapse scenes to evoke differing moods. There is no doubt that Calvet's figure dominated it, either by the scale and coloration of his works, or by the way that he gave an account of himself. For some, though not for me, his repeated focus on the son, Kevin, whom he had deserted seemed a little too much as though it were public self-flagellation, and did not seem to acknowledge that Kevin's mother, Nathalie, had just as much been abandoned by him. (She only got a mention in the closing third of the film, when he goes to France in search of Kevin.)

In this, the film-maker was doing his job, letting his subject talk for us to make our own mind up. Afterwards, in the session that David Perilli led, I asked Dominic Allan whether there had been anything that Calvet told him that he had been unable to check. I was thinking not so much of the work that had brought him to the States on false pretences or those externally verifiable issues, but his extended time in the house in the cul-de-sac, where he had found that he could quell his rage against life and the hallucinatory voices that beset him by attacking the main wall, and then all the surfaces, with paint and any other material (he described burning wood to make charcoal) that he could muster.

Afterwards, Dominic clarified that the images that had been used in the part of the film where Calvet revisits the property were made before work was done on the property (and it was put in the state of repair in which we see it). They, therefore, were the surviving testimony to that time, and, for all the anger and self-disgust that were directed to a suicide of a highly torturing complexion (rather than mere death), they struck a chord, when I saw them, that spoke too much of an ordered rationale arising out of the chaos. Perhaps Calvet had painted before - and he says that he needs that discipline to keep him well - as I otherwise found it hard to understand such an eloquent redemption in art coming to him, when the sort of frenzy and panic that he describes would not have been the time for getting acquainted with painterly method and technique.

The contrast, finally, is with Rembrandt, played in his later years by a second actor, and seeming to paint on not to find or be with his family, but despite them. Not a paradigm of the artist (whether painter, musician or writer), but one that seems to intoxicate some, and to give a different form of contented life from that sought by Calvet.