Levity is an irresistible temptation ! ~ Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel)

This is a detailed exegesis, following a review of Youth (La giovinezza) (2015)

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

11 February (link added, 19 May)

This is a detailed exegesis, following a review of Youth (La giovinezza) (2015)

Just this track, by David Lang, brings back the power of #LaGrandeBellezza / The Great Beauty (2013) :https://t.co/4ChEWDwNaF

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 13, 2016

* Contains many spoilers – intended for those who have watched the film *

It has been commented already [in I have to believe everything in order to make things up] that the title Youth, and Jane Fonda (as Brenda Morel), both make very delayed appearances¹.

(The title of that posting is quoting Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel), responding to Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) about his gullibility. That of this one refers to a conversation between Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano) and Ballinger, when Tree says that Ballinger and he made the same mistake (he with a film where he played Mr Q, Ballinger with his Simple Songs), of 'giving in to levity'.)

Whereas Sorrentino has his character / identity as a writer / director in Youth, Yorgos Lanthimos lost some of his in The Lobster (2015).

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 11, 2016

The whirling opening (heard presaged in the audio, as the various logos of collaborating film companies flick through) features a song called ‘You’ve Got The Love’ (originally recorded by Candi Staton, as vocalist with The Source, in 1986 (Florence and The Machine also spent quite a bit of time with it)) :

Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air
I know I can count on you
Sometimes I feel like saying, ‘Lord, I just don't care’
But you've got the love I need to see me through

Later, we see this group, The Retrosettes (from Manchester), in the context of the acts laid on at this spa-hotel, but we are straightaway introduced to the film’s style, its immediacy with the camera on the lead singer Helen Rodgers, as everything else literally blurs behind her. These words, which speak of love, may be speaking of divine love (as The Song of Songs, part of which is set by composer David Lang as ‘just’, also ambiguously does), but they mark one end-point, the other being the fictional Simple Songs, where we have (as well as violinist Viktoria Mullova) soprano Sumi Jo, on a pure white stage and cyclorama, with lyrics such as I lose control.

Paul Dano (playing actor Jimmy Tree) had been at the hotel with Michael Caine (Fred Ballinger), and is in the audience, as Ballinger conducts this piece by royal command. What does it mean that, in the very last moments of the film, we see Harvey Keitel (Mick Boyle) with both forefingers and thumbs put together to make a view-finder, as if just appraising this shot ? Of course, we might simply see Ballinger, imagining his departed friend, in this gesture. Or we might, recalling that The Great Beauty (2013) is a film of complexity (even as to waking and dreaming), and invoke the well-known question whether The Emperor dreams being a butterfly or vice versa…

For is it not a massive suggestion that this staged moment with Ballinger, which looks unreal, is unreal ? That, all along, Boyle has been devising a film about his life-long friend (we know that what was being worked on was called Life’s Last Day), and so, when Boyle (immediately after saying I'm going to make another film) casually jumps over the balcony, we should actually be reminded more of De Niro in Brazil (1985), as the semi-mythical Tuttle, than of Ida (2013) or The Lobster (2015) :

On this interpretation, we do not really see an act of dying, but Boyle Making an exit¹(just as Beckettt has Vladimir and Estragon draw attention to their theatricality²). Is nothing that we see afterwards - where we finally leave the hotel and its environs - inconsistent with the notion that this is footage from Boyle's new film ? [Even if Boyle did die, did he exist in the first place, outside this film - its costume, hair and make-up departments, and the person of Keitel ?]

A film in which Ballinger, mysteriously told by the doctor that 'youth' awaits him outside, does visit Venice (casting off this 'apathy' that Lena talks of, and seems to adopt (please see below)), where we realize that there has been a clever misdirection – complete with Ballinger visiting San Michele, Venice's cemetery island (on the way out to Murano, Burano, Torcello...) - with our impression that his wife Melanie, Lena’s mother, is dead. (Ballinger is only in the cemetery, because that is where Igor and Vera Stravinsky are buried (as they are).) Earlier, we had seen his look (shocked at the idea ? frightened ?), when Lena says, You could bring flowers to mummy.


Quite a time before this coda, and with Mick Boyle’s challenging confrontation with Brenda Morel still to come, we had had a scene with the six heads of his collaborators and his juxtaposed, though we roam from face to face, not taking in the whole. The scene's look is assuredly impressionistic (and quite probably a film reference, yet to be placed³), as they lie together, seeking to determine what, in terms of a closing moment, the conclusion of Life’s Last Day will be.

They are meant to be working on the scenario He's on his death-bed…, as a result of which, having heard all the other suggestions, Boyle overrules, determining that the unnamed character in the film ‘doesn’t say anything’ (but, rather, that something is said to him) : in all the conversations about this film’s genesis, we never know anything other than it concerns a man, because he is (somehow) not graced with a name. Yet this scene – with its stylized notion of a script that is complete but for that last utterance⁴ (as if it really could be added in at the end, as in the game where one pins the tail on the donkey) – comes both right after we have seen Ballinger in significant conversation elsewhere.

As to the question of his apathy, the etymology takes us back to an origin in a word in classical Greek for ‘without feeling’. In relation to which, Ballinger says to his daughter both that her mother could understand her, but, he claims, I can’t, because your mother’s not here, and that he can only relate to music. (As mentioned above, Tree says that Ballinger’s mistake was in relation to levity with Simple Songs.)

He considers himself retired from conducting (and composing), but, in the spot in nature to which he returns after Boyle’s exit, we have seen him in the surreal action of conducting the alpine cows (duly equipped with bells), birds, etc. – his animation, his enthusiasm and enjoyment. Since, even at the superficial level, this is a film, we can see this happen (as it does in Mary Poppins (1964)), but it is a clue to what the film within this film means, as are the titles of other works by Ballinger, which Tree gives us : The Black Prism and The Life of Hadrian. Encyclopædia Britannica tells us that ‘Hadrian’ also appeared in the form ‘Adrian’. Could The Black Prism evoke 2001 : A Space Odyssey (1968), in which the most famous use of music is Sonnenaufgang (Sunrise) from composer Richard Strauss’ tone-poem Also sprach Zarathustra (Op. 30) ?

If so, Thomas Mann is thought to have taken Friedrich Nietzsche, who is the author of Also sprach Zarathustra, as one model for the composer Adrian Leverkühn in his novel Dr Faustus (Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde [Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, Told by a Friend]), published in 1947, to which the titles The Life of Hadrian and The Black Prism could obliquely refer. In the review, links were made before both with this novel by Thomas Mann (concerning a Faustian pact made by a composer, often identified with Arnold Schoenberg, though might it well be Strauss ?), and also with his earlier novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), which was set in what is now The Hotel Schatzalp, one of the film’s secondary locations (in Davos, in Switzerland). (Mann seems to have started the work in 1912, but it was not published until November 1924.)

Der Zauberberg’s principal character, Hans Castorp, initially goes to the sanatorium in Davos to visit his cousin (before starting his intended career in ship-building). However, there seems to be an element of ‘guilt by association’, because the cousin is being treated for tuberculosis, and Castorp, whose departure back for Hamburg (and to begin practising his profession) keeps being delayed by his being unwell, is first thought to have a bronchial infection, but is then diagnosed with tuberculosis.

He does not leave for seven years (at which time, he leaves to volunteer to serve in the army in World War I), but he has a life there, in the sanatorium and its environs, that is centred around a very varied group of inmates, just as is that of Guido Anselmi’s (Marcello Mastroianni’s) in the spa-hotel in 8½ (1963), or Boyle and Ballinger’s is in that of Youth itself (the actual location is The Grand Hotel Waldhaus Flims). Ballinger’s connection with, and difference from, Castorp or Anselmi is that he is here for a cure (hence Boyle’s and his exchange of notes about rates of micturition, in a place where – as in 8½ – we see the guests as they queue to take the waters), at a place to which he has chosen to come for more than a decade :

Ballinger, though, is not a film director, trying 'to fizz himself' into bringing to life a film that is anxiously expected, but substantially does not exist (a topic at which Seven Psychopaths (2012) fairly unsuccessfully tried its hand), but rather considers himself ‘retired’ from the activity of conducting (and composing). [It remains unclear since when that is so, even if we may guess at it from his interactions with HM The Queen's Emissary (Alex Macqueen, of all surnames !), and with his daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz) in her capacity as his assistant.]


As we are well aware, it is Boyle’s métier that is film-making, even if, as his cinematic testament (with which the title Life’s Last Day chimes), he ultimately desires for his female lead a woman (in the heavily made-up shape of Jane Fonda as Brenda Morel) who twice calls his last three films ‘shit’ (saying that it is everyone’s opinion of them) : in attitude and appearance, Morel does not conjure up youth (la giovinezza), but resentment, and, with her withdrawal, she renders null the task of Boyle and his team (though he does not tell them that, when he parts from them at the station).

(To a lesser extent, also, there is Tree’s realization that he does not wish to work with horror – from experimenting as an agéd Hitler, complete with the alpenstock that we see him size up and purchase when Ballinger is with him (amusing himself by setting off the cuckoo-clocks), and having adopted (as Tree said that he did with all the guests), Ballinger's mannerism with his handkerchief : as with Luca Moroder, casting off Lena Ballinger and him from the mountainside and into the air, this idea of experimentation cannot properly be taken on a literal level, but a symbolic one, of imagery...)


The choice of music (i.e. meaning other than what David Lang has composed / adapted) likewise functions on the level of imagery. Four times (from Debussy’s Préludes, Book I, No. 6), Sorrentino brings back the motif of moving pairs of notes, the first accented, the second higher, which speak of muffled and snowy quietness (marked Triste et lent, and sub-titled – exactly at the end of the piece – ‘Des pas sur la neige’ (‘Footsteps in the snow’)).

Maybe not in this order (items 3 and 4 could be out of sequence ?), the entries of the Debussy occur when :

1. General conversation in the grounds of the hotel mentions the subject of love

2. The young woman (who turns out to be operating, from the hotel lobby, as a prostitute) is dressing, as the naked man in the room leans against the wall (or a chest of drawers ?)

3. Mick Boyle and Lena are talking about her father, and she says what a strange friendship they have that he did not mention the royal request – until they go on, they are ambiguously almost talking about Fred Ballinger as if he were dead

4. The end of Boyle and Morel’s conversation is near, probably when he has already said that he will make his film without her


All of these usages of the Prélude underscore times when there is a question of relationships – having heard it the first time, in its context, echoes for us when we have the situation of (2) a client (and the uncertain expression that he has on his face), (3) of old friends, when one (Ballinger) is discussed with one (Boyle) who must be an old friend of the family as well, and of (4) former colleagues (do we suspect, also, former lovers ?), whose ways are parting, in flagrant disagreement (though seeking to hold back (further) contempt and bitterness as they finish their meeting ?).


Boyle and Ballinger, it is suggested, can be thought of as parting company : though not necessarily, or only, in the way that proceeds from calmly stepping onto a chair – and, thence, onto a low parapet - and off. Even in the literal terms of cinema (within and despite the suddenness of this action, from which, as in Ida (2013), is where its effect comes), we know that Boyle is taking leave of the film, not Keitel of life – and similarly that, although Luca and Lena (such euphony) absolutely seem to float off above the Alpine greenery way below, we know, on reflection, that people will be credited with having made us think so. (We probably do not much need to invoke the world of Holy Motors (2012), and what it there means for Kylie Minogue’s character / character within a character to fall from the heights.)

Boyle, then, is parting from Ballinger. However, this is not known to the latter, of course – unlike Morel and Boyle, who propulsively found that they have scant common ground nowadays, or that client as the sex-worker is exiting, who, however much he may regret it, knows that he struck a deal for how much ‘company’ he would get (and would have to pay more to extend it). The surprise in what Boyle does, when he has been talking in the hotel-room with Ballinger, is that he has just asserted that he is going to make another film [emphasis added], which is the claim that this exegesis has been seeking to consider.

Just before he [says about making another film and] jumps, and in response to what Ballinger said to him about what he believes [and what] matters to him, Boyle tells him that Emotions are all we’ve got. Unlike those other partings, Ballinger also does not know what has happened (or that anything has happened) except that, as a man whose career has been built around working with sounds, he hears them from below : Mick Boyle, we see, has evoked a reaction in Fred Ballinger, and has got through to him, because we can see him shaking. (Although, on a literal level, it would be an extreme way to show Ballinger the existence and reality of his emotional life.)


In the closing sequence, the command-performance concert [the link is to @YouTube - audio only, of Sumi Jo and Viktoria Mullova with an unspecified BBC orchestra] is inter-cut with shots from Melanie’s room in Venice. There, we had previously seen Melanie, looking out of the window (as Fred speaks to her, and says what they will keep as secrets). (Curiously, we may have noted, the view from the window behind her, seemingly of The Grand Canal, is a painted backdrop.) However, images of Melanie are now brought back, and she is no longer seen from the side – seeing her face fully for the first time, and in the vividness of what seems real time, we realize how she resembles Lena.

Not only that, but there is then a moment when we are with Sumi Jo in front of the orchestra, in the lush, enthused intensity of what David Lang has written as Ballinger’s early work, and Sorrentino cuts across to Melanie : as we see her, and her lips moving, they seem to merge with the words being sung in London (not least because the soprano, as she performs, has often looked – for some technical reason, rather than any other ? – to be miming). With no disrespect intended to age, or the older Melanie, one is reminded of Dylan Thomas’ poem ‘After the Funeral (In Memory of Ann Jones)’, where his final words are envisaging the time until :

The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love
And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill


Of course, there is also Thomas’ famous poem about his boyhood, ‘Fern Hill’ (read here by Richard Burton), and, for Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) in La grande bellezza, his own early manhood, and his first love, is a connection that he finds himself making - unexpectedly breaking down in tears at news of her death. In that film, though, Paolo Sorrentino gives us early on Gambardella’s changed perspective on the life that he leads, and we are concerned with his working out what it means to him – with a convergence (again through symbolic cross-cutting) with the saintly nun who is to be canonized, painfully climbing La Scala Santa in search of spiritual sustenance.

And Youth (2015) ? When, and because, Mick Boyle leaves the film, we have Fred Ballinger, not as a man considering that there must be something wrong with him, but believing in his invigoration : he cannot resist, when told that he does not have any problems with his health (not even his prostate), asking what Boyle said about Gilda Black, and satisfying his curiosity. Unlike Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg and its Hans Castorp, Ballinger is not going out from the clinic only with the likelihood of dying in conflict, but to remedy years of neglecting to visit his wife :

If there is an element of Doktor Faustus about him, with what seems to have been his peremptory Quiet, Melanie ! to her (and thence to the rest of the household), Boyle seemed ‘to jump ship’ on that version of Ballinger’s life, no longer seeing the attraction of a film that leads to ‘a last day’ – if only to be outside that version, and so be able to make one, embodying youth, that starts from there. That is the thesis (on the analytical basis provided above), that we have Boyle at the end, framing his shot, because he is the originating film-maker within this film, not just in Ballinger’s memory (or mind’s eye) : as with Jep Gambardella, and what he values in life, what one takes from Youth beyond these clues will be personal.



End-notes

¹ At the station (of Wiesen, in Austria), just before Boyle turns out to have taken leave of the group with whom he has been working (the old filmic motif, of being revealed to be still being on the platform when the train pulls out), he has said – to counter their perceptions about the business of making films – that all have to do what Brendan Morel did In order to survive in this world, and claimed that We’re all just extras.

² Though, for notoriety at least, few works match the fact (albeit amply presaged by Chekhov, amongst others) that the activity referred to by Waiting for Godot turns out to extend, incomplete (announced, as it had been, by The Boy at the end of Act One), beyond the end of the play. For us, an often familiar audience (rather than the original, surprised Parisian one), this pair of lines (quoted from memory, as the text proves elusive) is as true :

Estragon : What keeps us here ?
Vladimir : The dialogue.


³ It is not the example that had been sought from the world of art, but Albrecht Dürer’s Christ among the Doctors (1506) comes close :

Or maybe it was M. C. Escher's Eight Heads (1922), after all (a tessellating print made from a wood-cut block) ?⁵ :

⁴ Slyly, Sorrentino does allude fleetingly to Gilda (1946) – till it turns out that Fred is reminding Mick of their seeming joint and lifelong obsession with Gilda Black : it is a film of which it is famously asserted that it was made up as it went along…

⁵ In fact, all along, it was this work (by Hieronymous Bosch)...

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

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

This is a review of Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès in Schubert’s Winterreise

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

This is a review of a performance at The Maltings, Snape, of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (Op. 89, D. 911) by Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès on the evening of Sunday 22 June 2014 in the 67th Aldeburgh Festival (@aldeburghmusic)

One might have imagined that the theatrical nature of to-night’s Winterreise at The Maltings, Snape, was Nicht für alle – but when Adès had sounded the final moment of calm, beyond bereftness, and had maintained long his final position on the keys (holding the reaction off), the vivid acclaim proved otherwise.

And seventy or more minutes had passed without seeming so, taking us to Der Leiermann quite, it might almost have felt, by surprise – could we really be at journey’s end already (wherever we actually were in time, that is)… ? Had we not been immersed, and begun to lose track of the number of song-settings by around the seventh – and why, anyway, was the figure of thirty-two floating around in the mind (or was that from The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 ?) ?

In ‘Gute Nacht’ (1*), right at the start of Wilhelm Müller’s sequence (though there were originally only twelve poems), there might have been some wonder at Bostridge’s extreme enunciation of clusters of letters at the ends of words such as gemacht / Nacht, and then, in reverse order, Nacht / gedacht**.

The initial impression was that maybe Bostridge had reacted to some criticism of his German by over-accentuation – but no, with further listening, diction in other places was more interior by far, not simply quieter, and, although (with the hall’s fine acoustic) it must have, seemed in danger of not reaching halfway up the side-stalls, let alone carrying to the back of the raked seating :

Something more complicated was going on with the voicing of this piece, which not only looked back to Bostridge’s recording with Julius Drake of ‘Erlkönig’ (D. 328) (on the EMI album Schubert Lieder*** in 1998), but also to his acclaimed appearances in so much Mozart, so much Britten, even as Caliban in Adès’ own much-lauded opera. (And, as Bostridge was in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, fitting to be reminded of a Director of Studies at Cambridge, who once expressed the belief that the separate characters in The Rape of Lucrece are different parts of one person – and the concomitantly repellent implication that Shakespeare had composed a fantasy of rape.)


Bostridge was bringing what amounted to a semi-staging to this late work of Schubert (hardly anything later than the year of death, and correcting the proofs of Part 2 of the song-cycle), but almost within the conventions of the concert-hall : done-up dark suit, single buttoned and almost a less-showy dinner-jacket, white shirt, but no tie for Adès or him.

Sometimes leaning on the curve of the Steinway grand as if this were cabaret (and sounding not a little Kurt Weillish), sometimes feeling like about to dive into it, under its lid (yet not as at a word-prompt, but as if his lost love and heart might be there), other times advancing upstage, at yet others writhing, contorted, and seeming to start disintegrating. Which, of course, is at the heart of Winterreise (after – and painfully leading on from – [Schubert’s setting of] Müller’s optimistic and enthusiastic Die schöne Müllerin (no sly self-reference there).

Or, more than two centuries later, at that of Beckettt in Molloy**** (and the other two novels of that trilogy, or even in the earlier work Mercier and Camier), though one was reminded most of that writer’s more famous and actually once cultured ‘men of the road’ in Vladimir and Estragon (affectionately, Didi and Gogo) : Could Bostridge possibly be seeing himself as a Vladimir, first of all seeing that special tree (‘Den Lindenbaum’ (5)), but with difficult feelings because of the mismatch with what is rooted in memory ?

That was the first really lyrical voicing, with Lieder-type gestures and tone, but it led, for example, to :

* ‘Wasserflut’ (6), with a massive, expressionistic stress on Haus (the ultimate word of the lyrics)

* Looking back on the town, as the departing man leaves it behind (‘Rückblick’ (8))

* The heart’s unfettered reaching out, in rapturous hope, when ein Posthorn klingt (in ‘Die Post’ (12)) – more clamorous lyricism

* The fixéd resignation / resolution (in ‘Der Wegweiser’ (20)) of :

eine Straße muß ich gehen,
die noch keiner ging zurück


Maybe at this point a different note set in – or perhaps as early as ‘Der greise Kopf’ (14)*****, contemplating the poet’s happy illusion of being old (because of frost on the hair). From then, diese Resie not seem to be demanding of Bostridge in the same way, and the slightly reeling and slurred Tom Waits down tone, contrasting with the defiant up voice that clearly and angrily states how the traveller has been treated, had evaporated – the feeling of ill-treatment had been early, starting with ‘Die Wetterfahne’ (2), and seeing Cressida-like inconstancy in the weather-vane signalling a change of direction (indicated by what is described as ‘[ein] Schild’, a crest or shield), and in the cynicism of the wind-changed beloved’s parents :

Was fragen sie nach meinen Schmerzen ?
Ihr Kind ist eine reiche Braut.


Yet this living so deeply with the role (no less than that, say, of Lear, where there is some respite) must have been at, and continued to be at, a price : at the end of Winterreise, when Adès and he went off, Bostridge seemed physically reduced from being already slim – though perhaps it was just the back view – and looked depleted, almost lamed.


Just one minor hesitation…

Yes, we can be plunged into this winter-world, but (especially if we do not know it, and struggle to follow the unremitting text in the concert-hall’s relative gloom) do we best find our emotional direction with Schubert’s work here ? Coming to the performance with our maybe hurried occupation of seats, our life outside the hall, brought into our seat ? – until, though, we relax into the offered music. No, we definitely would not have demanded more of Bostridge before Winterreise, but could we not have had a momentary taste of the composer just for piano, just to get us in his sound-world ?

As it was, it transpired that Adès, as accompanist, had read back into the early sections the spiky strangeness of the close, with his brought-out bass-figures and what seemed quirkily anachronistic stress, but could we have followed him better, and alone first, with a suitable Impromptu or two, to remind ourselves of the Schubert who after all strove, not least in Rosamunde (however fragmentarily his efforts usually survive, outside Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3’s) Schubert marathon, as ‘incidental music’), to be part of theatre ?

Or even Liszt transcriptions of some songs, to take us away from the text-based, score-based literalism with which we might have approached what, it turned out, was anything but a hide-bound Winterreise, but a dangerous encounter with the part-like nature of the self…


A review of the following night's marathon solo piano recital by Festival director Pierre-Laurent Aimard is now available here



End-notes

* The numbering denotes the positioning of the poems of the song-cycle (as against Müller’s sequence of poems).

** Not here, but later, is where sounds were almost launched at the front rows of the stalls, right below Bostridge : ab in ‘Gefrorne Tränen’ (3), and, probably next, überdeckt andausgestreckt in ‘Auf dem Flusse’ (7).


*** The initial recording, to which a Volume II was added (in the release in 2001).

**** ‘Rast’ (10) talks of sheltering in a charcoal-burner’s house, and there is such a person in Beckettt’s Molloy…

***** In the closing two lines, we have confirmation that this is a definite departure, eine Reise :

Wer glaubt’s ? under meiner ward es nicht
auf dieser ganzen Reise !


Also on Aldeburgh...

Ever-ambitious Aimard wows with authenticity

The Humphrey and Andy Show (Britten on Camera)


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

From the archive : The Language of Insults

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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11 May

The Language of Insults


Let’s abuse each other !

Waiting for Godot, Act I

If – God forbid ! – I were to wish to express the notion that the Prime Minister is a bad man, motivated by self-interest, how might I say it to Cameron’s face ?

I can’t emphatically say the natural You’re evil !, because the first syllable, with its diphthong, is hard to control at any volume when making sure that the message is abrupt and clear, so I might resort to three sharp, distinct jabs, You are evil !, and then add to it, making You are selfish and evil ! (or vice versa).

But how cowed by this will #Shameron feel, because he can just brush off the adjectives, knowing that he is a pure and noble breed* ?
Think of when you are in the car, or cycling, or on the pavement, and someone else using the road does something stupid. You might serenely and calmly turn your countenance to the fact that you have had – as the case might be – to brake suddenly, softly murmur How stupid…, and resume your assumed walk through life with the Buddha.

More likely, I suggest, is that you will react differently, and not resort to our earlier formulation, You are stupid !, at all, but to the You stupid x !, where – probably depending on the level of your non-Buddha-restrained frustration, indignation or even anger – x might be man, woman, etc.**, sod, bastard, twat, prick, and so on***.

At this point, it is worth noticing that many adjectives that, according to this pattern, occupy the place of our own ‘stupid’ are bisyllabic, such as ruddy, bleeding, bloody, sodding, fucking, useless, hopeless, etc., and can therefore be rattled through and over : they have their weight, but mainly as a qualification to our chosen engine of conveying our message, e.g. You priceless fucker / shite / wanker. (One can, of course, say (probably if relevant) You bald git !, and there is, in great, fat, dumb, proud, crass, etc., a whole battery of monosyllables, but the stronger qualifying words seem, again, to be polysyllabic.)

OK, so what is this exercise – even if some may find it fascinating – of considering condemning Cameron all about ? Well, I want to look at the words of insult that some of the bloggers on mental-health regard as taboo because, they say, they stigmatize those with mental-health issues. For example the terms lunatic, psycho, mad, crazy, loopy, demented, and psychotic.

If someone gets called a ‘fucking psycho’, that is one extreme, and it may constitute any number of things from a drunken mate approving a reckless act of violence to, say, the critical characterization of a risky piece of driving. (For we use words in context, and, in the first example, this may be part of the mythology of the mates’ behaviour, and so not be understood anything other than positively.)

There is a stage further, though, such as in the arena of taunting, or of threatening – or even administering – violence to a person who is known (or believed****) to have a mental-health condition. That reinforces a message that, if beautified, goes along the lines We don’t like you – or want you around – because of who you are, what you do, and what it means for you to be here, where you are not welcome.

However, I believe that some words have been denuded of any real malice, unless they are deliberately used offensively : I would suggest that, with enough energy, being called a pretty table-leg could, if anyone wanted to say it, be invested with and convey disregard, disdain, and disgust .
Or take this, from Soda Pictures’ booklet for New British Cinema Quarterly (where Eryl Phillips talks about making – planning to make – Gospel of Us, a three-day theatrical event to tell Christ’s Passion in and around Port Talbot) :

The ambition of the piece was bordering on madness – to attempt a film of it all was either a mid-life crisis or just lunatic

At least two of the words or phrases ‘mid-life crisis’, ‘madness’ and ‘lunatic’ explicitly suggest poor judgement through mental ill-health, but does that, in itself, make it insulting as such to those with that experience ? I’d draw the line in favour of those things being OK, whereas to have written this would be different, I suggest :

The ambition of the piece was bordering on demented – to attempt a film of it all was either a psychotic episode or sectionable

The insult, there, is to belittle psychosis (by likening it to feelings of alienation from one’s life, which usually fall far short of needing even medication), to draw the vague word ‘demented’ (usually meant to signify dangerous violence, and attributed in the popular imagination and vocabulary to mental-health conditions) into the mêlée of meaning, and to cheapen the real and highly threatening and frightening matter of being sectioned by mentioning it in the context of a film that would be hard to make...


End-notes

* In Paul Weller’s words ('David Watts').

** Or, as my father was wont to say, ‘individual’.

*** Enterprising individuals** might learn a whole string of them, or play a sort of melody, on a scale of them, in increasing and receding severity, such as :
man shit jerk sod cunt drip bum twat .

**** A sort of guilt by association or mistake, as in Max Frisch’s Andorra.


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

Julian Orchard ? : A Festival response to The Orchard (2013)

This is a Festival response to The Orchard (2013) in Microcinema with James Mackay

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6 October (updated 7 October)

This is a Festival response to The Orchard (2013) in Microcinema -

with James Mackay, at Cambridge Film Festival

Putting forward the work of prized pupils as if representative of a class or school, or taking the best figures to make claims for the achievements of the Tories in power (if not just inventing them instead, to make so-called welfare reform seem effective, even it is starving people into jobs), this is what is almost always nowadays called cherry-picking. (Cranes with a cradle and mounted on small vehicles are even called cherry-pickers, for no obvious reason.)

In The Orchard (2013), title and film alike, there is an attempt to distract attention from where the power in the latter comes from, by leaving out the word 'cherry'. Yes, we are meant to believe that the title derives from a real orchard in which a group of six amateur players (three men, three women) will perform an improvised version of Chekhov's play - even that is pretty vague, as if the instructions or invitation on which they are acting have been put through Waiting for Godot first.

However, it is hard to work out whether they are, in their factions, more heartily sick of each other than we become of the lot of them. Afterwards, we were told that all of the actors is performing a script, just a script where there is a good deal of bickering, largely disputation as to who will play which part and whether it has previously (in the film) been agreed - we were told in the Q&A that each, before and during shooting over just one weekend, was supported individually in playing a wholly unimprovised part by the directors, Clive Myer and Lynda Myer-Bennett.

That is as it may be, but none of it makes their carrying on engaging or with a plausible outcome, not even having them dine in costume. They have the excuse that they, the characters, are not professionals, but they want to treat what they have been asked to do as something to work towards, yet at the same time starting, on their opening evening, from such an open viewpoint, where female parts might be played by men and how to double is the least of their worries, that no one can reasonably believe that they will achieve anything, dressing as their characters or no.

The contrast is then with when they actually start looking at the text (which, previously, they have made almost a virtue of not having to hand), and we get cherries in the form of various translations of Chekhov. If, as we were told afterwards, The Cherry Orchard has outperformed any other play that we can think of, in numbers of times put on, it is small wonder that the touchstones of Chekhov's play will enliven the film, but they do not make believable that this factional troupe has somehow transformed itself and become inspired by, or just familiar, with their parts.

True, in the cacophony of their discussion and disputation when they have arrived (whose sound quality, maybe deliberately, was not very good, but such as to hurt one's mind with babble), we have every impression that they know the play and its characters. Yet, as noted, they refuse to go anywhere near the printed copies until the Chekhov is alive on their lips and in their acting. Maybe I blinked, but I do not know how that was meant to be credible.

In the overly long first part of the Q&A, before it was thrown open to the audience, we were told that Chekhov considered the play a tragedy. When I got to ask I question, I pointed out that it had been stressed to my class when we first studied it that he had called it a comedy (the Oxford University Press edition, we had been told, drew attention to this fact)*, but, rather than being comic, was it not toxic, because the same inertia that had stopped the family acting seemed to have infected the cast.

I was told that the directors interpret the play as being about 'change' - the change comes in because Lopahkin, who has had no one listen to him, buys the orchard to chop down for holiday homes. If that is 'change', it seems quite a regressive one to modern ears, even if, as in Uncle Vanya, there is much rhetoric about what the future will bring and be like...


* Postlude

I do not have OUP text, but I looked out my Penguin Classics text (Harmondsworth, 1959), translated and introduced by Elisaveta Fen, and she says that he wrote to Olga Knipper (an actress from the Art Theatre, whom he married) The next play I write for the Art Theatre will definitely be funny, very funny - at least in intention. Fen goes on to write (p. 28) : 

The play was altered and re-copied several times, but there was one point on which Chekhov remained consistent - it was 'not a drama but a comedy : in places almost a farce'.


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Beckettt, the alleged adherent to Buddhist thought

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19 November 2011

Brought to you from where I posted the review on Amazon*:

One academic writer, supposed to be an authority on Beckettt's work (see my review of one of his books, Beckettt and Eros), finds - or claims to find - deep Buddhist thought, philosophy, and probably even practice in it.

I wonder if he has considered Waiting for Godot in the following way...


The play has five characters, six if you include the named, waited for and talked-about Godot, who, we are told, has sent the last of them to appear (the Boy) to Vladimir (also known as Didi) and Estragon (also known as Gogo - the full name is the French one for tarragon), who have been (one, then the other) on stage from the start, and almost without break throughout the two Acts (although the end of both is, crucially, different - please see below).

The remaining two characters, Pozzo and Lucky (the atter is also known as 'pig', 'hog', 'scum', and a number of other offensive names, by Pozzo) arrive together, halfway through each Act, but seem mightily changed between them: in fact, we actually have no direct way of knowing how time passes, in this timeless and largely featureless space that keeps the characters in it or draws them to it (or through it), such as these two.

Pozzo is grand, pretentious even, and certainly cruel. However, he may not actually have the power either in the place where we see him, or in the relationship beyond his transit of these lands with the other man, Lucky. (At one point, Pozzo asserts or implies (but he alleges many things that we cannot verify) that this is his part of his land). Even so, he openly abuses Lucky before us, whilst - in the phrase used by another Beckettt writer to describe a scene of reported dialogue in the earlier novel Watt - often employing a 'language of bizarre civility', as well as some of the accompanying manners / mannerisms. His cruelty draws out that, alluded to earlier in speech largely, of Vladimir and Estragon, too.

Beckettt calls Waiting for Godot 'a tragicomedy (in two acts)', but it is often played for pure comedy, which jars with the obvious brutality and unpleasantness of what human beings (Didi (or Gogo) pronounces that 'People are bloody ignorant apes!') do to pass the time when bored, but have to be somewhere.

Are we, perhaps, reminded of the random torture that SS officers and the concentration camps gave rise to (this play was first performed in around 1953 in what had been Nazi-occupied Paris, and Beckettt, who had served in the French resistance - is this where the references (shared by the contemporary novel Molloly) to beatings during the night by an unspecified 'they' come from?), would have had some bitter experiences / memories of the recent war.

After Pozzo and Lucky leave the stage (for the first Act), there is an exchange between the Didi and Gogo that their appearance had passed the time. The retort is that it would have passed anyway, replied to by agreement, but that it would not have passed as quickly.


Another exchange is:
What keeps us here?
The dialogue.
Ah.


This is a play of quick wits, and comments and counter-comments batted back and forth, and one character (probably Estragon) is asked whether he cannot 'return the ball once in a while'.


As has been said, Pozzo and Lucky return, much changed, in Act II - Lucky, who was loquacious on demand, is, if not mute, then does not 'think' for us again on stage as he did before, and Pozzo - we are told, anyway - is blind (so now led by his Lucky, whom he could previously lead before, and jerk quite cruelly to the ground by his rope). Yet Vivien Mercier, another Beckettt 'crrritic' (from when Gogo and Didi decide to play the game of orally abusing each other) trying to be clever, described the play as nothing happening - twice.

When had Act I been? Whenever it was, the title-page to Act II tells us: 'Next Day. Same Time. Same Place.' And this is where the Buddhism trail comes in more clearly: only Vladimir remembers - and does not (really) doubt remembering - Pozzo and Lucky from Act I, but there is scant or no recognition or recollection on the part of the other three (four, when we include the Boy - please see below). He knows that they passed this way the day before, and is appalled at the change (the Buddhist doctrine of and teaching on the transience of all things?), but all the rest muddle through.

Of them all, if he could see this for what it is, he could break through the unreality of life, of striving, of searching after the wrong things, whereas they are locked in it, so busy, seemingly, living these frantic and tortured lives that they have both little self-awareness (a step on the Buddhist path to acquire it). Since they cannot capture the keys and clues to reality, they struggle, battle and scrape on, as if that struggle, battle and scraping, rather than rejecting it as meaningless, is the essence of life, of what life is.

As things stand, Vladimir is doomed to be trying to remind others of their own (past) lives. (This play can, it is argued, be seen as a presentation of a (potential) voyage towards enlightenment - whereas people seeing the play may think that it is for their entertainment (distracting them from life), which is a further distraction, this time from what the narrative thrust (yes, Professor Mercier - there is one!) of the play is trying to focus on.) For he does not twig (yet?) what it means. So this includes interacting with the Boy, who comes (alone, and to him alone) at the end to apologize that Godot will not come that day (after all).

The Boy, as has been seen with the others, has no knowledge that he came at the end of Act I in the same way. In consequence of that, and because Vladimir only knows how to respond by just being frustrated that even this young being is blighted and trapped by not even remembering his own life, he lashes out, orally and physically, against a weaker force, with the brutal streak that we have witnessed - with a shudder? (although Lucky seemed weak, subservient, and capable of being picked on, in Act I, he proved not to be wholly so) - most clearly when Pozzo and he are on the stage.


The play does not end, though, with the frightened Boy running off the stage at what the stage-directions call Vladimir's 'sudden violence' (a contrast both to the placidity of this scene, and to the previous encounter in Act I (although Estragon did then briefly participate, laying hands on the Boy, and accusing him of lying before Vladimir intervenes). It is Didi and Gogo, again, hoping and fearing for another day, for hanging themselves, if they bring some rope, and that maybe Godot will come then, after all, and (they do not specify how) 'We'll be saved'.

Yet the words with which he has, two pages back in the text, heralded trying to grab for the Boy (as Estragon had done in Act I), and sent him running off instead, should ring in our ears:

You're sure you saw me, you won't come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me!


He wants, at this stage to be witnessed, to be credited with existing and having existed in relation to another, but needs to let go. His search is for something else. Lewis Carroll had another faith, but wrote (for Isa Bowman, a child friend like the more famous Alice):

Is all our life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?

Bowed to the ground with bitter woe
Or laughing at some raree-show
We flutter idly, to and fro

Man's little day in haste we spend
And, from its merry noontide, send
To glance to meet the bitter end



End-notes

* A kind person called M. McCartney was moved to add the following comment (on 9 March (2012)):

Fascinating review, well worth following up. But who is the academic you mention, and what is the Buddhist Beckett book? I looked in your reviews, but it isn't there.


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