From the archive : Review of Cross-Channel + Discrepancy

This is a review of Ron Peck's micro-budget film Cross-Channel (2010)

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

At Cambridge Film Festival 2010 (the 30th) (#CamFF), Ron Peck's micro-budget film Cross-Channel (2010) screened, preceded by the short film Discrepancy - this is @THEAGENTASPLEY's review (from the Festival web-site)

* Contains spoilers *

DISCREPANCY, the accompanying short to CROSS-CHANNEL, was an aural onslaught. The source (manifesto?) from the 1950s, if true, which the voiceover acknowledged was not much surprise - hectoring was much more in fashion, just as experimentally yoking it to disparate images and challenging viewers to object would have been at any time from the early twentieth century onwards.

Fair enough, the thesis was duly counterposed (and so modified) by antithesis, etc., but we agree with THE TRIP’s Steve that arthouse films are where it’s at, so does what this film separately said and did really constitute a discrepancy of interest? I doubt it.

CROSS-CHANNEL deliciously and almost provocatively relishes showing us, albeit not in the technically challenging audacity of a single take, the way out to the sea from Portsmouth, and we only cut between views with any greater frequency after this sequence. Maybe this is what the narrator likes looking at, and his commonplace feeling that the ship is all his (and hence that the two men who unwittingly attract his attention are a kind of intruding temptation to him), and so must possess it, is what he proceeds to try to do with them.

He wants to know what he cannot know by eavesdropping, although that seems perfectly successful (contrary to his claim that he could not catch everything over dinner), and so feels free to substitute his imaginings for being actively present to the person with whom he asserts a seven-year relationship and to spending time with whom he is supposed to be looking forward so keenly.

As I observed in the post-screening question session, this film reminded me of the t.v. series called [The] Canterbury Tales, and, because of that, of Chaucer’s own story-telling. With that feeling of reverence for the journey, which almost smacks of pilgrimage and of enjoying it as much as where it takes the traveller, one is led to the parallel feeling that the heart of the film is not so much what is told, as the telling itself.

Ron Peck made clear that he had felt, in this unseen narrator, a person whom he did not much like because of his ascriptions of bad motives to the two men, but there is also his total self-obsessed certainty that we want to know what he has to say. Here, the parallel with Chaucer is so relevant, because the more grotesque of his pilgrims are highly self-revelatory (through some sense of needing to tell the truth about themselves?), even though that ultimately condemns them out of their own mouths when they seek to charm us.

Where this film also wins is not so much in what we are shown the men pictured doing or talking about (because, perhaps, we do not quite share his fascination), but in its sure pacing. The narrator neatly delivers us back to dock in such exquisite detail that we need never wonder how what he keeps calling ‘vessels’ are brought alongside the quay with such grace and beauty.


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

Young 'lack attention for Dickens' (according to Yahoo! News)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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5 February

There is a huge range of comments on an article under this heading at:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/young-lack-attention-dickens-044309473.html

Claire Tomalin, the most recent biographer of Dickens, has attacked the educational system and its effect on young people's literacy (and Dr Christopher Pittard of the University of Portsmouth, where Dickens was born (Portsmouth, that is, not the university), also commented on the significance of these works*):

What Dickens wrote about is still amazingly relevant. The only caveat I would make is that today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.


As I say, there is a wealth of opinion about whether Dickens is - or should be - read, and, if he is not, why that could be...

To which I shall but add:

(1) Think of my attention span what you will, but, in an earlier generation (or two), I grew up in a house where there was a t.v. from when I was very small - my father's business was selling, renting and repairing them (which, for those renting, was covered by the rental charge) and radios.

(2) The quality of programmes when I was a teenager and now bears no comparison - how anyone could be compelled to watch, let alone pay attention to, some of the output that our multi-channelled world has given us is beyond me.

(3) I used to do my homework whilst watching t.v. (but, as my mother reminds me, that third ingredient of holding a conversation and still concentrating was beyond me), although I am sure that homework - as have 'A' levels - has become harder since.

(4) I have even read many a long novel, and, in one week at university, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones in full.

(5) Reading such a book, unless you have to do it to that timescale, is nothing to do with the so-called 'attention span' - your attention is not uniterruptedly on Bleak House for its however many hundred pages, which will depend on the edition, but you will read it as and when you can (or can make time for it). That simply is not an issue that relates to attention span, except to the obvious extent that, if one can only - given the best opportunity to do so (see point (6), below) - read a short section at a time, then covering the whole text will take longer, in terms of the accumulating intervals between such a section and resuming, and prove more disheartening to the reader: I'll never finish this!.

(6) Some, particularly the cheaper, versions of 'The Classics', such as Dickens, are such poor photographic reproductions of earlier editions that anyone would rightly struggle to read them: it should not take William Morris or Eric Gill to tell Ms Tomalin how important the choice of typeface and the design of a book are both to the enjoyment of reading, and, thus, to the likelihood that one will persist with the activity (especially if the book is long).


End-notes

* Dr Pittard's view is that 'while his novels have a very definite shape to them, there's a hidden structure which isn't comprehensible at first, they are more like the DVD boxset of their time', thereby, sadly, perpetuating the belief that this, not 'boxed set', is the correct term.

As to the university, this appears (but I might be wrong) to be the most noteworthy thing** in the news about it (since it ceased being known as the University of Padua):

29 Sep 2011 – A STUDENT naked calendar is facing the chop following complaints that unedited photos of girls were leaked onto a pornographic site.

You don't want an unedited photograph at any cost - if it hasn't been 'touched up', it really shouldn't be visible!


** SIlly me, I missed this, but I'll let you, dear reader, look yourself at:

New Chancellor for former University of Padua


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