More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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13 October
My Beautiful Country (2012) is a German production whose German name translates as The Bridge on the Ibar, and the English title refers to a Serbian national song that a group of Albanians who have been captured are asked to sing. We see one of them, Ramiz, given the chance to escape, but he ends up on the Serbian side of the river, and Danica, who has been widowed, takes pity on him when she finds that he has broken in.
Both Mišel Matičević and Zrinka Cvitešić are very strong and natural in these roles, and we see Ramiz develop in relation to one of her sons (Danilo), who has not spoken since his father died, whereas his elder brother Vlado has disaffection for life, and ends up behaving dishonestly. Petty jealousy upsets things and sets in train a course of events that provides a fulcrum for the story in the shape of the bridge. It is a powerful film that makes one sees how destructive what divides us can be, but ultimately offers hope.
With Hawking (2013), we had a documentary about the 71-year-old Cambridge professor that received what must have been a premiere, but was not billed as one. After a t.v. film in 2004, it sets out to be Hawking’s own account of his life, based on his script or early writings about his diagnosis with Motorneurone Disease.
The film used actors to represent some scenes, as well as contemporary footage and stills. All in all, just as the expanding universe (the famous Big Bang) was represented schematically by shapes and whirls, so, too, are key moments, with shots of parts of faces, or faces or bodies out of focus.
Once Hawking’s marriage to Jane had been described as breaking down in the face of a private life very different from a public one, much of the nineties and beyond was passed over quickly. So much so that one might be forgiven for thinking that the last thing that Hawking did was write A Brief History of Time in the late 1980s, not that he has made more discoveries about black holes recently.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy presided over question session with Hawking and various people such as film-maker Stephen Finnigan, but Hawking did not seem to be put at the centre of that experience, with Guru-Murthy’s back to him much of the time. Some strategically left before the end, rather than watch what – no reflection on the Festival – was quite embarrassingly weak.
Finally, Woody Allen was in thoughtful mood with Blue Jasmine (2013), with Cate Blanchett striking as a character a little reminiscent both of Tennesee Williams’ Blanche Dubobis (from A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)) and of the mother in Allen’s own drama Interiors, from the late 1970s : though we did not always relate to some of Jasmine’s posturing, and maybe Sally Hawkins as Ginger was a little more uncomplicated (with Hawkins bringing a genuine enthusiasm to the role), Blanchett had a poise and a grace that made her the natural victim of Alec Baldwin’s duplicitous arrangements.
For his part, he was a man one could easily credit as pushing the boundaries of how to use apparent wealth to create businesses on top of businesses – and the film ably walked the tightrope between Jasmine’s memories of a hurtful past and how we see her try to extricate herself from acknowledging it. Ultimately, when she is confronted with it, we understand what she did when she felt herself humiliated, and Allen kept that moment for us : nothing is quite as it seems, and we gather what repercussions Jasmine’s instinct had for all.
There are laughs along the way, notably in the manner of Bobby Cannavale (as Chili), but no one should expect anything near as light as Midnight in Paris (2011) (or, though, as dark as Cassandra’s Dream (2007)).
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Sunday, 13 October 2013
Saturday, 12 October 2013
Fruits of the forest
This is a Festival review of El bosc (The Forest) (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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13 October
This is a Festival review of El bosc (The Forest) (2012)
A film festival is one of those rare places where you can talk to the person who has programmed films that interest you*, and, in this case, as last year, it was Ramon Lamarca for his Catalan films, of which I saw three (and managed one of those twice, the beautifully filmed and constructed The Redemption of the Fish (2012)), and it, with another, Eyes on the Sky (2008), were in my Festival top five at Cambridge :
The Forest (El Bosc)) (2012) has kept me thinking since, not since I did not have a chance to try a review until now, when memories have faded, and reviews tend to be shorter... In this time, there are antipathies between church-goers and the non-chuch-goers who largely make up the Republican forces, and between those who support the Republic and, those assumed to be Fascists, because they question it (they are conservatives). There is one notable exception, in the form of the man, who turns out to have falsified orders to protect a lone woman and her baby at this dangerous time by keeping a unit based at her property.
Another man, Coixo (Pere Ponce), is in love with her, and has been since childhood, but seeks to win her love by such means as seeking to starve her, although he has, probably for similar reasons, protected her from the worst excesses of the Republican forces. He and her husband Ramon (Àlex Brendemühl) and Dora (Maria Molins), who said that he would stand firm (and then fled), are the main characters in this drama.
It really wants to imply that nothing is as it seems - we do not know why the anti-Fascist forces are delayed so long until later - and Ramon has experience of another time that leads him to see many things differently. Effectively, although we do no not know what it was exactly like for him, he tells us that there are other worlds where conflicts are going on, and he learns humanity from this : that he has, as Dora urges, solidarity with the beings who looked after him.
Whether the strange fruit or alien creatures that we see distort our vision, I do not know (I hope not), but they serve to make another world more real (as I elicited in the Q&A**), and they also question our notion that everything is so clear on either side of a conflict.
End-notes
* I was interested that one character, Coixo, resembled Trotsky (and Dustin Hoffman) : it turned out that one influence that the training from the USSR had had on the Republican forces was to make leaders resemble Trotsky, by giving him as an example.
** In The Q&A, I referenced Diane Keaton and Woody Allen gorging themselves on enormous fruit (in Sleeper (1973)), and asked whether the director had had great fun designing the fruit. He did not answer as such, but said that it had been on a low budget, and that he knew what he had he had been doing when ordering it.
Read here, a review (with spoilers) from a colleague at TAKE ONE, Robbie Griffiths
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Sympathy for the Vampyr
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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13 October (updated 21 October)
The British Film Institute (@BFI) trailer for the release of the restored Nosferatu in its original version for the first time - due out on Hallowe'en - quotes Time Out as calling it one of the most poetical of all horror films, an evaluation with which I concur :
Nosferatu (1922), one will gather, was performed with live accompaniment by Neil Brand, and it was a very fine one :
In all of this, Brand brought out the passing of time with key moments when a clock strikes, for much in this film happens at a pace - Hutter's journey across to where Count Orlok lives - and much, when there is no immediate movement, has a sort of febrile negative inertia, a sort of immanence that the shining arpeggios or alternated chords bring out.
For example, when Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) energetically, boyishly even, dashes the book that tells him all the mysteries of the vampires to the floor, we suspect that he is trying to convince himself in youthful disrespect that all this is nonsense - and the music played out that half-hearted self-deceit. We, as observers of the film, are in a different relation to its subject, set, I guess, in something like the seventeenth century, when distances maybe seemed further and we did not have the same instantaneous media by means of which to learn things about the world, e.g. do a Google search about Orlok and his castle...
We would expect no less from Brand that his playing is humane - he does not imbue a live performance with qualities that are not there, but he so knows and loves this pre-spoken form of cinema that he can draw out the story, the visible emotions, the hidden feelings, and we trust him with seeing this film because he invests of himself and his talent. I am not sure whether, technically, they are themes or leitmotifs, but they recur, they remind us of earlier moments, and they help us be inward with the characters.
The film revolves around Nosferatu himself, who is involved in some land deal that will bring us back where we started and to his fate. In these times, some of the visual effects and the nuances of the film, for those not used to films of the time, will seem ludicrous, so there was a fair amount of laughing in Screen 2, but I hope that there was also an appreciation that there is a sort of obsessive love-story at play here, not just of a vampire for blood : the film's subtitle is eine Symphonie des Grauens, and a symphony requires more than one theme.
As a reviewer at IMDb has judged that Max Schreck (the name means something like 'fright'), who plays Count Orlok / Nosferatu, is Nosferatu, and he is both sinister, but at the same time desires beauty, in Ellen Hutter (played by Greta Schröder) : her character name means someone who keeps watch, and ultimately, by doing so, she defeats the infestation that responds to the control of Orlok.
As I say, there is an unfulfilled sense of longing, and this was in Neil Brand's masterly playing, showing that even the ugly Orlok can have desires in 'an Expressionist film' : if we can be in touch with the art of this time, whether the ambiguous states of mind in Edvard Munch's paintings, woodcuts and other prints, or the artworks and diaries of August Strindberg (not often enough thought of nowadays as a painter), we will see the action as something to engage with more seriously, and not limited by its technical constraints.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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13 October (updated 21 October)
The British Film Institute (@BFI) trailer for the release of the restored Nosferatu in its original version for the first time - due out on Hallowe'en - quotes Time Out as calling it one of the most poetical of all horror films, an evaluation with which I concur :
Lovely shimmering, chiming piano accompaniment from @NeilKBrand to a restored Nosferatu - fangs, claws, and rats with yearning (Sehnsucht).
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 28, 2013
It's a magical atmosphere in Screen 2 for @NeilKBrand 's @camfilmfest live piano accompaniment to NOSFERATU :)X pic.twitter.com/6ij8CztIXa
— Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse) September 28, 2013
Nosferatu (1922), one will gather, was performed with live accompaniment by Neil Brand, and it was a very fine one :
In all of this, Brand brought out the passing of time with key moments when a clock strikes, for much in this film happens at a pace - Hutter's journey across to where Count Orlok lives - and much, when there is no immediate movement, has a sort of febrile negative inertia, a sort of immanence that the shining arpeggios or alternated chords bring out.
For example, when Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) energetically, boyishly even, dashes the book that tells him all the mysteries of the vampires to the floor, we suspect that he is trying to convince himself in youthful disrespect that all this is nonsense - and the music played out that half-hearted self-deceit. We, as observers of the film, are in a different relation to its subject, set, I guess, in something like the seventeenth century, when distances maybe seemed further and we did not have the same instantaneous media by means of which to learn things about the world, e.g. do a Google search about Orlok and his castle...
Pianist, composer, writer @NeilKBrand did not entertain us with Nosferatu, he helped us see it live, make it live : http://t.co/fCz3Dcj2iq
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 13, 2013
We would expect no less from Brand that his playing is humane - he does not imbue a live performance with qualities that are not there, but he so knows and loves this pre-spoken form of cinema that he can draw out the story, the visible emotions, the hidden feelings, and we trust him with seeing this film because he invests of himself and his talent. I am not sure whether, technically, they are themes or leitmotifs, but they recur, they remind us of earlier moments, and they help us be inward with the characters.
The film revolves around Nosferatu himself, who is involved in some land deal that will bring us back where we started and to his fate. In these times, some of the visual effects and the nuances of the film, for those not used to films of the time, will seem ludicrous, so there was a fair amount of laughing in Screen 2, but I hope that there was also an appreciation that there is a sort of obsessive love-story at play here, not just of a vampire for blood : the film's subtitle is eine Symphonie des Grauens, and a symphony requires more than one theme.
As a reviewer at IMDb has judged that Max Schreck (the name means something like 'fright'), who plays Count Orlok / Nosferatu, is Nosferatu, and he is both sinister, but at the same time desires beauty, in Ellen Hutter (played by Greta Schröder) : her character name means someone who keeps watch, and ultimately, by doing so, she defeats the infestation that responds to the control of Orlok.
As I say, there is an unfulfilled sense of longing, and this was in Neil Brand's masterly playing, showing that even the ugly Orlok can have desires in 'an Expressionist film' : if we can be in touch with the art of this time, whether the ambiguous states of mind in Edvard Munch's paintings, woodcuts and other prints, or the artworks and diaries of August Strindberg (not often enough thought of nowadays as a painter), we will see the action as something to engage with more seriously, and not limited by its technical constraints.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Friday, 11 October 2013
My sweet banana banana land
This is a Festival review of My Sweet Pepper Land (2013)
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12 October
This is a Festival review of My Sweet Pepper Land (2013)
@THEAGENTAPSLEY @camfilmfest the instrument is called Hang...;)
— Si Belle (@si83belle) October 13, 2013
The instrument* carried and played by Golshifteh Farahani (Govend) in My Sweet Pepper Land (2013) is not Kurdish, but was invented in the West (in the States ?) around twenty years ago**. Anyone who is under any other impression has been allowed to think so by the filmmakers, and by an Iranian actress so westernized that it appears that she appeared nude for Madame Figaro.
@THEAGENTAPSLEY u r welcome its from swiss...
— Si Belle (@si83belle) October 13, 2013
Which is not necessarily to say that the film is bogus, but it did not catch my attention, and felt like a spoof of some sort of a western : a man, Baran (Korkmaz Arslan) posted to a border area where he is intent, from his unfinished police station (with flaps of plastic that intervene on the action, and then conveniently tuck themselves out of the way), on asserting the rule of law despite the activities of bandits and of a group of armed Kurdish women intent on preventing them.
Probably hilarity aplenty, but no serious message to be conveyed, other than that the bandits are hypocritical gangsters feigning a religious basis for their wrongdoing, including persecuting Govend, largely because of her support from Baran. Change of profession, but not so far from the owner of the saloon (leader of the dancing troupe, at any rate) in league with the sheriff...
End-notes
* My meagre researches, searching for 'percussion instrument', and then with 'turtle', found not quite what I wanted - just, in filming this clip, someone else who does not know what this instrument is called...
** Readers may now find more, thanks to @si83belle, at Wikipedia (or elsewhere).
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Wednesday, 9 October 2013
The cage door was shut ?
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9 October (seen at Cineworld, Cambridge)
I suppose it is honesty, but what documentary about a writer, predicated on one of the last interviews in his life, is left ending with this exchange :
What do you think of the universe ?
What a ridiculous question !
The question came hard on the heels of ones that established that life after death or reincarnation are what Paul Bowles, the subject of The Cage Door is Always Open (2012), called ‘intellectual toys’. This phrase was not picked up on, whereas some might see such beliefs as superstitions and not intellectual at all – again, Bowles is allowed to say something and not be challenged on it, just as, if Daniel Young meant anything by his universe question, he might at least have defended it.
So far so good. Each of the three sections is prefaced by a shot of a page from Bowles’ most famous novel, The Sheltering Sky, in each case a division of the book with a quotation. The quotation and / or the name of each section might mean something to Young in organizing his material, but I was left not understanding his taxonomy, nor why he includes animations that are not unlike Gilliam’s style and encompassing (it seemed) elements of Bowles’ life, but rushes them past the eye so that the experience is largely subliminal.
In interview, Bernardo Bertolucci calls The Sheltering Sky a poem in prose, each page filled with the venom of Bowles, which he wanted to distil into the film, but he was keen to stress that it is ‘not a psychological film, not a pyschological novel’ : They go into the desert and disappear for ever, these were his words.
Other figures such as Truman Capote, though there is no one like him for his bitchiness (or the huge cat that roamed his lap), gave the information about Bowles’ life, marriage, sexuality, writing and drug-taking, but, as said, arranged under the headings of his most famous book (including a quotation from Kafka), in a way that seemed largely arbitrary.
The documentary seemed to have been a long time in the making since Bowles’ death in 1999, when we were told that the impetus to make it had been reading The Sheltering Sky, contacting Bowles, and being offered the interview with which this review began. What is clear is that the writers of The Beat Generation flocked to him, for some of the same reasons that made him like North Africa, but he had been there first, and they learnt from him. Whether the film conveys much sense of Bowles’ literary legacy is open to discussion.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 October (seen at Cineworld, Cambridge)
I suppose it is honesty, but what documentary about a writer, predicated on one of the last interviews in his life, is left ending with this exchange :
What do you think of the universe ?
What a ridiculous question !
The question came hard on the heels of ones that established that life after death or reincarnation are what Paul Bowles, the subject of The Cage Door is Always Open (2012), called ‘intellectual toys’. This phrase was not picked up on, whereas some might see such beliefs as superstitions and not intellectual at all – again, Bowles is allowed to say something and not be challenged on it, just as, if Daniel Young meant anything by his universe question, he might at least have defended it.
So far so good. Each of the three sections is prefaced by a shot of a page from Bowles’ most famous novel, The Sheltering Sky, in each case a division of the book with a quotation. The quotation and / or the name of each section might mean something to Young in organizing his material, but I was left not understanding his taxonomy, nor why he includes animations that are not unlike Gilliam’s style and encompassing (it seemed) elements of Bowles’ life, but rushes them past the eye so that the experience is largely subliminal.
In interview, Bernardo Bertolucci calls The Sheltering Sky a poem in prose, each page filled with the venom of Bowles, which he wanted to distil into the film, but he was keen to stress that it is ‘not a psychological film, not a pyschological novel’ : They go into the desert and disappear for ever, these were his words.
Other figures such as Truman Capote, though there is no one like him for his bitchiness (or the huge cat that roamed his lap), gave the information about Bowles’ life, marriage, sexuality, writing and drug-taking, but, as said, arranged under the headings of his most famous book (including a quotation from Kafka), in a way that seemed largely arbitrary.
The documentary seemed to have been a long time in the making since Bowles’ death in 1999, when we were told that the impetus to make it had been reading The Sheltering Sky, contacting Bowles, and being offered the interview with which this review began. What is clear is that the writers of The Beat Generation flocked to him, for some of the same reasons that made him like North Africa, but he had been there first, and they learnt from him. Whether the film conveys much sense of Bowles’ literary legacy is open to discussion.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
My favourite poem is ‘Twat’
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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9 October
Evidently John Cooper Clarke… Live, relayed from Tyneside (though Cooper Clarke is from Salford), was hosted by Johnny Green, who had been manager of The Clash. It comprised a short video of Cooper Clarke reciting to guitar accompaniment from Franky (Frank Sidebottom, alias the late Chris Sievey), a quick word between Cooper Clarke and Green, the main feature of the film Evidently John Cooper Clarke, and a Q&A.
The collaboration that proved to be made with groups such as The Clash was by no means inevitable, except for CC’s self-belief and making it work on stage, even though, as Green said twice, he was very good at dodging bottles. By sheer perseverance, Cooper Clarke got audiences to listen to him as an authentic voice of the late 1970s, and we heard from, amongst others, Kate Nash, Bill Bailey, Steve Coogan and Arthur Smith what he and poems such as ‘Kung Fu International’ and ‘Evidently Chickentown’ meant to them at the time.
The film used intercutting of different versions to show the variation in Cooper Clarke’s performance from slower to incredibly fast, and how he was on and off stage in seconds in a way that his admirers and supporters found very cool, as well, of course, as what he did in between. The fictionally located ‘Beasley Street’ also proved of lasting appeal, a name chosen by Cooper Clarke to give him rhymes.
In terms of his own taste, Cooper Clarke named The Ramones as the final word on music of the time, and we saw him in The Black Lion at Salford as he reminisced about his career.
One of his teachers, Mr Monroe, was an inspiration not just to him, but his whole class, by reading poems that appealed to teddy boys. In turn, ‘I am Yours’, one of Cooper Clarke’s poems, was anthologized, and reading it at school inspired Alex Turner, who both wrote a song in his vein, and has now recorded a setting of the poem.
As Cooper Clarke was proud to say, Ben Drew (also known as Plan B) has also included him in his film Bad Illusions, performing a poem that he wrote after reading Drew’s script. These are both part of Cooper Clarke’s come-back, although what remained unclear is how much time from the 1980s onwards had been unproductive for him, largely because of drugs and their inheritance, and there is no good reason why one would have wanted to be more explicit.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 October
Evidently John Cooper Clarke… Live, relayed from Tyneside (though Cooper Clarke is from Salford), was hosted by Johnny Green, who had been manager of The Clash. It comprised a short video of Cooper Clarke reciting to guitar accompaniment from Franky (Frank Sidebottom, alias the late Chris Sievey), a quick word between Cooper Clarke and Green, the main feature of the film Evidently John Cooper Clarke, and a Q&A.
The collaboration that proved to be made with groups such as The Clash was by no means inevitable, except for CC’s self-belief and making it work on stage, even though, as Green said twice, he was very good at dodging bottles. By sheer perseverance, Cooper Clarke got audiences to listen to him as an authentic voice of the late 1970s, and we heard from, amongst others, Kate Nash, Bill Bailey, Steve Coogan and Arthur Smith what he and poems such as ‘Kung Fu International’ and ‘Evidently Chickentown’ meant to them at the time.
The film used intercutting of different versions to show the variation in Cooper Clarke’s performance from slower to incredibly fast, and how he was on and off stage in seconds in a way that his admirers and supporters found very cool, as well, of course, as what he did in between. The fictionally located ‘Beasley Street’ also proved of lasting appeal, a name chosen by Cooper Clarke to give him rhymes.
In terms of his own taste, Cooper Clarke named The Ramones as the final word on music of the time, and we saw him in The Black Lion at Salford as he reminisced about his career.
One of his teachers, Mr Monroe, was an inspiration not just to him, but his whole class, by reading poems that appealed to teddy boys. In turn, ‘I am Yours’, one of Cooper Clarke’s poems, was anthologized, and reading it at school inspired Alex Turner, who both wrote a song in his vein, and has now recorded a setting of the poem.
As Cooper Clarke was proud to say, Ben Drew (also known as Plan B) has also included him in his film Bad Illusions, performing a poem that he wrote after reading Drew’s script. These are both part of Cooper Clarke’s come-back, although what remained unclear is how much time from the 1980s onwards had been unproductive for him, largely because of drugs and their inheritance, and there is no good reason why one would have wanted to be more explicit.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Monday, 7 October 2013
What a puzzling thing to assert !
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8 October
If one has researched something (and somehow one's research was misguided), whether or not on one's own behalf, that is unfortunate.
However, the Kegelstatt Trio is no rarity (although Catherine Bott's interlocutor, from The London Conchord Ensemble, calmly treated it, in his response, as if it were), but it seems as though Miss Bott had never heard it again, after being on a judging panel that awarded a prize to performers of the piece, until now (Live in Concert from Champs Hill, Sussex, from 7.30 on Sunday evening).
I surely cannot have been alone in wondering why she was suggesting it recondite, when the very 'composed in a skittle-alley' claim (on which point she observed that the programme-writer miserably stated that there is no documentary evidence to support this account) draws one's attention to it at every time that Radio 3 bills it.
As it is, asking a question based on the premise that an unusual work had been unearthed, just made the interview appear an exercise in folly for the radio station as much as the questioner : as soon ask why Piano Concerto No. 22 is so infrequently played to lose credibility !
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8 October
If, @CatherineJBott, you have only heard the so-called Kegelstatt trio K. 498 once before, you mistake in thinking it obscure on @BBCRadio3.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 6, 2013
If one has researched something (and somehow one's research was misguided), whether or not on one's own behalf, that is unfortunate.
However, the Kegelstatt Trio is no rarity (although Catherine Bott's interlocutor, from The London Conchord Ensemble, calmly treated it, in his response, as if it were), but it seems as though Miss Bott had never heard it again, after being on a judging panel that awarded a prize to performers of the piece, until now (Live in Concert from Champs Hill, Sussex, from 7.30 on Sunday evening).
I surely cannot have been alone in wondering why she was suggesting it recondite, when the very 'composed in a skittle-alley' claim (on which point she observed that the programme-writer miserably stated that there is no documentary evidence to support this account) draws one's attention to it at every time that Radio 3 bills it.
As it is, asking a question based on the premise that an unusual work had been unearthed, just made the interview appear an exercise in folly for the radio station as much as the questioner : as soon ask why Piano Concerto No. 22 is so infrequently played to lose credibility !
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Eyes full of tears
This is a Festival review of Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008)
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7 October
This is a Festival review of Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008)
Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008) is not an overtly flashy film, but – deservedly – it does make big claims on our attention, and on our hearts. As can be seen, it is being shown not because it was made in the last year, but it is a UK premiere, part of the Catalan strand, again curated by Ramon Lamarca after a successful first appearance at the Festival last year, which made many friends.
I have written elsewhere about another Catalan film at the Festival (also a UK premiere), The Redemption of the Fish, which I watched twice, and I would – if possible – gladly have done the same with this film, but it is quality that the films have in common, not their subject-matter.
This one concerns the Spanish Civil War and the power of memory – what is best forgotten about when Italian air forces bombed Barcelona, and what should never be forgotten. One review that I have read (maybe this one) challenges how the film is put together, and its story and pace, but, for me, these are what most attracted me to it, for it uses acted scenes, documentary, and faux-documentary, e.g. to introduce the men who were in the anti-aircraft batteries that ringed the city on a number of eminences.
We see men and women, down in the shelters and tunnels that also served to wait out air-raids, interviewed by the same woman who challenges a visiting professor, apparently a Dante scholar and visiting for a conference, and pesters to get to speak to him – what some mistake for the monotonous course of this film is actually provoking us to ask ourselves (if we have not just read up all about it beforehand*) what is real, what is not, and what remembered, what feigned forgetfulness.
In this, we are as much in a confused state as the main characters (Maria (Gabriela Flores) and Mario (Paolo Ferrari), played with great conviction), who think that they know what is right, and not preconception, until life throws them up in each other’s way. After all that we have seen and heard, the closing scenes, and the beautiful reading that the professor gives from the opening of the Inferno, are painfully touching, speaking for all who have been lost.
For the second time this Festival, I was moved to tears just by that simplicity.
End-notes
* My approach to a film is that it should, for good or ill, stand for itself : if I need to have read the book or play on which it is based, it has failed in its own terms, and, if it cannot speak for itself, it is just images.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Sunday, 6 October 2013
Taking over the asylum ?
This is a Festival review of Sieniawka (2013)
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6 October
This is a Festival review of Sieniawka (2013)
What can I say about Sieniawka (2013) that is not inherent in watching it, in sticking with it ? Put another way, anything that I say will be reductive or interpretative (or both)
I believe that I cannot review this film (this was its UK premiere) in any traditional way, even with a ‘spoiler’ warning, but that I just have to say what I know, consistent with not saying too much :
1. Just as Fulbourn Hospital is named after a village near Cambridge, so Sieniawka is a psychiatric unit named after its neighbouring town, and we see another place nearby, damaged by flooding, at the end of the film.
2. Director Marcin Malaszczak and I talked extensively during gaps in my schedule, when not simply socializing at the end of the day (and once some reviews had been written). Those who do not just read film reviews on this blog will know about an experience of working in mental-health advocacy.
3. Marcin’s film (I cannot call him by his surname) falls into three sections, of which the longest is filmed in Sieniawka and its grounds. I have already mentioned the last section, and Marcin seems to think that we need not see it as chronologically the final one, although how it is set up suggests that it may be.
4. In the Q&A, I referred to Mr Endon in Murphy and to other writings of Samuel Beckettt. In particular, in Watt there is a journey to Mr Knott’s house, a two-part stay there, and a departure, but the narrative is framed by Watt and Sam meeting and doing their best to converse in different ‘pavilions’ of some sort of establishment. Apparently, the likeness had been seen before, but had not informed the making of the film.
5. Some of the questioners wanted to declare what the figures seen in the first part of the film, or their actions, meant.
6. However, it had a clear provisionality to it, which, at best (and knowing that one was doing so), one could interpret. From the end (or earlier), then, one might make an inference about whose body is delivered where at the opening, but never be sure.
7. It does not follow from the agreement of the staff for filming to take place, or from gaining the trust of the residents, that filming them does not exploit them.
8. I am not saying that it does, but comments from some of the others were that witnessing the repetitive behaviour disturbed them, or that they did not see the need to continue watching the footage.
9. When Marcin and I talked about such institutions (the food being set out, and a watery soup ladled into bowls, did not look very inviting), he agreed that his film would be seen differently by someone as familiar with them as I, and that I probably ‘knew too much’.
10. The impression that I know that he intended to give was of a sort of microcosm, where the smoking room – and people’s efforts to ask others, who receive tobacco beyond a ration, to give them some – is a hub of activity.
11. I cannot endorse such a view when, here as at Fulbourn in recent history, there have been people there for 20 or 30 years : they are alive, but they do not have their own space or life, and how some of the staff were heard talking about restraining a ‘bastard’ who got violent was shockingly self centred.
12. We see some residents playing volleyball or handball, but with no ball. Maybe they are more clever than Marcin imagines, and are ironically putting on a show for the camera. At any rate, when someone serves, he has – as I asked at the Q&A – added in the noise of the ball being hit.
13. Apparently, the mosaic at the end of the film gives hope, whereas one viewer had found hope lacking (see paragraph 11, above).
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Whiter than White Star
This is a Festival review of White Star (1983)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 October
This is a Festival review of White Star (1983)
You could not call it a Roland Klick* retrospective as such (Cambridge Film Festival did not), because (so I gather) many of his films had not been released in the UK. Not wishing to do a Jos Stelling, I decided on White Star (1983), and then, depending on how it went, maybe Supermarkt (1974).
However, I had, of course, not reckoned on making a mistake (going into Screen 3, rather than Screen 2), so missing the beginning of Leviathan (2013), and ending up with dubbed Klickery in Deadlock (1970), a film not on my list.
A desert, a guy who finds a dressed-up other guy, then takes more interest in his case and its contents, but hesitates – rock held high – to ensure that he does not survive, as if leaving him for dead were better. Second thoughts, going back, but the suited guy is gone, and holds him up. They drive off, arrive somewhere, only for the man with the upper hand to be easily overpowered. A mysterious woman. And so on, but all dubbed.
Did it seem bizarre, as the Festival write-up tells me that some had thought it ? No, not least because the word is overused, but really because it seemed arbitrarily wafer thin (to the point where I sneaked out, having stayed too long – until just after the title, because I had bizarrely thought it to be a preceding short that I had overlooked) who was in control. Hence ‘Deadlock’ ? Maybe, but the dubbing was killing me (even if subtitles were not then the norm) for its way of sucking the life (any of the film’s and mine)…
So Star, with its stark title, no longer seemed such a good choice, but there would be a Q&A with Klick. It, too, was supposed to be strange, but it seemed amazingly one dimensional in the way that Deadlock had threatened to be :
The opening scene is, I think, of Dennis Hopper (as producer Kenneth Barlow) trying to persuade Terrance Robay (as star Moody) to appear on stage in a club full of restless punks – either that, or of him, with his stooge Frank (David Hess), setting up for the latter to smash windows (which will later look as if there has been a riot), and arranging the foment of said punks. Oh, and, in arguing with the club’s owner, Barlow reveals that Moody is his sister’s boy. Nothing else do we need to know, and nothing else of significance emerges save from this starting-point.
Do we know why Moody trusts Barlow to be his producer, or why he goes along with this ‘White Star’ branding (with all its connotations of white supremacy, apart from those of space and of a burst of creation : it certainly is not Moody’s choice, though it is the best that the pair have to offer, even when Moody seeks to collaborate with a female vocalist (Sandra ?? Mascha ??)) ? Quite simply, other than probably having no other hope, no – since the conceit of the film is that Moody lives in Berlin**, the club would have been notorious, and he would never have agreed to try to play his synthesizer there.
The same objection is not dependent on being a denizen of Berlin. Since nothing in the film suggests that Moody is trusting (or, at any rate, trusts Barlow – except disastrously to take unspecified tablets in the back of a dangerously driven car when also ordered to change into his white suit), it hardly seems likely that he would not have objected to the choice of opening gig long before being there.
The only way in which this film works is if it is just a vehicle for a Hoppermonster, and we watch him barge through life like a giant game of PAC-MAN. Klick may not have hired him with that intention, and what he said about Hopper in the Q&A suggested that both that the man whom he had met before he arrived in Berlin, and what other people had said about working with him, had not prepared him for the reality :
Klick told the Festival audience (apparently, a story that he has told before), a coke story about Hopper, that, when he arrived in Berlin, the first thing that he wanted was cocaine, and Klick had to arrange something such that a man arrived with a briefcase every week with Hopper’s fix. The story went on : that Hopper was too high to act for the first part of the day, and too tired later on, but Klick had a clear two hours to get what he wanted from him (and, moreover, Hopper is scarcely off the screen).
Maybe, then, with the roles reversed, the film is a paradigm for making the film itself, with Hopper as the maverick star whom the director struggles to control, versus Hopper as the hell-bent producer, using all means and any to promote ‘White Star’ and ‘The Future’. A model of capitalism gone crazy in search of selling goods, but one that has really very little to say about why Moody goes along with it all and, say, sells the fittings of his studio (and shafts his black colleague) for Barlow to sell them for a song.
Glengarry Glenn Ross (1992), O Lucky Man ! (1973), The Color of Money (1986) – maybe (I don’t know) some of these films could have learnt something from Klick, and it is a helluva show from Hopper, but the ‘terrifying, unhinged performance’ (Festival write-up) is not enough, and Lindsay Anderson is careful to throw Malcolm McDowell into relief.
End-notes
* What sort of name is that ? I knew the phrase Das klickt nicht and the like, but still – perhaps he could develop and print a film for me…
** As we learn later, even if it may be a poor translation, since he is staying in a hotel.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
When we still had icebergs…
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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5 October
This film was shown in conjunction with a live relay from The Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton, in which the host introduced Sophie Fiennes (who grew up watching films there), its director, and later interviewed its presenter, Slavoj Žižek
The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) is a very good film, but, for a documentary, a longer one at 136 minutes : a little in the way of some non-narrative features, one kept wrongly thinking that it was making a move towards resolution, but that is an element that will be less present on a re-watching, which it well deserves.
Not least when sitting in Row C in Screen 2 (where one does not have the distance on it), it is not easy to keep with Žižek, because, although he may sometimes be tongue in cheek, he is always quite intense. In addition, the snorting, touching the nose with one hand, then the other (which are not feigned – if they were, he did them in the Q&A), can be off-putting. I say this merely to prepare a prospective viewer, as there is much, much more that is positive, and which draws one in.
One attraction, as one might gather from the trailer, is a wealth of film material that Žižek references here and – sometimes in more depth than in other cases – whose significance he analyses. It ranges from pre-war footage of Chaplin (plus Nazi commentary that criticizes him as typical of what is despicable in Jews) to Freeing Berlin from around 1944, which tells the story, from Stalin’s perspective, of what led to that event (and even portrays Hitler and him).
Žižek has many other examples, which encompass David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968), and Seconds (1966), as well as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), and The Dark Knight (2008).
Where Žižek is amongst his most expansive is in pulling apart James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), saying how ludicrous Kate Winslet partying with the lower decks to be with Leonardo DiCaprio is as a representation of class solidarity, and how hateful the denizens of the upper decks are made out to be by contrast. Most of all, though, how out-of-sorts Winslet is doing little more than feeding on DiCaprio to regenerate her flagging energies, even if at the cost of letting herself be abused.
Not that Žižek says so, but an arrangement of mutual benefit. However, he does ask, as one would know from the trailer, what part the iceberg plays in the development of the love-story, and he suggests that a worse disaster was averted by the couple’s not disembarking together and splitting up after two to three weeks of sex. He also comments how Winslet saying words to the effect that she will never let go of DiCaprio are literally at odds with thereupon releasing her grip on him so that he sinks into the water.
Throughout the film, through largely effective dummy-ups, and to much amusement, we see Žižek in a lifeboat beneath the stars to introduce this section about Titanic. He is then, variously, in the head in Jacket, relaxing by some of the furniture from Orange’s Korova Bar, or even on Travis Bickle’s bed – as good a way as any to draw attention to the artificiality both of the medium (in the original film, and in this one), and of what it passes of as distinct, real things.
Of course, this method also draws attention to the words that we hear Žižek saying, not least when, back to Titanic, he ends the film with an assertion and a power salute, and to how cinema can teeter on having us believe something and showing us that it is contrivance. Which is partly what he appears to be saying about the love-story in that film, that the real-life iceberg dramatically serves to make enduring the love that he predicts would have quickly petered out without it – no one wants the iceberg for that, but predicating a film on a doomed voyage would only be done to exploit it.
Žižek, as he did at length in the Q&A, states his views vigorously, but seems to disregard the reaction of the audience of Titanic when it was released, which must have known, at some level, that (a) the love was likely to be doomed, (b) it was being shown a fictionalized / idealized encounter between the classes, and, as a composite of these, that (c) the order of things is maintained.
No matter, as there is so much to follow in Žižek’s analysis*, that one loses the impression of being on top of it, for it is also part of his thesis that we chose our dreams and that we are complicit with engaging with ‘ideology’. Punchily, by showing us a scene from Guys and Dolls (1955), where one of the gang impersonates Officer Krapky (?) and the others make excuses that are grounded in their upbringing, and contrasting it with footage from the riots in the UK in 2011 and what was said by some then about why it had happened, he shows the connection between ‘ideology’, life and art. With scenes from the suppression of ‘The Prague Spring’ in 1968, he draws the lesson from Titanic that killing off the uprising allowed it to live on as a dream, not what he posits might have happened.
Necessarily, because Fiennes has had Žižek talk to camera* and then edited it together for her film, the creative act is hers, but the polemic may have, in the structure and order that she chose for it and the takes that she selected, have had its dynamics altered : I failed to hear this in the Q&A, but presumably (nominally) Žižek endorses the film, if only on the basis of having produced copy that is grist to someone else’s mill.
End-notes
* Incidentally, he told us in the Q&A that Fiennes read all of his books, worked for months beforehand, and, as she told us in the introduction, on nine months of solitary editing. He stated that his part was to shoot for two hours per day for two or three weeks in two locations, and was graphically explicit about how irritated he got when he was improvising, asked, because of technical issues, to do a second take, and then Fiennes asked him for a third take, saying that what he had said the first time had been better. Altogether, a strange collaboration.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 October
This film was shown in conjunction with a live relay from The Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton, in which the host introduced Sophie Fiennes (who grew up watching films there), its director, and later interviewed its presenter, Slavoj Žižek
The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) is a very good film, but, for a documentary, a longer one at 136 minutes : a little in the way of some non-narrative features, one kept wrongly thinking that it was making a move towards resolution, but that is an element that will be less present on a re-watching, which it well deserves.
Not least when sitting in Row C in Screen 2 (where one does not have the distance on it), it is not easy to keep with Žižek, because, although he may sometimes be tongue in cheek, he is always quite intense. In addition, the snorting, touching the nose with one hand, then the other (which are not feigned – if they were, he did them in the Q&A), can be off-putting. I say this merely to prepare a prospective viewer, as there is much, much more that is positive, and which draws one in.
One attraction, as one might gather from the trailer, is a wealth of film material that Žižek references here and – sometimes in more depth than in other cases – whose significance he analyses. It ranges from pre-war footage of Chaplin (plus Nazi commentary that criticizes him as typical of what is despicable in Jews) to Freeing Berlin from around 1944, which tells the story, from Stalin’s perspective, of what led to that event (and even portrays Hitler and him).
Žižek has many other examples, which encompass David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968), and Seconds (1966), as well as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), and The Dark Knight (2008).
Where Žižek is amongst his most expansive is in pulling apart James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), saying how ludicrous Kate Winslet partying with the lower decks to be with Leonardo DiCaprio is as a representation of class solidarity, and how hateful the denizens of the upper decks are made out to be by contrast. Most of all, though, how out-of-sorts Winslet is doing little more than feeding on DiCaprio to regenerate her flagging energies, even if at the cost of letting herself be abused.
Not that Žižek says so, but an arrangement of mutual benefit. However, he does ask, as one would know from the trailer, what part the iceberg plays in the development of the love-story, and he suggests that a worse disaster was averted by the couple’s not disembarking together and splitting up after two to three weeks of sex. He also comments how Winslet saying words to the effect that she will never let go of DiCaprio are literally at odds with thereupon releasing her grip on him so that he sinks into the water.
Throughout the film, through largely effective dummy-ups, and to much amusement, we see Žižek in a lifeboat beneath the stars to introduce this section about Titanic. He is then, variously, in the head in Jacket, relaxing by some of the furniture from Orange’s Korova Bar, or even on Travis Bickle’s bed – as good a way as any to draw attention to the artificiality both of the medium (in the original film, and in this one), and of what it passes of as distinct, real things.
Of course, this method also draws attention to the words that we hear Žižek saying, not least when, back to Titanic, he ends the film with an assertion and a power salute, and to how cinema can teeter on having us believe something and showing us that it is contrivance. Which is partly what he appears to be saying about the love-story in that film, that the real-life iceberg dramatically serves to make enduring the love that he predicts would have quickly petered out without it – no one wants the iceberg for that, but predicating a film on a doomed voyage would only be done to exploit it.
Žižek, as he did at length in the Q&A, states his views vigorously, but seems to disregard the reaction of the audience of Titanic when it was released, which must have known, at some level, that (a) the love was likely to be doomed, (b) it was being shown a fictionalized / idealized encounter between the classes, and, as a composite of these, that (c) the order of things is maintained.
No matter, as there is so much to follow in Žižek’s analysis*, that one loses the impression of being on top of it, for it is also part of his thesis that we chose our dreams and that we are complicit with engaging with ‘ideology’. Punchily, by showing us a scene from Guys and Dolls (1955), where one of the gang impersonates Officer Krapky (?) and the others make excuses that are grounded in their upbringing, and contrasting it with footage from the riots in the UK in 2011 and what was said by some then about why it had happened, he shows the connection between ‘ideology’, life and art. With scenes from the suppression of ‘The Prague Spring’ in 1968, he draws the lesson from Titanic that killing off the uprising allowed it to live on as a dream, not what he posits might have happened.
Necessarily, because Fiennes has had Žižek talk to camera* and then edited it together for her film, the creative act is hers, but the polemic may have, in the structure and order that she chose for it and the takes that she selected, have had its dynamics altered : I failed to hear this in the Q&A, but presumably (nominally) Žižek endorses the film, if only on the basis of having produced copy that is grist to someone else’s mill.
End-notes
* Incidentally, he told us in the Q&A that Fiennes read all of his books, worked for months beforehand, and, as she told us in the introduction, on nine months of solitary editing. He stated that his part was to shoot for two hours per day for two or three weeks in two locations, and was graphically explicit about how irritated he got when he was improvising, asked, because of technical issues, to do a second take, and then Fiennes asked him for a third take, saying that what he had said the first time had been better. Altogether, a strange collaboration.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Saturday, 5 October 2013
Julian Orchard ? : A Festival response to The Orchard (2013)
This is a Festival response to The Orchard (2013) in Microcinema with James Mackay
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
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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Thursday, 3 October 2013
Mum says that I am a monster for chocolate
This is a review of How I Live Now (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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3 October
This is a review of How I Live Now (2013)
* May contain spoilers *
Piper (unclear why she is called that, but played, somewhat precociously, by Harley Bird) says the title words to this posting to Daisy* (Saiorse Ronan), who, rather clumsily / unconvincingly tries to reassure her that there is not a connection between her mother not being there and eating chocolate : as we may well know, in cases of a separation, children can look for an explanation and end up blaming themselves, finding a causal connection and a regret, e.g. If I hadn’t eaten chocolate, mum wouldn’t have gone. (Daisy probably blames herself for her own mother’s departure : her mother, we are told, loved this location, and we see a photo of her by a sundial, later seen atop a hill.)
Pure observational / empirical psychology. Later, Daisy talks about chocolate, too, saying what she thought she was doing by not eating it, but, much more than that, her depiction as a person with intrusive commands in her head, and who describes herself more than once as a curse, suggest that she may be meant to have (touches of) obsessive-compulsive disorder (better known as OCD). It is not merely that she is fastidious (calling the contents of the fridge ‘gross’, and claiming that cheese is ‘a lump of solidified cows’ mucus’), but that she believes that something dreadful will happen, if she does not do certain things, and we hear what is in her head, compelling her.
Certainly, Edmond (Eddie, played by George MacKay) knows that Daisy has an inner conflict, and seeks to encourage her that she does not have to do what she is telling herself, after he has toppled her, fully clothed, into the plashing current of the family watering-hole, and thereby makes a further connection with her**.
Shortly before, he has whispered the herd of cows away that puts Daisy off proceeding, and, when she clumsily climbs a gate with barbed wire on, heals her hand, magic elements no doubt from the novel, and which enliven a fairly inert story, which would otherwise be of type ‘upheaval plus making a dangerous journey to be with loved ones’***, e.g. The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Lord of the Rings : Return of the King (2003), etc.
Anyway, back at the OCD, we hear Daisy talking about the change in her way of thinking that she has found herself making during the course of the film, and we have long since seen her doing things that would have made the earlier Daisy squirm or scream. I doubt that this ‘progress’ is anything other than symbolic, although, with psychological treatment, people can learn to do things that would otherwise overwhelm them with disgust, but I do not know what it is meant to mean on a figurative level, as some may be confused by what she does and hears anyway
As, considered differently, a story about insurrection or war, there are brutal moments, such as the enforced ‘evacuation’ (though less harrowing, because of the sheer violence, than an equivalent scene in Sarah’s Key (2010), and later parts of the film leave one wondering, from the available evidence, what need there could have been for splitting up the family) and when Piper is under threat from two men, as well as sudden detonations and overflights of aircraft.
Such things apart, there is a fairly static presentation of military conflict by means of low-frequency notes in the score and shots of burnt-out cars or the debris of an airliner (although there is the failure to appreciate that a box of chocolates might not be so pristine that it even has a tag on it (a tag to play on Piper’s mind ?)). The strife, then, seems too staged, almost as if it might only be happening in Daisy’s mind…
That may be the answer to it. When we knew that Daisy was with the family for a summer, it all seemed a bit My Summer of Love (2004), and the representatives of (full) adulthood being largely absent in a rather Narnia way, until the trees shook (in Tarkovsky vein, or that of Looper (2012) maybe) and Something Happened (again, a bit Narnia). Fairport Convention performing Tam Lin, about a magical abduction, has already paved the way ?
If it is all symbolic, then the ending can be reinterpreted as seen from knowing the beginning, as the ending voice-over invites us to do. Probably a comparison with Beckettt’s novel Molloy is pretentious, but his fastidious character Moran makes a punishing journey (in more sense than one ?) and ends up transformed. Moran opened his part of the book with ‘It is midnight. It is raining’, and closes it with ‘It was not midnight. It was not raining’. (Here, maybe that means that the end condition does not differ much from the starting condition, and maybe Eddie is no more than another aspect of Daisy's own personality, as there are certainly touches of A Beautiful Mind (2001), suggesting as much.)
With this film, it is all (for good reason) reminiscent of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, too, with another dramatic transformation. That said, it is the words spoken over by Ronan that make one think that anything is significant, since the ‘journey home’ with Piper seems hare brained, succeeds against all the odds, and sees Daisy using excessive force and threats to protect her – unlike in Lore (2012), there is no great sense of something that needs to be done except in terms of telepathy and / or dream, or of Daisy being / becoming a different person because of what happens.
Coupled with the fact that the film, even at only 101 minutes, seems to drag, all of this makes me think that it will not do very well, as comments that I heard were that it was like Twilight, and at least they had had a free ticket…
End-notes
* Daisy is really Elizabeth, but has chosen this name for herself (although using both to introduce herself to her aunt) : not surprisingly, such renaming is not often unassociated with some turmoil about identity.
** Previously, she had declared, rather abruptly, that she did not fish, did not swim, but then decides to go along for the ride.
*** Of which, I take The Road to be another such.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Wednesday, 2 October 2013
Visions of the Baltic
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 October
The more that I think about the first in the sequence of Estonian short films, Maggot Feeder (2012), the more that I believe that I have seen it before somewhere, somehow… (Probably on the screen in the bar at Festival Central, which had been showing a loop of clips.)
Not that it matters, because it said things to me with the stark beauty of its story-line, the Doctor-Who-like horribleness and ferocity of the maggots*, the faces of the man and the woman, motile behind the forms that contained them, and (again from science fiction) the stacked pairs of eyes of the spiders – inevitably, given the subject-matter, the frozen setting, I was reminded of the exquisite brutality of Far North (2007), but this film ended with blossoming, fecundity, to replace the sterility of the man’s reign (over the woman and the creatures whom he bloodily kills).
A perfect fable of stagnation, destruction and renewal, inventively brought about in animation and foley where every squelch of blood and slurp of lightly stewed flesh was telling. A good way into another transgressive world, that of My Condolences (2013) :
Without giving away the big twist, the delight of a crooked family, running a covert business, and how they respond to an outsider in their guilty midst. What better plan to hit on, worthy of Fawlty Towers in its bonkersness, than devoting a page in the illicit journal of their activity to the wording of a tribute to a fictionally deceased neighbour ?
The stranger joins in with their desire to express their regrets, and is asked to assume the position of scribe and author, resulting in excruciatingly amusing awkwardness, because the family members continue to fear detection…
Olga (2013) has already, vaguely, been accounted for, as well as the errantly provided Happy Birthday played with the conceit that Marilyn might sing to Mr Jesus on Christmas Eve, and that Mr Jesus is a robot with a rival : it did not have much to say, from what I saw of it.
In Triangle Affair (2012), cats, people with arms for heads (who, amongst other things, clean windows and cycle as a trio along high-wires), and trams converged spectacularly, overshadowed and overseen by chalk-wielding birds (crows ? Krähen in German / chalk, la craie in French ??), who are perhaps also the architects of this elaborate, futuristic city.
Maybe, though, they have bored of its having a function, and wish to subjugate that function to their desire to have fun (or to destroy) : crows and Kafka (which means ‘crow’ in Czech) and Prague…
Finally, Villa Antropoff (2013) uses animated full-frontal cleavage, sexual acts and drug use to parody the interests and attitudes of New Rich Russians, a freedom to be expressive since Estonia is no longer a satellite state, in the Baltic, of the Soviet regime.
Not unlike Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, one can prove to have outlived one’s popularity, if one’s actions are taken to excess, and it is then on to the next party ! (Oh, and a black man, whose home coast has nothing but debris on it, manages to crash the party, maybe in search of the same, but is not kindly received, but surely no denigrating stereotype here.)
End-notes
* Though, of course, maggots turn into flies, outside fairy-tales.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 October
The more that I think about the first in the sequence of Estonian short films, Maggot Feeder (2012), the more that I believe that I have seen it before somewhere, somehow… (Probably on the screen in the bar at Festival Central, which had been showing a loop of clips.)
Not that it matters, because it said things to me with the stark beauty of its story-line, the Doctor-Who-like horribleness and ferocity of the maggots*, the faces of the man and the woman, motile behind the forms that contained them, and (again from science fiction) the stacked pairs of eyes of the spiders – inevitably, given the subject-matter, the frozen setting, I was reminded of the exquisite brutality of Far North (2007), but this film ended with blossoming, fecundity, to replace the sterility of the man’s reign (over the woman and the creatures whom he bloodily kills).
A perfect fable of stagnation, destruction and renewal, inventively brought about in animation and foley where every squelch of blood and slurp of lightly stewed flesh was telling. A good way into another transgressive world, that of My Condolences (2013) :
Without giving away the big twist, the delight of a crooked family, running a covert business, and how they respond to an outsider in their guilty midst. What better plan to hit on, worthy of Fawlty Towers in its bonkersness, than devoting a page in the illicit journal of their activity to the wording of a tribute to a fictionally deceased neighbour ?
The stranger joins in with their desire to express their regrets, and is asked to assume the position of scribe and author, resulting in excruciatingly amusing awkwardness, because the family members continue to fear detection…
Olga (2013) has already, vaguely, been accounted for, as well as the errantly provided Happy Birthday played with the conceit that Marilyn might sing to Mr Jesus on Christmas Eve, and that Mr Jesus is a robot with a rival : it did not have much to say, from what I saw of it.
In Triangle Affair (2012), cats, people with arms for heads (who, amongst other things, clean windows and cycle as a trio along high-wires), and trams converged spectacularly, overshadowed and overseen by chalk-wielding birds (crows ? Krähen in German / chalk, la craie in French ??), who are perhaps also the architects of this elaborate, futuristic city.
Maybe, though, they have bored of its having a function, and wish to subjugate that function to their desire to have fun (or to destroy) : crows and Kafka (which means ‘crow’ in Czech) and Prague…
Finally, Villa Antropoff (2013) uses animated full-frontal cleavage, sexual acts and drug use to parody the interests and attitudes of New Rich Russians, a freedom to be expressive since Estonia is no longer a satellite state, in the Baltic, of the Soviet regime.
Not unlike Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, one can prove to have outlived one’s popularity, if one’s actions are taken to excess, and it is then on to the next party ! (Oh, and a black man, whose home coast has nothing but debris on it, manages to crash the party, maybe in search of the same, but is not kindly received, but surely no denigrating stereotype here.)
End-notes
* Though, of course, maggots turn into flies, outside fairy-tales.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Tuesday, 1 October 2013
I'm a self-destructive fool (Thanks, Kate and Anna !)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 October
* Contains spoilers *
During late-night Festival drinks, @tobytram was heard to say (words to the effect of) :
He has the self-delusion that [...]
According to said Tram, it was 'semantics' when @TheAgentApsley pounced, querying what delusion there is other than oneself being deluded, because, as with a headache, no one else can experience it as one's proxy - also, which was perfect true, that The Agent's point was not germane to whatever point he had been making*.
OK. Can X give Y a delusion ? In the world of films, it is often a device, but is it an illusion or a delusion, if someone pretends to be Mr Ripley, Martin Guerre, The Tichborne Claimant, or even Danny Rose as the beard ?
As would meet with Mr Allen's approval to mention, what magicians do is called an illusion - that card that someone scribbled on appears to have been found inside a perfectly ordinary orange, but maybe we do not know how it was done. Are we deluded ? Would we only be deluded, as I was as a 3-year-old, when I believed that the father of my next-door playmate could really cause coins to appear about her person ?
In common parlance, maybe we do not make much distinction between the world - he has set himself an illusory goal as against he is deluded about his likely success. Where, I would suggest, we should be thinking is where the belief is immutably fixed and not susceptible to reason, which could, say, be the paranoid belief that one's neighbours have trained birds to defecate when the washing is on the line (as I was once told) :
If the person will not just accept that shit happens and maybe she is just unlucky, we would probably describe that as delusional thinking. If, on the other hand, it is merely an explanation that comes out of some conflict, with a rational status, with the neighbours and which might cause a person out of sorts to wonder, then I am imagining that being amenable to reasoned argument would make calling it a delusion less certain, not least since the thoughts have passed with reassurance that it is coincidence. Some, though, might still say that the woman had been deluded, I guess.
Which is where we come on to what distinction a self-delusion makes. Can one really, as the phrase has it, delude oneself ? It sounds as though it is something that the person has set out to do, whereas, if we say that X deluded Y, it sounds more deliberate still - what about considering Allen's latest, Blue Jasmine (2013) ?
Does Alec Baldwin delude Cate Blanchett, or does he believe in what he is doing, and it is just infectious ? If he deceives her about other women (he says that he is doing something, when he is really with one of them), is he not, maybe, deceiving her about the stability of her lifestyle ?
Has he, then, created in his own head a world that is not supported by reality with regard to his finances, and to his and their vulnerability ? Would that amount to a self-delusion, a conviction built on an earlier conviction, but essentially no more stable than a house of cards - or is it just a delusion, because it may not mean anything to say that Blanchett has a delusion, when she may just be gullible, overly trusting, turning a blind eye to what seems crooked ?
What if her delusion consists in choosing to believe that she can live the life that Baldwin offers - has he deluded her, and is the delusion of the same kind or character as the semi-fantasy world that she occupies in the non-flashback part of the world ? That behaviour seems more like delusion : what characterizes it is that she drifts into recollection involuntarily, her notion to become designer does not seem either founded on a rational plan (the fixed idea about learning via the Internet, although the Internet is not something with which she is at all familiar) or capable of listening to objections, and she verges on being uncontrollably grandiose.
For all of this, we can see a psychological mechanism, i.e. that she has been built up to think herself worthy of good things, but lacks the insight either to address the past and come to terms with it (which flashing back into it cannot do - it merely paralyses the present), or, because of that paralysis, to operate outside the inherited preconceptions about the world and her place and that of Sally Hawkins in it. There has, as we come to see, been trauma, but it is hard to say that the delusions that Blanchett now has about where she fits in were put there by Baldwin - he wanted her to believe in his illusion, or even share in it with him, but it can hardly be said that he wanted, as such, her to be delusional as we see her.
On my view, maybe she was (willingly) deluded about Baldwin's and her wealth and its fixity, and it allowed her to have and / or accord herself the position of a moneyed woman of leisure and cultivation. The delusional aspects of her thinking and the psychological make-up resulting from realizing the truth are contingent on what happened - after the trauma and initial treatment, she is no longer fully functional, but that was not a delusional state that Baldwin sought or directly caused. I cannot see her as having deluded herself in the life that she tries to lead with Hawkins, only that she is wracked by the past, and is motivationally and functionally unable to adjust to her straitened surroundings.
In the end, I am left feeling, by this analysis, that ascribing a motive of deluding another, or oneself, lacks credibility - a true delusional state in another might be very hard to engineer (although films from Hitchcock's to The Ipcress File (1965) purport to show us how), and to try to bring about a delusion for and in oneself might be self defeating.
It could be that we are better off forgetting agency or causation (unless we are therapists), and just recognizing rooted delusions when we see them, as against conditions of fear, phobia or mistrust that they will respond to logical analysis and reasoning...
End-notes
* As if words do not matter outside of their context ?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 October
* Contains spoilers *
During late-night Festival drinks, @tobytram was heard to say (words to the effect of) :
He has the self-delusion that [...]
According to said Tram, it was 'semantics' when @TheAgentApsley pounced, querying what delusion there is other than oneself being deluded, because, as with a headache, no one else can experience it as one's proxy - also, which was perfect true, that The Agent's point was not germane to whatever point he had been making*.
OK. Can X give Y a delusion ? In the world of films, it is often a device, but is it an illusion or a delusion, if someone pretends to be Mr Ripley, Martin Guerre, The Tichborne Claimant, or even Danny Rose as the beard ?
As would meet with Mr Allen's approval to mention, what magicians do is called an illusion - that card that someone scribbled on appears to have been found inside a perfectly ordinary orange, but maybe we do not know how it was done. Are we deluded ? Would we only be deluded, as I was as a 3-year-old, when I believed that the father of my next-door playmate could really cause coins to appear about her person ?
In common parlance, maybe we do not make much distinction between the world - he has set himself an illusory goal as against he is deluded about his likely success. Where, I would suggest, we should be thinking is where the belief is immutably fixed and not susceptible to reason, which could, say, be the paranoid belief that one's neighbours have trained birds to defecate when the washing is on the line (as I was once told) :
If the person will not just accept that shit happens and maybe she is just unlucky, we would probably describe that as delusional thinking. If, on the other hand, it is merely an explanation that comes out of some conflict, with a rational status, with the neighbours and which might cause a person out of sorts to wonder, then I am imagining that being amenable to reasoned argument would make calling it a delusion less certain, not least since the thoughts have passed with reassurance that it is coincidence. Some, though, might still say that the woman had been deluded, I guess.
Which is where we come on to what distinction a self-delusion makes. Can one really, as the phrase has it, delude oneself ? It sounds as though it is something that the person has set out to do, whereas, if we say that X deluded Y, it sounds more deliberate still - what about considering Allen's latest, Blue Jasmine (2013) ?
Does Alec Baldwin delude Cate Blanchett, or does he believe in what he is doing, and it is just infectious ? If he deceives her about other women (he says that he is doing something, when he is really with one of them), is he not, maybe, deceiving her about the stability of her lifestyle ?
Has he, then, created in his own head a world that is not supported by reality with regard to his finances, and to his and their vulnerability ? Would that amount to a self-delusion, a conviction built on an earlier conviction, but essentially no more stable than a house of cards - or is it just a delusion, because it may not mean anything to say that Blanchett has a delusion, when she may just be gullible, overly trusting, turning a blind eye to what seems crooked ?
What if her delusion consists in choosing to believe that she can live the life that Baldwin offers - has he deluded her, and is the delusion of the same kind or character as the semi-fantasy world that she occupies in the non-flashback part of the world ? That behaviour seems more like delusion : what characterizes it is that she drifts into recollection involuntarily, her notion to become designer does not seem either founded on a rational plan (the fixed idea about learning via the Internet, although the Internet is not something with which she is at all familiar) or capable of listening to objections, and she verges on being uncontrollably grandiose.
For all of this, we can see a psychological mechanism, i.e. that she has been built up to think herself worthy of good things, but lacks the insight either to address the past and come to terms with it (which flashing back into it cannot do - it merely paralyses the present), or, because of that paralysis, to operate outside the inherited preconceptions about the world and her place and that of Sally Hawkins in it. There has, as we come to see, been trauma, but it is hard to say that the delusions that Blanchett now has about where she fits in were put there by Baldwin - he wanted her to believe in his illusion, or even share in it with him, but it can hardly be said that he wanted, as such, her to be delusional as we see her.
On my view, maybe she was (willingly) deluded about Baldwin's and her wealth and its fixity, and it allowed her to have and / or accord herself the position of a moneyed woman of leisure and cultivation. The delusional aspects of her thinking and the psychological make-up resulting from realizing the truth are contingent on what happened - after the trauma and initial treatment, she is no longer fully functional, but that was not a delusional state that Baldwin sought or directly caused. I cannot see her as having deluded herself in the life that she tries to lead with Hawkins, only that she is wracked by the past, and is motivationally and functionally unable to adjust to her straitened surroundings.
In the end, I am left feeling, by this analysis, that ascribing a motive of deluding another, or oneself, lacks credibility - a true delusional state in another might be very hard to engineer (although films from Hitchcock's to The Ipcress File (1965) purport to show us how), and to try to bring about a delusion for and in oneself might be self defeating.
It could be that we are better off forgetting agency or causation (unless we are therapists), and just recognizing rooted delusions when we see them, as against conditions of fear, phobia or mistrust that they will respond to logical analysis and reasoning...
End-notes
* As if words do not matter outside of their context ?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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