Martin Scorsese : Dipping back into the best bits of Hitchcock / Truffaut (2015)

Martin Scorsese : Dipping back into the best bits of Hitchcock / Truffaut (2015)

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

16 February

Martin Scorsese : Dipping back into the best bits of Hitchcock / Truffaut (2015)

Of course - it's Scorsese on cinema* ! - that was brilliant ! :)

* Hitchock / Truffaut (2015), by Kent Jones, is worth watching for Scorsese's insight alone into Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960). [The DVD has a third long contribution, in its Extras.]

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 16, 2021

Reader, I didn't marry him¹ - but I did, naturally, then need to re-re-watch Martin Scorsese on Notorious² (1946) et al.³.

¹ 'NYC, this time of night ?' = too big a cab-fare...

² In Extras.

³ Not massively helped by mis-cued jump-points in the DVD chapter-menu, @Dogwoof !

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 17, 2021

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

Don't look - just go : Internally, Joker (2019) gives advice to those watching ?

Responses to Joker (2019) [as seen at The Light Cinema, Cambridge]

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

25 November

Responses to Joker (2019) [as seen at The Light Cinema, Cambridge]

Until the much-trailed scene where Phoenix dances down, and prances on, the steps*, Todd Phillips and Lawrence Sher (DoP) largely starved our eyes of visuals, let alone anything cinematic

* Heavy groan, when first presented with these steps as some gross symbol of upward battle pic.twitter.com/4ct8IPhAHt

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 3, 2020

Only 'a little' - not enough to make it :

* Feel like the best role by Joaquin Phoenix - which isn't even You Were Never Really Here (2017), Lynne Ramsay's film (on which this 'leans')

* Resemble a worthy successor to Roma (2018)

* Any more than Psycho (1960)'s insights

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 25, 2019

Or The Master ?

Or Peter Lorre (as Hans Beckert) ?

Or https://t.co/NyrFLwQB9G

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 19, 2020

The time is 11.10 - at the start / at Ha Has

Time on Murray Franklin show is c. 10.40

Don't look - just go, almost certainly a quotation from (or reference to) many a film (in a film that deliberately invokes Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver (1976)) and Norman Bates (Psycho (1960)) - yet does so with unimaginative cinemtography (deliberately)

There's something special about you ~ Murray Franklin to Arthur Fleck

P. Fleck (box 37 ?)
Penny / Arthur Fleck

Laboured and unsubtle as the solo** cello-line

** Doubling / electronics ?

Joker Light

A film with his name all over it (co-writer and producer as well as director), it is not as if @thetoddphillips repays even interest on the debt to Ramsay (and nor does Joaquin Phoenix ?) in @jokermovie, which hardly matches the psychological insight of Hitchcock's Marnie (1964). https://t.co/22yQr2IIGt

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 26, 2019

Lynne Ramsay - You were Never Really Here (2017) - be angry at JP for taking all her best ideas and doing them over for Todd Phillips ?


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

Sergey Prokofiev hypnotizes Yevgeny Sudbin - or vice versa - at The Wigmore Hall [uncorrected proof]

A mini-review of Yevgeny Sudbin performing Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 7

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

4 November

A mini-review of Yevgeny Sudbin performing Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 7 in B Flat Major, Op. 83 ~ The Wigmore Hall (@wigmore_hall) (heard live via Radio 3 (@BBCRadio3blog) - available for 30 days ?) on Tuesday 2 December 2014

The sonata was first performed in Moscow, on 18 January 1943 :

Allego inquieto

Andante caloroso

Precipitato


In those markings, several that one would not often encounter…

After the tail of the Rachmaninov, the Prokofiev was perfect, @onradio3now : lovely pacing / use of restraint, last movement not overly fast
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 2, 2014

At the end of this recital, a so-called war sonata (Sergey Prokofiev's Piano Sonata no. 7) followed three Preludes by Sergey Rachmaninov, Op. 32 Nos 12 and 5 (in, respectively, G Sharp Minor and G Major), and Op. 23 No. 5 (in G Minor), amongst the most glorious of his smaller-scale works, and with a certain tonal grouping – all beautifully played, but at a time when concentrating on the road had to be a priority, rather than luxuriating in their compositional perfection.

When parked, however, one could not resist the prospect of this familiar work by Prokofiev – a friend had learnt it at university, and so there was much exposure to it in practice form. For, when a pianist ‘understands’ and can interpret a piece of music (even if it is being interpreted new to the listener), the manner in which the composition is being presented is likely to be persuasive, and notes that do not otherwise necessarily fit easily into the whole then have a place and purpose :

Yevgeny Sudbin’s playing of this sonata certainly was of this persuasive kind, and it was hypnotically so, as he construed the repetitions, dissonances, and inner notes, softening them so that the sonata cohered – and even ending it not at a break-neck, hell-for-leather pace, but conveying the sense of speed, yet at the same time being properly able to articulate the detail, which can get lost / subsumed in the conventional rush to be more literally ‘precipitate’.

Taking the finale thus, in the light of a central movement whose resemblances to Gaspard de la nuit (of Ravel) were sensitively brought out, meant that it was not an act of bravado – in the way, too, that Prokofiev’s Toccata, Op. 11, is often rendered – but part of the texture and structure of the sonata : not an add-on, but, through its edginess and figurations, reflecting the preoccupations of the opening and middle movements.

In the former was where Sudbin had exercised discretion and control, and not made this the stereotype of performance that Martin Handley had announced to us. Yes, detonations and explosions of a sort, but those of emotional turmoil, not the barbarisms of war – rather, the anguish of the soul, not a slashing knife in the vein (no pun intended) of Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates* (as the friend, not alone, gave one).

Not for nothing does Prokofiev juxtapose gestures that could be rendered as [the] violence [of war]** alongside the tenderness that was brought out for us here, which made the different modes of being communicate together and with each other, not separate messages, but aspects of one affect. (Which, unfortunately, seemed lost on Handley, judging by the words with which he sought to summarize his experience of the sonata.)

I’m still utterly speechless after hearing Yevgeny Sudbin @wigmore_hall tonight, the Scriabin encore had left me lost for words! #fb
— Robert Bell (@rgbell) December 2, 2014

The worst bit of what was heard of @BBCRadio3blog Live in Concert, with YevgenySudbin, was the twaddle that Martin Handley was talking !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 3, 2014

End-notes

* I.e. in Psycho (1960).

** And, of course, such gestures usually are, when this sonata is heard performed – which begs the question :

Why are the Prokofiev sonatas for piano (which are amongst the strongest and most exploratory of the smaller-scale works) rarely broadcast, whereas seemingly it is always the symphonies, in which some of us may sense that the composer’s heart did not really lie (any more than Shostakovich’s in his) ?


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