True Stories (1986)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 March

Not (essentially because, ironically, of the story) much of a film (and I doubt that I would revisit it to be sure*), but it gave rise to what should be admitted is a great album (some people might like to say the same about The Mission (1986), released the same year, but I think that is probably unfair).

My best friend from school, for reasons that were quite hidden to me, had - probably still has - a great liking for Martinu's** music. A few years ago, and a few years on from then, he played me some favoured orchestral composition of his when we were at university, and, admittedly not intending to be complimentary, said that it sounded like film music to me. (He found, I seem to remember, some way of interpreting the comment that questioned whether that was actually a bad thing.)

I vaguely heard the concert in the first part of to-night's Through the Night announced by the very safe voice of Susan Sharpe (on the night shift yet again!), but it was only when what turned out to be Martinu's Symphony No. 1*** was playing that it struck me that it could be accompanying some action that I probably wouldn't want to pay to see at the cinema (not my sort of film), and I went to www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 to be sure that this composer was on the bill of fare.


End-notes

* Even if a whole load of Garrison Keillor (and Bill Bryson's take on small-town America) has flowed under the bridge since then. (And, yes, I do know that this is Texas, not the mid-West!)

That said, I notice (which is the reason for all this) that I missed a film last year about and showing David Byrne in live performance, and have added the DVD to my basket - somewhere - for when I feel like spending a fiver...

** Radio 3 doesn't bother with the accent on his name on its web-page, so I am not troubled to go somewhere else, only to find that I cannot reproduce it anyway (or is that the one on his Christian name?).

*** Elsewhere (work in progress) I shall be asking about how we refer to kings and queens.

In the meantime, this convention of calling works by titles such as 'Concerto No. 3' (which no one respects when talking about them - but, then, we live in a world where Tracy Chevalier made up a name for a painting and got away with it) suddenly seems very odd.


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here