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)

The lady's not for turning ! or, Saying when you are wrong

This is a Festival review of Tony Benn : Will and Testament (2014)

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

14 September

This is a Festival review of Tony Benn : Will and Testament (2014), which was shown at Festival Central (The Arts Picturehouse : @Campicturehouse) in Screen 1

at 7.30 p.m. on Saturday 6 September, and followed by a Q&A

Tony Benn, even when just fighting with the limitations of the law, and of parliamentary practice, to become the MP that he had been elected to be by the constituents of Bristol South East (a ward that later disappeared in Bristol South), has a fascinating story to tell, one which, in this respect, had been so often trivialized at the time as a rich boy believing that he could possibly speak for the ordinary people.

This film deliberately does not rely on other people to narrate Benn’s story, as some documentaries would (as if for taste of variety in the telling*), for, when someone is speaking about what happened, it is Benn himself. (Apparently, he had been wary of anything being shot that might be seen to be eliciting a reaction through sympathy, wanting to stand rather on his words and his record.)

Director ‘Skip Kite’*, answering a question from the auditorium, said that it had been his decision that it was best to hear just from Benn himself (and rhetorically asked why, when one could listen to Benn, one would want to have someone else talking about him) – just as had been getting Benn to read his choice, for Benn, from Auden and Shakespeare (Benn’s family had been surprised, because he was not a reader of poetry), filming him in Southwold (and other places where he had given public talks), and, most importantly, the staging of much of the filming :

When not filmed in his actual kitchen (we were informed in the Q&A that it had been the only part of that property then capable of being filmed in), Benn spoke in what was also confirmed to be a film set (at Ealing Studios), with enlarged front pages of newspapers on one side, hanging as if they were military colours. Though in fact – more often than not – they reminded us (as they gently changed around and became updated) of the scurrilous way in which he had been treated and represented in the British press.

No one watching Tony Benn : Will and Testament can doubt that he was prepared to stand up and be counted for what he believed. *Certainly, his life and work had been an encouragement to the creative team that was represented at Festival Central, who had united under its director’s assumed name of Skip Kite : they all said how much they had learnt from Benn and valued meeting him in making the film, but how every meeting unfailingly had to start with ‘a cuppa’ !

Without venom or great resentment, Benn told us how there had been times in his family life when the doorbell was rung at regular hours throughout the night, and his wife and children were followed in the hope that they might make a mistake or otherwise let something awkward slip. He well knew that, when he was dubbed in the press The most dangerous man in Britain, his principles would not be easily contended for, and, of course, he became a convenient target for people’s class and political animosity. Yet in later life, when we saw him after his record-breaking Commons career (back at Parliament, for a cuppa), he was almost rueful about being viewed as a kind, grandfatherly figure… but still believing himself to be ‘dangerous’.

It also shows that, whatever one thinks of what Benn said or represented, one can – as much of the publicity for the film suggested, e.g. on the film-poster – consider his integrity apart from his politics and policies. Talking factually about how he had asked what a mark was on the pavement, when being shown around Nagasaki and having been directed to it, he said that he had been told that a child had been sitting there and been vaporized by the A-bomb : he had clearly been moved by this experience, and it lay at the root of his conviction of the evil of nuclear weapons.


Tony Benn : Will and Testament does show his remarkable will, that of paying the cost of contesting what he thought morally wrong – for example, whatever one’s beliefs about the rights and wrongs of The Miners’ Strike might be (in 1984 to 1985, and a theme of several Festival films this year), one can scarcely doubt that he meant it when he said how proud he was to appear at the annual gala at Durham Cathedral or pictured on a miners’ banner (and alongside heroes such as Keir Hardie and Aneurin Bevan).

Wanted to make it to @EnemyWithin1984 at @camfilmfest, but - as ever - so much choice, bi-location not perfected, yet saw @TonyBennFilm...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 13, 2014

Likewise, when Benn says that he came to realize that he had been wrong in government to work on setting up nuclear-powered power-stations in the UK, because he had failed to appreciate that plutonium, the principal by-product of uranium fission, would be used to make warheads for more nuclear weapons. Several times in the film, he says that he had had to admit that he had been wrong, and that he thought it only right to do so.

That said, a comment on Michael Foot’s leadership and how the dimension of his CND stance at the 1983 election** helped (along with the jingoism of the recapture of The Falkland Islands from Argentina under Margaret Thatcher) lead to another term of Thatcher government could have been elicited, but appeared passed over.

And, surprisingly, one Festival regular said that he would not attend the screening because of its subject, and one guesses that it must likewise have attracted, or kept away, those with leanings to the left or, respectively, lacking them, thereby giving rise to an audience that was generally interested in Benn and how he was to be portrayed :

Was, I think, appropriately dressed for Tony Benn: Will and Testament. Encouraged. #CamFF pic.twitter.com/JPMtWG4mMz
— Lilith Cooper (@Coops_LJ) September 6, 2014

To those not interested, whether because not holding left-wing views or not wanting to follow their history through a major figure, one has to suggest that they are mistaken in not watching this film. It has much to say about humanity and what makes life worthwhile, whether Benn’s shock at the death of his brother Michael in the Second World War, and his love for, and loss of, his wife, Caroline Middleton DeCamp (to whom he proposed within ten days, because she was otherwise returning to the States) – or his saying that what mattered to him most about Concorde, when he was Minister of Technology, was the people who built it.

@THEAGENTAPSLEY Thanks! appreciate the review! best Tishand the Film team :-)
— Tony Benn Film (@TonyBennFilm) September 15, 2014

End-notes

* Let alone on t.v., where people pretend to remember what their first thoughts were about x (where x could be anything from children’s programmes to a giant of British comedy), when one guesses that they have seen it since, and that they have been ‘guided’ as to what their recollected response was, typically We had never heard anything like it….

** According to Wikipedia®, the party had the lowest share of the vote since 1918 (though some appear to blame the SDP for splitting the vote and letting the Tories in).


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

Sellinger's Round (so people say...)

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

29 Juky (?)

Fresh from The Fields of Whimsy, @THEAGENTAPSLEY brings you a few Tweets, with some commentary...

The round London's Burning... Couldn't quite put a finger on it when forced-sung in childhood, but why such a jolly opening interval ? ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 29, 2014

Maybe, as it is repeated, the slumbering complacency of the majority of Londoners (around fifteen, in those days), into whose sleep this message creeps, and so sounding in a dreamy way ?

The round London's Burning... -> Only with 'Fire, fire !' [doubled dubiously with recorders ?] is there alarm, dampened by the water ->
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 29, 2014

Even without the shrill woodwind additions, the note here - which we have twice over - is wholly unexpected on the basis of what preceded it : perhaps piercing through that smug unconsciousness to a realization of the threatened loss of livelihood, liberty, and even life ?

The round London's Burning... -> But not any old method of dampening flames, but with 'poured-on' water. Genteel jugs, watering the fire ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 29, 2014

The water is poured, though, with a dismal fatality, going through the motions, as if trying to resuscitate a crisply dried-out plant, yet this one has been dried out with fierce force, and is smoking and smouldering.


And what does it come down to, this primary-school musical picture ?

Maybe realizing too late that appeasement does not work - and that this bogus austerity is just a titanic excuse for greater oppression than Thatcher ever dared, politically beaten back as she proved to be by the events of one 31 March...


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

The face of things to come

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

5 January

There are many ways in which we use this word face, of which I was encouraged to think of by glancing at a kitchen-clock (which I never look at for the time, as it is stopped at 2.10) :

* He looked at the clock-face

* She did an about-face

* Cromwell’s men defaced* many religious statues

* I can’t face it this time

* We will face out this embarrassment

* This tomb-stone has been defaced*

* This is the face of things to come

* The new face of Gucci

* The new face of Thatcherism

* Facing forward

* Facing into the storm

* At last, she is facing up to her past

* They have always been a two-faced pair

* Don’t deface these posters again !


End-notes

* Certainly in the first case, the word means that the faces have been taken off, which is what de-facing literally means, and it might have been done, too, to the top layer of stone of a grave-marker.


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