Useful footage on the Thatcher premiership – if you already know the contexts ?

This is a review, by Tweet, of Generation Right (2015)

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

20 August

This is a review, by Tweet, of Generation Right (2015)

The film was seen as a result of Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015 (@sheffdocfest), on Videotheque

And Thatcher is said to have described immigrants as 'swamping' Britain. Nothing about The Falklands, no reference to her ceasing as leader.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 20, 2015

Society does things – things happen – because of inequality.

Norman Tebbit (Lord Tebbit)

Footage of Scargill/ Orgreave/ strikers, but with fleeting mention of civil liberties, and no irony in MT condemning mobs / using police ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 20, 2015

We’ve privatized industry after industry. Government ought not to control business – it doesn’t know how to do it, it interferes.

Thatcher

-> Does it err too much on t.v. interviews and Party Conference speeches, and pretending some sort of vague balance with Tebbit, Howard...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 21, 2015

I don’t believe that economic equality is possible. Indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy, and keeping up with the Joneses and so on, that is a valuable spur to economic activity.

Boris Johnson

All in all, touches on too many topics in 41 mins, and only establishing Blairiteroots in Thatcherism’s tenuous claims to personal liberty

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 20, 2015

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

Giving the lie to Tebbit

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

30 September

The poster for The Artist and the Model (2012) makes you hesitate - the shapely back cannot be that of Claudia Cardinale, unless it is a re-release...

The film is not, of course, about looking at Aida Folch's body (as Mercè), but about discovery, for, when we first see Marc Clos (Jean Rochefort), he is contemplating what looks like it could be a modernist maquette of a female form. He picks it up, looks at it, rejects it by throwing it down, and going on to look at a fish's head, a tree, all of which subliminally conveys the message that he will know a form when he sees it, and that it will arise organically.

Veteran actor Rochefort (The Hairdresser's Husband (1990)), at 83, has all the class to be Clos, to be believable as a man who poetically talking about creation, about woman, life, and whom we see working on sketches, painting, models with Folch as his muse - at a key moment, she is delighting in being seen, in being the spark of his energy, and cannot but smile. The film is essentially between Clos and untutored Mercè, and, in a preceding scene, he unfolds a Rembrandt sketch to her, and she begins to interpret what she first just calls 'joli[e]', and he says that she is not looking - he tells her how it was made, when, and what it means to him, and he awakens her.

Cardinale (Léa), though, discovers Mercè at the outset : having been his model, and still beautiful herself, she knows what feminine appearance in Mercè will provide Marc with good poses, and we see her learning how to adopt a pose for Marc, resume one, be a source not of sexual attraction, but of beauty.

With only hints of coloration when the film begins (and ends), it is otherwise in black and white, and this, along with a soundtrack of birdsong, the sounds of insects and leaves, heightens the attention on form, line, texture, and shape in Mercè's body. We utterly believe that Rochefort is an artist who is friends with Matisee, that he is sketching, applying clay, smoothing surfaces, as we watch, which is part of his own malleability as a cinematic artist.

Inevitably, one thinks of other films with a relation to art and to connections between the artist and others, such as Conversations with my Gardener (2007), Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), and Scorsese's Life Lessons from New York Stories (1989), of which Nick Nolte is most compelling with the physicality of his large canvas, and Daniel Auteuil, with his gentle and humane observations and how he shares about life, love and art, whereas Derek Jakobi (as Bacon) shows us conflict between artist and model.

None of those quite compares to this portrait of Clos, although there are similarities to Auteuil as artist, and care has been taken (with Hockney as one of the advisers) to make everything as believable and realistic as possible in an immensely beautiful film.


Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge) If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here

Session 4: Open mic

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 March

When I first saw this - rather punctilious? - qualification of a perfectly sound abbreviation used, I could not quite believe that anyone would want to draw the derivation from the word 'microphone' into such stark relief: I was almost as amazed* as if someone had said to me that it had to be rendered thus, otherwise the unwary might be expecting (or fearing) that a candid man called Michael would be very frank with them**, and they would accordingly flock to (or abandon) the venue in droves.

In my view, this inadequacy of good explanation for something foolish equates to believing that, to avoid confusion, the term 'train station' is a necessary substitution for just 'station'. Besides which, it would follow that anyone called Mike would - because The Name Police would insist obedience or prosecution - have to start styling his name 'Mic', too, 'to throw up' that it shortens 'Michael'; similarly, anyone using the name Mick would have to prove that he had that name from when his birth had been registered, otherwise it would have to become Mich in written form.

Jack, too, should be outlawed, unless the bearer can show that he has borne that name since birth: it is a kid or pet name for John, and anyone called John should be called by that name***.
Oh, and, by the way, Norman Tebbit obviously urged the unemployed to get 'on your bic'!


End-notes

* Possibly akin to the sense of the word in which the shepherds apprehended events 'on Bethlehem Down'.

** Either that, or - perhaps - a huge game of Operation with a patient called Mike.

*** As for Tobacco O'Rourke, well he's just beyond redemption!


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