All by the board ?

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9 November (updated 10 November)


* Contains mild spoilers *


79 = S : 15 / A : 14 / C : 12 / M : 11 / P : 13 / F : 14

A rating and review of Captain Phillips (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17 / 17 x 6 = 102)


I know that I am not alone in saying that the closing minutes of Captain Phillips (2013) made all that went before worth watching.

Much of those two hours was, not very subtly, made to seem more thrilling by quick cutting and by the effects of heartbeat-like pulsations, other percussive sounds, and sustained high-frequency notes, which one may not register in Henry Jackman's score, but whose sudden absence lifts the preceding tension. The script also makes use of power-games, and games of people tryin g to work out which game is being played, such as wearing your opponent down through talk, addressing comments to someone who is not there to make it seem as those one has a powerful ally, and, equally, speaking when one knows that, unknown to others, someone else is listening.

The film has some basis in actual events. We have a captain, in Tom Hanks, who notionally establishes his American Irish credentials by saying one line in a lilting brogue (brogues always lilt), but not at any other point. Prior to finishing getting ready, he gratuitously brought up the itinerary on his PC, telling it to us, but as if he was just checking to be sure, which might fit his desire to have things shipshape.

On the journey to the airport to meet his vessel, Rich (Phillips) is admirably concerned about his children's future, when in conversation with his wife Andrea, but he sounds as though he is paraphrasing the lyric of 'Times they are a-changing' in a Forrest Gump (1994) sort of way. His arrival in port in Oman has him check the security on the way up to the bridge, which he announces that he wants rigorously put in place, but, when the time of testing comes, it puts up no resistance whatever.

This is where one wonders what has gone before - Phillips must know more than the e-mail warnings of Somali pirates that we see on his screen on board, and the hoses that are deployed must have been installed as part of a stratagem on the part of Maersk, but, if so, it all seems a little rusty, and rather too ineffectual.

We have Phillips' preparations for sea, and we have that of Muse's (Barkhad Abdi's) crew, under his warlord boss - we compare the Western approach of civility in giving orders with that of the Somalis, shouting at each other and jostling for position, but it is there in the relations on the Maersk Alabama, when Phillips takes on an objecting union member, and urges people to finish their break on time. Another point of contact is engines, on both vessels, being taken beyond their limits, all of which tends to suggest how similar things are in this parallel way.

Still, we do not quite know how much, on Muse's and Phillips' side, is instinctual thinking on their feet, and how much training. Maybe a vain boast from Muse that a $6m Greek vessel had been caught, maybe it was, but all benefit went to his boss - the huge surprise is the successful boarding. From there, everything is bound to go in cat-and-mouse fashion to sustain the film's need for twists and turns, even if Phillips seems the person least likely to convince in lying (both as he does it, and with the lies to hand), and when Muse allows a powerful position to slide for reasons that are fairly tenuous : either he knows how to conduct a situation like this, or he does not, whereas he seems swayed by Phillips, almost as if the white man saying that he does not know what happened to the crew is worth listening to.

For me, when Phillips is left to his own devices, the situation does not build a claustrophobic tension whose resolution one longs for, but one that drags, and where the visuals did not impress a sense of confinement on me. (However, we do have the very necessary element that all this happens at the time of the full moon.)

Hanks after that, though, is an excellent end to the film, focusing just on him, his essential responses and feelings, before we pull out from a wide view and close. Abdi and his fellow captors, especially Najee (Faysal Ahmed) and Elmi (Mahat M. Ali), are very strong, and suitably threatening.


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

Found in her memories

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7 November

90 = S : 14 / A : 16 / C : 12 / M : 17 / P : 16 / F : 15

A rating and review of Philomena (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17 / 17 x 6 = 102)

Those who read my blog with any regularity - poor fools ! - may have found that I am 'not good around' Judi Dench, though I did enjoy (even if I should not have done) Billy Connolly and her in Mrs Brown (1997), and, for this reason, will not have discovered much reviewed that features her : something to do with not being able to forgive her spending her effort on series after series (nine, was it ?) of As Time Goes By...

In Philomena, where she is the title-character, all my doubts were overcome - just the close-ups alone, where one could feel the yearning in her eyes, and believe that she was transfixed by the images that were her past, were worth the whole film. (I must last have seen her in Skyfall (2012), as M, but there she has a different vulnerability to her, feeling under personal threat, and then facing a murderous Javier Bardem - at those moments when Philomena was vulnerable, for she could also be very resourceful and admirable in holding her position, she did not seem nearly so frail, but very touching.)

As with another film out now, Gloria (2013), the clue is in the title, i.e. that we are going to witness a portrait of that person, but this person (although she, too, has hurts and griefs) is very different from Gloria. Martin Sixsmith, played by Steve Coogan (who produced the film, and co-wrote it with Jeff Pope), thinks that Philomena is credulous (and says so to his editor), but, when he more or less tells her so (in what sort of desire to keep her sweet, one does not know), she very quickly tells him that God would think him a feckin' eejit. (No, it did not smack of Father Ted, but seemed a very genuine response to Martin's thoughtless atheistic baiting.)

When I consider that Coogan wrote this part for Dench, I am humbled. At The Lincoln Monument, after he has moved her around like a piece of meat to try to get a good pose, there is a very telling pair of lines :

Martin : I'm only going to tell the truth

Philomena : That's what I'm worried about


The lines encapsulate a polarity at the heart of the film. Philomena is a real person about whom Martin Sixsmith, the former BBC journalist and then adviser to the last government, wrote a book in 2009, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee. The real Philomena (of whom a photo is shown in a closing montage) was presumably similarly torn about looking for the son whom she was forced to allow to be adopted, and the personal cost of her privacy in doing so.

Whatever the offscreen Sixsmith may be like (and Coogan does not use his ability for mimicry here), he must have allowed Coogan to portray as Martin a journalist who, when declining breakfast and asking for privacy in a supposedly polite way, has an abrasiveness to him that causes Philomena to rebuke him for rudeness. (His quick retreat into saying that he needs 'quiet time' felt like a sulk, the complementary side to beginning to correct her when she alludes to him 'going to Oxbridge' (because it is a contraction, not a place), and thereby ignoring the context in which said it, and what she was actually saying to him.)

What worries me a little about the film, from where I could judge the laughter to be coming from in Screen 2 (and of what quality), is that it veers close to the racist notion of being Irish equating with backwardness. Not specifically when an irritated Martin sums Philomena up as someone who has soaked up Reader's Digest and The Daily Mail (and one other publication), because he is not a million miles from being thoroughly conceited anyway (which, in characterizing a Sixsmith persona, Coogan must have enjoyed).

However, there are occasions when the timing of the editing does tend to make Philomena sound like a simpleton, for example when she does not get Martin's allusion to The Wizard of Oz, just after they have first met, and when she quotes the word 'titanium' in a single-word description of her new hip : it floats, as if she is foolishly saying things that she does not understand (whereas her job for thirty years suggests otherwise). Then, at the trademark salad-bar, it is clear that Martin does not know this sort of place to eat, and we are again left with space that makes it sound awkward that she is calling the croutons that she is adding to her salad 'bits of toast' (though croutons are really scarcely more than bits of toast).

As the film progressed, my perception is that a fair number in the audience were, in laughing, not being sympathetic - almost the old distinction of 'at' rather than 'with', although they might have been laughing, rather than bearing with Philomena. Perhaps they missed that Martin was not meant to be right in thinking her to soak up words and phrases to use without understanding, but that he - not unusually in the trajectory of such a film - was, as a graduate from Oxford, meant to learn things from her.

In the first scene at an airport (actually, identifiable as Stansted, from where they would not have been able to take that flight), Martin does not disguise that he has heard the plot of a cheap paperback on sufferance, quipping unkindly that he almost felt as though he had read it. When they are next at an airport, Martin has no answers for why they should not be, and we are left to congratulate ourselves when we hear Philomena articulate the reasons not to catch the flight that we thought of shortly before.

Fine as a plot device to make us think better of Philomena, and to watch Martin just go along with it when he had had no idea what to do, but there are perhaps too many other cases when we begin to wonder how sharp he really is, if he takes the step of going somewhere without having thought through what to do when he gets there. That is where the film seems weak, since we insufficiently have portrayed a Martin who is depressed, for whom some of what happens might no longer be grist to his mill.

This is also not a buddy film, but more of a Rain Man (1988) sort of film, in that Cruise's (Charlie's) position changes in relation to Hoffman's (Raymond's), and Martin ends up respecting Philomena, and making a gesture that shows respect for her views. The closing, rising shot is beautifully executed, and seems in no way forced in bringing an air of grandeur to the scene.

Alexandre Desplat's suitably unobtrusive score has achieved the same aim throughout, of being there, but not being so obvious that one feels it out of place (and, in this, he did as he did with Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013)). The device of using footage, so that Philomena almost seems to be prescient in seeing what happens to her son, is an effective one, and roots Philomena in the memories of what she had.

If we excuse the black-and-whiteness of the depiction of the nuns (though, for all that I know, Sixmsith's book may record Sister Hildegard's views as shown), the cast as a whole is strong, but especial mention must go to Sophie Kennedy Clark for bringing a vitality to Philomena as a younger woman, and for showing us the origin of the hurt, the moment of separation, that inhabits the reflective older Philomena's gaze.


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Pleasantry at The Pheasantry

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5 November


This is a review of Edana Minghella’s quartet gig on 2 November at Pizza Express’ jazz club in The Kings Road, The Pheasantry, with personnel Sarah Bolter (tenor and (curved) soprano sax, flute), Pete Maxfield (double bass), and Mick Smith (piano)


Declaration of interest : Trust me that I am being impartial, though Edana and I Follow each other on Twitter (as a consequence of having made the connection that I was at university with one of her sisters). However, this means that I cannot – because it does not sound right – adopt my usual approach and call her Minghella…


How can one capture a gig ? Go through the set-list, number by number, commenting on each ? Maybe, but, not that a review should document as such, here is the set-list for the gig (provided, complete with attributions, at lightning speed by Edana):


1. Bring a little water, Sylvie (Traditional, this version attributed to Leadbelly, aka Huddie Ledbetter)

2. Teach me to-night (Gene De Paul & Sammy Cahn)

3. Speak low (Kurt Weill, lyrics Ogden Nash)

4. Catch the wind (Donovan)

5. Who can I turn to? (Leslie Bricusse & Anthony Newley)

6. A little sugar in my bowl (originally as sung by Bessie Smith, written by Clarence Williams, J. Tim Brymn, Dally Small; this version reworked by Nina Simone)

7. All or nothing at all (Arthur Altman, Lyrics by Jack Lawrence)


8. With Guillermo Rozenthuler : Corcovado in medley with Vivo Sonhando (both by Antonio Carlos Jobim)

9. With Guillermo Rozenthuler : You and the night and the music (Arthur Schwartz, lyrics by Howard Dietz)


10. The King of Rome (David Sudbury)

11. Down with love (Harold Arlen, lyrics by E Y Harburg)


Encore : Don’t look back in anger (Noel Gallagher)



If we want to talk about Edana’s voice, it takes some courage – voices and nerves being what they are – to open one’s set a capella (1) and in a very unadorned, unaccented way (joined later by understated tenor), and it was not the only point at which we saw such fortitude.

The actual quality of Edana’s voice I describe as like silk, with honeyed tones, and sometimes lightly breathy. Less nasal than Stacey Kent (and with more of a range ?), Edana’s vocal quality reminded me of her, though their approach to phrasing, and to swinging a tune, is quite different.

However, you can judge for yourself, by going to her web-site, and having a listen to a couple of tracks from her CD Still on my Feet (you have to sign up to some innocuous application – at least, it seemed benign when I did so).

Back at the gig, we had a standard next (2), which I have certainly heard Stacey Kent perform. Edana used rubato to give the impression that the number was fighting to get off the leash, and that, at any moment, the tenor would rock it up. It was a teasing exercise in restraint, and she introduced minute hesitations to bring out the thrill in the words :

Should / the teacher / stand

By now, all members of the trio had joined in, and they next (3) gave us the repetitive irregular pattern of what I identified with as a rumba, piano and bass a solid rhythm section, with repeated spread chords from the former. (Yes, it is Kurt Weill, and I do not know what the arrangement was.) I believe that Edana let that accentuation speak for itself, but allowed the bar-lines to be flexible to do so, and was joined, in a neat matching of register, on soprano sax.

In introducing the next item (4), an audience request from Lesley, Edana dedicated it to anyone who had the experience of having walked along the sand with someone who is no longer there, and it was a beautiful, reflective number, called Catch the wind – a number that had a distinctive run of three notes before a rise, then, after a pause, repeating that note twice and descending, evocative, perhaps, of currents of air. It was given a straight run-through, with Edana’s voice floating above the accompanying forces.


Which brings me to a brief interude, on jazz-singers and their bands. As important as knowing one’s personnel is, what matters more is rapport and responsiveness – I recall one saxophonist, playing with eyes closed (and maybe thinking that he was Coltrane), distending a solo beyond the comfort of the singer, given that it was desired to resume the mood established for the lyric. ‘In proportion’ is another phrase that springs to mind, and that is what the dynamics of Edana with her trio seemed to be.

Examples have already been given where voice matched instrument(s), and, although it is always impressive when a pianist can go off on an impassioned train of thought or a sax-player go through some runs and riffs, a reliable group of musicians, in sympathy with the approach to the song, counts for a lot more. So, although Mick Smith took a solo in (5), it was clear that this is not his thing, but creating texture.

That song, which Edana introduced by quoting the lines ‘Who can I turn to when nobody needs me ?’, began with just piano and bass, and led to a balanced sax solo. Edana’s singing was with love, and projecting through the accompaniment as the words unfolded. Then Edana completely changed the mood (6) with a bluesy Bessie Smith number (though not trying to imitate her gravelly attack), where she brought out phrases such as ‘Wanna little sweetness down in my soul’, and let these suggestive appeals to ‘Daddy’ speak for themselves, so that the well-delivered lyric did the work for her : some singers can tend to suggest insufficient faith in the words, and the music that supports them, and so more can become less.

In the next song (7), Edana drew out the phrase ‘Half a love never appealed to me’, and was just backed by the bass, who gave us some slapped notes (and some harmonies that sounded a bit like the James Bond theme). Unlike Claire Martin’s recorded version, she chose to understate the impact, so that we could just concentrate on the duo, the melody against the chords in the bass.


The next two numbers (8, 9) were duets with Guillermo Rozenthuler, who had performed the shorter first set (and had had Edana as a guest for a song), the first ‘a sort of’ medley, where they felt very assured in each other’s vocal company, and then the team work of a song where they sang to and with each other. Both had solos, and Guillermo dazzled with his, in true scat style.

What I would draw from this is that it takes real class to be able to invite another performer to the stage and to fit into his or her style – it was clear from the anecdote told after the first song, about Edana visiting him for a singing lesson (and which unintentionally developed in a chaotically humorous way – the anecdote, that is), that the two know each other well, but that is not the point.

The proof was in the song that Edana said that June Tabor, heard live and recorded, had inspired her to sing (10), in which, after the liveliness of what had preceded, she was confident in respecting the feel of this simple song in the folk idiom. Sparsely accompanied by piano, and latterly by a tremulous flute, Edana gave the lyric its full meaning and weight, in an adept transition from the numbers with Guillermo.

The final song of the set (11) began with a slow introduction, where, with her strong diction, Edana was projecting the key notes, and developed into the more complicated rhythms of patter, which seemed all the faster for the held-back opening, and which she handled with assurance. Any slips in that sort of material are unforgiving, but there were none.

As an encore, Oasis, but in disguise, so the words ‘take that look from off your face’ took me unawares. At first, there were some Basseyesque qualities in Edana’s singing, and she was splitting notes across neighbouring ones for emphasis. Once I realized what the song was, it had a meditative quality in this arrangement (with tenor filling in the texture), and at this tempo, which made a good number on which to finish.


A thoroughly enjoyable and versatile set from a singer who has the ability and personality to go far.


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OBEs

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3 November

Pass by, if you wish to read about royal honours, not Out-of-Body Experiences...


It is a curious term, if you think about it. As usual, the experimental psychologists think that they have got it licked - in the lecture where I learnt about The Rubber-Hand Illusion (sounds more like something in one of Woody Allen's characters' magic acts), I was also told about a woman who was having some pre-operative measurements made of her brain.

She had epilepsy, and, by stimulating parts of her brain, the surgical team wanted to establish that they were not going to deprive her of any important function when they came to remove material to prevent her fitting further. It so happened that they found that stimulating one part caused her to say that she was above her body, looking down on it. For whatever reason this part of the brain had not been identified before, the psychologists seem delighted that they have the brain to hold responsible for this 'experience'.


Not much of an experience, when people report far more than just being above themselves, looking down, but the lecture did not dwell on that possible criticism of this enthusiastic discovery. Of course, experimenters can see that stimulating this part of the subject's brain, when they know where the subject is (i.e. not above their body), causes him or her to report looking down from above, but do they non-scientifically assume it is not a real effect, by invoking a silent circularity ?

In other words, we can see that the subject is where he or she was, so it is just a function of the brain that reports that he or she is several feet in the air above the bed. If the subject were alone when a non-induced experience occurred, he or she would say that, if someone else came into the room when he or she was above his or her body, that person would see his or her body. So, true scientific investigation would have to carry out this experiment (it is my guess that it has not been carried out) :

1. By a shield at mid-body level, prevent the subject from being able to see the lower part of his or her body.

2. Place an easily identifiable object, e.g. a coloured square, on the bed, unknown to the subject.

3. Then stimulate the relevant part of the brain. If the subject can, when asked, report the presence of the object, one can only conclude, not that the brain generates the impression of that point of view, but that the self is actually put into that point of view.


Has anyone tested that ? Or did science confuse cause and effect, as so often ?


Maybe it has been done, or you want to say that it is a waste of time to do an experiment of that kind (though ones on ESP have been carried out enough), and maybe the person would never be able to see the object, because it is just a function of the brain to cause the illusion (can science say why, what use it would be ?). OK.

Do you recall the pivoting beds on board the USS Enterprise in Star Trek ? What if the person whose brain were to be stimulated got put in one of those first, so that he or she is near vertical before the brain is touched ? Where would that person report his or her self being then - upright facing 'the bed', or still above, looking down ?


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Problems of the Self (to quote Bernard Williams)

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2 November

I saw an experiment being carried out to-day (a video of it), during a lecture called Boundaries Between Self and World by Dr Jane Aspell, Lecturer in Psychology, in Cambridge's Festival of Ideas : The Rubber-Hand Illusion.

If I put a rubber hand in front of you, and then suddenly stuck a fork in it, would you - other than the surprising gesture - be shocked, as if the hand were yours ?

Well, and although you would know what was happening (apart from the fork bit), if a physical barrier shielded your arm from sight, but your hand and the rubber hand (in front of you) were stroked with a paint-brush in the same place, your brain would come to identify the rubber one as yours, confusing the apparent stimulus (on the rubber hand) with the felt one (on your own hand), because of the visual message.

Without the fork element, here is a link to a video from New Scientist.


This all seems surprising, out of context, or even in a lecture of this kind, but is it, and does it show what the experimental psychologists claim ? I am told that the eye's lens throws an inverted image on the retina, and the brain's visual cortex adjusts for this - even to the extent that, if one wore glasses all the time that turned the projected image right way up (and so everything would be seen upside down), the brain adjusts in time, righting the perceived image. Or those walk-in optical illusions, where patterns of black and white can make things seem taller, shorter, or unstable in some way.

Consider, also, going to the theatre, opera or cinema : even if you lose yourself in what is being shown (arguably it is bizarre that projected moving images, when we know that we are in a darkened screen so that they can be seen, can engage us, and seem like life, but they do), part of you knows that it is not real, but does that (or Puccini's music) stop you being tearful over Mimi ?

Or take reading a book, where there is no illusion of reality, but we co-create it with the writer, and, like Beckettt's character Krapp, cry buckets at Effi, or come to hate Arthur Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall : as the player has it, what is he to Hecuba, when these are just words on a page ?

Identification of things that are not ourselves, but outside of us, is part of our living and loving - a text-message to say that a friend is delayed, a relative ill, would mean nothing if we did not pity, care, fear, hope, despair, pretend, imagine.


So is the Rubber-Hand Illusion that novel ? No, I think that the appeals that I have made to entering into the world of a film, or a symphony, and feeling something is far, far more remarkable.


More here from this lecture, with what they call OBEs, or Out-of-Body Experiences...


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Dropping the mobile in his soup (mini-spoiler)

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1 November (updated with rating, 2 November)


95 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 15 / M : 16 / P : 15 / F : 16

A rating and review of Gloria (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17 / 17 x 6 = 102)

Gloria (2013) is many positive things – it has more moods per fifteen minutes than many a film has in its entirety – and it most resembles, in this alone, Barbara (2012), for being an unwavering portrait of an independent and resilient woman, who knows what suits her, and how to make herself look and feel good.

Fleeting little touches of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) in the informality of the family scenes, and even a little whiff of Alice (1990), but this film is its own model, eschewing redundant reaction-shots, unnecessary explanation (we are never really sure what Gloria’s (Paulina García’s) job is, or, until late on, that she lives in Santiago), and a development any more predictable than that of life : Fernando (Sergio Hernández) tries to explain how his daughters look to him, and how he felt abandoned at a party, but we do not really know whether his words will carry any weight with Gloria.

García takes a very unmannered approach to Gloria’s portrayal, which makes it easy to identify with her character as she sings along to ballads (even power ballads) as she drives, and with her expressions (a smile, passing across her face), or seeing her enjoying dancing : questions as to where she is, and whether she has formed relationships through dance before, become largely redundant, because we are in the immediacy of her coming to know Fernando, of the problems that her neighbour upstairs is causing for her.

Indulgent to Fernando wanting to keep his ex-wife’s and grown-up daughters’ demands away from affecting her, we yet see him allow a date be spoilt by a phone that he could have switched off, and, likewise a sensitive reading that moved Gloria, is not backed up by greater commitment, because he straight afterwards takes another invasive call.

That tentative relationship is just part of what the nicely composed film offers – as indicated, one should not expect to know where it is going, because, amongst other things, we see a mother who cannot help giving her son and daughter slightly too little space*, has sexual desires that she acts on, and a willingness to try new things and have fun, and a capacity to be forgiving, loving and responsive.

A tremendous performance from García and an excellent cast, with what appeared to be just a few technical issues in the shots where Gloria meets Ferndando to render our viewing less than perfect. Probably not inspired by the hit of the same name from the 1980s, but it could have been…


End-notes

* Pedro gives us a beautiful movement from Bach’s Partita in D Minor for Solo Violin (No. 2), but this is the same son at whose phone Gloria cannot help trying to peer to see who a message is for, or clearing away crumbs on his table.


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Brahms and Liszt

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1 November

Yes, we know that it is Cockney rhyming slang - but where does the Brahms part of it come from ?

Why isn't it Bach and Liszt (preserving the single syllable, although it could just as well be Chopin and Liszt) ?

Was it the adoptive Viennese German composer's Hungarian Dances (which I prefer for solo piano, but did not realize that those first ten dances were for piano four hands), making a link with Liszt and, amongst other, better things, his Hungarian Rhapsodies (in my view - not the reason for preferring the piano versions with Brahms - Liszt was not strong at orchestration :

Endlessly, we are having played (by @BBCRadio3) the Chopin Piano Concerto No. 2 (and told the story about the coach, the parts, and how it is really No. 1), but we never hear No. 1, and I would prefer to hear more of the quality for the Sonata for Cello and Piano (now, also, coming to the fore) than these, let alone the Liszt Concertos.


Brahms and Liszt, inseparably linked with inebriation, and not a reliable source in sight to check whether my febrile musings have any meaning, o fallible Internet...

PS In fact, though, other web-sites are not at all inventive : Wiktionary and Oxford Dictionaries offer no explanation.


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Öd und leer das Meer

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31 October

* Contains spoilers *

89 = S : 15 / A : 16 / C : 16 / M : 10 / P : 14 / F : 16

A rating and review of Nosferatu (1922)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

Mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17) = 9






In acknowledgement of the fine live accompaniment of Neil Brand (@NeilKBrand)

At the end of to-night’s screening, I quickly read through the music credits, some by Hans Erdmann, that had been used to try to recreate his lost score for Nosferatu (1922) : at the end, one of the (excessively ?) summery themes that had been present at the start recurs as Hutter arrives back and kisses Ellen. Not a mood that lasts, although it appeared that Hutter had raced Count Orlok’s ship to Wisborg to protect her from him, which he then (save merely being there) does not do, even when she points out Orlok’s face at the window and says that he is there night after night – or seems powerless to do.

Continuing with the music, for the moment, one piece, a frivolous one (popularly given an accompaniment in the tapping of typewriter keys ?), is used when the letter from Hutter reaches home, seemed quite out of place for anyone with a familiarity with the reception of popular classical music to use. It was then that I realized with certainty that various compositions had been compiled, for the sub-Brahmsian summery and romantic music might have been written for this film, set in 1838.

Some instruments, maybe inevitably, came to the fore in the scoring, such as the xylophone, bass-drum, double-bass, and even a bass clarinet, as did a ground-bass, a creepy series of rising intervals, and chiming effects. All in all, though the film has to have an accompaniment, I felt that Neil Brand’s live playing at Cambridge Film Festival felt as though it did far more with far less :

We are several times shown, in an intertitle, the warning not to let the shadow of Nosferatu be cast upon one, and this score, at times, felt as though it were not just casting a shadow on the film, but overpowering it. The beauty of what Brand improvised – to continue this theme of choking – is that it allowed the film space to breathe, did not overlay the visual element with too much heavy meaning.

There is much meaning to be had here, with beautiful images of The Empusa at sea, and of the waves meeting the sea at Wisborg, where (amidst the iron memorials) Ellen likes to be, looking out at the water : for sheer beauty of the cinematography, these shots deserve to be relished.

Paper communications between Knock and Orlov in alchemical, magical symbols – such as one might get by putting a page of plain text in the font of that name – are but part of what is going on, since Knock telepathically knows when The Master is on the sea, getting nearer, or is dead.

Ellen, too, receives communication at a distance. When she sits up in bed at the time when fearful Hutter (who even tries to hide under the duvet) is about to be attacked in bed, she cries out – the doctor comes, and says that it is disturbances of the blood, blood on which Orlok feeds, of course, and is about so to do on her husband’s. Later, when both men are heading for Wisborg (there must be something missing that explains how Hutter knows that he is imprisoned), there is a sense, when Ellen calls out that ‘He is coming’ and she will go to him, she may no longer mean Hutter…

At the beginning, we see Hutter’s carefree expressions, but his delight in surprising Ellen and swirling her around before presenting her with the bouquet that he has picked is balanced by her asking why he killed the pretty flowers, suggesting a disposition to the melancholic, as may her appearance, her hair.

Hutter may not later choose the best language, by saying that he is going to the land of thieves and spectres, to make her feel assured of his safety (one feels that he is playing, although perhaps knowing that he plays with what he does not understand : his dashing the book to the ground after the night at the inn suggests denial), but he seems apt to rush off and leave her just like that. However, not just, one feels, that no woman in those times would be left alone, she is put in the care of the Harding couple, where she turns out to be a sleepwalker, who could have come to grief, if Harding had not caught her when she falls.


So, Ellen’s case maybe is not be taken superficially, and maybe the connection that Orlov, admiring her neck in Hutter’s cameo, makes with Ellen is some sort of unholy triangle of lust, where blood is not just sustenance (and he has tasted Hutter’s) : he wrote to Knock in the first place, because he desired a desolate property there – and where more desolate than these deserted warehouses, into which he can import his pest-laden coffins ?

He desired the property, he desired Hutter at his castle (just so that he could first feed on him, then lock him up away from Ellen ? Hutter’s papers, signifiying his agreement to the transaction, are never going to be returned, if Hutter does not leave), and he desired to be near Ellen and infect Wisborg. If Orlok has Hutter and Ellen behave according to his plans, then those plans have taken insufficient account of the fact that, in ein ganz sundlos Weyb, he desires what can destroy him.

The book from the inn, which Hutter finds with him at the castle, he tells Ellen not to read, but she does, of course, read it, and finds her fate. Struggling with it – and, importantly, not acknowledging that she has accepted it by symbolically throwing open the window facing Orlok – she disturbs Hutter, who has not even been able to offer the protection of staying awake to watch (which may signify that Orlok subdued him by taking his blood).

Significantly, he is sent not for an ordinary medical man, but for Bulwer, the Paracelsian professor (who has earlier been demonstrating the wonders of the Venus fly-trap and the like), and Hutter does not hesitate to follow the instructions. It is that he, of all people, will understand the nature of the struggle in which Ellen has been, not that she expects to survive it ? Of the triangle, Hutter is the survivor, and we have no sense of whether he can resume any life, as we are shown the destroyed castle of Orlok.

This is where I ended with my thinking in the other review – that there is, somehow, a sympathy for the vampyr, who poetically seeks out what is most likely to destroy him, in Ellen as the sinless sacrifice (the translation mistranslates ‘Weyb’ as ‘virgin’). His stiff, occasionally slightly hesitant demeanour, the doors, hatches and coffin-lids that open and close at his command, and the true horror as his form becomes upright in the hold of the ship, and he emerges from its hatch : he has so much power, and yet risks so much to feast on the bewitching Ellen.

A truly poetical meditation on the self-destructive impulse, which disguises itself from its possessor in the form of an obsessively thought- and carried-out plan.


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

Authentic calculation

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31 October

Whatever anyone else was drooling over in teenage years, for me it was the Deutsche Grammophon (DG) catalogue, marvelling at these discs (they were LPs) of Anne-Sophie Mutter and Maurizio Pollini, and seeing recordings of Luciano Berio or Steve Reich, with their stylish covers (or boxes).

And there was the distinctive look of the Archiv series - made, I now realize, to resemble icons - and the notion of, say, baroque technique and practice, along with the names of the recording artists and the repertoire.

Even with a score, though, one can only notate so much (but, by studying performance, one can spot where what is usually played differs from scores, or the composer's MS), so to recreate, when bowing, what happened 150 years or more ago from reading written accounts is bound to involve an element of interpretation.

The risk of it all : ending up with authentic-performance groups that, because of using (reconstructions of) older instruments, with their differing construction, bows and mouthpieces, may sound much like each other, but not, maybe - for having abandoned modern instruments and technique - very much more like what the original audience heard.

We probably do not know in some cases, but we can gauge the riskiness of some wind-playing from how - compared with, for example, a modern trumpet or horn - the note sounds. Curious that, in a way, music played in this way should have turned its back on valves, whereas technology is always building on previous invention, and only discarding what no longer works.

Can I imagine someone not only being told that, by saying a wyfe was buxom, Chaucer did not mean comely, but obedient, but also trying to speak Middle English (as some will Latin) ? Can I imagine the exercise of someone carrying out recreated operations, limited to the surgical instruments and procedures of Lister's day ? Do I imagine that I would have a greater feel for how mathematics and engineering of the 1950s were perceived and practised, if I had to use a slide-rule... ?


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

A scale for rating documentaries

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30 October

Following publication of a scale, with six variables rated out of 17 (so giving a maximum total rating of 102), for feature films, I have now developed one with more suitable criteria for documentaries, which I exhibit below.


The following example is a rating for The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012) :

54 = N : 10 / M : 8 / C1 : 11 / C2 : 7 / E : 11 / F : 7

N = narration / script

M = material / use of material

C1 = cinematography

C2 = cohesiveness

E = effects / music

F = feel


Mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17) = 9



For comparison, here is the scale for rating feature films in use :

97 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 15 / M : 17 / P : 16 / F : 16

A rating and review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel

Mid-point of scale (all out of 17) = 9


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

Duelling and Eugene Onegin

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29 October

In the Wikipedia® entry on Pushkin's Eugene Ongein, someone has gone to great trouble to show that the duel, despite Onegin's second Zaretski being (according to Pushkin's narrator) classical and pedantic in duels (chapter 6, stanza XXVI), should have ended with Lenski declared the winner, because Onegin was supposed to be there within fifteen minutes of the appointed hour.

As it is, the opera is what it is, and maybe all that we can learn is that (a) Onegin, from what the poem goes on to say, should not have relied on Zaretski in these matters. For us to imagine (b) that Onegin willingly acquiesced in the breaches of the rules to get Lenski killed, or (c) that Pushkin wrote about a duel without knowing the rules is unneedful.

Curious, though, that the moral inertia of these times is reflected in the lack of care in the arrangements for the duel, with all that stems from in for Olga, her sister Tatiana, and both families...


These thoughts stem from a recent live broadcast from The Metropolitan Opera, in Screen 1 at @CamPicturehouse, of Tchaikovksy's opera. (But there is also Ralph Fiennes in a film version, Onegin (1999), that seemed interminable.)


The Met's programme notes have things thus :

Lenski's second finds Onegin's late arrival and his choice of a second insulting. Although Both Lenski and Onegin are full of remorse, neither stops the duel. Lenski is killed.


On the interpretation of the duel above, there should have, at least, been an offer for Onegin to make an apology.


In this production, Onegin was played by Mariusz Kwiecień, Lenski by Piotr Beczala :

In killing Lenski, whom he made jealous with his fiancée, Onegin (via @CamPicturehouse from The Met) kills himself - as The Winter's Tale ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 5, 2013

Alexei Tanovitski played Prince Gremin, Anna Netrebko Tatiana :

In Onegin, from The Met via @CamPicturehouse, Tanovitski amazes with his expressive bass, but Kwiecień's baritone blends well with Netrebko.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 5, 2013

Tchaikovsky, using Pushkin's verses, concentrates in Onegin as if they were orchestral solos : the Prince's aria underlies Tatiana's fidelity
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 5, 2013

@THEAGENTAPSLEY Gremin was great!
— Attila (@attilalondon) October 5, 2013

I thoroughly agree, @attilalondon, with all of that - the audience saw all those qualities.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 5, 2013

I'm guessing that he reached into the text, and all that is there, @attilalondon.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 5, 2013

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

Rocket-launchers and The Middle East

A rating / Festival review of The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012)

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@THEAGENTAPSLEY Crikey, that is intense. I just thought the space race bit was overblown but I will leave the intellectual argument to you.
— neil white (@everyfilmdteled) November 3, 2013

54 = N : 10 / M : 8 / C1 : 11 / C2 : 7 / E : 11 / F : 7

A rating / Festival review of The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012)

N = narration / script

M = material / use of material

C1 = cinematography

C2 = cohesiveness

E = effects / music

F = feel


9 = mid-point of scale (all  scores out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)



The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012) is a curious film : as if it were not enough to have the achievements of that society commemorated in the film by a scale-model erected at Haigazian University (formerly College), it goes on to end (Disjunction 4) with an animation, which imagines (counterfactually) that the society went on, and continued where the Voyager mission left off, with gold discs sent into space. (Reasons are given why the society became part of the military, and was later closed down : an international incident concerning Cyprus; an accident when propellant was being mixed; and pressure from the French government, amongst others.)

Maybe this animation did not originally belong with the film (I can easily conceive of it as a quite separate celebratory screening on Lebanese t.v.), or maybe it would have been better as a fantasy beginning to the film, rather than the voice of the film-makers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, saying, in a puzzled voice, that they were born in the months either side of the Apollo Moon landings, so how did they never hear about this rocket society ?

In fact, I am told, they said to Professor Manoug Marougian (who led the society until he went back to Texas in 1968, not wishing, he said, to be drawn in by other interested powers) that they had first seen the commemorative postage-stamps (only mentioned later, and not, as I recall, shown), and had wanted to find out more. At the outset, then, these seemed something dressed up about visits to archives that had empty film-cans, and very little footage, and about the whole notion of just tracking down Professor Manougian (in Tampa, Florida) and forthwith going to see him (Disjunction 1).

If you can bear that they would have been in contact after Google and before going, and so would have known already what he had kept and handed over to them, then so good, but it seems a bit too much like a telling a story to an uninqusitive child. On the other hand, showing that what Google Images came up for 'Lebanese rocket' were not space rockets did make the point that no one was remembering rockets in those terms. What Manougian did not appear to have to hand over was all the footage that had been absent so far, and the film simply abandoned the idea of looking for the materials for simply presenting and explaining them as if it were self evident how Joreige and Hadjithomas had come by them (Disjunction 2).

At the time when the chronological story has been more or less told (Disjunction 3), we learn of the scale-model, and that the owner of the factory making it is nervous, in case permissions were needed to create something that looks like a rocket. In terms of us watching the film, we have no notion of how it has not been thought to obtain these permissions (not least if others had been funding it), and again, feeling a little false, we are shown top government officials (before the government falls) agreeing on screen to grant them (or that they are not needed).

Then the very impressive installation of the model rocket, which was supposed to be carried to the former launch-site on the coast and from there to the university (but of which, with no explanation, we only see the latter), and the final disjunction (already mentioned). The film did not need all these stages, but it seemed unwilling to tell any part of the story slowly and in full, and concentrated too much information - too much intense reading of subtitles - in the short period after the film-makers have met Professor Manougian.


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

Dangerous Mozart pleases audiences

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23 October

To-night, the first concert in @AAMorchestra's Cambridge season, complete with Alina Ibragimova and, no doubt, much fine playing...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 23, 2013

The Academy of Ancient Music’s (@AAMorchestra’s) concert at West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge (@WestRoadCH) fell into a half of early to mid-period Haydn (a concerto, then a symphony – Haydn was apparently unable to compose beyond 1802, but lived until 1809) and one of very early Mozart (symphony, concerto), opening in a stately Allegro moderato under violinist Alina Ibragimova’s direction in Haydn's Violin Concerto No. 1 in C Major Hob. VIIA : 1 (which the programme variously dates to (contents page) c. 1769 and (notes by Stephen Rose) the early 1760s).

Haydn, as with many a composer, sounds different when writing a concerto from a symphony, and this work reminded me of one of his Cello Concertos (No. 1 in C Major (Hob. VIIB : 1, which seems to be thought written between 1761 and 1765)) for its spacious character. At any rate, the notes tell us that Luigi Tomasini, leader of the orchestra at the Esterházy court, was the soloist for whom the concerto for violin was written, but it could have been written for Ibragimova, who made an imperious gesture in the opening phrase of her solo part, which then gave way to a sublime graciousness that pervaded the first movement.

In pieces from this period, we almost have, in sonata form, the same delight as in the da capo aria, of being reminded music from earlier on, and hearing it anew in its thematic context (although the programme notes tell me that this is more like a Baroque ritornello) : the effect was, at any rate, of somehow simultaneously slowing down and accelerating our sense of progression under Ibragimova’s direction, and she appeared not to be using written-out cadenzas, but gently meditating on the foregoing material.

In the slow movement, Ibragimova was given a full chance to demonstrate her singing string-tone, and the strings had a clockwork-like pizzicato, reminiscent of Vivaldi (those concertos), and brilliantly executed. Exploiting the purity of the upper register of her instrument, and using a lovely piano contrast, Haydn and she charmed us in this Adagio, and prepared us for the Presto finale, which, seemingly with a cognate theme to that of the first movement, had a pleasing sense of inevitability as it worked its way through to a sonorous close.

That same quality of togetherness, under the directorship from the violin of Pavlo Beznosiuk, marked the opening theme of Haydn’s Symphony No. 45 in F Sharp Major, to which the account attaches that it was his protest on behalf of the court musicians at the prospect, in late 1772, of the court at Esterházy staying there beyond the usual October till December. There are momentary bars of repose from that theme’s demands, but they are only momentary, and they built up a sense of longing.

We were then brought, in the long Adagio, to what seemed the emotional heart of the piece, with its well-captured reflective mood seeming to evoke a place for cognition, and subtle horn tones that enhanced this impression. In the shorter Menuet and Trio, a falling four-note motif was evident, which again gave an emotional pull to the music, as it moved towards the finale, marked Presto – Adagio.

The sonority that marked the first tempo was gradually waning in that of the second, since, in pairs, the instrumentalists were leaving the stage (say, second horn with principal oboe), enacting what happened at the first performance, until just Tomasini and Haydn were left : Haydn has a reputation both for his sense of humour (his ‘Surprise’ symphony, for example, or that string quartet that always catches me out), and for having influence with his royal master, but one does not know what risk he had been taking. AAM took none, only prisoners for its sensitive playing.


After the interval, a work of teenage years by Mozart (from 1770), was paired with one of his later - but still early - violin concertos, proving that we are wrong to match one of these concerto works with a later symphony. Hearing the Symphony No. 1 in G Major was not just an educational exercise, but helped reveal the building-blocks from which, more seamlessly, the composer was to construct his more mature style, such as a four-note motif in which the next note went up, then back, then down.

Listening to the thought-out playing of these two movements, again under the direction of Beznosiuk, there were hints of what was to come in the concerto, with a gesture of a heavily accented note on the strings, and then repeated notes. It came across wonderfully as a different sound-world already from that of ‘Papa’ Haydn, though written at the same time as his works.

• Alina Ibragimova : a mixture of total abandonment and total control that is in no way contradictory (The Times)

I thought that I knew Mozart’s co-called Turkish concerto, the Concerto for Violin No. 5 in A Major (1775, when Mozart was but 19, Haydn 43) but this interpretation caused me to experience it anew. After the preceding symphony, as I have said, I was better placed to spot the use of pairs of falling notes, noticing the structural elements, but finding how the music is much more than them, and it does not hurt to know that they are there.

At times bending towards the music-stand, and seeming usually to be in motion between the divided first and second violins, there was a physical feeling of freedom in Ibragimova and her flowing dress that matched her musical inventiveness, and the impression that the orchestra had really warmed to her leadership and performance. In the Adagio, an initial geniality of mood gave way to a sense of things becoming fluid, but, concurrently, of time standing still, as if the music were flowing directly from Mozart’s own bow.

In the Rondeau finale, she gave us ‘slapped’ notes in the strings that would not have been out of place in Bartók’s middle quartets (which, of course, she plays, but I do not know about techniques contemporary to Haydn), and a barbarity and a rawness of tone in the Turkish theme that made it feel fresh and new. In the true nature of such a movement, we also had a sense of play in not knowing where we were at an end, with its familiar unflashy ending, but the audience was in no doubt about how this piece was received :

Ibragimova came back for an encore, which I am told by AAM’s Michael Garvey, its chief executive, was the slow movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 6 in D Major (nicknamed ‘Le Matin’), which not only had a note of leave-taking about it, but also a phrase of wildly abundant expression from our soloist, only matched by the reception from those around me.

Garvey tells me that, after three performances in Italy, AAM is at a new venue for it in London, Milton Court Concert Hall, and then off for a fortnight to tour Australia. A good chance for many others to hear this nicely put-together programme !


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