More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 April
I am taking this space to start respond to various questions posed in a comment on Epiphany : my visit to Tate Britain II
I have now watched Turner Prize Video artist Elizabeth Price wins and BALTIC Bites - Elizabeth Price, and they should inform my answers
(1) I am unfamiliar with Beckett. If I were to listen to Words and Music, or watch Quad, what influences would be mirrored by Price?
(2) Did it not feel odd to spend so much time on the recreation with the burning furniture?
I can't say that it did.
After all, how do you convey the notion, the terror, of a fire without showing it, and the whole work is only around 20 minutes.
I don't even think that it could be mistaken for a re-creation. At that time, I believe less had been appreciated about how different substances in furniture burn, and how a source of fire might ignite other items.
I took the footage used by Price to be from filmed combustion tests, where the nature and spread of fire was being analysed. I have already commented on the use of two panes : for me, Price located, in this material, the bewitching, hypnotic quality of fire, as against, elsewhere, the destructive one.
(3) With Choir and with the information on the church architecture interspersed, did the fire seem like a sacrament?
(4) The description of the parcloses reinforced an absent focus on the parishioners. How did the film make you feel?
I take it that these belong together.
I watched the film twice through in succession, and therefore knew how CHOIR related to the other two parts of the film the second time.
In my vocabulary, a parclose is merely what I would call a rood-screen or, in other church traditions, an iconostasis (although, in that case, not serving to separate the choir from the rest of the church, but designating, by opaque panelling decorated by holy images, a place limited to the priest).
I am not sure how describing any of the church architecture stressed an absence of parishioners, since there was no one in this part of the film (unlike the distorted moving dancers / singers of the second part, into which the clicks, beats and handclaps drew us).
As I realized that the second section was moving towards giving detail of a fire in which people had been trapped and died, I felt uneasy. We did not see them. We saw the aftermath, and heard from those who had been outside. They were traceless, numberless dead.
They could have been trapped in the choir of a church, and, with no way out (except, perhaps, smashing the windows and climbing out), burnt to death.
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Showing posts with label sacrament. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sacrament. Show all posts
Wednesday, 3 April 2013
Tuesday, 5 June 2012
Civic amenities - a far cry from the locus amoenus?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 June
It could be urban myth, but, then, urban myth itself could just be urban myth. In any case, it started being stated in parks and gardens where ducks foregather that they should not be fed bread (whatever they should be fed, they crap a lot, and, if not feeding them bread made the result more like rabbits' pellets, so much the better), as, although Donland was unaware of the fact, in his eagerness to eat it, it is not good for him.
Extrapolating from what may or may not be true about what ducks shouldn't eat, and knowing that koi keepers and specialists have all sorts of elaborate methods and diets (maybe for the fish as well), I was surprised, in Salmon-Fishing in the Yemen, by Dr Alfred* Jones (alias Ewan boy from Perth McGregor), whose predication for being in the story is that he is a fisheries expert, feeding broken-off pieces of what seems ordinary white bread to his own specimens (koi, that is, not ducks).
Now, I think that we are given an insight, catch it if we may, into his (largely inner) turmoil, for although he is mouthing about his wife, his feelings for her and how he views their marriage (and he says more later to the Emily Blunt character), I believe that the key indicator at this moment of how upset he is lies in the fact that his fish, which I would guess are prized, are being fed this bread:
Now, it may not harm them, but maybe, in koi circles, it would be the equivalent of giving a toddler free access to two tubes of Rolos.
If so, then Jones, in the vicarious form of his fish, is venting feelings of self-harm: the fish are his pride and prize, and he is subtly hurting them with this sacrament of what may represent his own body (since he repeatedly professes no belief in the conventional sacrament such that, as ever, one questions whether he protests too much).
Plus the other Biblical overtones: casting bread on the water, and the loaves and fishes of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, etc., etc.
End-notes
* The name doubtless would come from the now, but, I think, not particularly Scottish?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 June
It could be urban myth, but, then, urban myth itself could just be urban myth. In any case, it started being stated in parks and gardens where ducks foregather that they should not be fed bread (whatever they should be fed, they crap a lot, and, if not feeding them bread made the result more like rabbits' pellets, so much the better), as, although Donland was unaware of the fact, in his eagerness to eat it, it is not good for him.
Extrapolating from what may or may not be true about what ducks shouldn't eat, and knowing that koi keepers and specialists have all sorts of elaborate methods and diets (maybe for the fish as well), I was surprised, in Salmon-Fishing in the Yemen, by Dr Alfred* Jones (alias Ewan boy from Perth McGregor), whose predication for being in the story is that he is a fisheries expert, feeding broken-off pieces of what seems ordinary white bread to his own specimens (koi, that is, not ducks).
Now, I think that we are given an insight, catch it if we may, into his (largely inner) turmoil, for although he is mouthing about his wife, his feelings for her and how he views their marriage (and he says more later to the Emily Blunt character), I believe that the key indicator at this moment of how upset he is lies in the fact that his fish, which I would guess are prized, are being fed this bread:
Now, it may not harm them, but maybe, in koi circles, it would be the equivalent of giving a toddler free access to two tubes of Rolos.
If so, then Jones, in the vicarious form of his fish, is venting feelings of self-harm: the fish are his pride and prize, and he is subtly hurting them with this sacrament of what may represent his own body (since he repeatedly professes no belief in the conventional sacrament such that, as ever, one questions whether he protests too much).
Plus the other Biblical overtones: casting bread on the water, and the loaves and fishes of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, etc., etc.
End-notes
* The name doubtless would come from the now, but, I think, not particularly Scottish?
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