More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 January
For Lucy Johnstone (@ClinpsychLucy) - written on a train into King's Cross
Some will be familiar with the idea of what is called (after the experimental psychologist of this name) a Skinner box, essentially a maze for rats, designed to test them (the rats) under different regimes and so make inferences about their psychological state, based on how they navigate the box.
Imagine such a box (or, rather, a series of them, say ten), on a relatively small scale, but designed to be resistant to the ingress of water. The experimental subject sees water (or a coloured liquid might be more effective) enter the system, and it is his or her job, each time, to direct it to a specified goal, either to the centre, or to one of a number of dead-ends, where there is a sink : the flow is such that, if the subject does not act reasonably quickly, the liquid will start to flow over the channels of the maze, which counts against him or her.
The subject directs the water by using baffles, i.e. insertable barriers that block the water from following any given route, and they represent means for closing off options that, once taken, cannot be undone. He or she is marked on criteria such as how quickly and effectively he or she directed the flow, whether the flow (and, if so, how much) ended up exiting from other sinks, and whether the flow ran over the channels. Say five times with each of ten target sinks, and this over ten boxes of different layout – no opportunity to run any one box successively, but in randomized order in which the five chances to tackle any given sink in any given box is allocated over the total runs, n = 500.
Analyse these data as one likes, say giving a weighting on which out of the five runs on this target in this box the results are for. Some statistically significant comparisons will result. Then imagine doing another 500 runs, and this just as training, but with the subject now told that he or she can operate freestyle, i.e. choosing the target sink, but, perhaps with penalty sinks (which might or might not be specified (beyond their existence and their number), which, if any liquid reaches first, stops the run and imposes a penalty, based on various criteria such as time elapsed, sinks blocked at that point, and a qualititative analysis of strategy. The subject would then be penalized, sometimes, for directing the water to a given sink, because it is an unstated penalty sink.
Now extrapolate all this to, say, human behaviour. X has been tested, for example, on the autistic spectrum, and been given a diagnosis. Does that mean, if the liquid is the flood of stimuli, inputs and other people’s behaviour, that we have done any more than establish that, over a thousand runs in life, X has adjusted to trying to deal with it in a number of symptomatic ways ? Maybe life has baffled X, and X has tried to understand or adjust to it, coming to find some strategies that are, if not better, than at least less bad than others for being effective, given the task specified – because of the flow, and the need to direct it, X was forced to block off some choices, and become more habituated to others.
Subject A has an experimental profile, over the two regimes of 500 runs apiece, which corresponds to what we might think of symptoms, and the tendency to exhibit or experience them, so does a similar Subject B. Otherwise, A and B may actually be more dissimilar than similar, seen in the round (outside these tests), but their test results bring them together into the same place on the spectrum – their humanity, interests, values, become valued less than what they happen to have in common :
A may resemble B, but also, otherwise, resemble C, but compare B and C and the match may not be statistically significant on a chi-squared analysis that compares their data. We could have an alphabet of subjects and more cases where the statistically significant comparisons do not predict the match with another who also matches one of the matching pair.
We could consider a tendency to depression, bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia as other test-results, other matches or mismatches. Do they tend to persuade us that diagnosis is perhaps no more than picking and choosing between bundles of what we call symptoms, and inferring the existence of a diagnosable condition, when a rigid experimental testing such as imagined might throw us back on our common humanity, battling the flow of money, relationships, stress, etc., against time and other objectives ?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Thursday 23 January 2014
Tuesday 21 January 2014
Who is this film about ?
This is a misguided review of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
22 January
* Contains spoilers *
This is a misguided review of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Maybe it’s the season of empty films – they have content and length, but all that they tell you is that : humankind can survive adversity; given long enough someone can be suckered in a huge way; and people can believe that they have rights over another person and his or her life [and that is not only slavery] : they are virtually the plot of platitude.
When it comes to The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), we think that Martin Scorsese might mix things up a bit and confuse, but he gives us Jordan Belfort (Leonardo diCaprio), a character whom, we might remember, we have no more reason to believe than when he tells us that, with the $5,000’s worth of stock that he is offering, we will kill ourselves that we did not buy more : we even have reality change before our eyes, as he tells us that his car was that model, but in white, not red, adjusting the pictures to what he says happened. (Yes, there is a tie to reality, because the credits tell us that the film is based on Belfort’s book, but that never means very much.)
If we skip that opening sequence, when Belfort is adjusting live action to accord with what he says happened, we are simply ‘buying’ what he tells us, occasionally by voice-over, but largely by people, things, events just being on the screen, and Scorese surely gives us a big clue that we should reserve judgement. If not, it is just Jordan’s way, all the way. Think about his first day at work : the film does not dwell on his being told that he is pond life, but instead on a man who can pull rank on the person using that description and, rather improbably, invite Belfort to a bizarre lunch on the strength of the fact that Belfort did something unusual to get noticed in his application. Is this objective reality, or the world of Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man ! (1973)?
The time between then (and the advice given at lunch, including to have hookers, snort cocaine, and jerk off twice per day) and Belfort becoming a broker is passed over, but with the big thump of 1987’s Black Monday to bring him down, though not for long. And then there is the core of people with whom he surrounds himself, one (Jonah Hill as Donnie Azoff) for little better reason as to whether he could sell parasols in Spain than that he provides Belfort with a really good high – yes, natural enough that Belfort should want to set up his own concern, but why with these people, foisted on us as his characters ?
Think back thirty years to Once Upon a Time in America (1984) – or earlier films about the world of organized crime – and that same coterie of those trusted with the innermost details. Scorsese does not just want us to watch what is happening and lap it all up – is that the approach that he intends with Taxi Driver (1976), just that we should go with what happens and think that the actions of Travis Bickle deserve to be celebrated ?
We have Belfort talk shaven pubic hair with his father (and the older man wish that he were younger, although he likes ‘the bush’), and we are suckered if we take him snorting cocaine off a girl’s rear as any more than a parody of possibility, of maybe what did happen all so often in the world of brokerage, but is not told us to prove that it could and did happen, but what it meant that it happened.
At the same time, Scorsese is playing with us, if we want to feel respect for Belfort for once giving a cheque for $25,000 to a woman now working for him who needed the money, if we want to be energized by Shakespeare’s Henry V, the speech that Kenneth Branagh lionized to stir and inspire his troops, or if we want to feel that there is humour in the scene where he learns that his phone is bugged (in fact, nothing comes of that) and, having ingested some arcane substance shared by Azoff and him (for reasons that are unclear), drives home to get Azoff off the phone.
Belfort is not a (submerged) narrator who tells everything to his advantage (e.g. reversing the car with his young daughter in it into a post in an effort to get her away from his wife, who wants a divorce and the children), but the broad thrust of things is how we wants to tell them, such as (seemingly spontaneously) not doing a deal that will remove him for his company, but ending up doing those who work for it far more harm as a consequence so that he ends up with just thirty-six months’ incarceration – grand, impulsive gestures, but just because he can, out of some sense of freedom, of who he is.
Amidst the glitz, the sex, the drug-taking, the nudity, taking what one can when one can*, ripping someone off because one can talk them into what, with reflection, they would never do, does one seek for something else, or feel that one might as well have done the same, if everyone else was doing so ? So is it a film about Belfort’s character-type, or about all of us, if we could, if we dared, if we admitted that we wanted to ? If we have just watched it on the surface, the answer is there : we have dreamed and lived the life with Belfont, and what is the challenge to being implicated ?
Maybe the whole film is a plea in mitigation to the judge, saying how he had never heard such language before he started working on the trading-floor, and showing how his behaviour became provocative, coarse, abrasive?
Post-script
According to Matthew Toomey's review :
Brought to the screen by iconic director Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas, The Departed), The Wolf Of Wall Street has generated controversy. Detractors believe that the film glorifies Belfort’s actions given its many comedic scenes and its lack of a moralistic conclusion. That was certainly not Scorsese’s intention. He didn’t want audiences to leave the cinema feeling better and thinking that the problem has been solved. He “wanted them to feel like they’d been slapped into recognising that this behaviour has been encouraged.” The film’s final scene is haunting in that regard.
See here what others reviews say...
End-notes
* And yet Belfort, until Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie) unequivocally offers herself to him in sex that he pulls no punches in saying lasted only eleven seconds (until he had something in reserve), is on the verge of going home to his wife).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Neither fish nor fowl
This is a review of American Hustle (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
16 January
This is a review of American Hustle (2013)
* Contains spoilers *
At 138 mins, @AmericanHustle could probably afford to run at around 110 mins and still do the job...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 17, 2014A Tarantino* could show us where this film starts and get us back there without it seeming the filmic equivalent of those 150 pages in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that are meant to be a night's reading and not interrupt anything : voice-overs at the opening from Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) and Irving Rosenfeld [field of roses] (Christian Bale) seem like rare occasions when we hear what [they say that] they are thinking, and they jar with the rest of the film, since there is no reason, at this moment, for the characters to be confessional (it is not as if they are telling their story to the man who caught them).
It even feels like a false moment of insight, not least since the title (as well as what we have seen) tells us that these people are bunco artists (one thing that the early part of the film establishes is Prosser's quick wit, when she can work out where Rosenfeld's account of part of his business is going more quickly than he can tell her), so one doubts that either really has a love of Duke Ellington (Prosser knows a track, and he finds it, with a jaw-dropping view of his crotch as he listens to it), because the film then shuts us out from any such revelation. Nothing about how we brought back to where they started in the film feels original, or that it had to be shown / narrated that way (except that a distraught Rosenfeld goes into the interior of the rotary-hanging space where he had arbitrarily had a whirl with Prosser), and this seems an obvious place where the film could have been tighter.
When we get to the meat of the action, with a surprised Jeremy Renner (as Mayor Carmine Polito), who seems unsure whether he is related to Elvis, Liberace or both, it feels not so much as though Rosenfeld has been lucky to have managed to extricate the FBI agent, Richie diMaso (Bradley Cooper), but rather that there was never a coherent plan in the first place, beyond a swanky hotel suite and some cash in an attaché case. Beyond DiMaso manipulating his boss (one really feels sorry for Louis C. K. as Thorsen) and hiring the rooms, he seems nothing to do with this, and, when he makes things go wrong, Rosenfeld (maybe because he has done his homework) is able to build up a link with Polito based on shared upbringing : one supposes, not just for the plot, that the sting has to be brought back on track, although it reflects on DiMaso that it needs it.
In all this, and what happens for most of the film, what role, does Prosser have (in her British incarnation of Edith Greensley), other than engaging and distracting the subjects' attention with her variously displayed breasts (and draped legs) ? We do not see her setting up the mark, a job that is exclusively taken by Rosenfeld in guiding DiMaso. Other than getting the really big hit at the end, she seems there to defy one to believe how many of these outfits could really have been left at one of Rosenfeld’s dry-cleaning outlets, and how she can freak DiMaso out by revealing that she is not British (except that he is fixated with his own beliefs).
The dynamic is only made interesting by the fact that she has led DiMaso on and got him so that he is desperate to sleep with her at the time of the revelation – obviously, it does not have to be spelt out, but it does not seem, to judge from their comments, any part of Rosenfeld’s and her plan, although it can coincidentally be exploited.
The answer is that it could be an approach of divide and rule : whilst Rosenfeld is working alongside and rubbing up DiMaso on one level, she is sizing up his seemingly unpredictable character from close up, stimulating and frustrating him, so that he will feel that he trusts her judgement better (and, crucially, forget that she is a poacher turned gamekeeper under compulsion). If that really is there is a plot-line, it is really rather submerged**, if it takes days of nagging at how and where, beyond sex, she is being employed in the film to find it...
It has to be said that @AmericanHustle is not nearly as much fun as @Silver_Linings or @2GunsTheMovie.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 17, 2014The maverick agent is played for more fun and greater laughs by Mark Wahlberg (2 Guns, though he also has a boss to be reckoned with), and Hustle really takes itself too seriously : DiMaso talking to himself, as he muses whether Prosser should have had a bed and water, or whether he had planned that she should not, is grotesque as a throw-away. Even when we have (uncredited) Robert De Niro playing a decrepit but menacing gang boss Tellegio against a fake sheikh from Mexico with just a few phrases to his name, the tension in the scene (from De Niro’s sheer presence, and notwithstanding all those jokey roles that he has played of late) weighs against the humour, or seeing it as another Argo (2012), dangerous but cunning : here, it just seems dangerous, and how on earth do the Mexican’s few utterances really extricate them from anything ?
Almost the best sequence in the film originates from Jennifer Lawrence as Rosenfeld’s wife Rosalyn, having met a new mob boyfriend at the same do, and singing and dancing to ‘Live and Let Die’ whilst imagining his obliteration. The potential for conflict, particularly comedic, between Adams and Lawrence has largely been lost, and it is thrown back on the latter to play the part of revealing what she should not know and the others’ damage limitation. Rosenfeld may just have written her off as depressed and never leaving the house where he provides every comfort, and precious little keeps them together, but she shows no sign of a disposition to such a mood (for what it's worth, Wikidepia calls her 'his unstable wife Rosalyn', when DiMaso is far more unstable) when keen to go out and socialize with Polito and his wife.
If, for some, the film offers variety and a mix of moods, from another point it lacks cohesion, and, whilst some may not mind whether it inconsistently concerns itself with Prosser as Prosser, rather than as advancing the plot, it does not obviously show that there is a scheme behind the rather loose plot : planting a surprise when we have been lulled into a notion that all is just adrift is not exactly showmanship…
End-notes
* Much as it might want it, though, this film never has his deftness of touch, his boldness with structure and character.
** According to Wikidepia, it is not : Richie believes Sydney is British but has proof that her claim of aristocracy is fraudulent. Sydney tells Irving she will manipulate Richie, distancing herself from Irving
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Thursday 16 January 2014
Match Point re-made with a Macbeth split in two
This is a review of Cassandra's Dream (2007)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 November (watched on DVD)
This is a review of Cassandra's Dream (2007)
* Contains spoilers *It was highly commercially successful, but that fact provides me with no reason to have liked Match Point (2005), whose flaws outweighed the Dostoyevskyian tones that it brought to re-entering the territory of Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989).
By contrast, I believe that Cassandra's Dream (2007) is not merely leaps, but bounds, ahead, and cannot relate to the admittedly many critics who pan this later film, thinking it a falling-off of quality from what I do not detect in the earlier film : it is not merely that we are willing Jonathan Rhys Meyers (as the Raskolnikov-like Chris Wilton) to get caught, but - despite Allen's valiant attempt at a plot with a twist - he would have done, and he failed to command my attention in the way that Martin Landau does (as Judah Rosenthal) sixteen years earlier.
Dream gives me many more things to like - Sally Hawkins as the older (?) brother Terry's (Colin Farrell's) wife Kate, a convincing portrayal of mental ill-health and of addictive gambling, the allure of Angela (Hayley Atwell) as the other brother Ian's (Ewan McGregor's) girlfriend and his vaulting, reckless ambition, a soundtrack by Philip Glass, a creepy, self-obsessed Tom Wilkinson (as Uncle Howard)...
A perfect crime to do the generous Uncle Howard a favour (generous, but at whose cost ?), but, just as Wilton is under the pressure of denying the voices of his victims in the night, it is really all too much, and what one has steeled oneself to (and still nearly does not do) will not allow one to rest : the two parts of the Macbethean psyche are divided against each other, and one seeks survival at the other's expense.
What the brothers wanted and gambled for they find themselves having never valued very much when the time comes, and, just as they did not heed Cassandra at the outset, so they do not at the close. The words of Uncle Howard, differently meant, could almost be hovering on the air :
In the end, all you have in this life that you can count on is family
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Wednesday 15 January 2014
What if we read the book from 1853 ?
A rating and review of 12 Years A Slave (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
15 January
A rating and review of 12 Years A Slave (2013)
77 = S : 11 / A : 13 / C : 11 / M : 10 / P : 12 / F : 10
S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel
9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)
Is @12YearsASlaveUK a modern The Emperor's New Clothes... ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 15, 2014
Well, @JeanieFinlay - the big display at @CamPicturehouse states that @12YearsASlaveUK is 'one of the best films ever made'. Pretty average.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 13, 2014
If you think that, as films go, 12 Years A Slave (2013), despite its emotive content, is just an average piece of film-making, and patchy in places, you are almost damned before you open your mouth : people refuse to separate the content of a film, when it is such as this, from the worth of the film itself, even if it does function in large part as a medium for the story (or message).
Ridiculously inflated claims for @12YearsASlaveUK - it's like inverted racism, to have to exaggerate how good it is. It's pretty average.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2014
Of course, what happens is objectionable (either crime, or people turning their eyes from it), but one cannot make out that slavery exclusively resides in the cotton-fields of Georgia, not, say, in tribes in Africa long subjugating each other's people by war or raiding, and with the well-known example of the people of Israel in captivity in Egypt. In the same way, The Roman Empire had freemen and slaves, and that goes back two thousand years, such that the New Testament is talking about slaves obeying their masters almost as a given (and which is a source for the preaching heard in the film).
Why not compare @12YearsASlaveUK (2013) with As if I am Not There (2010) - where is the unique injustice, brutality, inhumanity ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2014
The same director's (Steve McQueen's) film Hunger (2008) evokes The Maze Prison, but making a feature about the IRA hunger-strikers in the early 1980s was likely to make a modest gross at the box office (IMDb reports $154,084 at 5 June 2009 in the States, with $1,980 for the opening weekend (5 December 2008)), compared with the relative distance that one has on events 130 years earlier in Slave. As to a powerful piece of film-making, one may think that Slave does not pull any punches, but, compared with Hunger, it is all of these things - mainstream, stereotypical, and stylized in a very conventional way - and feels like a betrayal of that earlier aesthetic.
There are also scenes in the film (of which follow a few) in which McQueen seems to revel as moments, whether or not they work with the film, and so lose its direction and weight :
* For no very good reason (when he would not help her as asked), Northup, when he brings Patsey back to the drunk Epps as requested, tries to pretend that he has not whispered to her to make herself scarce (which he could have done at any point), and a ludicrous chase, in and out of the piggery, ensues - does it do any more than show Epps as gross, and that Northup is capable of a tactical misjudgement ?
* When Northup makes a request for a letter to be carried to his family, he certainly is - it is only by conceiving that he had worked out the lies of his cock-and-bull story beforehand, in case he was betrayed (but, then, he would not already have written the incriminating letter), and that he catches Epps at a good time, that it is credible that he escapes punishment or death by his excuses
* It is clever, but very foolish reasoning (as in any workplace), to contradict and show up your overseer in front of the owner, because, even if you demonstrate your cleverness by proving him wrong and that hardly justifies him finding fault to have an excuse to lynch you, you must know that he will not see it thus Your slick nigger ways
* A more subtle enemy might have got at Northup by breaking the violin that he has been given, and then showing it up as his ingratitude - that approach might have got Ford on his side and against Northup, where this one of finding fault to provoke a fight did not
* Patsey is almost definitely flogged out of deeper motives than whether she went to a neighbouring property for a bar of soap, and no one wants to flog or see another flogged, but can the irrational zeal of Epps (for once in tune with that of his wife against Patsey, whose urging renders him impotent to the task and makes him involve Northup) be yoked to the explicit reasoning of spelling out the doctrine that a man's 'property' is his to do with as he wishes (as Epps' wife would be, since she has no rights except through him, and so he early on chooses Patsey over her, if she wishes to exert herself) ?
* The uneasy moment when other men whom Northup finds on the way to the store are being strung up - maybe just scene-setting that lynching is a part of life (though that seems contrary to a film whose ethos is not to make everything normative), but a lost opportunity, with Ford's wife (who declared, when Northup and the fellow woman slave arrived, that the latter would soon forget her children) to set up some other resonance
What does not seem like a betrayal is simply lifted from someone else's vision (that of Terrence Malick) :
It is, @olidogwoof @JeanieFinlay ? Nicks the treatment of the forbidden fruit / blight theme straight from Days of Heaven (1978) anyway...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 13, 2014
The vision was in the cinematographic ethos, for example the gorgeous close-up of the caterpillar that, although Epps (Michael Fassbender - also in Hunger as Bobby Sands) denies it, is causing the blight of his cotton-plants : it feeds into other moments of the film, but not in the absorbed way that the wide landscapes do of Days of Heaven, and so makes the downright ordinary photography seem gratingly poor and uninspired.
The film contains four main moments of extended dialogue, first with the weeping woman who has been separated from her children (when sold with Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor)), then when Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o) makes a request of him, then when he makes a request of a white former overseer with whom he is working, and finally when he makes the same request of Bass (Brad Pitt). Certainly, the first two (whether or not the conversation is written out in full by Solomon Northup's memoir Twelve Years A Slave (in which he was assisted by a local writer, David Wilson)) sounded very stagey, trying too much to imitate the manners, language and diction of the age to be more than artificial - even if people ever did talk to each other in that way, it sounded more Shakespearean than from the mid-nineteenth century, and one felt that one was being told that these were Important Words to Heed : for example, How came you there ? How is this ? Tell me all. (I doubt it, but maybe some sort of attempt at Brechtian alienation, as when Northup arrives home and says I have had a difficult time these several years ?)
Hans Zimmer's soundtrack sought by means of rumbling, low-frequency percussive sounds, which would not have been out of place in Peter Gabriel's Millennium Show Ovo (e.g. the machine music of the track 'The Tower That Ate People'), or even The Wachowskis' The Matrix (1999), to impart a sense of menace or the like, but it lacked subtlety for a composer who had scored Inception (2010), and sounded derivative :
In @12YearsASlaveUK, deliberately iconic echoes of the arpeggios of Arvo Pärt's evocative Spiegel im Spiegel ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 12, 2014
If this film is remarkable, and breaks ground, it would be good to know in what way, and how one's understanding is advanced beyond that of Alex Haley's t.v. series Roots in 1977, or even the t.v. film Solomon Northup's Odyssey (1984) and the slavery strand in Cloud Atlas (2012).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Sunday 12 January 2014
Who fêtes Gravity, not this masterpiece ?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
12 January
S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel
9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)
Less Homer than Beckettt, more Job than Ulysses
We may not formally know until before the closing credits, but Robert Redford in All is Lost (2013) is Our Man : in this, the film is deliberately not specific, because we know more the name of the yacht, the Virginia Jane, than that of its captain.
We see him as a resourceful man, but only after, and from eight days before, the note whose text we hear him read¹ – otherwise, he is a man of few words (and there is anyway no one to talk to, when his Mayday calls come to an abrupt end< because he is not the sort of person who verbalizes the solution that he is seeking to each of his problems. The consequence is that we have to watch him quite closely, because all in what he is doing may be a clue to his reasoning, whereas, if we do not concentrate in that way (and it isdemanding), all may be lost for construing the film – why is he fashioning that piece of wood, or deploying the life-raft ?
Contrast this with the parallel¹ drama of Gravity (2013), and space, unlike the ocean, scarcely seems silent at all, with Bullock who, when not trying to copy Houston in, is narrating her situation and despair, or even acting under the remote instruction of Clooney. Some want (rather pointlessly, as this is fiction, and may even be parable) to say that Redford should never have been there or not so ill equipped – maybe Redford is too silent and strong, but, in relief, she just seems even more unengagingly neurotic to have been let into space. (People want to read beyond the ikon and the other religious symbols displayed and infer some meta-narrative of heaven and earth, rebirth, or God knows what, but it is will hidden.)
Redford is where he is (although he geographically is not, and the quality of the light seemed to give this away), and that is just a given – why, when in this modern era, or for what reason, are at best alluded to in his note (whose text we cannot refer to). Compared with the technical failures of depiction that can be levelled at Gravity, I believe that those of All is Lost are slight unless one is of a sea-going disposition, and have scant bearing : Our Man could have been lowered onto the vessel by angels mid-ocean for all that I care whether he should be where and how he is.
I say this, because I am happy (‘happy’ is not the right word – I am actively engaged in wishing) to see what I am shown and not seek explanation as to why it is foolhardy or unlikely, because it is what it is. For it is not as if Redford’s character is the last one on earth who should not be where he is, or there how he is, as rescuers the world over will testify, whereas Gravity just sidesteps the question of whether Bullock’s character could not have been better trained and / or have better absorbed the right training and attitude in adversity, rookie or no – would someone who panicks so much ever be taken on by NASA as an astronaut?
Continuing the contrast, the same test of plausibility must be levelled at each situation and character : even if Our Man should not be where he is and how he is, he could have chosen his own destiny and simply set out, whereas Ryan Stone (Bullock) had to satisfy others that she had the right skills and the nerve to fly a mission. In my view, there is no chance that she would not have been weeded out an early stage.
She subsists on the level of standing for all of us, a sort of Everyperson. However, this is not an Assumption of The Blessed Virgin, so that she can intercede for all of us, but a bumbling person with a neurotic core, and the plot-line depends on the presence of weaknesses that would not be there. All is Lost shows a man reasoning his way through what faces him, and not without being disheartened unto death : no one else appears to be to blame for where we find him, though we all find ourselves in life somewhere from which prior circumstances and decisions (ours and / or those of others) brought us there…
Our Man may or may not represent us, but we identify with him (unless we are aggrieved seafarers who berate him as suggested), and it is the inhuman dumping / falling of a container, just as we duly see these behemoths not notice him, that, if not exactly creating his problems, compounds them. Is he a righteous man like Job and what happens him being given over to be tested ? Maybe, but we do not feel that he is a special man, given over to ill to see whether he curses God.
What befalls him also evokes Homer’s Odyssey (and in one of the themes of Alex Ebert’s music we have The Sirens brought to life, when he thinks of giving into alcohol and before he seems to become beset by them proper), but I think that the closer parallel is with Beckettt’s Job-like figure in his mime Act Without Words I, who is temptingly offered water that he cannot drink, shade that is withdrawn (Jonah 4 : 6 – 8 ?), and the like.
Finally, the male figure, despite being prodded to continue with further temptations with the game, just withdraws. Famously, Beckettt’s trilogy of novels** almost has as its motto the closing words of the third, You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and the spirit of perseverance, though it ebbs and flows, is there in the resilience of Our Man’s responses to his situation. Towards the end, it is as if there is the same desire, which is somewhere in Kafka’s writing****, just to lie down in the snow, regardless of the risk and fall asleep.
As to Redford, it is only the white sideburns that discredit the idea that he is younger than 77, and all power to him, if he is rightly reported as being seen doing himself what his character did – the intense close-ups show him lined, but he is still every inch a star, and with commanding presence and conviction in his work. The arc of Our Man’s experience has those qualities brought to it, so that we cannot rest, scarcely drawing breath, whilst what faces him remains in the balance : No film, for me, has been (no real pun intended) as immersive as this one since Cell 211 (2009) at Cambridge Film Festival in 2010.
End-notes
¹ Spoiler alert - from IMDb, this is the text of the note :
13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry... I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you knew this. In each of your ways. And I am sorry. All is lost here... except for soul and body... that is, what's left of them... and a half-day's ration. It's inexcusable really, I know that now. How it could have taken this long to admit that I'm not sure... but it did. I fought 'til the end, I'm not sure what this worth, but know that I did. I have always hoped for more for you all... I will miss you. I'm sorry.
² It is far lesser, despite its 11 nomination for BAFTA awards to this film’s one (for Sound)… - told this, a friend pithily opined Then they are shitheads.
³ Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable.
**** Also suggested in the texts of Müller that Schubert set for Winterreise (which has been badly translated as A Winter’s Journey) : with Winterreise, as with this film, one has the feeling that the degradations of the physical journey are parallel manifestations of a disintegration of the soul or psyche.
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)
12 January
A rating and review of All is Lost (2013)
99 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 16 / M : 16 / P : 16 / F : 17
S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel
9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)
Less Homer than Beckettt, more Job than Ulysses
We may not formally know until before the closing credits, but Robert Redford in All is Lost (2013) is Our Man : in this, the film is deliberately not specific, because we know more the name of the yacht, the Virginia Jane, than that of its captain.
We see him as a resourceful man, but only after, and from eight days before, the note whose text we hear him read¹ – otherwise, he is a man of few words (and there is anyway no one to talk to, when his Mayday calls come to an abrupt end< because he is not the sort of person who verbalizes the solution that he is seeking to each of his problems. The consequence is that we have to watch him quite closely, because all in what he is doing may be a clue to his reasoning, whereas, if we do not concentrate in that way (and it isdemanding), all may be lost for construing the film – why is he fashioning that piece of wood, or deploying the life-raft ?
Contrast this with the parallel¹ drama of Gravity (2013), and space, unlike the ocean, scarcely seems silent at all, with Bullock who, when not trying to copy Houston in, is narrating her situation and despair, or even acting under the remote instruction of Clooney. Some want (rather pointlessly, as this is fiction, and may even be parable) to say that Redford should never have been there or not so ill equipped – maybe Redford is too silent and strong, but, in relief, she just seems even more unengagingly neurotic to have been let into space. (People want to read beyond the ikon and the other religious symbols displayed and infer some meta-narrative of heaven and earth, rebirth, or God knows what, but it is will hidden.)
Not Gravy - or whatever that film lacking 'it' is - though, @dimensionsmovie @guardian ! #GravityIsGravy
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2014Redford is where he is (although he geographically is not, and the quality of the light seemed to give this away), and that is just a given – why, when in this modern era, or for what reason, are at best alluded to in his note (whose text we cannot refer to). Compared with the technical failures of depiction that can be levelled at Gravity, I believe that those of All is Lost are slight unless one is of a sea-going disposition, and have scant bearing : Our Man could have been lowered onto the vessel by angels mid-ocean for all that I care whether he should be where and how he is.
If these criticisms of All is Lost (2013) (http://t.co/PGOBy7mJWY) mattered, Gravity (2013) would be ruled out of awards hands down !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 10, 2014I say this, because I am happy (‘happy’ is not the right word – I am actively engaged in wishing) to see what I am shown and not seek explanation as to why it is foolhardy or unlikely, because it is what it is. For it is not as if Redford’s character is the last one on earth who should not be where he is, or there how he is, as rescuers the world over will testify, whereas Gravity just sidesteps the question of whether Bullock’s character could not have been better trained and / or have better absorbed the right training and attitude in adversity, rookie or no – would someone who panicks so much ever be taken on by NASA as an astronaut?
Continuing the contrast, the same test of plausibility must be levelled at each situation and character : even if Our Man should not be where he is and how he is, he could have chosen his own destiny and simply set out, whereas Ryan Stone (Bullock) had to satisfy others that she had the right skills and the nerve to fly a mission. In my view, there is no chance that she would not have been weeded out an early stage.
She subsists on the level of standing for all of us, a sort of Everyperson. However, this is not an Assumption of The Blessed Virgin, so that she can intercede for all of us, but a bumbling person with a neurotic core, and the plot-line depends on the presence of weaknesses that would not be there. All is Lost shows a man reasoning his way through what faces him, and not without being disheartened unto death : no one else appears to be to blame for where we find him, though we all find ourselves in life somewhere from which prior circumstances and decisions (ours and / or those of others) brought us there…
Our Man may or may not represent us, but we identify with him (unless we are aggrieved seafarers who berate him as suggested), and it is the inhuman dumping / falling of a container, just as we duly see these behemoths not notice him, that, if not exactly creating his problems, compounds them. Is he a righteous man like Job and what happens him being given over to be tested ? Maybe, but we do not feel that he is a special man, given over to ill to see whether he curses God.
What befalls him also evokes Homer’s Odyssey (and in one of the themes of Alex Ebert’s music we have The Sirens brought to life, when he thinks of giving into alcohol and before he seems to become beset by them proper), but I think that the closer parallel is with Beckettt’s Job-like figure in his mime Act Without Words I, who is temptingly offered water that he cannot drink, shade that is withdrawn (Jonah 4 : 6 – 8 ?), and the like.
Finally, the male figure, despite being prodded to continue with further temptations with the game, just withdraws. Famously, Beckettt’s trilogy of novels** almost has as its motto the closing words of the third, You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and the spirit of perseverance, though it ebbs and flows, is there in the resilience of Our Man’s responses to his situation. Towards the end, it is as if there is the same desire, which is somewhere in Kafka’s writing****, just to lie down in the snow, regardless of the risk and fall asleep.
As to Redford, it is only the white sideburns that discredit the idea that he is younger than 77, and all power to him, if he is rightly reported as being seen doing himself what his character did – the intense close-ups show him lined, but he is still every inch a star, and with commanding presence and conviction in his work. The arc of Our Man’s experience has those qualities brought to it, so that we cannot rest, scarcely drawing breath, whilst what faces him remains in the balance : No film, for me, has been (no real pun intended) as immersive as this one since Cell 211 (2009) at Cambridge Film Festival in 2010.
End-notes
¹ Spoiler alert - from IMDb, this is the text of the note :
13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry... I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you knew this. In each of your ways. And I am sorry. All is lost here... except for soul and body... that is, what's left of them... and a half-day's ration. It's inexcusable really, I know that now. How it could have taken this long to admit that I'm not sure... but it did. I fought 'til the end, I'm not sure what this worth, but know that I did. I have always hoped for more for you all... I will miss you. I'm sorry.
² It is far lesser, despite its 11 nomination for BAFTA awards to this film’s one (for Sound)… - told this, a friend pithily opined Then they are shitheads.
As if I didn't know that #BAFTA nominations are stupid, All is Lost (2013) only gets one - for Sound !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 9, 2014³ Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable.
**** Also suggested in the texts of Müller that Schubert set for Winterreise (which has been badly translated as A Winter’s Journey) : with Winterreise, as with this film, one has the feeling that the degradations of the physical journey are parallel manifestations of a disintegration of the soul or psyche.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Saturday 11 January 2014
Towards a critique of the Klee show at Tate
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 January
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)
11 January
Paul Klee : Making Visible at @Tate Modern. A chronological survey, or the best of his work at each time ? Gems like Fish Magic, but...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2014Indeed, @Richardianheys - though I am unconvinced that @Tate always had access to the best work, or interpreted his place (e.g. Bauhaus)...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 8, 2014Paul Klee : Making Visible at @Tate Modern. By all means, buy The Pedagogical Sketchbook in the shop, but why no interpretative display ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2014Paul Klee : Making Visible at @Tate Modern. Schwebendes does not mean Hovering, Tänzerin has a gender - Female Dancer.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2014Paul Klee : Making Visible at @Tate Modern. The room with similar paintings (Room 15 ?) does not contain or refer to pic.twitter.com/KTYsS3k0co
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 12, 2014I believe the curatorship is heavy on reading philosophy and its concepts into art, @EMDeWachter @Tate @tanyabarson : http://t.co/BI88WSHiEz
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 11, 2014Considering the @Tate Klee and Hamilton shows, are they always best chronological, with a roomful of Pointillism out of sheer habit ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 2, 2014If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Friday 10 January 2014
Power in his clenched-up fist, held aloft
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
This review of The Phantom of The Opera (originally 1925, but revised in 1929) was of a special screening, with a world premiere solo harp score written and played by Elizabeth-Jane Baldry, at the Pathology Museum at St Bart’s Hospital on Wednesday 8 January 2014, the first of four such screenings put on there through Silent London (@silentlondon) (with a complimentary portion of freshly popped popcorn, and a Hendrick's gin (with tonic, if required)
Declaration of interest : Trust me that I am being impartial, though Elizabeth-Jane and I are friends (as a consequence of having met at Bath Film Festival). However, this means that I cannot – because it does not sound right – adopt my usual approach and call her Baldry…
To-night’s introduction to the film, by Pamela Hutchinson from Silent London, made clear that it had had a chequered history, not liked by the first audience that saw it, re-made by adding some comic elements (and still not liked), before getting to what we have now, with a grand scene at the Paris Opéra, which pays homage to Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (in fact, with an empty threat), in what we were told was an early type of two-part Technicolor. Predicting it where it was going was not easy, with films such as The Third Man (1946) having given certain expectations of underground chases with water, whereas, as referred, the Poe mention suggested a false trail.
What it does meditate on approaches, but veers away from, the subject of Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête (1946), whether love can redeem all and make physical disfigurement beautiful (with the singer Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin) as a healing Christ-figure), for then an index-card pins down exactly who The Phantom (Lon Chaney) is : something that only the force and energy of the mob (not exactly storming La Bastille, but almost), not the not-so-organized official means (which the very end of the film quite forgets about), can address. Roughnesses such as these may owe their existence to that troubled production history (and, doubtless, many have written much about its genesis), as, for example, this issue of continuity : when The Phantom goes off with one of his displayed pair of schnorkels (the need for two seems fanciful), then returns, deed done, and dons a hat, he is not wearing his mask, but, when, hat on, he is at the organ, he is wearing it.
The jauntiness of a man in full evening dress walking into water, over his head, and casually subverting a plot to find him. The sphinx-like fingers that had, by rising and falling, acted as some sort of unexplained early warning system. These elements and more were literally marvellous for their free invention – they almost floated free of wider considerations of plot or even character, and subsisted for their own pleasure.
Not really a story, either, of the vaulting ambition of Faust (it is presumably the Gounod version of which we see extracts on stage, but it could be that of Berlioz : the familiar motif of Gretchen am Spinnrad, in any case), despite Christine's being keen on being a star* and having The Phantom as her Master until, like Pandora (or Eve), she disobeys and sees who he is. There the parallel with the Cocteau story runs out, since she looks to Raoul to save her, and, for her, it is not going to be loving this creature in order to have a career.
So the index-card (perhaps where the story was re-worked) does all the work for us, and takes away the initial intrigue or ambiguity of The Phantom, when the pretty young dancers are busy being startled in their tutus, and where it could easily be a story from an episode of Scooby-Doo : Which way did he go ? Didya see him, Scoob ?, with the wicked Old Owners (with one of them in disguise as The Phantom) frightening the New Owners with a story, so that the latter, to be rid of it, will sell it back again for nothing. (Later, there is casual talk of 'another strangling.)
The story simply is not going to cohere and be any one thing, and why should it, when it is was hardly unusual for a film to be written as it went along (cinema has always been a wasteful business : just think, now, of all the feature-length films made, and how few get distributed) ? Whether the lengths to which those working on the film went were unusual, others would know better than I, but IMDb credits the characters of Carlotta and Raoul’s brother as only existing since the 1929 version).
Elizabeth-Jane Baldry’s accompaniment for solo harp does allow the film to cohere, and it is clear that she had thought carefully about times whether her part was to be more evocative, or more imitative, and there were important moments that she had to address in some way, such as when the man in the box is first seen by the new owners, and when, girding their courage, they return to find him somehow gone. The mirror into The Phantom’s realm was especially rich, when she had two types of material, one for the slightly dreamy Christine going through to him, the other for Raoul, shut out when the mirror has swung back** (and how fitting that the universal symbol of vanity should conceal from her the origins of her success, as the law from Pip how he comes to be a gentleman) : the alternation made clear that, however penetrable the barrier, Christine was in another world.
For a film of 93 minutes, the score is bound to use whatever one calls them of themes or leitmotifs, and the effect is as in sonata form, that one hears what one heard before, but, in between, one has heard other material, and the effect (even if the repetition were scored and played note for note the same) is that one pays attention to it in a different way. Elizabeth-Jane’s structure of themes led one unshowily through the film, though not to say, as many will know the harp from effects such as the glissando and from virtuouso concert-playing, that the accompaniment was not without its appropriate drama and grandeur (that Technicolor scene on the steps, or the seemingly playful folly of Christine removing the mask).
Using the physical architecture of the instrument, tapping and strumming on the case, and running and sliding her fingers along it, Elizabeth-Jane in no way limited herself to the traditional way in which a pedal harp would be employed, and she is no doubt influenced in her choice both by work as a recitalist and composer, and by playing works by other composers such as Graham Fitkin (who wife Ruth Wall plays his work in her repertoire). The music and its playing were daring and inventive, and the great round of applause that she received at the end of the work, and again when reintroduced, are testament to how much Elizabeth-Jane had enhanced people’s enjoyment of this silent master, with her varied layers of interpretation, and her witty and inventive performance.
End-notes
* Philbin showed herself, if not coquettish, then easily bought by flattery in her visual responses to what she hears her Master promise her : one momentarily thinks that she is not going to be taken in by it, and she then falls head over heels in love with her stardom and adoration.
** One finds it a little hard to stir much for Raoul [de Chagny] (Norman Kerry). Here, he knows that Christine has gone out of sight, behind the mirror, but, other than huff and puff a little, he does nothing, and seems to make nothing of trying to follow it up. A mere man might do no more, but it turns him into something of an anti-hero, and The Phantom, who is willing to fight for Christine’s love and capable of doing so, seem more appealing, which is all to the good of the dynamics.
And then there is when Leydoux (Arthur Edmund Carewe) and he, after the farcical holding of their hand in the air against the strangler’s snare, find themselves at The Phantom’s mercy, as the room of mirrors burns them and they strip off :
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)
9 January
This review of The Phantom of The Opera (originally 1925, but revised in 1929) was of a special screening, with a world premiere solo harp score written and played by Elizabeth-Jane Baldry, at the Pathology Museum at St Bart’s Hospital on Wednesday 8 January 2014, the first of four such screenings put on there through Silent London (@silentlondon) (with a complimentary portion of freshly popped popcorn, and a Hendrick's gin (with tonic, if required)
Declaration of interest : Trust me that I am being impartial, though Elizabeth-Jane and I are friends (as a consequence of having met at Bath Film Festival). However, this means that I cannot – because it does not sound right – adopt my usual approach and call her Baldry…
To-night’s introduction to the film, by Pamela Hutchinson from Silent London, made clear that it had had a chequered history, not liked by the first audience that saw it, re-made by adding some comic elements (and still not liked), before getting to what we have now, with a grand scene at the Paris Opéra, which pays homage to Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (in fact, with an empty threat), in what we were told was an early type of two-part Technicolor. Predicting it where it was going was not easy, with films such as The Third Man (1946) having given certain expectations of underground chases with water, whereas, as referred, the Poe mention suggested a false trail.
What it does meditate on approaches, but veers away from, the subject of Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête (1946), whether love can redeem all and make physical disfigurement beautiful (with the singer Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin) as a healing Christ-figure), for then an index-card pins down exactly who The Phantom (Lon Chaney) is : something that only the force and energy of the mob (not exactly storming La Bastille, but almost), not the not-so-organized official means (which the very end of the film quite forgets about), can address. Roughnesses such as these may owe their existence to that troubled production history (and, doubtless, many have written much about its genesis), as, for example, this issue of continuity : when The Phantom goes off with one of his displayed pair of schnorkels (the need for two seems fanciful), then returns, deed done, and dons a hat, he is not wearing his mask, but, when, hat on, he is at the organ, he is wearing it.
The jauntiness of a man in full evening dress walking into water, over his head, and casually subverting a plot to find him. The sphinx-like fingers that had, by rising and falling, acted as some sort of unexplained early warning system. These elements and more were literally marvellous for their free invention – they almost floated free of wider considerations of plot or even character, and subsisted for their own pleasure.
Not really a story, either, of the vaulting ambition of Faust (it is presumably the Gounod version of which we see extracts on stage, but it could be that of Berlioz : the familiar motif of Gretchen am Spinnrad, in any case), despite Christine's being keen on being a star* and having The Phantom as her Master until, like Pandora (or Eve), she disobeys and sees who he is. There the parallel with the Cocteau story runs out, since she looks to Raoul to save her, and, for her, it is not going to be loving this creature in order to have a career.
So the index-card (perhaps where the story was re-worked) does all the work for us, and takes away the initial intrigue or ambiguity of The Phantom, when the pretty young dancers are busy being startled in their tutus, and where it could easily be a story from an episode of Scooby-Doo : Which way did he go ? Didya see him, Scoob ?, with the wicked Old Owners (with one of them in disguise as The Phantom) frightening the New Owners with a story, so that the latter, to be rid of it, will sell it back again for nothing. (Later, there is casual talk of 'another strangling.)
The story simply is not going to cohere and be any one thing, and why should it, when it is was hardly unusual for a film to be written as it went along (cinema has always been a wasteful business : just think, now, of all the feature-length films made, and how few get distributed) ? Whether the lengths to which those working on the film went were unusual, others would know better than I, but IMDb credits the characters of Carlotta and Raoul’s brother as only existing since the 1929 version).
Elizabeth-Jane Baldry’s accompaniment for solo harp does allow the film to cohere, and it is clear that she had thought carefully about times whether her part was to be more evocative, or more imitative, and there were important moments that she had to address in some way, such as when the man in the box is first seen by the new owners, and when, girding their courage, they return to find him somehow gone. The mirror into The Phantom’s realm was especially rich, when she had two types of material, one for the slightly dreamy Christine going through to him, the other for Raoul, shut out when the mirror has swung back** (and how fitting that the universal symbol of vanity should conceal from her the origins of her success, as the law from Pip how he comes to be a gentleman) : the alternation made clear that, however penetrable the barrier, Christine was in another world.
For a film of 93 minutes, the score is bound to use whatever one calls them of themes or leitmotifs, and the effect is as in sonata form, that one hears what one heard before, but, in between, one has heard other material, and the effect (even if the repetition were scored and played note for note the same) is that one pays attention to it in a different way. Elizabeth-Jane’s structure of themes led one unshowily through the film, though not to say, as many will know the harp from effects such as the glissando and from virtuouso concert-playing, that the accompaniment was not without its appropriate drama and grandeur (that Technicolor scene on the steps, or the seemingly playful folly of Christine removing the mask).
Using the physical architecture of the instrument, tapping and strumming on the case, and running and sliding her fingers along it, Elizabeth-Jane in no way limited herself to the traditional way in which a pedal harp would be employed, and she is no doubt influenced in her choice both by work as a recitalist and composer, and by playing works by other composers such as Graham Fitkin (who wife Ruth Wall plays his work in her repertoire). The music and its playing were daring and inventive, and the great round of applause that she received at the end of the work, and again when reintroduced, are testament to how much Elizabeth-Jane had enhanced people’s enjoyment of this silent master, with her varied layers of interpretation, and her witty and inventive performance.
End-notes
* Philbin showed herself, if not coquettish, then easily bought by flattery in her visual responses to what she hears her Master promise her : one momentarily thinks that she is not going to be taken in by it, and she then falls head over heels in love with her stardom and adoration.
** One finds it a little hard to stir much for Raoul [de Chagny] (Norman Kerry). Here, he knows that Christine has gone out of sight, behind the mirror, but, other than huff and puff a little, he does nothing, and seems to make nothing of trying to follow it up. A mere man might do no more, but it turns him into something of an anti-hero, and The Phantom, who is willing to fight for Christine’s love and capable of doing so, seem more appealing, which is all to the good of the dynamics.
And then there is when Leydoux (Arthur Edmund Carewe) and he, after the farcical holding of their hand in the air against the strangler’s snare, find themselves at The Phantom’s mercy, as the room of mirrors burns them and they strip off :
From 1925 to-night, a homo-erotic moment when two wet-through men are found beneath a trap-door under the carpet : The Phantom of The Opera.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 9, 2014
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Stale old arguments about Scorsese
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 January
The Times (in an article entitled Cathedral defends showing ‘debauched film of Christ’s life’) reports as follows regarding Bath Film Festival's (@BathFilm's) screening of director Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), based on the book by Nikos Kazantzakis (and with score by Peter Gabriel) :
Members of the congregation have protested that the 12th-century Gothic Cathedral is to be used for an “appalling film” that “tackles the theme of debauchery”
Are they thinking, maybe, of another Scorsese film, Taxi Driver, which certainly does 'tackle' that theme, and appals in its literal sense (from Old French appalir to turn pale) ? Have they seen it, or are they like the protesters (placards saying 'Down with this sort of thing') penned by Arthur Matthews and Graham Linehan in Father Ted, who made more popular, through interest and intrigue, a film that they had not watched, The Passion of St Tibulus from 1995 ?
The appendix of the 1996 edition of Scorsese on Scorsese* (one in a Faber & Faber series to which The Agent is addicted) is devoted to the film. Here are some quotations from a statement that Scorsese made at a press conference :
When I read Kazantzakis's book, I didn't have the feeling that it would be deeply offensive to anyone, especially because I know of my own intent.
[...]
Among the boys who I knew when I was in the seminary, one is now the head of an order in Chicago called the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, and happens to be a great fan of Kazantzakis's book. And I know that the book is used in seminaries as a parable to argue about and discuss. This is how I hoped the film would be received.
[...]
A black minister wrote a letter to the New York Daily News, saying he loved the film, was going to use it as a study guide in discussion groups, and that he felt most of the people talking about the film had not seen it. He said they adhered very much to the word of the Gospel, but not to the spirit.
After the event, read more here about it and the film, if you wish...
End-notes
* Faber & Faber, London, 1996.
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)
10 January
The Times (in an article entitled Cathedral defends showing ‘debauched film of Christ’s life’) reports as follows regarding Bath Film Festival's (@BathFilm's) screening of director Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), based on the book by Nikos Kazantzakis (and with score by Peter Gabriel) :
Members of the congregation have protested that the 12th-century Gothic Cathedral is to be used for an “appalling film” that “tackles the theme of debauchery”
Are they thinking, maybe, of another Scorsese film, Taxi Driver, which certainly does 'tackle' that theme, and appals in its literal sense (from Old French appalir to turn pale) ? Have they seen it, or are they like the protesters (placards saying 'Down with this sort of thing') penned by Arthur Matthews and Graham Linehan in Father Ted, who made more popular, through interest and intrigue, a film that they had not watched, The Passion of St Tibulus from 1995 ?
The appendix of the 1996 edition of Scorsese on Scorsese* (one in a Faber & Faber series to which The Agent is addicted) is devoted to the film. Here are some quotations from a statement that Scorsese made at a press conference :
When I read Kazantzakis's book, I didn't have the feeling that it would be deeply offensive to anyone, especially because I know of my own intent.
[...]
Among the boys who I knew when I was in the seminary, one is now the head of an order in Chicago called the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, and happens to be a great fan of Kazantzakis's book. And I know that the book is used in seminaries as a parable to argue about and discuss. This is how I hoped the film would be received.
[...]
A black minister wrote a letter to the New York Daily News, saying he loved the film, was going to use it as a study guide in discussion groups, and that he felt most of the people talking about the film had not seen it. He said they adhered very much to the word of the Gospel, but not to the spirit.
After the event, read more here about it and the film, if you wish...
End-notes
* Faber & Faber, London, 1996.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Tuesday 7 January 2014
I put aside childish things
A rating and review of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 January
A rating and review of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)
93 = S : 16 / A : 16 / C : 16 / M : 17 / P : 15 / F : 15
S = script
A = acting
C = cinematography
M = music
P = pacing
F = feel
9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)
When Sean Penn (Sean O’Connell) and Ben Stiller (Walter Mitty) finally meet in this film, it is at the quiet point around which the world turns – Penn, who could so easily have outclassed Stiller in that sort of way that older actors can, just casually reveals that he does not always take a shot when he ‘is in’ the moment of it.
As a photographer, capturing the oftentimes fleeting, he knows what it is to have to wait for his subject to come to him, but he speaks against this idea that we ‘capture’ so much, with our camera-phones and the like, that we are too busy capturing to be there. (That irritating advertisement where a couple ‘shares’ that they have just launched their pastel-hued candle-boats, and straightaway get back an evauluation of how wonderful it is.)
This is not a notion that James Thurber, the writer of the four- or five-page story on which this (and the preceding) film is based, would have rejected. Although he fought for his own career, he also recognized, as Stiller wants to do in his closing credits, all the hands through whom one’s work passes and to which it is entrusted.
I also do not think that he would have been too bothered, unless one ascribes some arcane respect to his original creation (who is not so much a character, as a behaviour), by the action-hero figure that Mitty pictures himself to himself as, which seems quite in line with the ‘ta-pokka, ta-pokka’, and had more than fifteen years before he died in which to get used to Danny Kaye as Mitty – that said, those of an anxious temperament, might find the noisy character that he becomes, lifting up the pavement as if he has hammer-drills in his heels, something that it is welcome he discontinues, and that heavy ticking noises also subside.
This is not a film where we are really invited to know whether, like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), he gave up the life that he desired to conform and provide a wage, but it is touched on. (And then Mitty has a chance to do some big things after all, and he does, although he only day-dreams it happening, become a younger version of himself – hair, looks, etc., to reflect well-being) What we do see is that his mind races ahead to encounter some new possibility, and that he was not ‘in the moment’ but outside it, as if as a way of coping with it.
Thankfully, a careful script from Steve Conrad acknowledges that, when someone says that someone else ‘zones out’, is just a phrase, not the only phrase, and does not convey very much of the experience, which, at the appropriate time, Mitty tries to put into words, and is understood. In what is almost an entirely telephonic contact with Todd Maher (Patton Oswalt), who is trying to explain why the bits that Mitty just skipped might be important to a functioning profile that will let him send ‘a wink’ that he agonizes about sending (only to find a problem when he finally does press the enter key to contact Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig)), Mitty talks about what has made day-dreaming less frequent.
All the while, we are whirled up in an adventure, as to whose status, given that Mitty has not re-emerged from it, we feel reasonably, but not totally, settled. Then, when Penn and Stiller meet we have this beautiful moment where they bicker, take offence, listen to each other, and pitch into a riotous football game with sherpas before the setting sun. Something different, something apart from life, even if Stiller has actually been landed on a glacier by helicopter (presumably, not flown by his screen pilot) : a moment apart, a positive version of that endless journey to discover what is best not known in Apocalypse Now (1979), because the real horror is the casual, uncaring dismantling of an iconic publication.
We do not dwell there (although a cock is snooked at Ted Hendricks (Adam Scott), who tried to belittle Mitty, but just resulted in endearing him to others), because we turn to relations Melhoff / Mitty, but there is a tribute to Mitty’s care for the work of its leading photographer. In between, Stiller has been allowed to present convincing enough evidence of his credentials on the skateboard, and there is just sufficient of his past with his sister and his parents to see who he is now. A certain fastidiousness, keeping a tally in his cheque-book, and so on.
On the side-lines, but engagingly playing a mother whose need to have, in perpetuity, a piano which we are not even certain that she still plays (or desires to play – the so-called elephant in the room) figures large is Shirley MacLaine. A warm portrait to which she brings real affection, as well as acceptance and care.
This is a Mitty for our century, a man who takes his imagination and turns it into seeing what is possible, rather than being held back by whether he can get the train there. He is not everyman, so his solutions are not everyone’s, but the cinematic glories of where he goes make this film shine – although one has to wonder whether some Icelandic influence has gone into the caricature of Greenland (Melhoff, knowing Mitty better than he thinks, checks that he knows that they are different places…), which is, if not exactly dismissive, is scarcely flattering, with men drinking huge beers all day from glasses shaped like boots and, even at their smallest, they are still huge.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Mira Schendel at Tate Modern - Part III
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 January
This is Part III of a review of a current exhibition at Tate Modern of the work of Mira Schendel (Part I is here, and Part II is here), which is due to finish on 19 January 2014
Room 7 is where Schendel’s work begins to get interesting, foreshadowing the work in Room 12, just as do the two works that appear in Room 8, in the series Little Trains, the installation in Room 10.
We are told that the installation of pieces in the series of Graphic Objects emulates the installation in The Brazilian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1968, and where she made use of the transparency of the rice-paper. Whether it is meaningfully claimed that ‘transparency’ had a special usage that Schendel made of it is unclear (pun intended), but this is what the room guide asserts :
Schendel’s concept of transparency was derived from the writings of the German philosopher, poet and linguist Jean Gebser (1905 – 1973), who used the word to refer to human consciousness, experience of time and to a form of the spiritual.
Maybe some significance is lost, and also in not following word for word the philosophy, poetry and lyrics, but the work’s strength, in being an accretion of smaller works, is by positioning them in relation to each other.
In a similar sense, Variants 1977 makes one aware that one could be shorter, or taller, and perceive the installation somewhat differently, inevitably looking through one of the ninety-three panes (one is white on black), or not looking through it except by bending or standing on tip-toe. It does so more effectively than the installation in Room 7, and, as the room guide says, it is a constellation or cloud, a sort of Cloud of Unknowing.
Here, the panels are very small and they interpose a sense of depth, with what is near overlapping, at different points, central and far others. It is beyond proper description of photographic representation, and just deserves to be seen.
Little Trains are sheets of rice-paper that hang loose on a thread, and the smaller, in particular, of the two in Room 8 evokes an oriental mood, as if not so much kimonos as samurais. They consist less in what they show than what we can project onto them, and similarly, with some of the Transformables that are hanging nearby, we are meant to look less at their resemblance to strands of DNA (or some other biological material) than at the patterns of varying shade that they cast. Sadly, these are not hung in such a way to make much of that aspect.
Max Bense was the only one who understood that...these things [Transformables] didn't function as objects, because all that mattered was the light and shadow, a continuation of some drawings of mine, those done on that ultra fine, transparent paper.
Room 9 is passed over, because it contributes, with its Calculations, Circumscribed Letters and Typed Writings, as much to what matters about Schendel as the Monotypes and Graphic Objects. Room 10 contains an installation, made for the 10th Bienal de São Paulo in 1969, called Still Waves of Probability - again, it achieves its aims by repetition of the same (or similar) material, and here, as we walk around it, it becomes more or less permeable to our sight, sometimes seeming dreach before our eyes, sometimes seeming as if nothing intercepts the view of the other side of the room.
It means more than this attempt to describe it suggests, more than what Schendel said (as quoted in the room guide) that it meant to her, and more than in the Biblical text that she chose to accompany it (from I Kings 19 : 11 – 12**), in black on Perspex :
And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD. And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake:
And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.
One might relate to the work without the text, or without the words being understood in a Judaeo-Christian context – say, as the search at the sub-nuclear level, and what gives matter mass – but it speaks in these gradations of very loud and powerful, yet very quiet and peaceful, and with all the changes of state in between. Arranged before the other installation, and with the sixteen works (akin to the stations of the cross, though not in number ?) that constitute Homage to God – Father of the West (1975) en route in Room 11, this is the richest part of the exhibition.
Again, one might not relate to a Hebraic God – as number 11 has it, The living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – but there is the notion of a family line and of protection, to which we all, in varying ways, can relate in thinking about the group of people of whom we are part have fared. For others, the stark statement of number 12, God is love, will make it harder to relate to these works, but, as the room guide makes clear, the church was what permitted her to survive, and it could be seen as quite a personal statement, as was, say, her participation in the São Paulo Bienal, which others thought right to boycott.
As a thinker and an artist, Schendel was quite clear about making her own choices of what was best for her conscience and for speaking through her art. Arranged on either side of walls tapering towards each other, this is a rare twentieth-century statement of faith, and rewards attention for the bold marks and the consequence of her choice of medium***.
As to the tail of the exhibition, what appears in Room 13, with its concentration on day and night, is subject to quite a bit of interpretation, manipulation even, where the room guide says ‘They [tempera and gold] also refer to the determination of the Self’. Of them, and of the concluding trio of series in Room 14, I say that they are not on a par with the striking pieces that occupy Rooms 10 to 12 :
Itatiaia Landscapes feel like a rehash of a series of the Mononotypes in Room 6, whereas, a little in the way that the Roy Lichtenstein show had him persevering to the end with his Benday dots, making landscapes (I recall that being true of another Tate one, and, whilst I could be thinking of Damien Hirst, I think that it was probably not) : it could have been Miró, because nothing pf his that was shown transcended, for me, the four triptychs that were displayed in pairs of two…
Even if one ultimately thinks that Imogen Robinson is harsh about Schendel's works in her Review : Mira Schendel at the Tate Modern for Just A Platform, it is of interest to find comments where she echoes finding pretension in the curation and the claims made
End-notes
* Taken from the exhibition's chronology of Schendel's life.
** The words are well known from the ending of John Greenleaf Whittier’s hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’.
*** Where it falters is with the curatorial choice of translation for the description of number 16, Der Geist – rendered The Ghost, the word ‘spirit’ might have been a better choice.
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)
7 January
This is Part III of a review of a current exhibition at Tate Modern of the work of Mira Schendel (Part I is here, and Part II is here), which is due to finish on 19 January 2014
Room 7 is where Schendel’s work begins to get interesting, foreshadowing the work in Room 12, just as do the two works that appear in Room 8, in the series Little Trains, the installation in Room 10.
We are told that the installation of pieces in the series of Graphic Objects emulates the installation in The Brazilian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1968, and where she made use of the transparency of the rice-paper. Whether it is meaningfully claimed that ‘transparency’ had a special usage that Schendel made of it is unclear (pun intended), but this is what the room guide asserts :
Schendel’s concept of transparency was derived from the writings of the German philosopher, poet and linguist Jean Gebser (1905 – 1973), who used the word to refer to human consciousness, experience of time and to a form of the spiritual.
Maybe some significance is lost, and also in not following word for word the philosophy, poetry and lyrics, but the work’s strength, in being an accretion of smaller works, is by positioning them in relation to each other.
In a similar sense, Variants 1977 makes one aware that one could be shorter, or taller, and perceive the installation somewhat differently, inevitably looking through one of the ninety-three panes (one is white on black), or not looking through it except by bending or standing on tip-toe. It does so more effectively than the installation in Room 7, and, as the room guide says, it is a constellation or cloud, a sort of Cloud of Unknowing.
Here, the panels are very small and they interpose a sense of depth, with what is near overlapping, at different points, central and far others. It is beyond proper description of photographic representation, and just deserves to be seen.
Little Trains are sheets of rice-paper that hang loose on a thread, and the smaller, in particular, of the two in Room 8 evokes an oriental mood, as if not so much kimonos as samurais. They consist less in what they show than what we can project onto them, and similarly, with some of the Transformables that are hanging nearby, we are meant to look less at their resemblance to strands of DNA (or some other biological material) than at the patterns of varying shade that they cast. Sadly, these are not hung in such a way to make much of that aspect.
Max Bense was the only one who understood that...these things [Transformables] didn't function as objects, because all that mattered was the light and shadow, a continuation of some drawings of mine, those done on that ultra fine, transparent paper.
(1970 - 1974)*
Room 9 is passed over, because it contributes, with its Calculations, Circumscribed Letters and Typed Writings, as much to what matters about Schendel as the Monotypes and Graphic Objects. Room 10 contains an installation, made for the 10th Bienal de São Paulo in 1969, called Still Waves of Probability - again, it achieves its aims by repetition of the same (or similar) material, and here, as we walk around it, it becomes more or less permeable to our sight, sometimes seeming dreach before our eyes, sometimes seeming as if nothing intercepts the view of the other side of the room.
It means more than this attempt to describe it suggests, more than what Schendel said (as quoted in the room guide) that it meant to her, and more than in the Biblical text that she chose to accompany it (from I Kings 19 : 11 – 12**), in black on Perspex :
And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD. And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake:
And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.
One might relate to the work without the text, or without the words being understood in a Judaeo-Christian context – say, as the search at the sub-nuclear level, and what gives matter mass – but it speaks in these gradations of very loud and powerful, yet very quiet and peaceful, and with all the changes of state in between. Arranged before the other installation, and with the sixteen works (akin to the stations of the cross, though not in number ?) that constitute Homage to God – Father of the West (1975) en route in Room 11, this is the richest part of the exhibition.
Again, one might not relate to a Hebraic God – as number 11 has it, The living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – but there is the notion of a family line and of protection, to which we all, in varying ways, can relate in thinking about the group of people of whom we are part have fared. For others, the stark statement of number 12, God is love, will make it harder to relate to these works, but, as the room guide makes clear, the church was what permitted her to survive, and it could be seen as quite a personal statement, as was, say, her participation in the São Paulo Bienal, which others thought right to boycott.
As a thinker and an artist, Schendel was quite clear about making her own choices of what was best for her conscience and for speaking through her art. Arranged on either side of walls tapering towards each other, this is a rare twentieth-century statement of faith, and rewards attention for the bold marks and the consequence of her choice of medium***.
As to the tail of the exhibition, what appears in Room 13, with its concentration on day and night, is subject to quite a bit of interpretation, manipulation even, where the room guide says ‘They [tempera and gold] also refer to the determination of the Self’. Of them, and of the concluding trio of series in Room 14, I say that they are not on a par with the striking pieces that occupy Rooms 10 to 12 :
Itatiaia Landscapes feel like a rehash of a series of the Mononotypes in Room 6, whereas, a little in the way that the Roy Lichtenstein show had him persevering to the end with his Benday dots, making landscapes (I recall that being true of another Tate one, and, whilst I could be thinking of Damien Hirst, I think that it was probably not) : it could have been Miró, because nothing pf his that was shown transcended, for me, the four triptychs that were displayed in pairs of two…
Even if one ultimately thinks that Imogen Robinson is harsh about Schendel's works in her Review : Mira Schendel at the Tate Modern for Just A Platform, it is of interest to find comments where she echoes finding pretension in the curation and the claims made
End-notes
* Taken from the exhibition's chronology of Schendel's life.
** The words are well known from the ending of John Greenleaf Whittier’s hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’.
*** Where it falters is with the curatorial choice of translation for the description of number 16, Der Geist – rendered The Ghost, the word ‘spirit’ might have been a better choice.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Monday 6 January 2014
The deceptive allure of the rhyme
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 January
Hot or not ?
As can be seen - because the question was asked a year ago - it couldn't have been...
But ponder, when you next hear yourself saying
why it no longer sounds right to you to say :
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 January
Hot or not ?
As can be seen - because the question was asked a year ago - it couldn't have been...
But ponder, when you next hear yourself saying
That's way too much ?
why it no longer sounds right to you to say :
That's far too much ?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)