John Berger ~ Always much more than the author of Ways of Seeing*

This is a response to The Seasons in Quincy : Four Portraits of John Berger (2016)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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18 July

This is a response to The Seasons in Quincy : Four Portraits of John Berger (2016)

Now watched The Seasons in Quincy : Four Portraits of John Berger with @jackabuss :

Evocative, full of life, and thoughtful - that was Jack pic.twitter.com/g07N6BETM2

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 18, 2017

Tilda Swinton shares her friendship with Berger / he his with her : they know they're filmed, but no pretension :https://t.co/1db2h5FC9W

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 19, 2017

Either one keeps one's wits about one, to know more about the unifying, but unobtrusive score, or seeks out Simon Fisher-Turner's credit...

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 19, 2017

To find him in the picture back when Derek Jarman - in league with whom this shoot also took place - was first seen directing Tilda Swinton. pic.twitter.com/IrwfD9Mbgy

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 19, 2017

End-notes :

* Yet, at the same time, we see how much of him - and of his work - rightly came from properly seeing : to encompass 'listening', 'creating', 'being'...

New to the Film Shop this weekend. Get them now! pic.twitter.com/E3vR2xLTx8

— Irish Film Institute (@IFI_Dub) August 26, 2017

Not, if you're so 'early music' that you don't want @orlandoconsort + a film (or wrote this @ConvoCinema card)... but excellent otherwise ! pic.twitter.com/79dYDqnZEW

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2017

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

I counted them all out...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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29 August

Sadly, I do not have the skills of a Brian Hanrahan, but, going through the Festival's Main Features (that link takes one to where the PDF brochure can be downloaded), I made it twenty documentaries*, and there may be others (there and elsewhere) - in former times, which was not necessarily better save from a bean-counting perspective, they were listed in a separate section from the feature films per se, but now they mingle.

I think that I spotted a score of the DOC logos. I was looking, because, in one of our chats the other day, Festival Director Tony Jones said that emphasis is needed on how many one can see - over the 11 days, however exactly they may be spread, that is around two per day, after all, so one can see his point. (I always like to make space for three or four in the course of my Festival viewing, but, as with the whole Festival juggling cum three-dimensional crossword, compromise is inevitable.)

Tony is a nice, level-headed guy, and always makes time to talk to me. A few weeks back now, he and I chatted as we negotiated Parker's Piece in Cambridge**, and I learnt for the first time that Hawking was coming to the Festival, and about negotiations for getting Hawking people over from the States for it.

This most recent time, it was the documentaries, and also exactly what hard work for Festival stalwarts from the Arts Picturehouse and from his family (and from his son's circle) it had been to put on twinned screenings on Grantchester Meadows***. As I said to Tony, not wishing to diminish that effort and to remind him of his great enthusiasm for outdoor screenings, he wouldn't do it, if he didn't enjoy it.

The previous time, a little word that - whatever it may be, and I do not think that I am being indiscreet - Surprise Film 1**** is a World Premiere. Famously, no one knows (though @JimGRoss always guesses) what the film is / films are except Tony, and the projectionist only gets it / them just in time to do the necessary...

And I remember, last of all, coming out of Cell 211 (2009), and Tony wondering, even though he was pleased that I thought that it was a powerful screening, how it would stand for getting distributed. (If you follow that link, you will see (on IMDb) that the film, after all, did pretty well for itself.)



End-notes

* Sadly, I am an idiot, and failed to appreciate the music-documentary nature of the 33 1/3 strand, which makes the sum around thirty !

** For those who do not know it, click on this link, book yourselves some films, and get over to Cambridge to see this square of land, criss-crossed by paths, bicycles and foreign language students, and home to cricket- and football-pitches and the like on your own scenic walk from the station...

*** A real place, known to many by virtue of Fink Ployed.

**** Last year, there were two (for the first time ?), and the first of this year's is on Saturday 28 September.


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

Is Izzard fizzin' ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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27 October

According to Wikipedia®, and regarding Eddie Izzard :

In 2009, he completed 43 marathons in 51 days for Sport Relief in spite of having no prior history of long distance running


I probably couldn't even bring myself, except in a good cause, to eat what used to be called a Marathon for six out of seven weeks, so I have no notion how Monsieur Izzard managed that : maybe some account of it talks about the nasty effects on his health, or, at least, on his running-shoes...

What I was really serching the sacred annals for, and finding no mention of it, was a point of comparison for a statistic that IMDb gives at 5' 7" (or 1.70m), which led me to conclude:

1. The sort of person who routinely goes to IMDb for information about writers, actors and producers needs to know their height (it's probably sneaked from there onto Amazon somewhere).

2. The person consulting Wikipedia® may have other things on his or her mind, and, in Eddie's case, there is a lot to read - including the snippet included above.


But is it actually this, that Wikipedia® can get a bit fussy about these things with its end-notes and notes where a citation is needed, and so it doesn't want to say 5' 7" in case he's 5' 5" (or 5' 10")?


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Who's Who

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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20 October

Now, for some reason, I probably had no notion of who might own IMDb (www.imdb.com), but, when an idle click on a link to jobs brought me to a page about eligibility to work in the States, and with links to Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, it all became a bit clearer.

We may know about offers of Twitter followers or Arsebook likes (wipes?) in return for a payment - and some people must be so desperate, as for sex, that they will pay for it - and it wouldn't be an impossibility, on that analogy, for such hired hands to vote a film up (or down), or even to make a user review seem more (or less) popular than it is. It would be quite easy to do that, let's say.

But it means that, if you think of buying, say, the DVD of Midnight in Paris (2011) from Amazon and want to look more widely than its own Amazon customer reviews, you're not actually seeing anything that's independent, and not under Amazon control, at IMDb...


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